The Retaliators (REVIEW) | Projector
[Ad - Sponsored by Movie Palette] Film Brain rocks out to this horror-thriller with a host of cameos from the likes Tommy Lee, Five Finger Death Punch, Papa Roach, Bad Wolves, and many more, that feels like several different films rolled into a splattery, uneven whole.
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Movie Palette.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, a host of rock stars,
00:06 including Five Finger Death Punch, Jacoby Shaddix,
00:09 and Tommy Lee, co-star in the horror adventure, The Retaliators.
00:15 [MUSIC]
00:31 The peaceful life of Pastor John Bishop, played by Michael Lombardi,
00:35 is shattered when his eldest daughter, Sarah, played by Katie Kelly,
00:38 is murdered by Ram Kady, played by Joseph Gatt, a member of a vicious motorcycle gang.
00:43 The detective investigating the case, Jed Sawyer, played by Mark Menchaka,
00:47 offers John the chance to get one minute alone with Ram to do whatever he wants,
00:52 going beyond the law to do so.
00:54 As Ram's biker gang, led by his brother Vic, played by Ivan Moody, search for him,
00:59 will John take the opportunity to seek retribution and step into a horrifying underworld?
01:05 The Retaliators is the second movie from Better Noise Films,
01:08 the film offshoot of the rock music label, Better Noise Music,
01:12 which amongst their roster includes Motley Crue, Five Finger Death Punch,
01:17 Eva Under Fire, Bad Wolves, and formerly, Papa Roach,
01:21 almost all of which appear in this movie, either as cameos or as full-fledged supporting roles.
01:27 The film is directed by Samuel Gonzalez Jr. and Bridget Smith,
01:31 who you'll be completely unsurprised to hear have a long history in directing music videos,
01:35 and this is their second full-length film each,
01:38 although Smith has the more interesting CV in that she actually directed
01:41 the first Better Noise film, an addiction drama called Snow Babies,
01:46 which, considering the label that it spawned from, seems a little bit off-brand,
01:50 but this is very much on brand.
01:53 Weirdly, in some places, including the press email I got about this movie,
01:59 Michael Lombardi, who is the star of this film and also a producer on it,
02:02 is also listed as a third director, and I don't think that's true,
02:07 I can't corroborate that, but on the movie itself,
02:10 only Smith and Gonzalez Jr. are credited, and the same is true for the poster as well,
02:16 so if Lombardi did work on this movie, he's uncredited on it.
02:20 The film is written by the Gere Brothers, and this is their debut screenplay.
02:25 Now, the film did actually premiere last year at Fright Fest,
02:29 and since then has been touring all around the world,
02:32 to use a bit of band parlance, at various different film festivals,
02:36 and now it is finally getting a wide release, a worldwide release, in fact,
02:42 because for one day only, although there does appear to be a couple of encore screenings,
02:46 it is screening all around the world on September 14th,
02:50 so that is worth checking out at your local cinema if you're interested,
02:54 and I presume that it's going to get a digital release a couple of months later.
02:59 Now, full disclosure, I did actually receive this film from a screener,
03:02 but they have no input over this review.
03:05 The Retaliators is clearly meant to be a throwback to 80s exploitation flicks,
03:09 really going back old school, lots of practical gore and effects,
03:13 and all the filth and nastiness that you would expect out of one of those movies,
03:17 and clearly the filmmakers had a list of genre mainstays
03:20 that they wanted to homage and fold into this one.
03:23 The problem with The Retaliators, though,
03:25 is that it not just feels like several different movies at the same time,
03:29 it feels like several different movies made by totally different filmmakers
03:33 that aren't even on speaking terms with one another.
03:36 And the fact the film was made by two different directors
03:39 kind of makes me wonder if different sides of the movie were helmed by different people,
03:43 and then when they put them together in the edit,
03:45 they realized they didn't actually gel together,
03:48 because the film has no real internal consistency to it.
03:53 There's no real kind of logic to the shifting of the genres,
03:57 it just seems to happen on a dime,
03:58 and the themes and ideas of the movie seems to shift along with it.
04:03 It's very strange.
04:05 I went into The Retaliators knowing very little about it going in,
04:09 aside from the rock star element of it,
04:11 and as I was watching it, I genuinely thought to myself,
04:14 "I have no idea where this is going."
04:17 And that wasn't in a good way.
04:19 It wasn't in a sense of, "Oh, this is a totally absorbing movie
04:22 where I'm surprised by what's happening."
04:24 It's in a sense of, "I don't know what film this is trying to be."
04:29 Like, it's so all over the place tonally
04:33 that it kind of left me at a little bit of a loss.
04:36 It's the kind of movie where you're thankful for a lengthy horror pre-title sequence,
04:39 because if it didn't, and it just opened where the story began,
04:43 you might get the mistaken impression you're watching a pure flicks movie instead.
04:48 In that the first 20 minutes of the movie are largely family melodrama,
04:52 in that the pastor, rather unfortunately named John Bishop,
04:55 apparently completely unaware the British comedian of the same name,
04:59 he's a single father having to take care of his two daughters after his wife's death,
05:04 the eldest of which, Sarah, is going to therapy for the trauma of the event.
05:09 And he's a bit of an uptight, overprotective father,
05:13 but he wants to keep his daughter safe.
05:16 And I will say that these opening scenes are actually quite well acted.
05:20 Michael Lombardi and Katie Kelly both previously appeared in the aforementioned Snow Babies,
05:25 so it feels like they're picking up where they left off.
05:28 And Katie Kelly in particular actually quite impressed me with her role as Sarah,
05:33 even though she doesn't have a lot of screen time, because obviously she's doomed,
05:37 but she manages to make her feel like a person,
05:40 so when the worst inevitably happens to her, you feel something about it.
05:45 But Lombardi is also pretty good in the lead role.
05:48 He's probably best known for his work on TV's Rescue Me.
05:52 It's a part that requires him to be a religious pastor,
05:54 a grieving father, and an action hero simultaneously.
05:57 And for the most part, he manages to pull that off.
06:01 There's a couple of moments where he's required to be at the edge of intensity,
06:04 and he doesn't quite sell it properly, and it's a little bit hammy,
06:09 but for the most part, he's a reliable, solid anchor for the film
06:13 in a way that the movie itself doesn't properly provide.
06:17 But the fact the movie devotes so much of its early screen time to him sermonising,
06:20 and you can tell we're meant to think that he's a cool pastor
06:22 because he's got a rock band at his services,
06:25 it does make you wonder, "Am I watching a Christian message movie in disguise?"
06:31 You're not, but the movie still makes you watch the entire lengthy sermon that he delivers,
06:36 even though the scene that he is describing
06:39 is literally the one that we've just watched beforehand,
06:42 because immediately before, there is a major scene, at least from a thematic perspective,
06:48 in that they're going out Christmas tree shopping,
06:50 and then some jerk steals the tree from Sarah,
06:54 and the pastor tries to intervene and try and get the tree back.
06:58 But of course, because he's got a "turn the other cheek" policy,
07:01 he's a pacifist that fails, and the bully tramples all over him.
07:06 And that scene is clearly meant to be a critique on his failures as a man.
07:12 Especially reinforced by the fact that Sarah talks to him about how much he loves Die Hard,
07:18 and he loves motorbikes, but he's too afraid to actually ride one,
07:22 and he doesn't take charge like an action hero would.
07:26 And this is obviously very much about masculinity and asserting oneself,
07:32 which, if you're familiar with revenge thrillers, is very much on-brand for the genre.
07:37 And this scene at the Christmas tree lot is begging to be intercut with the sermon
07:41 where he describes it later, because having them as two separate scenes
07:44 renders the second one redundant.
07:46 But I think the reason they've kept it that way is because
07:49 Clerks' Brian O'Halloran cameos as the jerk who steals the Christmas tree
07:53 so they wanted the most amount of screen time.
07:56 This will be a recurring problem later.
07:58 But you'll probably notice the fact the movie is set explicitly at Christmas,
08:02 which helps with the 80s throwback vibes,
08:05 because a lot of action horror films from the period did set themselves at Christmas
08:09 as an ironic retort to the idea of goodwill to all men.
08:13 And the retaliate takes place in a cruel and cynical world,
08:17 where just beneath domesticity lies a seedy underbelly of violence and brutality.
08:24 And plus, it's also another little nod to Die Hard.
08:28 But of course, very quickly the movie shifts gears into being a revenge thriller,
08:33 when Sarah takes the car out to go to a party,
08:36 and she ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time,
08:39 and just happens to pull into the same gas station as Ram Kady,
08:44 and ends up being pursued and eventually killed by him.
08:48 And this serves as another failure on the pastor's part,
08:52 another loss that he has failed to protect himself and his family from.
08:57 But now we get the introduction of Sawyer, the detective on the case,
09:01 played by Ozark's Mark Menchaca.
09:03 And Menchaca is terrific in this role.
09:06 He gives a gravitas to this burnt-out type that has lost his faith with the law,
09:11 even though he is technically representing it.
09:14 And he empathises with the pastor because he knows exactly what he's going through.
09:19 Sawyer has lost everything that he loves, and he decides to do something about it.
09:25 As we see in a very lengthy flashback halfway through the movie.
09:30 How lengthy, do you ask?
09:32 It has a flashback within the flashback.
09:35 That's how long it goes on for.
09:38 So Sawyer was previously on a case where he had to track down
09:42 a kidnapper, abuser, torturer, and murderer of women called Quinn Brady,
09:46 played by Papa Roach's Jacoby Shaddix.
09:49 And so he managed to put him behind bars,
09:52 but then those failures of the law, they decide to release him after just six years.
09:59 I'm not sure how that happened, considering that when they caught him at the time,
10:03 he had literally just shotgunned a woman in the face, deliberately, as they opened the door.
10:10 I think that's more than enough evidence to put him away for life,
10:13 but for some reason he was let out of jail,
10:16 and of course, predictably, he targets Sawyer's family.
10:20 And the movie delivers this backstory in incredibly convoluted fashion.
10:26 There is no reason why it has to be anywhere near as long as it is in this movie.
10:32 And again, it could have very easily been crosscut with him exposing it in voiceover.
10:38 But again, I think because they have Robert John Burke in the movie,
10:42 of Robocop 3 and thinner fame, playing one of his fellow officers,
10:47 it feels like the only reason this flashback is as long as it is,
10:51 is because they wanted to give as much screen time to a cameo as they possibly could.
10:55 Again, there is a pattern emerging here.
10:58 But in this aspect of the movie, there is a germ of an interesting idea,
11:03 in that the pastor is a man of faith who completely loses his way.
11:07 He becomes absorbed with the idea of revenge and retribution.
11:11 Very Old Testament.
11:13 And then he's given this unique opportunity to come face to face
11:18 with the man who killed his daughter for one minute,
11:22 and he can do whatever he wants to him so long as he doesn't kill him.
11:28 And so, in that way, he is in a situation where there are no repercussions for his actions,
11:34 aside from the self-knowledge that he has committed this sin,
11:38 and having that on his conscience.
11:42 And so, the question becomes, what would you do
11:45 if you had something so precious to you cruelly taken away like that,
11:50 and you were given the opportunity to take out all that pain that is on your soul,
11:56 and physically inflict it on the perpetrator, and they are totally helpless?
12:02 Would you consider that to be a cleansing or a healing in some way?
12:07 Would you get a catharsis out of it?
12:09 Or would you consider it to be wrong and immoral?
12:13 And that all sounds very kind of lofty and serious,
12:17 and that kind of is part of the problem,
12:19 in that, yes, there is actually an intriguing moral dilemma at the centre of this movie,
12:25 but, A, the film doesn't really have any interest in following through on this, or debating it.
12:32 But also, the other problem is that, really,
12:36 the best exploitation movies don't take themselves seriously.
12:40 They're outrageous, and over-the-top, and ridiculous.
12:44 Those are the fun parts of exploitation films,
12:47 whereas The Retaliators really does take itself a bit too seriously,
12:53 and also kind of unpleasant to watch at times,
12:57 especially because there is so much emphasis on the torture element.
13:01 I believe at the film festivals, the filmmakers have actually introduced this
13:05 as being kind of like the thinking man's version of hostile,
13:08 which is really overselling it, in my opinion.
13:11 But even so, there is an idea here that they could have probably followed through on
13:16 if they wanted to, and really, kind of having the biblical stuff make sense overall.
13:22 But, of course, this movie doesn't want to properly engage with it.
13:26 It's just an excuse to have more over-the-top violence in the movie.
13:31 And also, it's the kind of film where, overall,
13:35 the actual message is something along the lines of,
13:38 "Even if you are a literal pastor, sometimes you have to stick up for yourself
13:43 and commit a literal assault by punching someone in the face."
13:48 Presumably, the end credits roll just before he was arrested.
13:52 But if the movie was solely about that, it would at least feel internally consistent.
13:56 But unfortunately, the movie decides to crunch its genre shift again
14:01 because it decides the third film it's trying to be simultaneously is a biker movie.
14:05 There is an entire subplot about Ram's fellow bikers
14:09 who are trying to work out what the hell has happened to him.
14:12 He's disappeared in a puff of smoke since this drug deal gone bad,
14:17 with a bunch of money and crystal on him, and no one knows where he's gone.
14:21 So, they're trying to track him down.
14:23 And the only reason this subplot is so prominent in the movie
14:28 is because Five Finger Death Punch play all the bikers, including Ram's brother.
14:34 So basically, there's a lot of screen time diverted to them
14:37 storming into completely random locations, roughing people up and going,
14:41 "Where's my brother?"
14:42 If you're wondering where the rock was in this rock horror, it's on this side of the movie.
14:49 And that means that there are just entire scenes
14:52 diverted to these biker characters wandering into somewhere
14:56 and they need to find a tracker or something.
14:58 So, they beat up another biker who's played by the lead singer of Ice Nine Kills
15:04 and so on and so forth.
15:05 They go into a strip club so that we can have some completely gratuitous nudity
15:10 and scenes of people doing blow.
15:12 And the DJ at the strip club is Motley Crue's Tommy Lee,
15:16 also known for getting his willy out on Instagram.
15:18 And all of these scenes set up plot points that go completely and totally nowhere.
15:24 Like, Robert Knepper turns up as the VP of the biker gang
15:28 who gives them orders.
15:29 And he has this really long mog about all the different charters.
15:33 They're all in uproar.
15:34 They're all converging together.
15:36 And they're all trying to find Ram and the money and the crystal.
15:39 So, they need to be the ones that find him first so that he can punish him alive.
15:45 But everything that is set up in that scene is totally irrelevant
15:50 to how the movie actually plays out in the long term.
15:53 In fact, it's pretty much forgotten as soon as the scene ends.
15:57 The only reason it's there is because Knepper provides a cameo
16:01 so they wanted to keep it in the movie.
16:02 He never reappears again after that scene.
16:05 It just goes nowhere.
16:07 And so many of these scenes are like that.
16:10 They just introduce famous person on screen.
16:13 Why are they there?
16:14 Because they're there, I guess.
16:16 The money and the crystal that are so prominently spoken about
16:20 get no resolution at the end of the movie.
16:22 There is not even, like, a passing mention of what's happened to that.
16:26 It's just totally and completely forgotten about.
16:30 And this is a problem that I actually see in a lot of rookie first-time writing.
16:34 And the Gear Brothers clearly didn't know where their focus was actually going to be.
16:40 So, the movie either needed a total rewrite or a total re-edit
16:44 to get rid of all these indulgences.
16:47 These scenes don't need to be in the movie
16:50 if they don't actually contribute to the main plot.
16:54 And the weird thing is, the movie oscillates between this grief-stricken revenge actioner
17:00 and all this biker stuff with heavy metal music slathered over it.
17:05 And of course, when it comes to the music, much of it is tracks from the label.
17:09 That just adds to the tonal disrepensy of the movie
17:14 because we're having these emotional scenes with this grief-stricken father
17:18 and it's backed with heavy metal music over it.
17:22 Like, the movie doesn't know what it wants to be most of the time.
17:27 And then when it finally does, you just go, "Wait, what?"
17:30 The third act of this movie is completely and totally bonkers.
17:35 If actually hadn't spawned it in the opening pre-title sequence,
17:38 this would have come so completely out of left field
17:41 that it would have been like a malignant-style gonzo twist.
17:45 It's that divorced from the entire rest of the movie beforehand.
17:49 Suddenly, after about an hour of being a revenge thriller,
17:53 the film decides, "You know what it's actually going to be?"
17:56 "The hills have eyes with shades of Mandy."
17:59 Like, where has this suddenly come from?
18:02 Suddenly, a bunch of mutants are running rampage in the woods.
18:07 They've all been released and they're all various different criminals
18:11 that have been so badly tortured that they've lost any semblance of their humanity.
18:16 And so they're just running around feral, attacking people on sight.
18:20 And Lombardi turns into the film's Bruce Campbell
18:23 because he has to kill every single one of them.
18:26 Yeah, you remember the whole stuff about him being a Christian?
18:29 "Oh, I can't do harm unto others."
18:31 Well, forget all that, because suddenly in the last section of the movie,
18:34 he's like, "I'm gonna ride a motorbike, I'm gonna decapitate people,
18:37 and I'm gonna shoot people, and it's all gonna squirt blood in my face."
18:42 The film is painted in crimson for the last half hour.
18:46 And full credit to the effects team,
18:49 because those practical effects, they are pretty gnarly.
18:52 They do work pretty well.
18:54 But also, you just wonder, like, where has this movie suddenly appeared from
19:00 that understands the true appeal of an exploitation film?
19:03 Like, this kind of trash is what makes those kind of movies fun,
19:08 but it's preceded by an hour of grim, super serious posturing.
19:13 It's very, very odd.
19:15 But Joseph Gat is also very solid as the movie's villain, Ram.
19:20 He's wickedly evil, as you would expect.
19:22 He's got a great look about him.
19:24 You probably recall him from roles in Game of Thrones or in Tim Burson's Dumbo.
19:29 Here, it's pretty clear that they cast him on the basis that he looks a lot like
19:33 Michael Berryman in The Hills Have Eyes.
19:36 He's pretty much doing that kind of performance.
19:38 And he particularly seems to be having fun as the film reaches its climax
19:41 in probably the only way it can,
19:42 namely a knockdown, full-on, no-holds-barred brawl between the pastor and Ram,
19:47 covered in sweat and blood,
19:49 and each of them seems to be trying to see which one has the bigger pair of balls to kill the other.
19:54 I suppose for all the changes in tone,
19:56 at least one thing is thematically consistent,
19:58 hypermasculinity to the point of homoeroticism.
20:01 The Retaliators is a mess of a movie that's trying to be so many different horror influences,
20:05 it struggles to find its own identity.
20:08 I guess it does towards the end,
20:10 but that's still two-thirds of the way through,
20:12 when really it should have done that kind of shift about halfway through,
20:16 but it's bogged down by cameos and guest appearances
20:20 that don't really add to the movie overall.
20:24 I think that it does at times nail the exploitation vibe that it's going for,
20:28 and Splatterhouse will certainly appreciate the practical effects in the movie.
20:33 And I guess, if you're a Rock fan,
20:35 this will have significant curiosity value.
20:38 I do wonder if this is the kind of movie that probably plays a little bit better with an audience,
20:42 especially a rowdy, midnight screenings-esque crowd
20:46 that are just there for the most outrageous stunts and moments and the shifts in tone,
20:52 and probably aren't asking itty-bitty questions like,
20:55 "Who or what are the Retaliators of the title referring to?"
20:59 You've probably seen this swish thing in the background of the entire video.
21:03 This is a movie palette.
21:05 It takes the color tone of an entire movie and turns it into this artwork.
21:09 So each of these lines represents a scene or sequences from the entire movie.
21:14 In this case, this is Terminator 2, Judgment Day.
21:18 And if you would like a movie palette of your own,
21:19 then you can go to moviepalette.com and use the code FILMBRAIN15 to get 15% off your order.
21:26 And thanks again to Movie Palette for sponsoring this video.
21:28 If you like this review and you want to support my work,
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21:36 Or you can buy some of my band merch over at my Tee Public page.
21:40 Or you can rock on over at my Patreon,
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21:48 But until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, fading out.
21:52 [Music]