Cold in July Sizzler

Sundance shoot 'em up: Dexter and Miami Vice stars have a blast in new Texas thriller

PARK CITY, Utah — After eight seasons of playing a likable serial killer in Dexter, Michael C. Hall knew it was time to do something different. So when he was approached to portray the owner of a picture framing store in a small town Texas whose life gets turned upside down when an intruder breaks into his house in the film, Cold in July, he jumped at the opportunity.

"I liked that my character wasn't inherently remarkable, yet all these amazing things were happening around him," Hall told a recent standing-room-only audience at a screening at the Sundance Film Festival. "Dexter was winding down at the time and I really wanted to play a guy who only 'accidentally' kills people."

"Dexter was winding down at the time and I really wanted to play a guy who only 'accidentally' kills people."

Based on a novel by Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale, Cold in July is a rock 'em, sock 'em pulp fiction thriller that starts like a house afire — the first 30 minutes will have you on the edge of your seat — before morphing into a buddy comedy with a dark twist and a bloody ending.

Life is pretty routine in an East Texas town until Richard Dane (Hall) shoots and kills a masked man in his living room in the middle of the night. Turns out the burglar is a convicted felon whose father (Sam Shepard) just got released from Huntsville prison and is out for revenge.

I don't want to reveal much more about the movie, which will be screened at Sundance Cinemas in Houston Thursday night at the Sundance Festival USA, because it's much more satisfying to have no idea what happens next. The movie takes a lot of interesting and sometimes implausible twists before its violent conclusion. (It's been purchased by IFC Films for release later this year, so the Houston screening is a rare opportunity to get a sneak peek. Director Jim Mickle be in Houston to answer questions from the audience after the film — a Sundance Festival tradition.)

After the screening in Utah, the audience had a lot of questions for Mickle, Hall, Don Johnson (who practically steals the movie as a wily Houston investigator who drives a red Cadillac with fuzzy dice on the rear view mirror), and author Lansdale, the only one on stage with an authentic Texas accent. Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches and is writer-in-residence at Stephen F. Austin State University.

When I heard they were shooting in New York I said, "OOOOHHELL!," Lansdale said.

It took Mickle and co-screenwriter Nick Damici, who plays a shady sheriff in the movie, eight years to adapt Lansdale's book and get it on screen. Though it's set in east Texas in the 1980s, the movie was filmed in upstate New York with tax incentives.

"When I heard they were shooting in New York I said, "OOOOH HELL!," Lansdale said. "Then (Mickle) sent two photographs, one of upstate New York and one of east Texas and I couldn't tell the difference except they had a mountain up there but we didn't shoot the mountain."

The movie is chock full of 1980s technology and appliances — a cellphone the size of a brick gets a lot of laughs. "They came over to my house and found it all," joked Johnson who was one of the biggest stars of the decade in the hit '80s television series, Miami Vice.

"We had a great art department," Mickle added. "They even made some stuff with photographs on contact paper just applied to wood."

And Hall's hair is a modified mullet — the ultimate '80s hairstyle.

Asked how he learned to portray a Texas character, Johnson said, "I went out with a lot of Texas girls," as the audience erupted in laughter. "My daughter Dakota was born in Austin," he added. (Dakota Johnson has snared the lead in the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, currently being filmed in Canada.)

"I was born in North Carolina . . . not exactly Texas," Hall said. "I watched lots of films set in Texas and drew from those and Joe was on the set to help. I also got inspiration from that mullet hairstyle I was sporting."

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The Sundance Festival USA screening of Cold in July is Thursday (Jan. 30) at 7:15 p.m. CultureMap editor-in-chief Clifford Pugh will moderate a Q&A between director Jim Mickle and the audience. Click here to purchase tickets.

A man with a mullet (and a gun): Michael C. Hall stars in Cold in July.

Michael C. Hall in Cold in July Sundance Film Festival

Photo by Ryan Samul Courtesy of Sundance Institute

A man with a mullet (and a gun): Michael C. Hall stars in Cold in July.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess