“Trigger Point,” a new action movie starring Barry Pepper and now on VOD, is stylish looking and features good actors but suffers from a bad case of been there, done that.
Pepper is Lewis, a retiree leading a quiet life in a quiet upstate New York town. His days are spent at the local diner, flirting with waitress Janice (Nazneen Contractor) and sipping tea at the quaint local book store.
His home life, however, isn’t so quaint. His cabin-in-the-woods is a veritable fortress, complete with high tech surveillance gear and drone security.
Turns out Lewis is actually Nicolas Shaw, a former superspy for a shady operation called The Agency. In hiding after his actions resulted in the assassinations of his entire team, he’s brought back into the dangerous world of international intrigue by his former handler Elias Kane (Colm Feore).
Kane’s daughter Monica (Eve Harlow) has been kidnapped by the shadowy figure who may have been responsible for the methodical murder of Shaw’s team.
So, just when he thought he was out, Shaw is dragged back to the underworld to rescue Monica and search down the man responsible for his professional and personal undoing.
“Trigger Point” director Brad Turner has a long and varied list of television credits, including episodes of “MacGyver,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Hawaii Five-O.” He knows how to shoot action and where to put the camera so the movie looks good when the bullets are flying.
He’s also good at casting interesting looking, solemn-faced actors like Pepper, Feore and Carlo Rota, all of whom have tread this territory before.
It’s in the storytelling that things go south. Weighed down by tough guy banalities, there is very little in “Trigger Point” that we haven’t seen before and done better. The actors breathe whatever life they can into this collection of clichés but no amount of grim determination can elevate this above the level of a forgettable direct to video time waster.
To celebrate twenty episodes of “In isolation With” we’re having a look back to the highlights of the first batch of shows. We talk about stress reduction with Timothy Caulfield, how to properly clean your food with Olunike Adeliyi, how to bridge the political gap with Steve Earle and why being an actor is such a grave responsibility with Clarke Peters. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Julie Eng does a mind-blower of a magic trick and Gordon Deppe of The Spoons does a live, solo performance. Even in lockdown, it’s been a wild ride. Come spend some time with us!
Watch the whole thing HERE! Or on CTVnews.ca HERE!
Check out episode eight of Richard’s new web series, “In Isolation With…” It’s the talk show where we make a connection without actually making contact! Today, broadcasting directly from Isolation Studios (a.k.a. my home office), we meet Laura Vandervoort, star of “Rabid,” new to VOD this week. We talk about her recent consultation with a dog psychic, why you should never drink the fake blood on a movie set and her hand washing tips. Come visit with us! In isolation we are united!
A remake of David Cronenberg’s lurid, low-budget 1977 body-horror chiller, “Rabid” comes to VOD in the middle of a pandemic with the story of a disease spread by human contact.
Laura Vandervoort is Rose, an “ugly duckling” fashion designer working for the Zoolander-esque Gunter (Mackenzie Gray). When he isn’t belittling her work, her cocaine-snorting colleagues Bev and Ellie (played co-writers and directors Bev and Ellie Soska) treat her with disdain. Even her BFF, a model named Chelsea (Hanneke Talbot) barely rises to the real definition of the word friend. One night, after an incident at a nightclub Rose is involved in a terrible motorcycle accident. In the hospital she is covered in bandages, suffering from internal trauma and disfiguring damage to her face. Her only hope at returning to normal life is an experimental treatment from Dr. William Burroughs (Ted Atherton), a megalomaniacal surgeon whose stem-cell procedures are just slightly outside the boundaries of accepted science.
The surgery is a success and this time when she takes off the bandages she is met with an idealized version of her face. She is no longer an ugly duckling and with her new image comes a new, highly confident attitude. The people at the design studio now take her work seriously and the velvet ropes of nightclubs, barricades that once kept her on the outside, suddenly disappear.
On the downside, the procedure has left her with a vampiric lust for blood and soon she is feasting on the innards of nightclubber Billy (CM Punk) and soap opera star Dominic (Stephen Huszar). Each time she feeds, she also spreads a deadly strain of rabies, raising fears of a widespread outbreak of virus villainy.
The new “Rabid” takes some liberties with the source material. Through his star, former porn star Marilyn Chambers, Cronenberg examined large social issues like consumerism, gender equality and political impropriety. The Soska Sisters retain the bones of the story but shift their focus to Rose’s inner life as she transmutes into a form she doesn’t understand. Vandervoort effectively portrays Rose’s quandry, bringing out an emotional core to the story missing from the 1977 original.
“Rabid” works best when it lets itself go. There are some outrageous and gruesome special effects—a fight between an aging soap opera star and a younger rival is ferocious, fearless and bloody good fun—but that sense of unpredictability and savagery doesn’t translate to the rest of the film. It’s a shame because a sharper edge would have helped “Rabid” become its own thing and not simply a remake of an older, much-loved horror movie.
