All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Disaster on the Coastliner (1979)

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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

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Drop (2025)

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In the three-year gap between my starter and trophy wives, I had some terrible dates with terrible women. One meeting turned out to be the Worst Date Ever. It’s a long story — and sorry to say, relaying its details is more entertaining than watching the fetching Meghann Fahy go through her own in Drop.

The Blumhouse production deservedly gives Fahy, a breakout star from season 2 of HBO’s The White Lotus, her first turn leading a motion picture. As Violet, she’s a single mom, widow and domestic-abuse survivor all in one, getting “back out there” for her first date in years. The lucky guy — or is he? — is mustachioed photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar, Emily the Criminal), who joins her for dinner at a posh restaurant atop a skyscraper in downtown Chicago.

Before the two can so much as exchange “hello”s, Violet receives ominous memes on her smartphone, AirDrop-style. Then the texts roll in, ordering her to conduct a series of tasks, lest harm come to her 5-year-old son and her babysitting sister (Violett Beane, Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare) held hostage back home. The unknown sender’s demands build to an ultimatum: Kill Henry, right there at the table.

Happy Death Day helmer Christopher Landon keeps things thrifty by setting 90% of the movie in the restaurant. When it comes to stirring up suspense in a single place, however, perhaps he should’ve sent the script back to the kitchen for more time in the oven. Although not a bad film, Drop reveals itself as rather repetitive, constantly generating progressively strained excuses to get Fahy or Sklenar to vacate their chairs so the plot can move forward.

Trouble is, Drop doesn’t move quickly until its tail end. And for this type of thriller, it’s not twisty enough. Landon plants red herrings, but you can tell their color simply by their placement in the running time. To Fahy’s credit, she rises to the challenge of selling the concept’s preposterousness. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

House on Haunted Hill (2024)

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A follow-up to William Castle’s 1959 House on Haunted Hill via a found-footage is not a terrible idea. Just when it’s executed so wretchedly as in the hands of writer/director Dustin Ferguson, who often excretes enough movies annually to number in the teens. Considering one of the credited producers is “Cheap AF Videos,” at least the subprime-mortgaged House lays all its cards on the table. 

Set in 1978, this same-named sequel takes the guise of a live broadcast on Oct. 31 from WPIX-TV. At the titular abode, a reporter (Terrifier 3’s Daniel Roebuck) and a psychic (Jennifer Moriarty, Ferguson’s needless Spider Baby remake) investigate the supposedly spooky mansion. They encounter such fear inducers as a horny couple in a closet, a man in a gorilla mask hiding in another closet, and a science-class skeleton dropping from the stairwell. 

Every couple of minutes, these on-the-scene antics cut back to an in-studio interviewer (Brinke Stevens, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama 2) and her guests, one of whom is played by Vincent Price’s daughter, Victoria. Then WPIX cuts to fake commercials for local shops and services. 

Although it opens with a six-minute highlight reel of the ’59 original, Ferguson’s House on Haunted Hill doesn’t rip off Castle’s classic as much as it does Chris LaMartina’s WNUF Halloween Special. Although WNUF takes great pains to look the part to better sell the parody, Ferguson makes no such effort. You wouldn’t know the time frame was the ’70s if not for being told via supers. No iota of attempted legitimacy shows up; the flick even repeats its batch of ads — not for comedic effect (absent), but because Ferguson lacks ideas. When you’re shooting a new batch of video clickbait every Wednesday — Cocaine Cougar, 5G Zombies, Angry Asian Murder Hornets — who has time for second drafts?

This is the laziest, lousiest excuse for a motion picture since your little nephew stole your phone while you weren’t looking and recorded himself sticking out his tongue. Ferguson pushes and pushes and pushes this thing to an interminable 64 minutes. The closing credits might be the slowest I’ve seen ever, no exaggeration, as it takes one line 70 frickin’ seconds to make the valiant rise from the screen’s bottom to top.

I watched this Hill of beans on Fawesome, blessedly free because it’s heavily ad-supported. The ill-named streaming service’s numerous breaks of seven consecutive ads — real, largely shilling Progressive — were more entertaining. 

House on Haunted Hill ’24 is “dedicated in living memory” to Messrs. Price and Castle, whom I’d like to think deflected the gesture from above with, “No, thanks. We’re good.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

Isaac Asimov’s Robots (1988)

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As anyone who read ol’ muttonchops Isaac Asimov knows, precious little of his classic I, Robot collection made into the Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster of the same name. Anyone hoping for a semi-faithful adaptation should either keep waiting or hunt down Isaac Asimov’s Robots. Frankly, since the latter option is a “VCR Mystery Game,” you may be better off letting time idle. 

The Eastman Kodak production stars Stephen Rowe (Cyber-Tracker 2) as New York City ace police detective Elijah Baley, a head shorter than everyone else. He’s partnered with a walking, talking, trash can-looking robot named Sammy (Richard Levine, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2) to solve the attempted murder of a Spacertown roboticist (John Henry Cox, Bridge of Spies) in 24 hours or less.

As Baley stumbles upon vital clues to crack the case, he addresses the camera about evidence he’s submitting, prompting viewers to draw a card from the game’s deck. Or something like that. Watching the bush-league acting of Robots for its 45 minutes is rough enough; I can’t imagine having to play the accompanying game, too. What I can imagine is children so bored, they begged to go do homework instead.

One of Asimov’s celebrated Three Laws of Robotics is do no harm to humans, which the mere of existence of Isaac Asimov’s Robots contradicts. The drab whodunit looks as cheap as the video on which it was shot, seemingly made on Sesame Street sets. It plays like TV’s Alien Nation were retooled as a sitcom, but mistakenly beamed for broadcast minus a laugh track. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

Freaky Tales (2024)

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WTF

Clearly filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden didn’t work out all their 1980s love on Captain Marvel. The decade’s aesthetic — from green neon to VHS tracking fuzz — is all over Freaky Tales like an infection. No can of Bactine stands a chance against the interlocking foursome of stories set in ’87 Oakland, California. (But bookended by unapologetic Nazis and sports stars’ homes robbed mid-game, the movie could take place in ’25 Anywhere, America.)

A simple siege of a peaceful punk club by skinheads, the first story establishes Freaky’s darkly comic, heavily violent tone. The second concerns a different type of war: one of words in a rap battle between Too $hort (Symba) and two young ladies (Normani and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Dominique Thorne) who might be set up to lose. This bit would be entirely incidental, if not for introducing the movie’s ultimate villain (Ben Mendelsohn, Ready Player One) as an ultimate piece of shit. 

Things pick up considerably in the third segment, fronted by Pedro Pascal (Wonder Woman 1984) as a freelance enforcer on what he promises to his pregnant wife is his last assignment … until suddenly, he’s willing to work overtime for vengeance. (Psst: Somewhere within those ellipses, a surprise A-list cameo awaits to delight.)

Tales reaches its cathartic crescendo in sharing the legend of NBA player Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis, Top Gun: Maverick). Although the former Golden State Warrior is a real athlete, the night depicted here sure isn’t as Floyd takes grisly, glorious revenge upon a house party of Confederate scumbags for misdeeds against his family. This bravura sequence not only feels like a kung-fu cousin to the thwarted Manson murders in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …, but practically doubles as a bid for Ellis to front that long-gestating Blade reboot.

Befitting a Tarantino reference, Freaky Tales often plays like chunks from a weekend’s Blockbuster Video binge — say, oh, Repo Man, Heavy Metal, Wild Style and Game of Death — vomited back up in a fever dream. Scrappy and strange with infrequent bursts of energy, this mishmash tries throughout to reach the level of fun it continually teases, until achieving near-nirvana in that fourth and final chapter. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.