It’s difficult to discuss what a movie like Vulcanizadora is about without ruining it for everyone else. So let’s not spoil things! I’ll keep this brief.
Marty (Joshua Burge, 2015’s The Revenant) is a perennial sad sack. His friend, Derek, is a motormouth with a chunk of hair that looks like it leapt from his cranium, clung to his chin and died. The salt to Marty’s vinegar, Derek is played by the film’s writer, director and editor, Joel Potrykus.
Armed with cheap fireworks and a canteen of Jägermeister, they’re taking their first steps on a camping trip like no other, deep into a Michigan forest. Thus begins a slackerpalooza of junk food, spank mags, candle lighters, petty arguments and the stark reality they were ill-prepared for adulthood, so they’ve essentially stayed children.
Their mission? Yes, they actually have one, but this secret sequel to Potrykus’ Buzzard is not about to spoon-feed you those details until it’s damn well ready. And once it is, you won’t be.
Vulcanizadora (Spanish for “tire repair shop,” which figures into the stealth plot) arrives more twisted than a box of garlic knots from the corner store freezer. A two-hander for a majority of its running time, this M-80 of an indie revels in comedy as black as it is bleak. I can’t help but admire what Potrykus achieves in this daring high-wire act. Love it or loathe it, no one is likely to shake its memory. —Rod Lott
Other than perhaps the practitioners behind them, nobody gets the film novelization better than S.M. Guariento. He acknowledges the general public’s dismissal of the oft-maligned publishing arm (“What the kazoo is to music, so is the novelization to prose,” he writes), then spends 530 pages ofLight Into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations proving those people wrong.
Like any art form, you encounter both good and bad in the novelization; the joy is finding is what works for you. Guariento’s book is all about his discovery through several dozen examples. First published in 2019, his tome remains held in high regard by yours truly as a thoroughly engaging blend of scholarship and obsession.
Now, a half-decade later, it’s even more so as a Revised and Updated edition with 50 more pages, including an updated intro, several expanded chapters (most notably, The Incredible Melting Man), more cover art and — as if all that weren’t enough — an all-new index and outro. The latter includes Guariento’s list of the 10 best and brings the reader up to speed on his subject’s current resurgence via Severin Films and Encyclopocalypse Publications’ paperbacks for B-horror VHS favorites that never got the novelization treatment.
It bears repeating: more cover art. From thumbnails to full-page images, the hundreds upon hundreds of images are reason enough to merit a purchase, but what struck me the first time around remains: how splendidly written it is — no fandom-level first draft here.
Read my original review for a more in-depth look at the contents. As with that first volume, this Revised and Updated run comes in two flavors: the DeLuxe Edition in full, vibrant color and a more-affordable Midnight offering in black and white. —Rod Lott
Between 2022’s Talk to Me and 2024’s Oddity, cursed-object flicks might not be back in full force. They are, however, resurging enough for the creepy old shopkeepers to flip the dim lights back on. Unlike the aforementioned films, Osgood Perkins takes a different and comical tact with his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Monkey.
After Petey (Adam Scott, Krampus) fails to return the titular toy due to a stringent return policy and a disemboweled pawnshop owner, he leaves the monkey to his twin boys, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery, Cocaine Bear). Then he walks out on their mom (Tatiana Maslany, TV’s Orphan Black). The boys quickly learn winding up the doll triggers a Final Destination-like series of events that kills someone close to them.
The two try to rid themselves of the monkey and drift apart. But as an adult Hal (Theo James, HBO’s The White Lotus) prepares for one final trip with his teenaged son (Colin O’Brien, Wonka) before forfeiting custody, he encounters a string of familiar and often explosive deaths. It seems somebody is making the monkey drum its sticks once again.
The Monkey sails through its brisk runtime, cutting through would-be lulls with quick vignettes of increasingly outlandish kills. James gives life to an otherwise flat character in Hal, breaking through the deadpan dialogue to produce a standout performance. His dual role as his brother lacks the emotional weight, but still carries its own compelling and maniacal charm. O’Brien compliments James well, grounding realism to the outlandish circumstances that surround him.
Unfortunately, Perkins’ attempt at real emotion doesn’t mesh particularly well with the film’s wackier side. It’s like he’s fighting against himself, bloating the film with gags when the premise is entertaining enough. The grossly unprepared priest and the borderline-creepy babysitter work presumably well in King’s universe, but they fail to jive well in Perkins’.
And that may be what this and the director’s previous work lacks: an artistic impression. While it’s not necessary for every filmmaker to make it painfully obvious they made something, Perkins doesn’t appear to leave any mark at all. For a director that has firmly rooted himself in horror — even to the point of putting his name front and center in The Monkey’s promotional material — he doesn’t leave a meaningful signature. There’s probably a director who has made a point to operate like this, and maybe even successfully, but for Perkins, it just feels uninspired and hollow. Hopefully he can use 2025’s Keeper to establish himself a bit more. Because as it stands, it doesn’t feel like he’s truly emerged as a director.
While it manages to earn a few solid laughs and deliver some — at the very least — interesting deaths, it still feels overly clinical in the wash. Perkins understand dark comedy, sure, but he lacks restraint and subtlety, unintentionally robbing his more poignant and frankly funny sequences of their power. Akin to the director’s 2024 film, Longlegs, The Monkey slips on the peel. —Daniel Bokemper
In his tribute to Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and makeup maestro Jack Pierce, Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy (The Beast and the Magic Sword) plays a few classic baddies of his own: Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, Dr. Fu Manchu, Bluebeard and, yep, werewolf Waldemar Daninsky.
But first we see him doing Rasputin cosplay. It’s just the kind of thing a washed-up actor would do — not Naschy, but his Howl of the Devilcharacter, Hector. He lives in a mansion with this precocious, monster-obsessed nephew (Sergio Molina, Naschy’s real-life son) and, on occasion, a village sex worker for Hector’s fiendish, fatal, carnal doings. We’re talking nipple-tearing, throat-slicing, torso-chainsawing and back-axing — the whole nueve yardas.
Despite Howl’s rock-hard lean into starlet slaughter, this is a middling effort for Naschy as director. And despite the radiant beauty of Caroline Munro (The Last Horror Film), this is an ugly movie in terms of its low opinion of women, each and every one deemed a whore or bitch or slut. Was Naschy working through some misogyny or was it simply an excuse to get the parading ladies free of clothing posthaste?
One thing’s for sure: The greatest lines await your ears when Hector’s servant (Howard Vernon, Countess Perverse) shows the movie’s first rent-a-harlot around the place:
Servant: “There are places in this house where time has stopped forever.” Harlot: “Fuck that.”
One year before he picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue in Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges played a Secret Service agent in Disaster on the Coastliner, exactly the type of movie the 1980 landmark comedy parodied.
With the U.S. vice president’s wife aboard a commuter train from L.A. to San Francisco, Bridges’ Mitchell plants himself in the Amtrak dispatch office, much to the irritated-AF exasperation of Snyder (E.G. Marshall, Creepshow), its department head. As Snyder and staff monitor their blinking wall of lights, Mitchell scoffs, barks orders and complains about the dadgum computers.
Turns out, Mitchell has a point. Those computers don’t mean diddly squat when the train is hijacked by a big galoot (Pieces’ Paul L. Smith) who happens to be a freshly fired employee. He retaliates in the way he knows will hurt the rail service the most: engineering a collision of two trains by sending one the wrong way down a one-way track.
The solution to avoid “the worst disaster in railroad history”? Easy: Just divert one train to another track … by adding 30 yards’ worth in 90 minutes. Suddenly, an entire crew is workin’ on the railroad all the live-long lickety-split to make that happen. That’s impressive considering I can’t even wake my teenage son in that amount of time.
Disaster being a disaster movie, subplots abound. All aboard, William Shatner’s con man tries to get laid by romancing a fellow passenger — understandably since she’s played by Jackson County Jail’s Yvette Mimieux. In what counts as a twist, The Shat is not the guy who mansplains sushi to an Asian woman. Meanwhile, as the train company chairman, Raymond Burr (Godzilla 1985) sits at a desk and never stands.
With Coastliner being made for television, call it The Taking of Pelham $1.23. One can see why ABC tapped Vanishing Point’s Richard C. Sarafian to direct. After all, a speeding car isn’t that different from a speeding train, right? Right?
While Sarafian doesn’t conduct this to the level of choo-choo jitters seen in big-screen blockbusters like The Fugitive or Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, it certainly surpasses Under Siege 2. And unlike the pilot pic for Supertrain that same prime-time season, it manages to deliver an actual derailment sequence. From its punch-card teletype titles, I was in. —Rod Lott
