This weekend, while the Sex and the City women are laughing all the way to the bank, on the other side of the multiplex, things are much, much darker for the men. For them, there is only horror, anguish, confusion and despair. It comes courtesy of The Strangers, which begins with a man (Scott Speedman) and a woman (Liv Tyler) driving to a house in the middle of nowhere. They're both in fancy party clothes, but she's crying and he's looking like he wants to cry, only he's a manly man and so must settle for clenching his jaw, manfully.

They get to the house and despite the candles, rose petals, champagne, crackling fire and a bubble bath... Tyler is still crying. It's like every man's nightmare: You've done all the right things and she's still not happy? So Speedman says he'll give her the bedroom and he'll sleep on the couch, and this is totally not making any sense to me: Bubble bath + candlelight + champagne + romance = sex. At this point in the movie, my palms were clammy and a cold sweat was trickling down my back. Did someone change the rules?

Depressed and despondent, Speedman sits at the table and pulls out a five gallon tub of ice cream and starts eating it with a spoon. This is obviously a horror movie about men turning into women. And not just any women -- women from early 1990s romantic comedies, the kind of movies that use shots of women eating ice cream as shorthand for, "She's feeling sad right now." But then, as if to clear everything up: A flashback. Except this is the kind of flashback that directors who think they're too good to need flashbacks use, where they end the scene right before you actually see what happened: Speedman says to Tyler, "I remember the first time I saw you," and he's turning a velvet box that wedding rings come in over and over in his hands. Only Tyler looks really upset and suddenly... the flashback is over.

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Forget every supposedly scary thing you've ever seen in horror movies. Every lame monster, every loser mutant, every boring stalker. The scariest thing going in horror these days is Mena Suvari's big, pale, pimply pumpkinhead floating through Stuart Gordon's Stuck. This freakish cranium is big enough to have its own atmosphere and her body dangles off the bottom of it like a vestigal tail. Crowning this planetary monstrosity are cornrows. Tight, blond cornrows. In case you've forgotten, Mena Suvari is a white girl and white girls have about as much business wearing cornrows as fat men have wearing Speedos.

Mena Suvari has a lot to apologize for: Starring in the straight-to-video Day of the Dead remake, her godawful performance in pandering urban comedy Beauty Shop, being the love interest in lame 2001 action dud The Musketeer -- to name a few better forgotten credits. But her performance in Stuck as Brandi Helper, registered nurse, goes a long way towards erasing the bad taste of her filmography. Brandi is trapped in the warm limbo of an old folk's home and whether she's up to her elbows in one patient's fanny disaster, sucking up to her bloodless boss for a promotion to "captain," or desperately hitting the High and Low Lounge and washing down a fistful of E's with a bucket full of Cosmos in an attempt to forget the cozy stasis of her life, she always feels like Brandi, not Mena. Maybe it's the cornrows.

Zooming at her from the other direction is Stephen Rea as Tom, one of life's little losers who seems to have absorbed everyone else's bad luck. He can't even go to a vitally important job interview without suffering through epic humiliations. Tossed out of his SRO, he clutches his pathetic bundle of possessions to his chest and tries to nap on a park bench, but people like Tom don't even get to sleep safely in this world of ours and a cop soon sends him stumbling on his way. "Go to the men's shelter or go to jail -- it's your choice," the cop says, but for people like Tom, life is just an endless series of these so called choices -- where every option is a bad one. Director Stuart Gordon learned horror, blood and black comedy while creating E/R and directing the classic horror flick Re-Animator. Stuck is his particle accelerator, smashing the Brandi atom into the Tom atom and tracking the gory results.

Continue reading "Stuck Review - Director Stuart Gordon Smashes Mena Suvari Into Stephen Rea and Tracks the Gory Results " »