Action

Ms. 45 (1981)

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I admit I hadn’t seen the rape-revenge parable Ms. 45, mostly because it has far too much brutal rape for my decidedly non-rapey tastes. With the new Arrow Blu-ray, I finally gave it a try and, well, it’s definitely one of the scroungiest, scummiest, rape-filled movies of all time. It scars me every time I close my eyes.

But I now understand why it’s one of the most feminist-coded flicks of all time, even if it didn’t mean to be.

With a truly skeevy atmosphere behind a low-rent, disco-funk soundtrack, mute New Yorker Thana (Zoë Tamerlis, Special Effects) is a low-level seamstress who, on her way home from picking up groceries, is raped by a nameless vagrant … and then, mere minutes later, again raped by a burglar. She bashes the burglar with an iron and, thankfully, kills him. Finding his gun among the debris, she becomes what the alternate title suggest: an Angel of Vengeance.

Exacting her bloody will, the traumatized Thana shoots a “Noo Yawk” guy point-blank in the head, in glorious color. Throughout the next couple of days, she shoots a sleazy pick-up artist, a stereotypical pimp wanting his money, and the total cast of The Warriors coming out to play (on their off-time) and getting killed for their troubles.

In the stunning climax, after lovingly kissing bullets as a preamble to a massacre, Thana lays waste to all the men at the work party, all to an ominously post-punk beat and while dressed as a nun. Man, there’s no way around it: The movie is about a woman who justifiably slaughters half of the most chauvinistic section of New York City proper, with a little left over for the outer boroughs. Where were these copycat murders?

Much like the big city it skewers, it’s an abrasive and downright abusive portrayal of a woman at the end of her noose, and we’re in her bloodstained way. A cloistered holy warrior in a world of unchecked perversion and wanton lust, Ms. 45 is the type of film that should be shown to males on their 13th birthday with a chemical-castration prescription as a caustic topper. It’s the least we can do!

I’m glad I saw Ms. 45, but I feel like I must volunteer at a battered women’s shelter or something, because it gave me feelings I must deal with — and soon. At least let me pay for your bullets, Zoë! —Louis Fowler

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Thriller

Night Nurse (2026)

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Georgia Bernstein’s first feature, Night Nurse, is heralded as a contemporary erotic thriller. Smart marketing aside, I find the label misleading, because the film doesn’t go far enough to qualify. It feels every bit as repressed as a Reagan-era housewife protesting the sale of Playboy at the local 7-Eleven she didn’t even patronize because “the clientele look dirty.”

That in and of itself is not necessarily a negative — the Night Nurse vibe, I mean, not Mrs. Risner’s racism. Just don’t expect to see anything akin to costar Mimi Rogers’ Full Body Massage. Not even a shoulder rub over the sweater.

Eleni, played by Cemre Paksoy in her film debut, is the titular health care practitioner. Newly hired at a retirement community, she’s assigned to assist Douglas Callum (Bruce McKenzie, Your Name Here), who has “maybe early onset Alzheimer’s,” which is a nice way of saying he’s an irascible, uncouth bastard. Hard-headed and impossible to please, Douglas is a devil in unwashed PJs.

Taking advantage of Eleni’s inexperience, he ropes her into a DUI-bond scam targeting fellow absentminded residents over the landline. Despite Douglas’ erectile dysfunction, first-feature writer/director Georgia Bernstein depicts this scene as a metaphorical sexual assault, which Eleni oddly, suddenly submits to like the contents of a colon to a spoonful of Metamucil. Next thing we know, Douglas has all the nurses under his chainsmoking spell and attending parties in his apartment where they ingest vitamins via IV.

Here’s the problem with the events of the previous paragraph: Why on earth? McKenzie gives such a credibly diabolic performance, we dislike Douglas immediately; we’ve all dealt with manipulative bullies like him. I might be able to comprehend the allure for the mousy Eleni if her backstory filled in enough blanks. But every nurse on staff? Bernstein supplies no impetus for that, which is where the movie lost me.

Rather than a modern twist on the 1980s erotic thriller, Night Nurse strikes me as an update of the ’50s and ’60s juvenile-delinquent flicks decrying the pitfalls of hanging with “the wrong crowd,” with McKenzie as the wild one who’ll rebel against whatever you’ve got, just for kicks. Like those movies, Bernstein’s deals in dialogue charged with innuendo, where seemingly every line holds two distinct meanings. Unlike those movies, perversity and danger hang over every frame, although too undeveloped and antiseptic for my taste. Douglas’ phone cord may coil, but tension is another story.. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Macumba Love (1960) 

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Somewhere along the South American coast, likely just a grid square or two from Blood Island, lives milquetoast myth-buster J. Peter Wells. He’s played by Walter Reed, not to be confused with yellow fever pioneer Dr. Walter Reed. (The latter’s name adorns hospitals, schools and other renowned institutions; the former was in Superman and the Mole-Men and comes off like a sub-John Saxon struggling to stifle an oncoming IBS incident.)

Peter’s writing a book on voodoo. He couldn’t have picked a better spot, what with all the thick-of-night rituals involving voodoo dolls, snakes, dead goats, dancing in circles, drums aplenty and topless villagers for sacrifice.

This is the world of Macumba Love. According to Google my crack investigating skills, “macumba” refers to a type of Afro-Brazilian folk religion. And the “love”? Well, it could be the staid Peter making time with local hottie Venus de Viasa (Ziva Rodann, The Private Lives of Adam & Eve).

Or Peter’s honeymooning daughter (visibly buoyant June Wilkinson, The Bellboy and the Playgirls) showing up with hubby Warren (William Wellman Jr., Winter a-Go-Go), whom Peter greets with the cringe-inducing “My replacement!”

Or Venus flirting with Warren so aggressively and openly on the dance floor, she may as well be grinding her mons pubis against his leg.

But let’s go with my love — for this kind of crass, garish jungle picture. Horror-adventure travelogue trash is a lost art, and this one offers cut-rate thrills ’n’ chills wrapped in a quasi-whodunit.

While Peter and Venus frolic in the ocean, a corpse surfaces (hi, Bob!) in a well-done jump scare. Pulling a poisoned hatpin from the dead man’s tummy, Peter suspects the work of Mama Rata-loi (Ruth de Souza), the voodoo lady shakin’ that stick and drivin’ them crazy — a solid guess, seeing as how skulls surround her dockside shack’s doorframe. He pops by Mama Rata-loi’s unannounced and says he’s heard enough about “the serpent of revenge and the rest of your voodoo trappings.” Speak for yourself, Peter!

The only film directed by character actor Douglas Fowley, whose CV ranges from Singin’ in the Rain to Cat-Women of the Moon, Macumba Love benefits greatly from the scenery — both Wilkinson, then still a teenager, and outdoor Brazil. Without Mother Nature, production value might be as primitive as the natives participating in the rituals bookending the movie.

As with many B pictures of the day, the threadbare script is padded by several diegetic songs. Personally, I could do with less Calypso, but then, what would Wilkinson have to dance to? —Rod Lott

Action

Smash-Up on Interstate 5 (1976)

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Turns out ol’ Buddy Ebsen can’t follow a road that isn’t paved in gold bricks. Perhaps encumbered by his unruly eyebrow hair while cruising down the freeway, Ebsen veers out of his lane, causing a catastrophic traffic crisis one might call a Smash-Up on Interstate 5. This made-for-TV disaster movie sure did.

As California Highway Patrol cop Robert Conrad (Palm Springs Weekend) narrates, the July 4 holiday mishap involves 39 vehicles, forcing 14 people to declare independence from the surly bonds of earth. After the crash, Smash-Up jumps back in time two days in an attempt to invest viewers in the various drivers’ and passengers’ lives before the fickle hand of fate did its due diligence.

The soapy story threads include Vera Miles (Psycho) navigating L.A. single life despite looking like Nancy Reagan; a biker gang with Lolita herself (Sue Lyon) just one pair of leather pants away from passing as a PTA mom; and a young couple on the lam after knocking over a grocery store. As one of Conrad’s fellow officers, future U.S. Marshal Tommy Lee Jones turns in what may be his finest acting ever since the role requires smiling.

You know people tuned in to ABC’s Smash-Up on Interstate 5 just to see the titular demolition derby. Hopefully they didn’t switch channels after those initial minutes, because that’s a mere preview of the full, fucked-up mishap awaiting at film’s end. Cars and trucks collide, flip, fly, go willy nilly and so on, as do stuntmen’s rag-dolled bodies.

Director John Llewellyn Moxey (Circus of Fear) is no Hal Needham — see the latter’s Death Car on the Freeway for a superior primetime fender-bender — yet Smash-Up is excitingly shot and skillfully edited where it counts, with a stunningly affecting mix of slow motion and pauses. Buckle up! —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Narco Shark (2023)

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When he’s not practicing black magick, the “perfectly oiled killing machine” Ricky Valente fights the Mexican yakuza. They’re a cult of red-robed ninjas who deal coke and worship a shark god. Ergo, Narco Shark.

Lest ye think Gerardo Preciado’s $10K epic is yet another lazy exercise in microcinema’s put-on-a-shark-on-it obsession, the ocean predator is incidental, even removable. The flick would work just as well without it, being a gleeful genre parody informed by a lifetime’s consumption of direct-to-video Mexitrash action, half-assed kung-fu tapes, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. And yeah, probably something with a shark.

Valente’s gift is neither his mullet nor his fanny pack, but his hypnotic pull on others by playing “the sexy sax.” Just witness the boiling horniness of his fully naked wife as he blows the instrument an inch from her Barbie-smooth ladyparts. (She’s played by a department-store mannequin.) Her brother, Tico Suave, desperately wants Ricky to teach him how to be cool instead of a bucktoothed, bespectacled, friend-free weirdo who, I suspect, collects orders from area grammar schools establishing acceptable radii. Ricky eventually relents; the lesson involves breakdancing.

Presented as a VHS cassette from 1989, Narco Shark opens with a (fake) note that Suave died during the film’s making, so Preciado has used all the tools at his disposal — alt takes, doubles, mo-cap recreations and other Furious 7-sounding tricks — to allow for completion. A title card promises, “You will not be able to tell the difference,” which of course sets up a running joke that never tires.

That goes for the movie’s whole as well. Usually these spoofs with few resources have one joke to tell and stretch it past a breaking point, often by the 10-minute mark. Remarkably, Preciado knows just when to quickly pivot to something else, whether cutting to commercial or even fast-forwarding itself.

No matter how lo the fi, Preciado isn’t dicking around; this is at least a couple levels up from that. So boneheaded and yet sharp-witted, it earns a spot in the same league as similarly minded ’80s pastiches Dude Bro Party Massacre III and Lethal Force. Narco Shark’s faux FBI warning orders in part, “Do not see this film by yourself. It is meant to be seen by a party of at least 4 people.” Although I endorse that thinking, I had a blast watching all by my lonesome. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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