Eliza Dushku

  • Open Graves (2009)

    Open Graves (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I had a bit of trouble making it to the end of Open Graves without falling asleep. Let’s see if I do any better describing it to you. A straight-to-video release from 2009, Open Graves has to do with a few surfer post-teenagers who discover a strange old game that… zzzz… okay, that didn’t take long. As I said: an old game in which the order in which they die in the game is reflected in what happens to them soon afterwards, as if the screenwriter threw the Jumanji script in a blender with one of the Final Destination sequels. (Fun fact: every single review of this film elsewhere on the web makes the exact same reference to Jumanji and Final Destination. This review also obliges.) I’ll admit that this description almost makes Open Graves sound interesting (although many, many screenwriters have blended those two scripts before), but the film doesn’t quite have what it takes, either in the writing or the directing, to keep things interesting. The cool-blue cinematography and soothing rhythms soon make viewers… zzzz… right. Occasionally, the film does something halfway interesting, like throwing in a car stunt that makes no sense in terms of physics but at least shows some budget shown on-screen and/or CGI flames. Plus, there’s Eliza Dushku in a prominent role, which reassures us that she was at least alive at the time of the film’s production. (But seriously: Wikipedia tells us that her gradual disappearance from acting over the past ten years obscures a return to school and motherhood. Congratulations!)  Still, she’s very much not enough to save Open Graves from terminal boredom and cheap CGI overuse. This is the kind of by-the-numbers horror film featuring young adults being killed that you can plot in your sleep and… zzzz… well that was a trigger all right. Open Graves is really not worth any effort. Your finger may slip on the remote and you’ll end up watching it without much of a reaction. Thanks to director Álvaro de Armiñán, It’s not funny, it’s not overly gory, it’s not good, it’s not terrible: It just is.

  • Wrong Turn (2003)

    Wrong Turn (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2017) It’s kind of amazing that Wrong Turn spawned five sequels (and counting), given how much of a generic hillbilly horror film it is. Featuring college-aged protagonists pitted against murderous cannibal hillbillies, Wrong Turn delights in macabre gags, makes no secret of its affection for its monsters rather than its human victims, and feels like a cynical attempt to churn out just another clichéd horror film. It’s a film that doesn’t have much of a reason for existing, even while we’re watching it for the first time—it’s obviously following conventional genre formula, and it’s not particularly well executed enough to rise above the muck. Eliza Dushku and Emmanuelle Chriqui have featured roles (poor them), but that’s nowhere near enough to justify seeing the film. Wrong Turn’s meanness will be repulsive to anyone who’s not a convinced gore hounds, while not offering anything more than straight-up genre thrills.

  • True Lies (1994)

    True Lies (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On DVD, July 2010) I hadn’t seen True Lies since it was first released in theatres, and while it has visibly aged since then, it hasn’t lost much of its appeal.  Beginning like a competent James Bond clone featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the film soon takes a then-unusual turn in portraying a secret agent dealing with matrimonial issues.  While this trope isn’t so fresh now after such films as Mr and Mrs Smith (and was adapted from French film La Totale in the first place), it’s still rich in possibilities that True Lies exploits relatively well.  Unfortunately, what seems more obvious now are the pacing issues: There’s a mid-film lull that more or less coincides with increasingly unpleasant harassment of the lead female character by her husband, and even the reversal/payoff later in the film doesn’t completely excuse the bad feeling left by the sequence.  On the other hand, the action scenes are almost as good as they could be despite some dated CGI work: True Lies may be among director James Cameron’s lesser work, but it shows his understanding of how an action scene can be put together and features mini-payoffs even in the smallest details.  The last half-hour is just one thrill ride after another, culminating in a savvy Miami high-altitude ballet.  In terms of acting, it’s fun to see Eliza Dushku in a small but pivotal pre-Buffy role as the hero’s daughter or Tia Carrere as an evil terro-kitten –although it’s no less strange to see Jamie Lee Curtis get a few minutes of screen time as a sex symbol and I can’t help to think that Schwarzenegger, however great he is playing up to his own archetype, is singularly miscast as a character who should look far meeker.  Uncomfortable mid-film harassment sequences aside, True Lies nonetheless holds up fairly well more than a decade and a half later, thanks to a clever blend of action, humor and married romance.  What really doesn’t hold up, though, is the bare-bones 1999 DVD edition, which is marred by a poor grainy transfer and a quasi-complete lack of supplements.  We know about James Cameron’s reputation for excess during the making of his movies: There’s got to be an awesome documentary somewhere in this film’s production archives.