Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Looking for fun and adventure? Look no further. This week I have three new movies from around the world: a supernatural thriller set in Bavaria, a dark mystery in northwestern China, and an action comedy that takes place…in outer space!

Borderlands

Co-Wri/Dir: Eli Roth

It’s outer space in a post-apocalyptic future dominated by a multi planetary corporation known as Atlas. The worst place in the universe is the planet Pandora, once prosperous, but now decrepit and desolate. That’s where Atlas CEO’s daughter still lives. Pandora is a mecca for treasure hunters looking for a legendary vault, one that will provide limitless wealth to its discoverer. Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) Atlas’s teenaged daughter, still lives there. But when she is kidnapped by Roland, an ex-soldier (Kevin Hart) and Krieg, a deranged, masked muscleman (Florian Munteanu) Atlas is furious,  not least because his daughter may hold the key to that vault. So Atlas (Edgar Ramírez) approaches Lilith (Cate Blanchett) to bring her home. Lilith is a hard-boiled bounty hunter, notorious for her ruthlessness; she’ll shoot anyone who gets in her way. And she hates Pandora more than most, having lived a traumatic childhood there. But business is business, so when Atlas offers an enormous sum of money to compete this “simple” job, she flies off to rescue Tiny Tina. 

Problem is it’s anything but simple. Tiny Tina doesn’t want to be rescued. She’s also dangerous: the cute teddy bears she carries are lethal explosives. Eventually they form a truce:  Lilith, Roland Tina, and Krieg, along with Claptrap — a wise-cracking R2D2 — and Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) an academic with a sketchy past. But can they fight off all those dangerous treasure hunters? And who in this group can be trusted?

Borderlands is a science fiction action/comedy based on a video game. It’s filled with strangely shaped vehicles, scary monsters and cool weapons. It has pretty good special effects and a stellar cast. Unfortunately, the movie kinda sucks. It’s like a third-rate Mad Max. Eli Roth, is a competent, though gory, horror director, but he totally missed the boat with this one. The story stays close to the original game, but who wants to watch characters advancing to higher levels in a game you’re not playing? It just doesn’t translate into a movie plot: Cross a bridge before it collapses. Enter the elevator before the bad guys attack… Boooring. The jokes are not funny, the script is awful, the CGI is relentless, and the characters are shamelessly stolen from movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Tank Girl.

Perhaps fans of the game will enjoy seeing their favourite characters on the big screen, but otherwise I can’t see any reason to watch this.

Only the River Flows 

Co-Wri/Dir: Wei Shujun 

It’s the early 1990’s in China. Detective Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) is a recent arrival to Banpo, a rundown small town on the Yellow River. HIs wife is pregnant with their one child, He was an award winning cop back in Yunnan before transferring here and the ambitious Police Chief (Hou Tianlai) has high hopes. He wants to move the police HQ to an abandoned cinema. But first, Ma’s team must prove its crime-solving talent. Lucky for Ma a kid finds a dead body by the riverbank. It’s an old lady who tends her geese but rarely interacts with anybody else. She lives with a formerly homeless drifter she adopted, who people in the village call Mad Man. However any evidence was washed away with the flowing river. A similar killing is discovered a few days later by the river; a local poet, whose writing ties him to a single woman. 

There are a lot of seemingly unconnected clues. A cassette tape found near a crime contains crucial information recorded on it. One interrogated witness admits his guilt —- but is he telling the truth? The more clues they find, the less sure Ma is. And the longer he takes to close the file, the more agitated his ping-pong-playing Police Chief becomes. Eventually, truth merges with fantasy until Ma can’t tell his dreams from reality. Can he regain his clear head and catch the real killer (or killers)? Or will this case be his last?

Only the River Flows is a policier portraying an earlier China that’s dirty and poor. Though it involves a series of killings, the mystery is less important than the mood: dark, wet and crumbling. There are some surprisingly memorable scenes: like a primitive CSI where they strike a hog carcass to determine which knife was used in the killing.  The film manages to be cynical and satirical, without being out-and-out depressing, poking fun at things like the PRCs obsession with official banners and awards.  The acting is good, but the camerawork and art direction is great, infusing the film with a miserable nostalgia. I’ve never seen a film by Wei Shujun before, but his reputation precedes him. And he was born after the film takes place.

Not bad at all.

Cuckoo

Wri/Dir: Tillman Singer

It’s the forests of Bavaria, in the not-so-distant past. Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is a depressed and angry 17-year-old who carries a switchblade in her pocket. She likes scowling and playing goth music on her electric guitar.  She was sent to Germany to stay with her divorced dad, his second wife and their kid Alma (Mila Lieu) after her mom died. They live in a modern house near a seedy, isolated resort — named after the cuckoo — that they want to develop. The hotel is owned and run by a slimy control freak named Herr König (Dan Stevens), who hires Gretchen to work at the front desk; We need more English speakers, he says. 

But she soon discovers this guesthouse is no picnic. Female visitors are prone to vomiting and keeling over in the lobby. Strange noises and powerful invisible waves, coming from nowhere, wreak havoc with their brains.  And when Gretchen rides her bike home one night — over Herr Konig’s objections — she is closely followed and nearly killed by a terrifying hooded woman — with round glasses and grasping claws — running all the way. She narrowly escapes by seeking refuge inside the local hospital. But the police dismiss her scary experiences as a prank by local kids. Her family and their friends (except her mute half-sister Alma, and a bearded detective named Henry) seem to have turned against her. The longer Gretchen stays there, the more beaten up she gets, with an arm in a sling and gauze across her forehead. But every attempt to escape is thwarted by invisible forces, fueled by time gaps in her memory. Can she ever get away from this godforsaken place? And who are the scary people here: Demons? Vampires? Werewolves?

Cuckoo is a highly-original story of a sensitive teenaged girl trapped in a bizarre situation. It’s a fantasy thriller/horror but different from anything I’ve seen. It’s not set in any particular era but probably the 1990s. (Picture older hospital rooms, endless rows of filing cabinets) Writer-Director Tillman Singer also composed some of the songs. The acting is excellent, and more than that, the actors really seem to enjoy their strange characters, especially Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) and Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey). Cuckoo is funny, sexy, scary, totally unpredictable and weird as all get-out. 

I loved this one.

Borderlands, Only the River Flows, and Cuckoo all open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.