Cold in July (2014) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Thriller

Tagline: How many men can one bullet kill?

How can a split-second decision change your life? While investigating noises in his house one balmy Texas night in 1989, Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall in an affectingly vulnerable performance) puts a bullet in the brain of lowlife burglar Freddy. Although he s hailed as a small-town hero, Richard soon finds himself fearing for his family s safety when Freddy s ex-con father, Ben (Sam Shepard, August: Osage County) rolls into town, hell-bent on revenge. But not all is as it seems in this seemingly peaceful community, and soon Richard s life begins to unravel into a dark underworld of corruption and violence that will pit him against the most unlikely of foes. Co-starring Don Johnson (Django Unchained) and adapted from the Joe R. Lansdale novel by director Jim Mickle (We Are What We Are) and star Nick Damici (Stake Land), Cold In July is a pulpy Southern noir whose twists and turns continue to pile up right up to its shocking conclusion.

Storyline: When a protective father meets a murderous ex-con, both need to deviate from the path they are on as they soon find themselves entangled in a downwards spiral of lies and violence while having to confront their own inner psyche.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, October 6, 2014 -- When actor Michael C. Hall completed his final season as serial killer Dexter Morgan on Showtime's Dexter, he wanted to play someone more normal, not only to avoid being typecast but also because he thought he would find such a role "therapeutic". Ironically enough, in the first script that attracted Hall's interest, his character, Richard Dane, kills someone right at the start of the film, but the death is almost inadvertent, and Dane is unnerved by the experience. An ordinary family man who surprises a burglar, Dane could almost be described as the anti-Dexter. His accidental brush with violence becomes a trap door through which he plunges into a world of violence and revenge. Every time Dane thinks he's hit bottom, he discovers there's further to fall.

Cold in July is based on a novel of the same name by Joe R. Lansdale, whose literary output covers a wide array of genres and formats, including graphic novels. The best known adaptation of Lansdale's work to date is Don Coscarelli's 2002 cult classic Bubba Ho-Tep, based on Lansdale's novella. Writer/director Jim Mickle and his frequent writing partner Nick Damici were attracted to Cold in July by its twisty narrative, vivid characters and the opportunity to try something different from the horror films like Stake Land and We Are What We Are for which they were known. Hall's involvement helped them to attract other major talent, namely Sam Shepard, whose character begins as the film's intimidating villain and ends as something else, and Don Johnson, who gives the film a caffeinated jolt of energy at midpoint as a P.I. whose Texas-sized personality overflows every room he enters.

After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014, Cold in July was picked up by IFC Films, which gave it a limited release in May 2014 and has now issued it on Blu-ray and DVD.

The time is 1989 (the year when Lansdale's novel was first published). In the small Texas town of Laborde, Richard Dane (Hall) has a framing business and lives in a house with his wife, Ann (Vinessa Shaw), and their three-year-old son, Jordan (Brogan Hall). Awakened by strange noises one night, Dane arms himself and confronts a burglar. In a reflex action, Dane fires, and the intruder is killed. A local detective, Ray Price (co-writer Damici), tells Dane that he killed a dangerous felon named Freddy Russell, who is wanted for numerous crimes. Dane should feel good about what he's done. The local townspeople hail him as a hero.

But Dane doesn't feel heroic. He's sickened at the thought of having taken a life. He shortly has new cause for concern when Freddy Russell's father, Ben (Shepard, quietly menacing), a recently paroled convict, appears on the scene making vague threats and lurking at inappropriate places like young Jordan's school playground. Det. Price can do nothing in the absence of an actual criminal offense, and the first act of Cold in July plays like a compressed version of Cape Fear (either version), as Ben Russell stalks the Dane family.

But then Mickle and his cast expertly navigate one of the film's several hairpin turns, and Cold in July strikes off in another direction, one that brings Dane into contact with Don Johnson's private detective, Jim Bob Luke, a colorful fellow with an easy smile, a war veteran's combat skills and a detective's eye for detail. It is through Jim Bob that Dane begins to discover the full extent of the mysterious world into which he fell simply by pulling a trigger. Almost before he knows it, Dane is inventing cover stories to explain his absences to Ann as he joins Jim Bob on stakeouts, and he encounters violence beyond anything he ever expected to see in his tidy frame shop.

The film's third act involves yet another sharp turn into something so disturbing that even Jim Bob, who thought he'd seen it all, is appalled. It's at this point that Dane has the opportunity to walk away and rejoin his wife and son, absolved from any further involvement, but he finds that he can't. One of the core themes in Cold in July is the responsibility of fatherhood, which is first expressed in an obvious (and ultimately superficial) form when Dane defends his family from an intruder. Throughout the film, there are suggestions that Dane himself lacked a strong father figure, which makes his erratic behavior with his own son all that much harder for him to bear, as he struggles emotionally in the aftermath of the shooting.

Ben Russell wasn't much of a father, but he arrives in Dane's town with some notion that he "owes" his son Freddy a form of justice. As events unfold, however, Ben's initial impulse is constantly being undercut and redirected, as he learns more about Freddy's background. The fact that these two very different fathers are also combatants keeps the tension high at all times. The film is worth repeated viewings just to observe the tiny flickers that pass between these two even when they aren't looking directly at each other.

Hall's remarkable ability to draw viewers into his world is essential to Cold in July, just as it was key to the success of Dexter. He resists every impulse to make Dane heroic, even when he's fighting off an attacker. In Hall's portrayal, Dane is just an ordinary guy who was getting along as best he could without much confidence in himself, when he stumbled into something horrible. If he makes it through, it won't be with a sense of pride or triumph, but more with a feeling of relief. But he'll always hold his head a little higher, and those around him will notice the difference.

A recurrent complaint by both director Mickle and author Lansdale is the insistence by publishers and film studios on pigeonholing works into genre categories. No doubt one of the many qualities of Cold in July that appealed to Mickle was its cheerful disregard of genre boundaries, a quality he was careful to preserve in the film adaptation. The work has elements of a film noir, a detective story, a police procedural, a revenge tragedy, a coming-of-age tale and a horror film, but it's none of the above. It's a distinctive film that exists in a world of its own, anchored by an understated but supremely assured performance by one of the best actors currently working in film and TV. Highly recommended.

[CSW] -2.2- Another reviewer put it better than I could with this:
If you watch this movie because the previews piqued your interest, then you will be in for a surprise. This will not be the movie that you expect it to be. I would describe this movie as having two distinct acts, which I will heretofore describe as Act I and Act II. Act I is the movie you are expecting (and perhaps even excited) to see. It's a Cape Fear-inspired drama that begins with a home invasion and turns into a revenge story. It's suspenseful and intriguing. It opens up compelling questions. It sets a haunting tone that makes it easy to identify with the main character (Michael C. Hall). And...it's over in 20-30 minutes or so. Most of the scenes from the previews take place in Act I. Act II begins when Don Johnson shows up and lasts the rest of the movie. Johnson's character is about as cliché of a Texas detective as it gets, and it's never clear exactly why he shows up and why several of the other compelling characters inexplicably go away. Once Johnson enters the picture, the movie drops pretty much every possible interesting avenue. In other words, Act I leaves several questions unanswered. (Though it probably wouldn't be a "spoiler" to say what those questions are, I will err on the side of caution by not mentioning the plot lines that I have in mind, here.) Instead of pursuing any of these avenues, the film turns into a vigilante Western revenge story of sorts. (But not at all the type you may have been expecting.) In short, whereas I compared Act I to Cape Fear (one of the greatest revenge thrillers ever made), Act II descends into an episode of Miami Vice meets Gran Torino meets Road House. It's hokey, it's cheap, it's predictable, and it's lowbrow.

[V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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