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‘Killing Joan’ is Unpolished But Shows Strong Potential: Review
Uncork’d Entertainment’s Killing Joan combines the focused supernatural revenge of The Crow and the gritty feel of Death Wish, infusing it with the righteous power of an ass-kicking, take-no-shit alpha female.
Joan (Jamie Bernadette, All Girl’s Weekend, I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu) is an enforcer known for her ruthless tactics and wild abandon. After she is double crossed by her boss and left for dead, she becomes a vengeful spirit and is doomed to wander the Earth until she is able to take down the men that attacked her.
Joan works on a short fuse, dangerously blasting through her assigned shakedowns. She careens from one job to the next while entangling her personal affairs – including some unfinished business with her ex-boyfriend, Anthony (Teo Celigo), a good-natured youth counselor.
Even when Joan is kicking ass and taking names as an enforcer, she has a zero-tolerance policy for macho posturing. She is a protector at heart. This communicates the overall journey of the film; while her methods are fueled by anger, Joan’s desire to do the right thing is her strongest quality.
As a modern exploitation film, it’s surprisingly bloodless. This doesn’t necessarily alter the affect of the movie – you don’t need buckets of blood for a revenge film – but it does lower the stakes for the dramatic scene in which Joan is attacked. It leaves her condition rather ambiguous in a time when we should genuinely fear for her life.
Bernadette as the titular Joan has intensity, but she lacks the bite to truly sell her character’s inherent violence. She seems more sardonic than aggressive, although she perfects that world-weary quality that the audience can completely relate to. Her reckless actions seem to come from a deep-seated apathy rather than a personal desire to cause harm.
The source of Joan’s afterlife upgrade is unclear – she is imbued with powers of shadow manipulation, but we don’t get a clear sense of why, or how, or what the limitations are. Early on, it’s established that she can only move through darkness, but that rule isn’t strict in its execution. Perhaps as she grows stronger, she moves past that restriction? If so, we’re missing the step that directly addresses that.
Overall, Killing Joan is a clever and compelling concept, but it’s a bit unpolished. The editing is, at times, a tad choppy, and the fight scenes are missing the commitment to fully sell them. That being said, I am curious to see what comes next from writer/director Todd Bartoo. Killing Joan is an earnest effort that shows a lot of potential as Bartoo’s first feature.
With creatively incorporated visual effects by Paul Lada (Prometheus, Harry Potter, Pacific Rim Uprising), the cast includes Erik Aude, David Carey Foster, Katarina Leigh Waters, Erin O’Brien and Daniel Gardner. Killing Joan is available digitally on April 3rd and comes to DVD July 10th.
Check out the trailer and poster below!
For more revenge films with a strong female lead, check out this trailer for the aptly titled Revenge.
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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News
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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