78/52: written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe: Eli Roth, Richard Stanley, Elijah Wood, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mick Garris, and assorted other film types offer their opinions on Hitchcock's seminal thriller Psycho. The movie frames the discussion within the formal context of the Shower Scene (78 camera set-ups, 52 shots).
Things get a little too breezy at points, but it's nonetheless a treasure trove of information and opinion on Psycho, Hitchcock, and the film's status as both a deceptive, boundary-pushing hit and a movie-changing movie. Recommended.
The Last Witch-Hunter (2015): written by Cory Goodman, Matt Sazama, and Burk Sharpless; directed by Breck Eisner; starring Vin Diesel (Kaulder), Rose Leslie (Chloe), Elijah Wood (Dolan 37), Michael Caine (Dolan 36), Olafur Darri Olafsson (Belial), and Julie Engelbrecht (Witch Queen):
Vin Diesel sports an unconvincing beard-and-wig combo for the medieval flashback sequences in this somewhat ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. He's Kaulder, killer of the Witch Queen some time in the 1200's in Europe, cursed by her with immortality. He works for the Axe and Cross, a secret society of witch-fighters and, um, witch-regulators.
Assorted shenanigans convince Caulder, now in present-day New York and looking like the clean-shaven Vin Diesel we all know and love, that some bad witches strive now to bring the Witch Queen back to life. As the Witch Queen caused the Black Plague with magical Plague Flies, this could be bad. But not bad enough for anyone to notify the Centres for Disease Control!
The Last Witch-Hunter took a critical and box-office beating when it came out in 2015. It's not actually that bad. For example, it's much better than Solo, Warcraft, Alien: Covenant, and Tom Cruise's The Mummy. What praise, you say! What praise! It's about on par with the Netflix Will Smith movie Bright, also an ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. Hey, at least they're trying for something other than another superhero movie.
Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel, and looks and acts pretty much like Vin Diesel once we get him out of all that fake hair. Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) is fine as an unconvincing love interest, or maybe they're just going to be friends because nothing romantic happens in the movie. Michael Caine plays Michael Caine as a mentor figure. Elijah Wood is under-used and misused as a magical priest sidekick to Diesel. Someone named Julie Engelbrecht plays the Witch Queen under so much make-up and CGI than it did make sense not to cast a name actress as the main villain because she would be unrecognizable.
The direction of Breck Eisner is programmatic in the manner of a video-game adaptation. Or maybe a video-game cutscene. There are a few monster designs and production design moments that suggest real imagination in some of the visual effects houses that worked on the movie -- the spider-transformer-robot-thingie Jailer of the Witch-Prison is the best of these. In all, an adequate time-waster with enough goofy moments to keep it afloat. Lightly recommended.
