Cold in July 2014

This one’s a keeper. A noirsh color saturated nightmare of a B movie set in a small town in East Texas in 1989, the land that time forgot. The movie throws us fast and hard into the plot with Michael C. Hall one night being wakened by his wife who thinks she hears someone prowling around the house. Sure enough Hall nervously takes down the shoe box from the top shelf in the closet that holds his gun and bullets and promptly shoots the burglar dead. He didn’t mean to, the gun just went off, but Hall who is mild mannered and owns a frame shop (a nice touch that is also in the book) is being hailed as a hero for protecting home, wife and young child and part of him likes that. But here’s where the ride which I thought was safe and steady starts going fast and loose around those dangerous curves and what you think is going to happen doesn’t, and this is what keeps this thriller thrilling for its running time. Sometimes I have a strong graving for this sort of film, but this is a dying or already dead genre, and the only way to get my fill nowadays is through some of those damn good series that occasionally  turn up on cable and are the new B movies of our time. “Cold” fits in and belongs with the Coen Brothers and John Dahl who at one time early in their careers made little rodent droppings of movies, somewhere between here and there that played homage and cheap boarding house host for the likes of Robert Mitchum, Dana Andrews and Dick Powell. It helps to have Sam Shepard all grizzly and gaunt and Don Johnson bursting at the seams along for this ride throwing odd angles and off kilter personality traits at us a mile a minute. The violence is sometimes rough and in your face and for that reason I can only say see this film to a select few. Directed by a young filmmaker I never heard of Jim Mickle who has previously made zombie and vampire movies and is based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale, also good is the music score by Jeff Grace.