Killing Zoe (1993)

Title: Killing Zoe (1993

Director/Writer: Roger Avary

Cast: Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy, Jean-Hughes Anglade

Review:

So the story with director/writer Roger Avary is that back when they where nobodies, Tarantino and Avary worked in a  video club in Los Angeles called ‘Video Archives’ ; a place of gathering for cinephiles and future film directors and producers. This video club turned out to be Tarantino and Avary’s breeding ground, after working there, they both went on to have successful film careers. Avery and Tarantino collaborated in a couple of films like Reservoir Dogs (1992), True Romance (1993) and Pulp Fiction (1994), though for whatever reason, Avary would go uncredited on some of these projects. Both of these talented individuals parted ways because as two great creative outputs, their geniuses would clash. Currently Avary says he can’t hang out with Tarantino because in Avary’s own words: “he sucks stuff from me”. Hey, I’d be pissed too if my buddy would steal ideas from me and then call them his own, or get all the credit for them. The lessons here being, don’t share your ideas with anyone, especially not Hollywood people.

But anyhow, Avary has gone on his own path in Hollywood. His first attempt at directing a film was Killing Zoe, a bank heist movie not unlike Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in that it’s a heist movie in which everything gets blown to hell. There’s two kinds of bank heist movies out there, the ones in which the heist is spectacularly pulled off, and the ones where everything goes wrong. Well, this is one of the ones where everything goes seriously wrong. First we meet Zed (played by Eric Stoltz) a safecracker who travels to France in order to help an old friend named Eric pull off a bank heist. All he has to do is break the safe, get in, get what they want, get out. The heist sounds simple enough to Zed, especially when the tough shit is left to Eric and his gang of misfits. All Zed has to do is open the safe. Nothing much to this films plot except the question that everyone asks while watching this kind of film: will they pull of the heist?

With Killing Zoe, you definitely feel like you are watching a Tarantino film, there’s drugs, hookers and violence, only Killing Zoe is a bitter affair, there’s no comedy to the proceedings. Avary seems to have a more acid outlook on things and it’s because of this that Killing Zoe is such a serious affair. Save for Eric Stoltz ‘Zed’ and Julie Delpy’s ‘Zoe’, most of the characters in this film are not likable at all, they feel like real douche bags. The first taste of bitterness comes when Zed has had sex with Zoe and they immediately like each other. They seem to be really hooking up, but then Eric comes storming into the room and coldly kicks Zoe out of the room even though she’s completely naked! What a douche bag! So right off the bat, we get a taste of this Eric character, who is very obviously a real asshole. He’s the kind of character who’s bitter sweet.  He’s Zed’s lifelong friend, but he is also extremely rude. We then have to hang out with Eric and his gang of equally douchie junkie friends during a night of debauchery in the streets of France. Eric tells Zed “I’m going to show you the real Paris”.

This whole crazy night was a great part of the film; I really got the vibe that I was hanging out with a group of low lives who like to live on the edge. They’ll try every drug they can, push the limits of what their bodies can take. They hang out in these seedy pubs, doing heroin while everyone watches. You kind of have to wonder how they are going to pull off this heist with the hangover they will probably have the next day. This part of the film feels genuine, probably because the script is partially based on Avery’s own experiences while visiting Paris, you have to wonder what kind of trip Avery took to inspire a film like this, but anyhow, after a crazy night of drugs, booze and broads, the movie shifts into the heist which starts out well enough, but soon degenerates into a blood bath.

Ebert called this movie “generation X’s first heist movie” and the first film from the “film generation”. This whole “film generation” thing that Ebert referred to in his review makes sense, considering this film comes from a real cinephile like Avery. These are really the best kind of films in my book, the filmmakers behind them feed off other films and then do their own updated version of the movies they love, with their own style infused into the proceedings. Tarantino, Scorcese and Del Toro are this way, they are all cinephiles, true lovers of cinema that make movies influenced by hundreds of other movies they’ve seen before. Though to be honest, I couldn’t really compare Killing Zoe to anything I’ve seen before! It has its very own style and mood, very realistic, gritty and violent. It’s got that nihilistic 90’s vibe that the youth of that decade had. I remember being a teen during the 90’s, the young people of that decade were very angry, very upset at the world; their music was not happy music. This is where grunge came from, from all that pent up anger.  The characters in Killing Zoe have an anarchic “fuck everything” mentality to them, these are men who don’t give a crap what happens to them. To them, life is just one big fat stupid joke not meant to be taken seriously.

The only real problem for me with Killing Zoe is that the film is very thin. It’s only about these crazy pissed off characters pulling off a heist, with not very much to say about anything. One of the characters has Aids, and some seem to think the film is some sort of metaphor for aids, but honestly I didn’t see that. Zoe and Zed have a pseudo romantic involvement, but it’s doesn’t go further than their first encounter as hooker and customer.  For a movie coming from a writer, to me Killing Zoe didn’t have any depth to it. It has crazy characters, violence, nudity, drugs, and an overall chaotic feeling to it, but did it say anything to me past its crazy characters and situations? Not in my book. In comparison Reservoir Dogs has all sorts of themes and depth to it, Killing Zoe simply has its kinetic energized style, that’s it. This could have something to do with the fact that Avary wrote the film in a couple of weeks when producer Lawrence Bender found this abandoned bank while scouting locations for Reservoir Dogs. When Avery heard of this location, he immediately wrote the screenplay based on his experiences while traveling through Paris. This is probably why the “hanging out with the crazy junkies” part of the film feels so genuine. Not that I’m complaining, I’m simply saying that Killing Zoe is a good example of style over substance. But is it boring? Not in the least! The film entertains with its sordid characters and the complications that occur during the heist, just don’t expect anything more than that.

Rating: 4 out of 5       

The Prophecy Films

So I finally got around to watching The Prophecy films. I bought them in this nifty dvd which collected all three films in one disk, so I ended up watching them back to back. I know that these films have gone past their third installment, I believe they are currently on their fourth sequel, but I don’t even count the ones after part 3 because they don’t have Christopher Walken in them, they feel more like a cash in, a last desperate attempt to milk the franchise for all it’s worth. I just don’t have any interest in them. But if anyone out there thinks that Prophecy: Forsaken (2005) and Prophecy: Uprising (2005) are worth a damn, let me know, I just might give them a shot at some point. But for now, they don’t even register on my radar. This review will cover only the first three films. So it’s a three for one deal, enjoy!

The thing about these movies is that they started out with a decent theatrical release, which was the first film, the sequels after that all went straight to dvd which always raises a red flag for me because they make me think that if they went straight to dvd, then they weren’t considered good enough by the producers, at least not good enough to bother with a theatrical release. So maybe this is the reason why I had never bothered seeing these straight to dvd sequels that followed the original. But curiosity always gets the best of me and I found this dvd with all three so cheap that I went for it. I’m glad I did, the first three films are fairly decent on their own right.

The interesting thing about these first three Prophecy films is that they all had a decent cast. I mean, take a look at the first one where we have the always entertaining Christopher Walken as the human hating angel, Gabriel. You see on these series of films, some angels hate humans because they are jealous of them. They feel that God loves humans more then angels, so some angels have decided to completely annihilate the human race, just so they could be number one again. They want to make it like before, when God loved them best. In order to achieve this, Gabriel wants to find the soul of the most evil human on the planet, who just so happens to be a military leader for the U.S. army. Just watching Walken playing an angel is great, he has such fun with the character; who by the way gets funnier as the series progresses. He spews lines like “I’m an angel, I kill firstborns while their mamas watch!” These movies are that much enjoyable simple because Walken is in them. So anyways we also get Elias Koteas, the guy who always plays secondary characters in every single movie he’s been in except this one, where he   plays detective Thomas Daggett, a priest wannabe who every now and then  gets horrific visions from god. The whole thing makes you wonder why God would send someone such horrible images! But whatever, Daggett is investigating the appearance of dead angels, which keep popping up across the city. Along for the ride is Virginia Madsen who plays a grade school teacher and the always underused Eric Stoltz who plays the good angel that’s trying to stop Gabriel. But the avalanche of talent isn’t over my friends! The amazing cast continues with Amanda Plummer as a zombie/ghoul who helps Gabriel move around and Viggo Mortensen playing Satan himself! So we got an amazing cast rounding up this horror film! Was the film worth it?

Well yeah. The story is all about humans, it preaches on about how we are capable of a lot of good, but unfortunately, a lot of evil as well. The idea that an angel needs the soul of an evil human to help him destroy humanity itself says a lot about how the filmmakers see humanity. We are creatures capable of such violence, that our violent capabilities rival even that of God’s own angels! We are the experts on the subject; so much so that they need US to destroy humanity; as Lucifer himself puts it: “Humans -and how I love talking monkeys for this- know more about war and treachery of the spirit than any angel” The film unfolds in a very dark and eerie manner, with angels running around the city killing each other as lightning strikes the skies. Somehow American Indian folklore works its way into the film! Same as in many horror films, Indians always have the best connection with anything supernatural, which really is something of a cliché in horror films. There’s always an Indian burial ground, or an Indian spirit, or an Indian shaman to help out. The thing about these Prophecy movies is that they are always on the verge of some big apocalyptic event happening, but nothing ever does. The big war between angels and humans, or good angels vs. rebel angels never really consummates. But whatever, the in between was also fun.

These films are all filled with angels crouching on top of furniture or on top of buildings like birds; problem is they never really fly! I never got his about these movies, these guys are angels but they don’t seem to ever use their wings for flying. We do get to see a five second sequence of angels flying in the clouds, but we see it from afar, and briefly. And they re-use that same stock footage on a couple of these films, which I hated. I guess it had something to do with budgetary limitations, but we never really get to take a good look at the angels spreading their wings and flying. If an angel opens its wings, we only see the shadow of that, or someone’s reaction to it, but we never see the freaking angels taking flight. They do skip around a lot and jump around a lot though. I found it funnyt that since angels don’t know how to handle human machinery, they have to resort to having humans doing things for them like driving them around town or showing them how to use a computer or a walkie talkie. Why don’t they just fly where they need to go instead of using a car?

So, in comes Prophecy II (1998) which was the most difficult to watch of these three films. I found it extremely boring, and disappointing for various reasons. Number one, I didn’t like the fact that the film resorted to using so much stock footage from the first film. To me this is a lame ass, lazy move from any filmmaker. You are showing us the same images from the first film! Don’t do this! We as an audience feel cheated as hell! Still, the director felt the need to show us the same sequence of angels flying far up in the sky, and these flashbacks of angels fighting that we already saw on the first film. Laaazy! On this second chapter of the Prophecy series Jennifer Beals has a one night stand with an angel. The angel is looking for the right girl to father his child. You see, the angels want to conceive a half breed, a half human, half angel child. This half breed is the one destined to stop the rebel angels from committing genocide. So Jennifer Beals character functions as a “Virgin Mary” of sorts on this film.

Even Satan doesnt want this guy in hell! 

Now here's where things dont stick to bible lore: in the bible the sons of angels are called ‘The Nephilim’. According to the bible angels actually looked down the from heavens at the eartlhy women and foudn them incredibly hot. Cant say I blame them, I'm merely a human and I find them irresistible. Yet, this idea of angels having sexual desires makes no sense because according to the bible, angels are supposed to be asexual! So anyhows, they found earth girls hot and materialized so they could get a taste of female flesh! So any way, they ended up having babies, and these sons of angels ended up being evil giants who terrorized the land. That’s right my friends, according to the bible giants once walked the earth! And they were evil! Yet on this movie the Nephilim is supposed to be some sort of savior! Humanities last hope for survival. See what I mean? No sense whatsoever. On top of this, the angel that screws Jessica Beals doesn’t even care for her, he just uses her! The bastard! Point is that this angel ends up committing what the bible refers to as fornication, which is just a big word for having sex before getting married. According to the bible, this is one of the biggest sins you could commit against god! But this angel doesnt care, he sins in order to defeat the bad angels? And these are supposed to be the good guys! So anyhow, this second chapter in the series has a cool cast, again Christopher Walken returns as Gabriel, we get Jennifer Beals as Rosario, we get Eric Roberts and Danzig as angels. And as an added bonus Brittany Murphy played the ghoul who does Gabriel’s beading!  But in spite of this film having a great cast, this second chapter in the series feels like an in-between chapter in a much larger story. It feels like they were setting everything up for something bigger. And that’s exactly what they were doing with this second film. The third film was far more entertaining and fulfilling. It wanted to end the series with a big bang! I think it achieved it.

Brittany Murphy in one of her earliest roles

The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000) surprised the hell out of me. Having seen the past two films and finding them only mildly entertaining, I went in to this third chapter with very low expectations, yet I’m happy to inform that I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s the one that I enjoyed the most out of all three! One thing I like about these first three films is that they have continuity to them. Characters return and reappear; problem is that sometimes it’s difficult to realize this because they keep changing actors. In spite of this, you do get a sense of continuity, and Walken’s Gabriel is the one character that holds all three films together. One element I enjoyed about this one is that Gabriel is human on this one, and so he is kind of getting used to being human. He likes living on earth, he’s dropped the short black hair and trench coat for long white hair and living like a bum on the streets. On this film he is slowly learning to actually like humans. With this film they pulled a Terminator 2 (1992) on us and went and made the villain a good guy this time around. Walken is no longer hell bent on destroying humanity, he’s lightened up. One hilarious scene has him just enjoying a drive down the dessert on this beat up old car trying to play a trumpet as he drives, cause you know, according to the bible, angels play trumpets in heaven all the time, which kind of makes you think about who gives angels music classes, and who makes these holy musical instruments? 

But who cares seeing Christopher Walken playing a trumpet as he drives is hilarious right?! In Gabriel’s place we now have a villain called Pyriel who is still very much interested in destroying all humans and proclaiming himself the “next god”. The Nephilim Danyael (who was introduced in the second film) is now all grown up and has lost all faith in God. In fact he runs a church that preaches against god! I thought this was so interesting! But across the film he learns to accept his true destiny which is going up against the Pyriel, the leader of the rebel angels.

This third film distinguishes itself for various reasons, first, it was directed by one Patrick Lussier. Now this is a director whom you can either love or hate, depending on how much cheese you can take. Lussier is the guy behind Drive Angry (2011), a film I enjoyed hating. He also made My Bloody Valentine (2009) and is currently hard at work putting the finishing touches on Halloween III (2012). He’s also the guy behind all those Dracula 2000 movies. All of these films are high in octane and cheese, unapologetic about their b-movie nature. I guess this is the reason why this Prophecy film was so fun to watch. The previous two films feel dreary and boring when compared to this one which is filled with chase sequences and matrix-style fighting. Also, it has this awesome showdown during its last sequences between two angels that is the most exciting thing in the whole trilogy. The film even has a happy ending to it! 

Another thing that made this one cool: it has Brad Dourif playing a gun totting religious fanatic who walks around with the bible in one hand and a gun to shoot any infidels on the other! This is yet another crazy character to add to Brad Dourif long list of freaky characters he's portrayed on film.Well, I guess I’ve run out of things to say about these movies. Not a bad trilogy of films, the third film offers up a nice wrap up to the trilogy and has finality to it. At least this series isn’t as bad as the Children of the Corn movies which by the way I will comment on soon. But these Prophecy films prove one thing to me once again: God hates to appear in horror films,  while Satan loves them. For proof of that check out one of my most popular blog posts: God and Satan inFilms. And another thing, if you freeze frame the last image in Prophecy II, just before the ending credits you can see a face forming in the clouds, while thunder and lightning crackle…don’t know if that qualifies as an appearance by God or not, what do you guys think?

Rating: The Prophecy (1995)  3 out of 5

Rating: The Prophecy II (1998) 2 out of 5

Rating:  The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000) 3 1/2 out of 5