Reviews

Yet another instalment of what we can begin to call the high school shooting genre with its ever fascinating take on the twisted minds of deranged teenagers follows a high school student through her attempt to turn the tables on the gunmen. In his Die Hard of school shootings, like in the original with Bruce Willis if you're old enough to remember, she takes out the bad guys one by one with occasional sniper support from her father, all the while wisecracking the leader of the gang of the hoodlums. If only the acting wasn't so good and the suspense so visceral it would be more easy to bash this movie for its bandwagon subject of mass shootings. Like a character in the movie proclaims, in a broad line-up of competition, you've got to excel to stand out, but by Jove, let it be the last one.

The structure of the movie, as also confirmed by the director is that the whole gruesome plot with all its killings, prostitution and arson in the prewar Dutch town of Oss is centered around the main character Johanna played by Sylvia Hoeks who both forms the anchor and focus point of the story. While based on true events some artistic liberty was taken and the scenario as presented is an amalgam of things that really happened but not necessarily in that order or time-frame. The Gang of Oss was a loosely organized band of misfits specializing in theft, insurance fraud, murder and arson, it has also been regarded as a result of dire poverty in the area and the struggle of the rural populace to fit in the upcoming discipline of industrialized factory work. The government tries to bring the town under control by dispatching a contingent of military police, thus setting the stage for violent developments with key stakeholders gathering in the cafe where Johanna doubles as downstairs waitress and upstairs prostitute. When her husband whom she loved at first, even if he just bailed out of jail becomes abusive a sinister plan comes up to kill him while trying to fetch the money on his life insurance. This killing is both extrajudicial considering the stated law as well as the unwritten law of the local gang leader that no such thing should happen without his permission. This gang leader has enough worries already since after a big-wig MP was killed the up-scaled police force tries to break open the code of silence to finally crackdown on all the gang members. When the gang leader, while trying to frame the MP murder on the guy that did Johanna's husband is getting a tad too cruel in conspiring with the towns notables in a sex ring to which her sister falls victim Johanna finds the means and courage to kill him. She escapes justice only because at that time, just before as in hindsight the Nazi's are going to invade the lowlands and for political reasons the military police are withdrawn from the area and she is able to miraculously escape on a boat to America. Sylvia Hoeks as always does not disappoint, for the Dutch audience even presenting an elevated authenticity because she is so well versed in the local accent from the same area she was actually born. The camera loves her and she is in almost every scene. For some reason Dutch filmmakers think that if a movie concerns a time in which color movies still had to be invented they also need to dial down the color saturation to give the film a more authentic look and which in this case resulted in a somewhat pale appearance of Sylvia, besides to a lesser extent of irritation all the other characters and throngs of extra's that lined up for this movie. Also when the Dutch make a movie with what they consider a big budget, they elevate its epic status by sheer duration even if it was not a punishment to explore this earlier work of Sylvia Hoeks, who later just like her alter ego Johanna made it big in America. So while for a local audience the story is interesting for its historic context internationally that may not mean much and the film should be interesting on its own merit besides digging up some historical dirt on a town that most people would never even have heard of and in that respect it would only have been moderately interesting if Sylvia had not saved the day.

With so many divisive forces to drive a relationship apart, it becomes in fact a consoling thought there isn't at least a gender gap between the two women in this remarkable love story. Class, as in being a well educated lawyer compared against being a mere hopeful to land a job as a waitress could be a thing, more importantly in this story if your dad is on death row there's no favorite karma in ending up in a fling with somebody who thinks there's consolation for the victims in the killing of a convict. But when the lines start to blur it is getting interesting. The classy lawyer starts to dig into her friends' case by unearthing some facts about the sentence of her father and then, given those facts, while it is not said in so many words evokes at least some sympathy for the eventual execution, even if it is a sordid business. It is certainly the power of this movie to evoke a feeling of being uncomfortable in the swaying of your own beliefs or at least being forced to look at the matter from the other side's perspective. The interaction between the women as they court each other is endearing as much as convincing, the latter the two actresses are likely more fond of to hear. Also it becomes apparent that driving around in a rickety RV has the benefit of being able to have erotic interludes on stopovers. For a conclusion it is hard to say what the message of this movie is, for example: in a life and death situation, who cares if a few girls are making out? Love conquers all? Puritans eat your heart out? That's the nice thing it is left to your own means to unravel.

For a moment I thought haven't we been here before, seeing Elle Fanning on the cover of a movie poster in a neon light glow and indeed we have, but compared to "The Neon Demon", while there are some parallels, this movie is more about actual accomplishments than the totally superficial world of modeling. For wannabe singers a talent show, especially when broadcast on a continental scale can be a tremendous leg-up, however it is also a great watershed for the mediocre so be careful what you wish for when signing up. The story is set in the UK for a change which accounts for the somewhat subdued hysteria surrounding the events that will lead to the instant stardom of our Violet. From the Isle of Wight where she tends to a horse until it gets sold for reasons of poverty we follow her to the stages of London with her coach and mentor Vlad who has an uncanny resemblance to Albert Einstein however knows nothing of relativity theory but all about being a destituted opera singer and alcoholic. While the single mom vouches for her child behind the telly Violet parties a little too much but a total drama can be averted in a funny scene where Vlad provides the opposite force to the gravity that kept Violet to the ground. The real cliffhanger are the end-titles where I learned, although vaguely suspected that Elle Fanning performed her own songs for the score. In those moments, just like the performance of the horse that didn't know it was in a movie, we see an actual Elle Fanning perform an actual song and that's about as real as it gets. If you don't have time to watch it, at least consider the soundtrack, there's some sweat in there.

The movie is set in France at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century which is not immediately clear to the clueless like myself since from the start all the French people mysteriously speak English, I personally only became aware when a trip to Paris took a mere train to reach, but perhaps the title should have given it away. Colette, Claudine so perhaps at this screening I was not at my brightest. The movie is superb, never a dull moment but sometimes the jumps in time are a bit abrupt, for example at one point they are courting and the next setup all married and settled in a house in Paris, is there an extended version or was it my equipment? The they being Colette and her husband Willy who is somehow a famous writer but has managed to delegate most of his writing to a bunch of lackeys to which he quickly recruits his wife also (I can make jumps too). The wife, Colette, with some encouragement, persuasion and sometimes even blatant coercion churns out an increasingly popular series of novels about her alter ego Claudine, the novels are fiction but draw inspiration from her youth and mundane adventures in broiling Paris. Colette discovers her complimentary attraction to women and we are privy to some developments in that area that of course also are good fuel for the printing press, let alone add some spice to this movie and I can use the words girl-on-girl again without honestly having suspected that up front. When the inflated character of her husband Willy starts to dwindle and he both refuses to offer her the critical acclaim she deserves and moreover sells the rights to the Claudine novels for a tuppence she calls it quits and develops a career of her own that was already flourishing in the theater also. The movie is riddled with wit, especially quips from Willy are quite entertaining and it somehow counters the idea that he was a total nitwit, also he must at least be credited with the insight of his wife's genius, if only he had had the courage to publicly admit it. The arc of the movie is about Colette discovering and developing her own voice and breaking free from the influence of Willy and as soon as that is accomplished the movie is over and we are left to the end titles to learn that she really did make it afterwards but all that solitary women's life is not part of the movie which is strange if you consider it is really a movie about feminine independence, well at least achieving it. Keira Knightley is a darling, there I said it and there are a few remarkable scenes in this movie in which she really shines and we can also observe her own personal development in a career that might once warrant a story of its own.

This movie (and the book it was based on) is an outcry over the apparent practice of trying to convert gay people (those are the ones with the unspeakable sin of same sex attraction) to become good protestants and denounce their desires using semi religious indoctrination practices. An adolescent girl named Cameron has an erotic adventure on the backseat of a car with another girl of equal persuasion and is being discovered by her so-called boyfriend and it is a big dramatic situation. She is sent off to a religious group led by a self assured female and her gay brother who claims to have seen the light and is supposedly 'cured'. The story develops on how she and a bunch of other kids cope with their predicament being brainwashed and humiliated over their sexuality. A big part of the therapy is coming to terms with all the factors that led up to their behaviors and drawing that all up on a sheet of paper with an iceberg on it. All that negativity, most of which they just make up to satisfy their teachers is a tool to shame the participants in front of their peers. Quite hilariously they let the girls share rooms and sure enough between inspections they manage to pull off some serious smooching. A band of three teenagers, two girls and a boy forms and their witty observations of the crazy therapy make up for a good deal of humor that is interspersed in the story despite the deplorable situations or maybe just because of that. One boy that has a particularly stern father at some point can't take it anymore and seriously injures himself. Outside investigators come in and then the point comes where Cameron realizes in a One-Flew-Over-the-Cuckoo's-Nest moment of epiphany that she isn't actually the crazy one but rather it is the therapists of whom she realizes in that moment don't have a clue about what they are doing and are just making it up as they go along. A great moment when the child shows and assumes more responsibility over her tutors and is forced to take matters into her own hands. The band convenes and they take a hike from the madness and that is the end of the movie. There's a funny moment for movie buffs when one of the kids says something about 'the mother of Carrie' (as in the horror story) while of course Chloë Grace Moretz who plays Cameron in this movie was the Carrie in the other. This girl Moretz, totally prepped and groomed for the movie industry from childhood, proves to be a tremendously versatile actress and escaped the typecasting of the horror genre wonderfully, she can absolutely be freaky if she wants to, but in this movie she is just a lovable teenager and that helps to build the sympathy needed to get the message across. Apart from all the gayness it is also a story about building friendships in a hostile environment and somewhat of a coming of age movie and not just about coming out of the closet.

So here we have it, the actor and the subject he portrays, in my perception both important names in the American cultural life, in and about few of the things having the stamp Made in America that Americans can actually still feel proud of: movies and literature. Both viewed in the clarifying insight that death provides. The actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who with this movie established his fame firmly and that was described as a turning point in his career. Similarly for the portrayed, the real author Truman Capote (also himself an actor once), while already quite famous at the time, with his 'non -fiction novel' (if ever there was an oxymoron) In Cold Blood also shot to stardom. So it is very interesting and understandable that the creators of this biopic chose the period in which this novel came into being and by casting an actor also on the verge of a solid breakthrough. For me the movie was a nice introduction to the person of Truman Capote who appears as a complex personality with his all too human vanity, piercing perception and ruthless exploitation of emotions pertaining to the heart in the service of his goal: to write a great book. To gauge if the quirky manners of Capote has seen here have any connection with reality maybe you should watch some old footage from the era, but somehow the sense of trust emerges that Seymour Hoffman had been doing just that and it earned him an Oscar. Slowly and decidedly the plot builds up to the point where it cuts to the chase regarding the events on that fateful day when the victims were slayed and to get that story out of the main perpetrator. In parallel another very connected plot is building: the equally decided machinations of the American justice system with its appeals and hearings leading up to the eventual and unavoidable execution of the convicted. By hanging. A good old Kansas hanging and even if it takes place in a confined space with well dressed fancy hatted witnesses it cannot escape the notion that it is equally barbaric as a public hanging of old in the town square with cowboys and a horse pulling the rope. The movie can be credited for providing us this insight of how the deplorable practice was performed (the gallows are now on display). Of course a great climax for the movie and enabling Capote to finish the book that since watching this movie has piqued my interest. Summarizing this movie is interesting on many levels as for me it provided some food for thought and spurred further exploration, I recommend to watch it and bring a friend.

Paterson is a calm movie, it entices you to reflect, on such things as life, duty, art and poetry. A bus driver in the somewhat infamous town of Paterson, incidentally also named Paterson himself dabbles in poetry and is encouraged by his beautiful wife Laura to do more with that and moreover, to make a backup copy of his 'secret' notebook in which he writes is little poems, that for the movie were borrowed in kind from an actual poet. The fantasy of screenwriters can only go so far so they hired a specialist. I say somewhat infamous because of the most notable legacy of the town Nobel laureate Bob Dylan wrote about, its law enforcement's racist tendencies and the fallacies of the American Justice system so perfectly illustrated by the case of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter. It is touched upon in the movie by a few children passengers that our bus driver happens to overhear. The name of Laura is not an arbitrary one, it is the name of the muse of the famous Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch. Like the bus driver, Laura also has ambitions and dreams about breaking away from their simple life that they nevertheless seem to enjoy happily. We must also consider the benefits of being able to let your mind wander freely to artistic heights when your day-job doesn't demand a great deal of intellectual capacity, so like Einstein who was dreaming big while working as a clerk in a patent office, being a bus driver and an aspiring poet might not be such a far fetched combination of occupations. The film is full of hints and hidden messages of which I probably missed a few. In a fairly big town such as Paterson, especially in public transport where you would see a lot of people, encountering a few twins now and then should not be a surprise, but if your wife told you she had been dreaming of having twin babies ('one for each of us') you suddenly notice them everywhere. The story encompasses one whole week and the days have an absolute repetitive character, but it is the little deviations from the suspected strict routine that make you realize that everyday is still special. Some of the routine events are disrupted spectacularly, for example everyday he drives trough town quite uneventful, then one day the bus breaks down and it's a big situation, with all the passengers on the sidewalk and needing to call bus headquarters with a borrowed child's cellphone. Another example (I warned you for spoilers...) is the bar he frequents daily when walking his mischievous little dog, some tension had been built up there over a guy trying to win back the love of his lifelong friend that he could not get to be promoted to an actual girlfriend with its associated benefits, but you would not immediately expect he would turn into a gun toting maniac threatening to first kill the girl and then himself. But no police needs to arrive on the scene with their red lights flashing in the hot New Jersey night since Paterson disarms him before he can do anything (and the gun appears to be fake...). Then, if you payed enough attention, you might remember Paterson was in the army because there's a photograph of him in uniform on the bedside table, yes he knows his way around. Disaster strikes when Mr. doggy eats the secret notebook before the promised backup could be made, but as Paterson walks out to let off some steam he meets a ghost of Christmas past in the form of a Japanese poet who hands him a fresh empty notebook which is the symbol of a grand new beginning, more concretely that is the next Monday that looks suspiciously like the first, since by now we know the drill that is the logical end.

Who knows the cartoon on which this film is based first realizes that its author, Marjane Satrapi, now also involved in this film project, has ensured that her original story was changed as little as possible. However, the beloved instrument of the musician, an Iranian tar (a kind of precursor of the modern guitar) now had to make room for a violin whose sounds resonate better with the western audience for whom the film was made. Secondly, you realize that the power of a strong story is separate from the medium to which it is transferred, be it the naive black-and-white drawings of the original or a detailed film version like this. When musician Nasser-Ali meets his lost love Irane after many years on the streets and she claims not to recognize him, he ends up in a downward spiral that eventually brings him face to face with death. He does not get out of bed anymore and during the eight days that he has left, he watches over his life with visions of past and future. In the present, attempts are still being made to reach him, but the decision is made for the melancholic musician. Although his wife loves him, he realizes that he is having a bad marriage in which there is a lot of bickering and if she ultimately destroys his violin this stresses the husband to the limit. All this despite the fact that he has two adorable children, now the girl is a bit more cute than her hyperactive brother and is closer in character to her father. It continues to amaze you where they get those talented children for such a film. In his visions he will see how they are doing: his daughter smokes herself to death after a tragedy and his son becomes a businessman in America with a bunch of obese children, his daughter in turn is so fat that she does not notice a pregnancy, and so we are suddenly three generations ahead. Irane, too, has now become a grandmother and of course she had recognized him, but despite her pain, she decided to let the past rest. Although the cartoon version is marketed as a kind of successor to the famous comic strip "Persepolis", which deals with the period of the Shah and the Islamic revolution, the history of that period in the film version is pushed even further into the background, although it is the case that the brother of the musician had been in jail because he was a communist and his son eventually had to flee to America after the revolution because he had been in the army, but I think you only notice that if you already know it from the book. In this sense, this story is much more a personal consideration of the consequences of the choices in your life independent of the great world events, or as the death angel Azrael also says: you only had this life.

A review of this movie could easily evolve into a full fledged essay about school shootings in America, but we will have to consider that this is a work of art, a fictional depiction and not a documentary or, god forbid, a blueprint. The most disturbing aspect of the movie is the shallowness, carelessness and totally unempathetic way the perpetrators go about in preparing and then executing their hideous act with the support of a society in which mail order guns are a normality. Probably nobody goes unprepared into a sitting of this film since otherwise it would be difficult to understand why we would need to follow a bunch of high school kids going about their chores in a typical, if not mediocre high school setting with the cliques, weirdo's and good kids that have become the cliche's of American high school cinema. Of course that all changes when the shooting starts. For dramatic effect all kids that we had just gotten to accept for their juvenile awkwardness are popped off like rats in an abandoned house basement with a BB gun. Except it was an AR-15, which was then and since the tool of choice for instant infamy. Anger wells in this reviewer when considering the reason for inclusion of a dose of 'German weirdness' in the form of old Hitler footage and Beethoven sonata's as a hint of foreign influence to such atrocities instead of the innate sickness of American society. Nevertheless Gus van Sant could have followed the simple rule that movies that include the Moonlight Serenade are statistically more likely to attract higher review scores. Casting a final verdict on the movie should include the consideration if we learned anything, is it food for thought? When thinking about the fact the impact of the movie doesn't allow for a quick and snappy soundbite that the answer must be yes, it's highly disturbing, if this is how it is, it is terrible.

What constitutes a typical art-house film may be difficult to describe, but if you are confronted with one, it is immediately clear. It has something to do with the quiet way in which the story is portrayed and with the original scenes shot on location. This film excels with no doubt with its view on vast landscapes and serene lakes. We travel together with a father who has suddenly reappeared after twelve years and his two children in a car through a desolate area on their way to a mysterious island where the story unfolds. The two sons respond to the reunification in their own way, with the oldest inclining to idolization and the youngest to unconcealed skepticism. That the father still believes he has the right to authority over his children is a dangerous miscalculation. The children act sublime especially the youngest, from the beginning his relationship with the eldest is difficult but in the end they are connected through their shared destiny, even more than the development of the bond with their father it is about the relationship between the brothers who need to deal with the newly created situation. Little is explicitly clear about the motives of the father, but at a certain crucial moment it is easy to guess, but it also appears that they only partly have to do with re-establishing a bond with his children but show a lot of egoistic traits. Once you have crossed the Styx there is no way back.

Coming out as a lesbian would already be difficult as it is in any conservatively oriented community, so if that community is an ultra orthodox Jewish clan closely affiliated even with the local synagogue that is understandably a more difficult enterprise. City mouse Ronit comes back to her old neighborhood to mourn the death of her father who was the head of the synagogue, her arrival is a surprise to most except to Esti who did in fact take the initiative to inform her of this bereavement also for her own personal desires. Esti and Ronit share a past of passion that was cut short but not drowned when Esti married Dovid, who is to success the deceased Rav, Ronits father. The movie is endearing for the often subdued but sometimes exploding electricity between the two women as they rekindle their love that is lasting but is forced to be continued separated eventually. The chemistry between the women is played out masterfully by the two lead actresses that for obscure reasons appear on the casting list as if they were mere supporting roles. That Rachel Weisz had great depth was known to me, but that Rachel McAdams had this ability surprised me, she really showed her loveliest unmasked face, far away from that usual touch of harshness. That moment your spirits are elevated when that one beloved person enters the room, whatever room even if it is a shoddy kitchen is one of the memorable scenes. Yet coming out is one thing but following through another, especially when you appear to have become pregnant from obligatory Friday sexual encounters with your devout rabbi. Not a bad man eventually but utterly naive to marry a woman from whom he should have known had different appetites. Religion can be so self deceptive. The charm of the movie is the contrast between the serious Jewish religious rituals and the girl-on-girl passionate encounters between Esti and Ronit, that should teach the zealots! In the end a dramatic story close to a happy end but not quite as Esti has gotten her freedom but with that given option decides to stay around for reasons we are left to guess and with a crying Ronit headed back to New York. Being left with such a melancholic end is unsatisfactory, as it gives us the pang of loss we all know so well.

The defining nature of intelligence agencies is their secrecy (otherwise they are called news agencies) so for books and movies their benefit is twofold, first is that their hidden nature intrigues, the desire to know and understand what goes on in the back chambers of diplomacy and sometimes its cellars. The second thing is unless word comes out you never can know what really happens which gives fictional writers great freedom in writing their plots as by definition matters are unverifiable. Still the notion of a so called Honey Trap is as old as the Bible (Delilah) at least and if my Sumerian was better I might have found an example from their heritage too. Enter Jennifer Lawrence who I shall call by her real name because keeping track of all aliases her character uses in this movie Red Sparrow becomes tiresome, after all she is a spy. But before becoming a spy our darling is a ballerina and watching those scenes we are reminded of the hype Natalie Portman caused in Black Swan for portraying a believable dancer and if it wasn't for the fact in this movie these are only the overtures and unless when the DVD comes out they reveal it was all cunning CGI they may give Jennifer Lawrence an Oscar for this stage performance too. Then follows a really agonizing scene where she breaks her leg, I mean further down the line we are entertained sufficiently with people getting shot in the head or skinned alive but the leg breaking scene is really nightmare material. Without a job at the opera she becomes vulnerable and a devious uncle who is also part of the Russian intelligence community signs her up for a honey trap job which gets out of hand after which the girl is send to what can be best described as it is eventually done in the movie itself as Whore School. Whore School has an interesting curriculum, oh and failing it means you get one in the head for being no longer useful to the state. From the lessons in seduction our aspiring Red Sparrow learns to identify their targets' vulnerabilities so she can tune her strategy to what they really want which unsurprisingly is often sex. The overall problem for her handlers in the movie is that she is not a spy by vocation but rather tries to make the best of her situation an putting her own interests first. This starts to become clear on her first assignment as she is tasked to spy on an American but takes a liking to him and basically puts her cards on the table. It is quite endearing and also surprising to realize the two main characters in fact never seem to lie to each other while both of them are perfectly trained to do just that. When they inevitably hit it off we see the woman take the initiative which is a nice deviation from the common emphasis on masculinity. The plot that subsequently unfolds is quite intricate and complicated as spy stories tend to be and you will only understand in the end that Jennifer really played out the long con and then longer. Overall I liked this move, it has less cliches which is refreshing and some scenes at Whore School are quite startling so the Puritans can have a field day denouncing them but I think they are not overly vulgar. We see a strong woman and she uses what she has, which is both body and brains. Fine.

This mildly funny movie about an ousted dictator holing up with the daughter of a single mother in a typical suburban environment with the cliché high-school mean girls can only be regarded positively in the sense that it is great learning lesson for upcoming talent Odeya Rush who gets to build experience acting together with an icon such as Michael Caine and to a lesser extent Katie Holmes for which for this performance nobody would start jumping on a couch. Seth Green, apparently added to the cast for his name only (that has been slightly degraded in the process) plays a dentist with a feet fetishism which is an appropriately chosen weirdness that can be safely depicted for the ever perceived sensitivity of the American audience. The dictator, while trying to regain the control of his country starts to educate the high-school-er in subversiveness which she starts to put into practice by overthrowing the realm of the mean girls without much moral concern. There's no explanation given to the fact she has a crush on a religious freak who dives into bed with one of the same mean girls and both are in fact headed for a happy end (save for a neck brace after a failed suicide attempt) when the inevitable happens as the dictator is being apprehended, jailed and extradited. The acting overall isn't bad but the story is weak, these actors deserve a better script.

I will try to describe the bizarre plot of this overrated movie as scathing as possible so be prepared. A lonely woman that lives above a cinema and that cannot talk works as a cleaner in some secret government facility that oddly enough seems to be located in some city center. Her dull daily routine, that involves playing with herself (yes that kind of playing) in a bathtub each morning and boiling eggs is disturbed when a strange creature is wheeled into the facility in a big tank. While security at the facility is tight with myriads of cameras she manages to build a relationship with the amphibian. The beast does not exactly live up to modern CGI standards but is nevertheless passable. Some sadist at the site responsible for security likes to prod the aquatic humanoid with a cattle stick and this violence is duly met by Mr. Underwater with biting off a few of the man's digits and that ms. Mute finds when cleaning up the blood spill. Violence in this creature does not necessarily need to be provoked as we will soon learn when it bites off the head of an innocent cat. Apparently unaware that moviegoers are the same people that endlessly watch cat video's on YouTube this incident flied by the censors in the cutting room, maybe it shouldn't have. With the help of her neighbor, also quite lonely, she manages to free the scaled creature and hide it in her rooms that are located above the old fashioned cinema. Now the beast is in the bathtub and while it presumably has godlike powers of healing it struggles to breathe in that environment. Overlooking the fact that each cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton, the woman decides to submerge the bathroom so she can have a sexual encounter with the beast. We never see his thing, but Hollywood as usual can jump through hoops to explain that all away, shooting people dead with guns on the other hand as we can see later on is no problem, but a graphic depiction of the inception of life cannot be handled by the puritans, however admittedly at this time we would be breeding a chimera. The security guy in the mean time, under pressure from the military is scrambling to unravel the plot all the while struggling with the gangrene eating away at his reattached fingers. The only interesting dialog of the whole movie occurs when the army general explains to the guy how one failure can render a man useless despite any long standing record of accomplishments. For a silly moment I thought that all might end well if the creature could heal the man's fingers and in return he would let it escape in peace and all would be jolly, but no it had to end in violence with the man being killed by the creature that slashes his throat effortlessly. The mute woman, after also being hit disappears under water with the creature and that is the end of it and I would not worry what would happen to them just like the screenwriters that must also have been happy to conclude this plot open ended.