After a hiatus in Vegas, glamour model Emanuelle (Nicole D’Angelo, Darling Nikki) returns to town and into the abusive arms of her controlling ex (Chris Spinelli, who also produced). She makes her intentions clear: “I just want to be beautiful again.”
He makes his clear, too: “Street trash,” he chides her, then adds, “You can stay here and we can dream better” — whatever that means. As with the case of every Gregory Hatanaka film I’ve seen, “whatever that means” remains unclear, ostensibly up to the viewer. But we do know she stabs him with scissors … or do we?
With D’Angelo co-directing alongside Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance), the hourlong The Awakening of Emanuelle then settles into a thrice-repeated pattern: She meets a photographer. The photographer shoots her in hot lingerie. She beds the photographer. Next!
Conceived as an affectionate send-up of the days when you (read: your parents) could go to the theater to see two movies, a serial, a cartoon, a newsreel and a handful of previews on one ticket, Flicks offers just that. Peter Winograd’s film is like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, but in half the running time and the fake trailers aren’t any good.
What little notice Flicks attracted on its way from skipping theaters for video store shelves flagged the animated “Cat and Mouse at the Home” as the standout. From the retirement home for cartoon actors, former teammates Cat and Mouse reminisce about their golden years before proceeding to beat the crap out of one another for old times’ sake. In taking the classic Tom and Jerry rivalry to an extreme, it’s an undeniable precursor to The Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy.
Then, in appropriate black and white, the “News ’R’ Us” segment (“All the news that be or ever were”) casts its roving-reporter eye on a unique medical experiment (compression of Siamese twins versus separation) and America’s ball-whacking craze — the latter because the joke wrote itself.
In the film’s first “feature,” Martin Mull (Ski Patrol) and Betty Kennedy (Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie) stars as spouses who move into the House of the Living Corpse, so named for the disfigured, malnourished, shellacked dog-loving creep who lives within the walls, Bad Ronald-style. Mull may be the name, but Kennedy’s in the driver’s seat as the dim-bulb blonde, delivering an excellent comedic performance that could go unnoticed if you’re disarmed by her sex appeal.
The second feature on this double bill is Philip Alien, Space Detective, a noir parody with a sci-fi gimmick: The third-rate gumshoe is a 6-foot bug from outer space. Voiced by Simpsons vet Harry Shearer, Philip falls for a human dame (Pamela Sue Martin, 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure) while looking for a runaway husband. While it may not land as intended, it earns a few laughs nonetheless, like when a flummoxed Philip tries to unhook Martin’s bra using four of his insect limbs.
Shown purposely out of order, two consecutive chapters of Lost Heroes of the Milky Way bookend the phony features. The Flash Gordon-style serial chronicles the intergalactic mission of the S.S. President Nixon patrol vessel, captained by Joan Hackett (The Last of Sheila) in her final film role. The serial also features Mull as the evil Emperor Tang, comedian Richard Belzer as a stoner, more dated counterculture humor and a henchman made of chocolate ice cream.
Penned by its director and three writers from HBO’s Not Necessarily the News, Flicks could illegitimately hail from the National Lampoon; it certainly reps the magazine’s spirit better than the Lampoon’s own similar project of ’82, the triple-spoofing Movie Madness. Unlike that partial-birth abortion, I find something new to appreciate in Flicks, however insignificant, each time I give it a whirl. —Rod Lott
In the sweepstakes of films in which strangers awake in a mysterious locale for unknown reasons or purpose, Death Count shoots to earn the consolation prize of Most Gory. Held captive in individual cells and outfitted with a back-of-neck explosive device are eight school faculty members, including a stereotypical Hispanic janitor, a stereotypical masculine female gym teacher and a stereotypical meathead coach for whom “violence” is a two-syllable word.
They’ve been gathered by a figure calling himself The Warden (Costas Mandylor, Saw III-VI), who looks like the CW’s Arrow, but with a bedazzled, BDSM-friendly leather eyepatch. Broadcast online, his game entails comply-or-die scenarios of self-injury, like fingernail removal via box cutter or scissoring off a fingertip. Each round, whoever gets the least “cyber likes” is eliminated. No contestant reacts properly to excruciating pain, whether hammering their hand, practicing dentistry with pliers or taking a kerosene shower. Now, before you think The Warden inhumane, please know he’s prestocked each cell with toilet paper.
Meanwhile, at the police station, the detective trying to locate the signal source is played by Michael Madsen (Species). From the looks of his bruised and butterfly-bandaged face, Madsen came straight to set from a snooze in the alley, where he tussled with a hobo for the biggest piece of cardboard. En route to The Warden’s pad, he delivers an impassioned monologue about the loss of true relationships and connections in the digital age. If that sounds preachy, it’s nothing compared to the reveal of Why The Warden Is Doing All This — a reason so asinine, it takes an otherwise serviceable bit of Sawsploitation from enjoyable trash in the first half to insufferable trash for the second.
Soon enough, a showdown — complete with a “Huzzah!”-style bit of stage magic — leads to an anti-ending, followed by end-credits jabber that shames the audience for watching. With that, one’s left to wonder why director Michael Su (The Revolting Dead) bothered with torture porn. I’ll give the benefit of doubt to screenwriter Michael Merino (Acceleration), considering his credit arrives with a rather suspicious F.U. attached: “with revisions by Rolfe Kanefsky.” No word which gentleman wrote The Warden’s “Now we’re cooking with gas!” quip (as a character gets the asphyxiant treatment) or tried to determine a credible way to get Sarah French (Insectula!) to bare her breasts. They didn’t, but she does anyway. —Rod Lott
On my iMac, the F9 key operates as a fast-forward button. For F9, this function is apt. Among the increasingly less fun globetrotting adventures of the clutch-burning covert-ops heroes, this is the franchise’s least-engaging entry since the fourth, 2009’s Fast & Furious. In these films’ ever-widening world, there’s nothing a popped can of nitrous can’t fix … except boredom.
Marking the return of Justin Lin (parts 3-6) to the director’s chair, F9 finds Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and several others getting the gang back together after receiving a distress signal from the downed plane of their government agent pal (Kurt Russell). In the crash, imprisoned terrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron in an unflattering bowl cut) escaped. She’s working with a new bad guy who happens to be Dom’s long-lost brother, Jakob (John Cena), to find both halves of a device that, once assembled, is some kind of super weapon; apart, the pieces look like Rubik’s Turtle Shell, if such a 3D puzzle existed.
From a chase through a mine-strewn jungle to a chase with a magnetic truck (which would be more entertaining if Michael Bay’s 6 Underground hadn’t already used a similar gimmick), the set pieces show Team Toretto continue to have the most extraordinary luck around. The members not only defy the laws of gravity, but rewrite all scientific rules, causing stakes to dissipate. I know it’s “just a movie,” but having a meta scene comment on their apparent indestructibility does not excuse lazy screenwriting. Equally apathetic is the brushed-off “explanation” of the resurrection of fan favorite Han (Sung Kang), who “died” in film 3, The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Since Han is not the first “JK, I’m alive” character, the exercise steers F9 closer to soap opera.
Like a soap, F9 is overstuffed with wholly extraneous scenes dragging the pace (sorry, Helen Mirren and Cardi B), none begging for excision more than Dom’s origin story, which no one needs. Nearly two and a half hours are filled with so many characters and callbacks, it feels like Lin assumes viewers have seen all the previous movies and watch little else than the repeats on CMT.
As was the case for the previous film, The Fate of the Furious, in trying to top each successive sequel, F9 becomes the victim of its own excess. What’s wrong with aiming to make a movie as good as the one before it rather than attempt to go bigger? Once you’ve traveled to space, as Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson do here in the third (or fifth?) act, you’re too far gone to realize you jumped the shark miles ago. —Rod Lott
Jerry Jameson is the Michael Corleone of made-for-TV disaster movies. He’d directed about a half-dozen before graduating to the big-screen reins of Airport ’77 and Raise the Titanic (a disaster movie in reverse?). Just when he thought he was done with uh-oh flicks for the tube, they pulled him back in. Arguably the biggest is Starflight One, also known by the unimaginative, kindergartener-workshopped title Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land. It may as well have been called Airport ’83: In Space.
On the eve of the maiden voyage of Starflight One, the world’s first hypersonic transport plane, designer Josh Gilliam (Hal Linden, TV’s Barney Miller) doesn’t think it’s ready to fly. But because stocks are more valuable than humans, the cantankerous CEO (Ray Milland, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) refuses to delay launch. So up, up, up it goes, with Lee Majors (TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man) starring as the pilot, with Lauren Hutton (Viva Knievel!) playing the publicist intimately familiar with his cockpit.
Wouldn’t you know it? Things go wrong, kicking the $50 million craft out of Earth’s orbit and gaining a hole in its cargo hold, placing all 60-some-odd passengers in mortal danger. To account for the loss of gravity, string is strung down the aisle for people to hold onto! But how to solve the problem of precious air hissing away by the second? The crew simply calls the Space Shuttle Columbia (R.I.P.) to drive on over, pick up Gilliam (transferred by floating coffin, no less) and take him back to man the ground-control computers. After that, the shuttle returns to fetch the passengers from Starflight One via a snake-like chute whose insides look like a Fantastic Voyage through the esophagus.
Sizewise, Hutton’s celebrated space between her two front teeth doth not compare to any gap of logic among the dozens present in Starflight One. Curiously, in look and feel and theme, the film is like a no-jokes retread of Airplane II: The Sequel, as if one of the Starflight producers — for sake of argument, let’s say Henry Winkler — saw the comedy the year before and said, “Ayyyyyyy! Let’s do that, but serious. And with chintzier cheeseball effects.”
Also aboard this interminable, star-studded teleturkey are future Oscar nominee Tess Harper as Majors’ too-mousy wife, future Weekend at Bernie’s corpse Terry Kiser as an asshole, future Elm Street teen-dream slayer Robert Englund and future insufferable evangelical Kirk Cameron. Thoughts and prayers. —Rod Lott
After a hiatus in Vegas, glamour model Emanuelle (Nicole D’Angelo, Darling Nikki) returns to town and into the abusive arms of her controlling ex (Chris Spinelli, who also produced). She makes her intentions clear: “I just want to be beautiful again.” 
