Reviewed: ‘Eephus,’ ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders,’ ‘Mickey 17,’ ‘Delicious’ and ‘Silent Zone’
‘Eephus’ (2024)
If you need a baseball fix before the Red Sox’s opening day, this drolly nostalgic work by first-time feature filmmaker Carson Lund may be just the thing. In it, a bunch of old-time ballers play one last game at a park in the autumnally speckled hills of Central Massachusetts (Douglas, to be exact) before the lot is torn up and a school built. The time is somewhere in the early to mid-1990s, when the Curse of the Bambino was still a thing, but besides 1970s Sox hurler Bill “The Spaceman” Lee appearing in a small part, there’s no mention of the hometown team or MLB at all – these are just local dudes with day jobs playing for Adler’s Paint on some team called the River Dogs. It’s unclear if they ever play other teams, are in a league or just play each other. The ragtag and grizzled lot are cut with character as deep as the wrinkles on their mismatched uniforms. Many have paunches, and others casually sip beer and offer laconic barbs as they warm up for a sleepy match that begins with the sun high in the sky and concludes with the aid of headlights as a cold October evening rolls in. It’s a long, lazy marathon that Lund builds as a dryer, tamped down version of Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!” (2016) with the same level of respect and love for the game that John Sayles imbued in his unheralded “Eight Men Out” (1988). Adding local flavor is legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman as the voice of the radio broadcast announcer. The title refers to a super slow, arcing pitch that came into being in the 1940s and makes a knuckleball look like blazing heat. It’s rare but gets an every-now-and-then use due to its ability to daunt and confound batters – try it a second time, and it’s to the moon. For lovers of the game, this nostalgic slow roll is right down the strike zone. (Speaking of the Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino, I have been part of a season ticket holder group since that game was played out in Douglas, but I almost missed seeing the Sox reverse the curse, something you can read all about in my “The Season That Almost Wasn’t” published in Slippery Rock University’s lit mag SLAB in 2007. You’ll likely get paywalled, but here’s a publicly viewable version posted last year on Substack.)
‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ (2025)
Keeping with legendary Cambridge-based documentary filmmakers, the latest from Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “American Dharma”) tackles the unshakable enigma of Charles Manson, his cult and the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders they committed. Fifty-plus years later, the inconceivable acts of Manson and his “family” loom like they happened yesterday. Morris’ rewind is kind of chaotic despite being organized into neat chapters, throwing a lot out there without resolving things as the filmmaker normally does. The Beach Boys, Doris Day, a Kennedy assassination, the CIA and LSD experimentation all make their way in, and the film’s peppered with frequent segues to Manson songs played off his one record – believe it or not, the diabolical manipulator was not a bad singer-songwriter; the Beach Boys even recorded one of his tunes, which, in a way, led to the Tate murders. It’s all based on a similarly titled 2020 book by Tom O’Neill, who claims the race war theory put forth by lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was fabricated for courtroom theatrics so Bugliosi could get rich off writing “Helter Skelter.” This feels a tad like conspiracy theory. More interesting is the archival footage of Manson, creepy and charismatic, and the chilling confessionals from his followers who did the killings, though most informative and credible are former prosecutor Stephen Kay, who worked alongside Bugliosi, and Bobby Beausoleil, a songwriter who joined Manson’s cult and is still in jail for carrying out an earlier murder at Manson’s behest. (His testimony is delivered from telephone interviews. It should be noted that he’s up for parole this year, so there’s that.) Morris and O’Neill put a lot out there, but the most compelling part of the film is the maniacal puppet master, his cold, aloof rantings, hold on his subjects and ability to skirt the law and authorities even when he was a known sociopath and likely high risk to the public. The film makes one want to go back and rewatch Quentin Tarantino’s rescript of history, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) to cross reference fact and fiction. No matter, Manson, his minions, their crimes and courtroom antics remain a fresh and lurid annal of American history.
‘Mickey 17’ (2025)
Eternal snow, clones and an endless sea of bison-sized parasites – oh my! If that sounds something like a “Star Wars” chapter, much of the action does take place on an ice planet in a galaxy far, far away, like Hoth in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980). Also suggested here is “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), “Starship Troopers” (1997) and “Snowpiercer” (2013), the last another English-language film by director Bong Joon Ho taking place on an ice planet: Earth in the uninhabitable, climate-changed near future, with survivors living on a bullet train segregated by class and privilege. Harvey Weinstein, then at his megalomaniacal mogul apex, had it edited down to near cinematic mush and tried to bury it. It went on to become a cult hit, though, and Bong would rebound mightily, crushing it at the 2020 Oscars with four statues for “Parasite” while Weinstein became the #MeToo poster boy. Based on “Mickey 7,” a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, “Mickey 17” feels like a more lighthearted companion piece to “Snowpiercer.” Robert Pattinson, last seen in galactic duty in the Clare Denis deep-space sex-camp of “High Life” (2019), plays the character of the title, a human guinea pig known as an “expendable” who can be brought back to life infinitely by a 3D genetic printer of sorts. Not many sign up for the process, as you’re regulated, copyrighted and indentured like replicants in “Blade Runner” (1982). The year’s 2054 and the reason Mickey inks the line to become a Dolly is that he’s in debt to a gangster (just like Han Solo was, hmm) and Earth – wait for it – is barely habitable. Added to the futurescape mix is former Congressman and megalomaniac cult leader Kenneth Marshall (a hammy Mark Ruffalo) who has kicked off a lottery for select earthlings to get on his Noah’s Ark of a spaceship to build a better world on a distant planet. By signing up as cannon fodder for the unknowns of settlement, Mickey jumps the line. The inhabitants of Niflheim are referred to as creepers, which Marshall’s Cruella de Vil wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) describes as “a croissant covered in shit.” She’s not far off, but it would be more apt to say they look more like tardigrades (microscopic water bears) on steroids. It turns out that the creepy creepers are pretty intelligent, have a deep sense of community and the mother of them all saves Mickey 17 after he falls down a crevasse. Because Mickey’s frenemy Timo (Steven Yeun) thinks he’s dead, Mickey 18 gets printed up. This is where the film, and Pattinson, a flexible actor in his prime, start to have some fun: 17 is a hapless, simple sort, while 18 is a simmering sociopath. The yin and yang is delicious, and further spins the plot as one of Marshall’s legal edicts while on Earth was to ban “multiples,” which means the two Mickeys, when they cease trying to kill each other, have to hide together. When 17’s girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie, who nearly steals the film from Pattinson) discovers this, she’s all in for a ménage à trois. Things don’t get as steamy as one might hope, considering the question oft asked of Mickey: “What’s it like to die?” Bong answers that by letting us see the excruciating deaths of earlier incarnations of Mickey from poisoning, machinery mishaps, medical experimentation and the treacherous, harsh frozen terrain of Niflheim. Ultimately a war with the creepers looms and the Trump-like Marshall reveals his Hitler-esque agenda to have a pure-bred colony. It’s here unfortunately that the film shifts away from Mickey (and Pattinson) and toward a “Starship Troopers” showdown that is entertaining but hokey. After your viewing, I’d suggest a palate cleanser of Bong’s apex creature-feature and social comedy, “The Host” (2006) which you can find on Max.
‘Delicious’ (2025)
Eating the rich and critiques of commercial consumerism have long made their way into cinematic fare, often with devilish bite – from “Parasite” and “Snowpiercer” to George Romero’s iconic meat mall shamble, “Dawn of the Dead” (1978) and, closer to now, the sadistically witty “Saltburn” (2023). “Delicious” aspires to be in that conversation, but in execution, the tale of rich Germans lounging around a French resort town and getting too chummy with the help is a discombobulated, vainglorious hand wave of hot-button social issues that doesn’t really say anything. Directed by Nele Mueller-Stöfen and shot with allure by Frank Griebe, the film looks great in framing and posture and begins with a kick: The German family arrives in Provence amid riots. The waitstaff at the resort – most from poor immigrant areas of southern Spain – despise their clientele and often urinate in the wine and Perrier bottles, then put them back in the fridge, later stealing phones, underwear and more. Class and race lines are drawn, but not sharply. The fam is there because wife Esther (Valerie Pachner) comes from money and has taken the reins of the family-owned villa. One night after dinner at the resort’s ritzy restaurant, they have a minor auto mishap with Theodora (Carla Díaz), a young woman who works at the resort. She loses her job and moves in as the house aide and cook (where’s she sourcing that main dish from?) and in the process becomes a confidant to the young daughter (Naila Schuberth), sexual fantasy for older son (Joep Paddenburg), relationship advice pal to pa John (Fahri Yardım) and party playmate to Esther. Esther’s sexual liberation follows her becoming undone by the soulful eyes of one of Theodora’s co-workers, Lucien (Julien De Saint Jean), one of the lot she runs with. Secrets and dark doings abound, and to say more would be to give too much away, but it is clear from frame one that Theodora is an insidious plant, a point that gains lift when after Theodora takes Esther clubbing, she invites her former co-workers over without permission to enjoy the family’s pool. It’s a slow simmer that like “Saltburn,” holds its card very close to its chest, but manipulatively so, without much character development or characters we care about or care to understand. There are whole sections of plot that never tie up or make sense. It plays like pastiche, but one that’s hard to look away from, the darker, humorless B-side of “White Lotus” on a lo-fi budget.
‘Silent Zone’ (2025)
Do postapocalyptic zombie thrillers ever get saggy, gray and flabby like the decaying flesh of the cannibalistic undead? Yes and no. Nothing will ever have the profound resonance of George Romero’s genre-defining classic, “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), despite the many that have followed bloody suit. Even the 15-year (and still going) “Walking Dead” series on AMC has less effect; Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” was among the first to move zombies from slow shambles to sprinting, ravenous physicality, followed by Zack Snyder (“Justice League”) pushing them toward superhuman in his amped-up “Dawn of the Dead” (2004) and giving them a video-game-style boss-level, alpha zombie in “Army of the Dead” (2021). This lo-fi action movie is much like the latter, and while it’s ambitious in scope and gritty in execution, it’s routinely trite in plot. Based on the novel “Welcome to the Silent Zone” by Viktor Csák, who shares a screenwriting credit, the film begins with the collapse of civilization. Abigail (Katalin Krenn), a girl in a charming suburban home, watches her mom and baby brother get munched to mush and transform into rabid undead. Fortunately, Cassius, a strapping military type (Matt Devere) happens to be passing by. Flash forward 10 years and Cassius and Abigail, now a young woman played by Luca Papp, live in the woods trying to avoid the packs of zombies and their scouts, who communicate through clicks, grunts and snarled growls. The goal is to get to safety in “the colony,” a commune aboard a flotilla of old cargo ships. Cassius’ cold, go-it-alone-and-don’t-get-bogged-down mindset conflicts with Abigail’s idealism, something that comes to a head when they come across a pregnant woman and her husband. For its shoestring budget, “Silent Zone,” directed by Péter Deák, does impress in makeup, sets and action choreography. Devere’s Cassius is a bit too one-note, but Papp provides a grounding offset with a wisp of naiveté. The plot plays along like a Game Boy fantasy – it’s the end of the world as we know it, and we know exactly what’s around the next bend of the dilapidated building our survivors are about to bust into.
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