All You Need to Make a Movie Is...

 If I told you that Zhang Yimou, famed Chinese director of arthouse epics made a slapstick version of the Coen Bros. Blood Simple, would you think I was crazy? Well, I'm not, but maybe he is: behold A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2010).

It's set in "olden days" in the Chinese western desert, in the titular noodle shop. Yan Ni, the titular woman, is buying the titular gun from a flamboyant Turkish trader. She's good looking but kind of bossy, the type who would like to have a gun handy. But also, she is having an affair with Xiao Shenyang, a grimacing, cowardly goofball who dresses in neon silks (like Yan). Since her husband, Ni Dahong, is the boss of the shop, and brutal, she may need that gun.

Into the shop comes a troop of soldiers, with a handful of prisoners - all adulterers, destined to be killed for their crime. One of the soldiers, Sun Honglei, suspects Yan and Xiao, and comes back by himself, looking for a chance to make a little money. And that's the setup.

If you remember Blood Simple, you'll get most of the beats of the plot, as well as some specific scenes (a shovel? A hand?). The characters are very different, however. The lovers are less film noir, more Chinese opera buffa. Sun's version of the detective played by M. Emmet Walsh in the original is less fat and clownish, but just as menacing. And the husband, Ni, is just as spiteful and evil as in Blood Simple, but weirder - he wants Yan to give him a son, or failing that, to pretend to be his son when she's having sex with him. He cuts the faces out of posters of babies and makes her stick her head through the hole. Twisted.

Also, since this is Zhang Yimou, the movie is full of beautiful shots of the Chinese desert, with bare hillocks striped with yellow, white and ochre. This doesn't seem strange at all. I guess it's China's version of Texas.

So, if you liked Hero, or Raise the Red Lantern, I have no idea if you'll like this. If you like the Coens and Chinese costume comedies, I can guarantee you will.

Fat Guy Goes Nutso

 We kind of enjoyed a John Candy comedy last week, so we queued Going Berserk (1983). They both are based on losing your mind, but this one is much more 80s.

Candy plays a limo driver, with business partner Joe Flaherty. Candy is engaged to Alley Mills, the daughter of Senator and presidential hopeful Pat Hingle. Hingle is not at all happy about his son-in-law, who is not just a lowly driver, but also a lousy drummer and not too bright. The basic plot is that a cult brainwashes Candy to kill Hingle, but that only scrapes the surface. 

For instance, Candy and Flaherty are friends with sleazy impresario Eugene Levy, who cast them in a dubbed martial arts movie. He wants to film the Candy-Mills wedding. Also, Candy somehow gets arrested, and handcuffed to murderer Ernie Hudson. Hudson breaks out, taking Candy with him to his girlfriend's place, where he dies after some vigorous sex. So now Candy is handcuffed to a dead black man. 

The cult is based on greed and aerobics, and brainwashes him to kill when he sees the 10 of spades. Either that or it will just make him act like a schmuck. Turns out, it makes him a schmuck. 

So you've got a real mish-mash - aerobics cultists, motorcycle gangs, limos, martial arts movies, Manchurian Candidate murder plots, and a drumming subplot that goes nowhere. Really, they use it for one scene: He's practicing terribly, and Mills picks up the sticks and is awesome. I don't think it's mentioned again. 

Still, Candy is just funny, and it's great to see his buddies Flaherry and Levi. I kind of wish it made more sense or was funnier, but we'll take it.

Paradise Waits

I'll admit, I queued up Paradise Hills (2019) because Netflix recommended it and I liked the cast (of women). It looked like a sci-fi fantasy, but I thought I could sell it to Ms. Spenser as horror. Turns out I didn't have to.

It starts with Emma Roberts at a baroque futuristic ball, that turns out to be her wedding. She sings an odd song for her husband (sinister nonentity Arnaud Valois), then precedes him upstairs. She gives a "your probably wondering how I got here..." voice-over, and we flash back to:

Roberts wakes up on a concrete cube in a futuristic room. She is wearing a dirty bathrobe and tee-shirt. She has been kidnapped. Guards come and force her to dress in a Thierry Mugler white dress, with a tuille skirt, white leather harness and a sort of utility ruff. She meets the headmistress, Mila Jovovich, who wears enormous hats and delicately gardens or sips tea as she explains. They are on an island called Paradise Hills, a sort of finishing school, reformatory or spa, where rebellious girls are sent to improve. They get lessons in comportment, yoga, spa food, and some clumsy brainwashing.

Roberts is rooming with Danielle Macdonald, a fat girl sent to slim down, who figures it will be a nice break from her mother, and Awkwafina, a punk who wears spiked headphones at all times and suffers from panic attacks. She is befriended by Eliza Gonzalez, a pop star who has been sent to Paradise Hills to make sure the hits keep coming. 

They plot to escape, they learn the secret of the island (think Stepford Wives). There are some mild horror scenes, and a very fairy tale ending for Jovovich. The ending is quite satisfying, although maybe some clever plotting was sacrificed for improved symbolism. 

But all that isn't important. Ms. Spenser in particular was enchanted by the sets, costumes, and art direction. It has a mixture of a Renaissance fairy tale and post-Modern decadence. It was partly filmed at Ricardo Bofill's La Fabrica, a decommissioned concrete factory turned into a modern castle. Add to this a fine cast of women, with Jovovich doing a wonderfully mad grand-dame. I was reminded a bit of Mirror, Mirror, with Julia Roberts in the evil stepmother role. It was also more beautiful than good. 

A Spanish production, this was directed by Spaniard Alice Waddington, whose only other feature is Disco Inferno. Not currently on Netflix, but we'll watch out.

Carry On, Holmes

 I suppose I've seen most of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes at one time or another. But I can't actually remember any of them. So I've queued up a few to watch from time to time. This time: Sherlock Holmes: The Scarlet Claw (1944).

It starts in a Canadian pub, when the church bell starts ringing. After a lot of sitting around and muttering, they finally go to see what's up. They find Lady Penrose holding onto the rope, dead, with her throat ripped out. She had slowly bled to death trying to ring for help. Yet nobody said anthing like. "Wish we'd come as soon as we heard the bell..."

Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanaugh) is attending a meeting of the Occult Society, expounding on the mysteries of existence, while Holmes and Watson reply skeptically. When he gets the news about his wife, the meeting adjourns. Holmes and Watson are packing up to leave Canada, when they check the mail, and find that Lady Penrose had written the previous day telling them that she feared for her life. This plea from a dead woman convinces them to stay and investigate.

This is not based on a Conan Doyle story, unless you count The Hound of the Baskervilles. There wasn't a lot of Holmesian deduction, but a lot of Holmes barging into houses and rifling corpses, etc. The best part, I'm afraid, was Nigel Bruce bumbling and mumbling through the Watson role. 

Anyway, to warm up for this, we watched a movie I downloaded from archive.org, Carry On Screaming (1966). The Carry On series were a bunch of low British parodies, full of bad puns and smut. This one is a parody of the Hammer Horror films, and pretty funny. It has Fenella Fielding as a sexy mad scientist - or member of a mad science team along with Jon Pertwee. Pertwee plays Dr. Watt, and even makes a Dr. Who joke, three years before he was cast as the third doctor. We get a number of the old Carry On crew, including Bernard Besslaw, Charles Hawtrey, and Joan Sims as the classic nagging wife. If this sort of thing sounds fun to you, give this one a try - it's supposed to be the best of the lot (there's ~30 and some are right stinkers). 

Anyway, it made a great intro to the Holmes and Watson. 

Pair of Marked Ones

Ms. Spenser is a big fan of horror, but has fairly particular tastes. We watched Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) because she finds the PA movie series to be reliably entertaining. I rather liked this entry too - while not endorsing the series in general, mind you.

As with all entries, this is done entirely "found footage" style. We meet three friends, Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, and Gabrielle Walsh, as they are graduating from high school. Jacobs is the dark, brooding one, Diaz the dopey friend, and Walsh, the hot girl who's just one of the boys. Jacobs (and Diaz?) lives in a slightly crumby apartment built around a courtyard in a Hispanic neighborhood in LA (Oxnard, I guess). We get some home movies of him goofing around, but significantly of the creepy crazy lady who lives in a downstairs apartment. When they taunt her, she mutters, "You have no idea what's going to happen to you."

She turns up murdered, and they spot a fellow student running from the back of the apartment. Instead of telling the police (snitched get stitches), they investigate the apartment and find all kinds of evidence of witchcraft. They take a book of spells, and try out a summoning in the abandoned church across the street. The results are scary, but inconclusive. Later, when they are playing with a Simon electronic game, it starts answering Jacobs' questions like a Ouija board. Except the question: "Are you good?"

Jacobs starts showing weird symptoms, like a bite mark. When he gets mugged, he turns out to have super-strength and just tosses the thugs around. But he is also having dark moods, and beats up a kid for talking to Walsh. I don't think he considers using his powers for good.

I won't go into the last act: suffice it to say that it ties into the whole mythos, with the first 2-3 movies referenced (we see Jacobs doing the haunting from the first movie. The last part of these movies always seems to me to be the scariest and the most random. So it is here.

But I do want to say that I liked the way this was not about rich white people. It's not super-ghetto, but about young adults living less than perfect lives. My only problem (other than not getting what was going on at all times) is that Grandma Irma wasn't able to stem this possession. Sure, she wiped some vinegar around, but couldn't do what nanny Diaz did in PA2. I guess she didn't succeed either.

The Hitch-Hikers

 The first (and until now, only) time I saw It Happened One Night (1934), I wasn't that impressed. Which is funny, because screwball is one of my favorite comedy genres, and this is considered to be the first and maybe the best screwball comedy. It is directed by Frank Capra, one of my favorites, and stars Claudette Colbert, who I love, and Clark Gable, who might be the problem.

I hardly need to go through the plot: Spoiled rich girl Colbert has married a fortune-hunting aviator and phony. She is kidnapped by her father and hustled onto a yacht in Florida before the honeymoon. She escapes and gets on a bus to New York and her husband. On the same bus is Gable, who has quit his newspaper job. They quarrel but she eventually falls asleep on his shoulder. That would probably be that, but he sees a newspaper and figures out that she is the missing heiress. His proposition to her is: He will help her get to New York if she will give him the exclusive. Otherwise, he will turn her in.

The scenes on the bus are rather jolly, with a lecherous salesman and some group sing-alongs. The pair have almost no money, and wind up sharing a room in a motor court with a blanket on a clothesline separating their beds. We do get to see Gable strip out of his shirt, the scene that cratered undershirt sales all over America.

We also get to see two styles of hitchhiking: his involves the thumb, hers a different limb. This is a competition because they have continued quarrelling. She is a bit of a clueless rich girl, and he is a know-it-all, who has to instruct her how to hitchhike, dunk donuts, and so on. 

And there's the rub. He is kind of a jerk - even when he realizes that he loves her, and wants to make it right, he does it thoughtlessly, and almost loses her. She isn't quite so unlikable, but with her privilege and frivolous marriage, she's not exactly lovable. But I guess I give a Colbert more latitude than Gable. Also, blowhard men who bully women aren't in fashion like they used to be. 

Still, it has that snappy Capra patter, plus a nice on-the-road feel, with the regular people - again, that Capra touch. I think I liked it more this time, although it still isn't a favorite. Ms. Spenser, on the other hand, liked it even less.

Cowboy Down

I'm kind of interested in Chloe Zhao (because Eternals) but sort of wasn't interested in Nomadland. When I mentioned my dilemma to Ms. Spenser, she suggested we watch The Rider (2018). Now, this is a semi-documentary movie about Native Americans, traumatic brain injury, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome (maybe) and I was prepared to be pretty bummed out. But I knew it would be beautiful.

It start Brady Jandreau as Brady Blackburn, a rodeo rider of Lakota descent with a bad head injury. Note that this is true of the actor and his character. His father, played by his father, is a drinker and gambler. His sister, played by his sister, is developmentally challenged. Wikipedia says autistic, but I was guessing fetal alcohol syndrome - I guess she doesn't match the facial characteristics, so I don't know. Anyway, she's sometimes the least fucked up in the family. Their mother is dead.

Brady can't ride, and certainly can't ride rodeo. His hand sometimes clenches uncontrollably and he gets nauseated when he rides. And of course, another head injury could kill him. His old rodeo buddies come visit and take him out to a mesa to drink and smoke dope around a fire all night. They all want him to get back on the horse. He wants to get back on, but can he?

He visits his friend and mentor. Lane Scott (played by himself). Lane has some more serious injuries - he is nearly paralyzed, shakes uncontrollably, and can barely sign to speak. Brady helps him with physical therapy, holding reins for him to pull. They talk about him riding again, but it doesn't look like he'll ever even walk. Next to him, Brady must feel pretty lucky, and maybe a little guilty for not trying harder, for not being harder.

And so it goes - he works at DakotaMart, shelving, checking and mopping. Kids in the store are excited to meet a rodeo star like him, and don't put him down for taking some time off. He works with one youngster, getting him ready to ride rodeo, and even gives him chaps and the shirt that Lane gave him to wear at the rodeo.

And we see him training horses. I don't know if this is called "breaking", but it should be called gentling horses. These scenes are magic, as we watch him develop trust and rapport with a beautiful animal. One scene is kind of funny, because his client, the horse's owner keeps up a stream of praise - "Look at that, he calmed right down.," "They said you were the best, boy, it's true." It seems a little over the top (these are mostly non-actors, and the script seems to be mostly improv), but also real.

His sister sings all the time, about the Moon and Stars and Clouds. Not Indian songs, just nonsense. It's beautiful.

There's a lot of hardship in this movie. Brady's dad sells their horse to pay rent. Brady buys a poorly trained horse cheap and trains him up - even when riding makes him puke. This doesn't end happily.

But oddly, through it all, this is not a movie about misery. It's about strength - Brady is going to do whatever he can to get back on the rodeo. Even if he can't, he's going to do everything he can to do what he can. He is stronger than his body. It's also about love - his family (even his asshole drunk dad), his friends, the horses and the big sky and country he lives in.

So I did not end up bummed out. Maybe more thoughtful than uplifted. But my spirit was not crushed.

One stupid thing I'd like to mention. I was just reading about the Lakota, and it seems that when the Sioux first saw horses, they called them "magic dogs", because dogs were the only pack animal they had domesticated. And the look in the horses' eyes in this movie - wary, intelligent, not trusting, but willing to consider cooperating - reminded me a lot of our dog. She's not a dog who gives undying devotion, stares into your eyes and begs for a pet. So I think our dog maybe part magic horse.  

Tiptoe through the Tulpas

The Empty Man (2020) is an odd kind of horror movie - actually 3 or 4 kinds.

It starts out in Bhutan with two young American couples hiking. They go up a mountain and over a dangerous looking rope bridge. They're about to head down when one of them hears a sound. He goes to investigate and falls into a crevice. When the other guy climbs down, he finds him sitting crosslegged and silent in front of a six-armed, dome-skulled, twenty-fingered skeleton. He is completely unresponsive. They get him back to a hut, but can't hike him out, besides, there's a storm. The next morning, one of the women sees a figure in the fog, and the previously comatose guy is gone. Then, his girlfriend goes nuts, kills the other couple, then herself, and plunges off a cliff.

Cool! Tibetan demonic possession movie! Roll opening credits.

The next scene James Badge Dale is grieving over something, and Sasha Frolova, daughter of a family friend comes to check in. She's got a bit of teenaged nihilism going on, but seems pretty together. But her mother, Marin Ireland, calls the next day to say that she has disappeared. Not only that but she has scrawled, "The Empty Man made me do it" in the bathroom in blood.

Dale starts to investigate. One of Frolova's highschool friends, Samantha Logan, tells him about a recent night her, Frolova, and a bunch of kids where hanging out at a bridge and talking about the Empty Man - if you blow across a bottle at a bridge and think about the Empty Man, he'll come and kill you in three days.

OK, it's an urban legend movie. Not as cool as a Tibetan demon, but we'll go along. 

Checking out the bridge, Dale finds the teens hanged underneath - but not Frolova. Dale starts to put certain (obvious)clues together, and decides that these disappearances and deaths are related to something called the Pontifex Institute. He does some quick wikipedia research and finds out that it is a kind of nihilistic, solipsistic self-help cult, who believe in "tulpas", a Tibetan term for "mind bodies", embodied thought forms. He investigates the cult and...

Oh, yeah, now we're in a cult movie. Anyway, I won't give much more away - but there's a few more twists and at least a hint at another movie, about memory and identity. Also, SPOILER - the crazy skeleton never really pays off.

I actually kind of enjoyed this mish-mash. Maybe it was partly the pleasure of the Bhutan setting. But the rest of it seemed to have a good look. This is director David Prior's first features - he had previously made a bunch of "Making of.." shorts. It was taken from a comic book, which might help explain the mix of concepts and tropes.

In conclusion, I'd like to mention the sound that attracted the hiker to the crevice was made with a sort of bone flute, played like blowing over the mouth of a bottle. This reminded me of the Aztec Death Whistle, but it sounds nothing like that. Never mind.

In Dreams

We had already seen the first half of the Design for Living / Peter Ibbetson (1933) Gary Cooper double header, so I will concentrate on Ibbetson.

It starts in Paris, mid 1800's. A little English boy called Gogo lives next door to a little girl, Mimsey. They fight over boards to build a dog house or a carriage. They are always fighting, but are best friends. When Gogo's mother dies (his father already being dead), his uncle, Douglas Dumbrille comes to collect him. He takes him back to England, and renames him Peter Ibbetson.

In the second act, Peter has grown up to become Gary Cooper with a Vincent Price mustache. It's funny what this new look does for him. He looks like Melvyn Douglass with a chin. Anyway, he has become a successful young architect in the neo-Gothic mold, working for blind Donald Meek. He is restless, unhappy as an architect, wanting to quit and search for meaning and love. Meek convinces him to go on vacation in Paris.

He meets a cute cockney girl there - Ida Lupino! - and visits the places he and Mimsey lived in, now shuttered. He realizes then that the only thing he ever loved was a little girl, and she's now gone. When he gets back, Meek convinces him to do one more job, rebuilding the stables for a Duke John Halliday. 

But mostly he is arguing with the Duchess, Ann Harding. She demands that he simply repeat one wing of the stable on the opposite side, while he has a whole new design in mind. Although they argue, they find themselves drawn together. At one point, they are discussing a dream and realize that they both had the same one. 

But the Duke gets jealous and disparages Harding's honor. Although the pair has never touched, they declare their love for each other in from of him, and realize that they are Gogo and Mimsey, grown up. The Duke draws a pistol, and Cooper throws a chair at him, killing him. Although it's self-defense, he is sentenced to life in prison.

The last act has Cooper in prison, with Harding living in seclusion. He is not a good prisoner, and the guards break his back whipping him. One night he dreams of her, and she tells him they can be together in their dreams. She shows him her ring and tells him she'll send it to him in real life, so he'll know the dream is real. And so she does.

And so they live to old age, miserable in life, happy in dreams. Then, she dies...

This is all wildly romantic and melodramatic. It's known for the shared dream fantasy, but that doesn't really hit until the end. It isn't even very surreal. But the whole movie is suffused with a glowing internal light that black-and-white is so good for. Cooper's famed stiffness works well for this upright, honest, seeking man. Harding is his equal.

But not, I'd say, as much as Miriam Hopkins in Design for Living. We didn't watch the whole movie, because it was a school night, but I was amazed at how beautiful, sexy and seductive she was. Every time she kissed either Frederic March or Gary Cooper, she looked so ecstatic. And when she stretched out on the day bed... Wow!

Hard Nose the Highway

Since I've been a cosmic cowboy since way back, Heartworn Highways (1975) was a natural for me. But it turns out that Ms. Spenser (usually more of a metalhead) got into outlaw country driving around with her cycling buddies. So she was pretty excited when Netflix finally made this available. 

It's a documentary about the first generation of outlaw country, and done just right. There aren't any interviews or talking heads - it's all music or the outlaws bullshitting. It starts in a recording studio, with a guy named Larry Jon Wilson recording a little number called "Ohoopee River Bottomland." It shows him working out the parts with the band, teaching them the changes using the Nashville Number system - the 1, the 4, the 5, back to the 1, etc. It's funny because he is also assigning choruses to the musicians, "You're on the 1 and 3, he's on 4 and 4", and talking about shifting through the gears, like "We start out in first, and the drums come in, shifting to third", etc. You see this kind of thing in a doc and expect they'll cut away - but nope, they do the whole song, showing all the musicians and the engineer, etc. And it's a great song, from a singer I've never heard of.

But some of the others we hear are Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Alan Coe, Rodney Crowell and a very young Steve Earle, looking more like 16 than 20. They sing a lot of old favorites, like "Old Time Feeling" and "LA Freeway", which I thought of as a Jerry Jeff Walker song. There's a few I'd never heard of, like a band called Barefoot Jerry who do a pedal steel breakdown called "Two Mile Pike", shot in the recording studio again.

We see some old timers, including a couple of guys from Uncle Dave Macon's band singing a very dirty tune, "Doctor's Blues", and a Peggy Brookes, a honky tonk gal, doing "Let's Go All the Way" (a song about marriage).

We see Coe driving his tour bus and chatting on the CB. He's on his way to a show in prison - there are a couple of prison shows, and a couple of these guys have spent time in them. Outlaw means outlaw. There's an old black farrier, who talks about Jesus and whiskey. We meet van Zandt, his girlfriend and his dog, goofing around in his yard. 

But mostly it's just some great music, some homebrew. some smooth. There's even some Charlie Daniels from before he became an asshole (?). It meanders a bit, but it gives most songs their due, and it's the music that counts. Also, seeing these guys, now old bastards or dead, as kids. 

It's Delightful, It's Delicious, It's Delirious

Delirious (1991) just seemed like it would be fun - John Candy is a soap-opera writer, stuck in his own show. In fact, just "John Candy" probably would have gotten us.

It starts with Candy waiting for the cable repairman. As he shouts at the cable company dispatcher, we see  the repairman all over New York, enjoying the sights, having a long breakfast, going to the zoo. There isn't much point to this sequence except to establish that Candy is often abused, and although he may shout, in the end, he has to take it. Once he gets his cable working, it also establishes that he writes for a soap opera, and is sweet on one of the leads, Emma Samms. 

As he is getting to work, we also meet Mariel Hemingway, calling her mother before going to an interview for a role in the same soap opera. She drops some change, and Candy steps on her fingers, destroying her nails. Then he rips a sleeve of her dress off trying to help her up. That establishes her as a bit of a klutz. 

It turns out that she is trying out for a role that Candy doesn't want to write into the show. The producers want to kill off his crush, Samms, and replace her with someone new. They've even brought in a new writer in case Candy won't do it. He blusters and rants, but it isn't going to do any good.

He has plans to take Samms to Vermont on an antiquing trip, but sees her making out with her co-star, David Rasche (Sledge Hammer). So he heads off on his own, and gets in an accident.

He wakes up in a hospital, with Samms as his nurse and Rasche as his doctor, the parts they play in the soap opera. In fact, he is actually in the soap opera. After he figures this out, he tries to write a better part for himself - he writes that the garage calls to tell him his car is ready - and it does, and it is.

Hemingway shows up as the daughter of a murdered scientist who is selling the secret formula... never mind. Let's just say that she thinks Candy is John Cage Bill Gates Jack Gates, mysterious millionaire. So that's the set up. He keeps writing cool stuff for himself, mainly to get to Samms. But it's pretty clear that he should be falling for Hemingway.

This is all pretty light froth. There aren't too many great gags, although there are plenty of amusing situations. The joys are mainly Candy's irrepressible style, ranting, wheedling, whining and playing the big shot. The rest of the cast are pretty great, including a cute cameo from Robert Wagner as the "real" Jack Gates. As Candy says, "But you never play daytime drama!"

Of course, it all works out for everyone, except maybe Wagner. And it worked out for us too. We had a great time. Not a new favorite or anything, but left us smiling. My only complaint was that Hemingway wasn't so much a character as a prize. Not an unusual problem for movies of this type. Also, the opening song was Prince's Delirious, but the closing was something limp and blah. 

Sync or Swim

We watched Synchronic (2019) partly because we had liked two of producer/director team Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead's other movies. But also, Netflix was pretty relentless in promoting this.

It stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as two paramedics in New Orleans. But first we see a couple in a hotel room take a drug, then find prehistoric vegetation in their room. She meets some sort of shaman, who lets a snake bite her. He goes out for ice, and when the elevator door opens, it opens on empty sky. He winds up at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

The guys are finding more and more odd drug deaths like this, along with the usual overdoses. A guy run through with a sword, for instance. Mackie traces the drug, a quasi-legal DMT analog designer drug called Synchronic, back to a smoke shop, where the spacy register girl sells him the last five packs and tells him it is discontinued. On his way out, a nervous business type tries to buy them from him. He turns out to be the scientist that created the drug and wants to get it off the street. You see, it can really cause time travel.

We have seen that Mackie is a player with the ladies, and it looks like Dornan wants to be, but he's married with a baby and a teen daughter - a moody, distant teen. When the daughter disappears, and a drug-den denizen mentions her name, it looks like she has taken Synchronic and time-travelled. So Mackie starts taking Synchronic to find her.

This is kind of interesting - the experimentation all captured on video, the tests of what you can do in the past, what you can bring back, etc. I'm going to give you all a little spoiler - he kills his dog Hawking while trying this out. It's kind of unforgivable. A lot of negative reviews mention this. Especially because Hawking is clearly a nod to Doc Brown's Einstein. 

This is not as trippy as the other movies of theirs we saw. The hypermasculine pair of leads are pretty hackneyed, and no one else has much of a character. There were some setups that didn't really go anywhere, like the scientist. I think he went out the door muttering about "just one more sample to get rid of", and I figured that would be a plot point. Nope, never heard from again. Maybe a set up for a sequel.

This was not the horror movie I expected, although some of the drug stuff was a little hard. It wasn't much of a thriller either. Really, the best part was Mackie working out the mechanics of the drug, and that was marred by the sacrifice of poor Hawking. Sigh.