Film Reviews

GO RAPE OF THE SOUL Artists and bishops are evil, and they want to make us as bad as they are. We already suspected it before Rape of the Soul, a delightful talking-heads romp through the world of Satanism, pederasty and alien infiltration as represented in religious art. But now, confronted with The Evidence by director Michael A. Calace, we know it for sure. Is Rape a hilariously stupid documentary or an ingenious put-on? Honest to God, it’s hard to tell, but in these Da Vinci Code days, one is tempted by cryptic Dan Brown–like clues to come down on the side of the latter: (1) Though Calace seizes credibility by the balls as our outraged goombah narrator, he describes himself as an actor and an “inventor” who holds a patent in golf technology. (2) The way the film turns everything into an acronym (“the Greater Toronto Area, or GTA”) is just too funny. (3) Calace finds the English word S-E-X embedded in paintings from the Italian Renaissance. (4) Hundreds of years ago, an artist precognitively painted an exact portrait of Vladimir Putin; Calace suggests the devil gave him access to future visions. Find your own clues! The real joke is that, though many of the subliminal “faces,” “penises” and “666s” Calace discovers in his 140-minute assault are pure fantasy, a lot are plainly visible! They may not have actually stimulated our modern wave of child molestation and general immorality, but they reap their own potent consequences: Instead of seeing penises in Christ, I’m seeing Christ in my penis. And that ain’t good. (Fairfax) (Greg Burk)

GO SLITHER In Slither, the most sensationally scary-funny creep-out movie since Gremlins, an army of extraterrestrial slugs hitches a ride on an asteroid, crash-lands in the sleepy, deer-hunting hamlet of Wheelsy, South Carolina, and sets about feasting on the local population. And damn if writer-director James Gunn doesn’t almost have you rooting for the little mollusks! A Darwinian if ever there was one, Gunn paints the Wheelsy locals as a bunch of comic grotesques — overgrown frat boys, loose women and disturbingly picture-perfect Norman Rockwell families — then takes demented pleasure in turning the hunters into the hunted. It’s the kind of movie that used to be called “trashy good fun,” only there’s nothing trashy about it: Gunn, who scripted the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, is clearly punch-drunk with horror-movie love; Slither is, among other things, a freewheeling homage to The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and just about everything by George Romero. But it’s also a crack social satire that weighs in on the au courant evolution-vs.-creationism debate, cautions against the dangers of groupthink and turns into a hilarious test case for the sacred vows of marriage. Gunn keeps the action zipping along, aided by ingenious makeup effects and actors (including that sublime screwball Elizabeth Banks) who gleefully throw caution to the wind. You’ll never be able to listen to Air Supply’s “Every Woman in the World” in quite the same way again. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

STAY ALIVE Disney is reportedly using Stay Alive to revive its Hollywood Pictures division — what better lifeblood than a brain-dead teens-in-peril thriller? This one takes The Ring and replaces the cursed videotape with an underground video game, the players of which inadvertently resurrect the spirit of murderous Transylvanian countess Elizabeth Bathory, and subsequently — after being terrorized by self-breaking mirrors, self-opening doors and hordes of kabuki zombies — get slaughtered. Strapped with a PG-13 rating, Stay Alive is death porn without the porn: Director William Brent Bell’s pre-gore cutaways should enrage even those horror buffs for whom suspense is irrelevant, to say nothing of the fact that the movie’s only real scare tactic is playing what sounds like a reverbed electric razor on the soundtrack. The banter (“The problem with your mouth is that stupid, insensitive shit comes out of it”) s on a level appropriate for star Frankie Muniz’s Malcolm in the Middle crowd, although the setting for this celebration of slaughter — New Orleans — now seems tacky enough to begin with. Picked off roughly in order from most annoying to least, the movie’s semiprofessional gamers (led by Jon Foster) aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, with penchants for wandering into abandoned construction sites and illuminating darkened hallways with Zippos, even when the electricity is presumably working. Maybe video games really do rot the mind; the kids should have long ago hung up Castlevania IV in favor of Videodrome and eXistenZ. (Citywide) (Ben Kenigsberg)