Movie Reviews: The Happening, Poultrygeist, Savage Grace

 POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD A blend of 11 herbs and spices accounts for the secret recipe for Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. Less furtive and more bounteous are the ingredients necessary for the standard Troma production, but Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is made from a revamped formula that boisterously mixes the obligatory old (breast-jiggling, lesbianism, exploding pus bubbles) with the snarky new (pomo musical numbers, equal-opportunity racism, a reference to Jenna Jameson). Opening with the best trying-to-unfasten-a-bra and zombie-finger-as-butt-plug gags in movie history, which are closely followed by the most tasteless fisting scene since William Friedkin’s Cruising, Poultrygeist chronicles what happens when a fried-chicken shack goes up on a Native American burial ground. Because she doth protest too much, Wendy (Kate Graham) is branded a Sappho B. Anthony, and when a Muslim woman named Humus (Rose Ghavami) conveys shock, it’s with the good ole “Oh, Shiite!” A predictably hit-and-miss yuk fest, the film calls it a satirical day after naming most characters after fast-food restaurants (Arbie, Carl Jr., Paco Bell), then redundantly coasts on a series of scatological explosions and phallo- and anal-centric invasions. The Romero zombie fest is a major point of reference, but given the plethora of harrumphing reaction shots and cameos by D-listers like Ron Jeremy and the South Park boys, so is Scooby Doo. (Sunset 5) (Ed Gonzalez)

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

The Happening

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More About

• Ed Gonzalez
• Reha Erdem
• Tom Kalin
• Jessica Alba
• Animated Films

QUID PRO QUO For the first half-hour, Quid Pro Quo flirts with the kind of sexual perversity that fueled Crash, David Cronenberg’s lurid 1996 film about a subculture of autoerotics. But the opening scenes prove little more than a tease, for there is nothing fetishistic — much less metaphorical — about the case of Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl), a public-radio reporter who was 8 years old when a car crash killed his parents and left him a paraplegic. An anonymous tip leads Isaac to a clandestine fraternity of “wannabe amputees” — physically intact individuals who yearn to be disabled. His guide into this strange universe is Fiona (Vera Farmiga), a mysterious beauty — and soon lover — who craves not dismemberment but physical paralysis. Farmiga is captivating, Stahl less so — although a bigger problem is writer-director Carlos Brooks’ script, which sets up one story, then shifts gears into something more personal and psychologically specific. That’s normally a plus, deepening the viewer’s sense of involvement, but the transition here is bumpy and, ultimately, unconvincing. (The Landmark; Playhouse 7) (Jean Oppenheimer)

SAVAGE GRACE Designed more for train-wreck gawkery than psychological illumination, Tom Kalin’s garish melodrama applies icehouse style to hothouse material: the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland, former wife of the heir to the Bakelite fortune, by the grown son she’d taken to fucking to cure his homosexuality. From the life-preserver-clinging of his culture-vulture mom (Julianne Moore) to the contempt of his aloof playboy dad (Stephen Dillane), young Antony Baekeland was molded from birth into a sexually confused, neurotic mama’s boy (played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne). His standing as his mother’s de facto husband led inevitably to incest, violence and a grimly redundant self-suffocation; in Kalin and screenwriter Howard A. Rodman’s hands his downfall becomes a glossy travelogue with stops in Paris, Majorca and London (where a fateful kitchen knife awaits). This marks Kalin’s first feature in the 15 years since his queer-cinema landmark Swoon, a grave, provocative retelling of the Leopold and Loeb case. This, by contrast, is a tawdry nighttime soap that marvels without insight at its characters’ despicable behavior: It squanders a major performance by Moore, who rips into Barbara’s confrontational mania, maternal perversity and all-consuming need with nail-clawing fury and no small amount of malicious humor — as when she tries to quiet her increasingly agitated son/hand-job recipient with a sharp “inside voice!” (The Landmark; Playhouse 7; Sunset 5; Town Center 5) (Jim Ridley)

GO  TIMES AND WINDS Times and Winds is a film bewitched by the rhythms of everyday life in a remote Turkish village. Director Reha Erdem sees pain and love the same way he does the moon and sun — as constant, illuminating forces — and his camera pushes forward as if on an axis, peering at family and communal experience through the impressionable eyes of three preadolescents. Ömer (Özkan Özen) prays for the death of his cruel imam father, inviting the bitter wind into the man’s bedroom at night and contemplating the effects of a scorpion’s sting on the adult body; Yakup (Ali Bey Kayali), enchanted by his teacher’s beauty, refuses to clean the woman’s blood from his thumb after he pulls a splinter from her foot; and Yildiz (Elit Iscan), resentful of her mother and blinded by the adoration of her father, weeps when she catches her parents having sex. The actors are prone to expressionless, and Arvo Pärt’s score bears the brunt of the story’s thematic heavy lifting, preciously rhyming growing pains to the sway of the seasons. But Erdem’s vignettes can be trenchant, as in the amusing scenes of boys and girls responding differently to animals bumping uglies — evocations of how society determines sexual roles at an early age. (Music Hall) (Ed Gonzalez)