All posts by Rod Lott

Comedy

The Perils of Pauline (1967)

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A contemporary adaptation of the iconic 1914 serial, The Perils of Pauline is one Hail Mary of an action comedy, patched together from three episodes of an intended TV series canceled before it could air. The production attempted to capitalize on the mad, mod, quasi-parodic pop sensation known as ABC’s Batman — and boy, is that evident, for good and ill. 

Aging out of the orphanage that’s raised her since infancy, the virginal Pauline (Blue Hawaii cutie Pamela Austin) enters the real world and gets into and out of one scrape after another. Her trouble begins in Africa, where she tutors a 12-year-old royal prince (Rick Natoli, Hang Your Hat on the Wind) who wants her for his harem. The kid’s so horny, he chases her around the palace. She’s also pursued by tigers, dangled over a pit of stock-footage sharks and kidnapped by a gorilla — twice! 

From the sewers to the high seas to even outer space, Pauline’s inadvertent adventures find her pursued by the three über-wealthy men, including Terry-Thomas (The Vault of Horror) and Edward Everett Horton (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). But the only one who has her heart is an age-appropriate fellow orphan (’nilla crooner Pat Boone), who spends a chunk of Perils in a block of ice floating in the ocean. Trust me; it’s a long story, figuratively and literally. 

Innocence personified, Pauline doesn’t go chasing waterfalls; they just seem to find her. Every time she faces danger, the parlor piano music kicks in and the film is sped up, all the better to ape its chapter-play origins. Pre-“talkies,” silent films, including serials like The Perils of Pauline, relied on exaggerated physicality to help impart emotions. That performative spirit haunts this update through barn-broad slapstick — a style that pays off in the whimsically entertaining prologue, then lacks ingenuity thereafter. The real cliffhanger is how much of your bat-time you’ll cede before changing the bat-channel.

Try as the producers might to cobble the individual eps into a functional feature, it just doesn’t work in the more demanding format of cinema — even the semi-spoofy kind. Prestige TV, Pauline ’67 was not. Adam West’s Batman influence notwithstanding, this flick lands amid the female-fronted, spy-fi likes of Fathom, Modesty Blaise and Deadlier Than the Male. As with Pauline, each is a sexed-up send-up of pre-existing IP … and we know how those turned out: best viewed via their posters. —Rod Lott

Action

Kingkong Is Coming Back (2024)

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Thanks to the People’s Republic of China, Kingkong Is Coming Back! And copyright lawyers are nowhere in sight! 

That’s right: Kingkong, one word, as if that qualifies as ethical and saves the keisters of all involved parties from the threat of litigation. Still, this so-called “giant” gorilla isn’t large enough to hold anyone in the palm of his hand. Imagine a primate the size of Harambe after going without Mounjaro shots for six months, including year-end holidays. Also, his face gives “durrrrrr.”

Story? I mean, I guess. A mineral exploration team in the mountains is ordered by their bald, bad benefactor to stop searching for mines and capture the ape. Or else their families will pay … in blood. (This movie should pay … in steep tariffs.)

You might predict ’kong (not Kong) will save our scientists. You will not predict the movie’s other freak of nature: a veritable Tarzan Boy raised in the wild. Clad in long hair and short loincloth, he moves and flies and flits and spins and scales like he’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Encino Man. The kid also punches and kicks CGI wolves that cast highly unnatural shadows. 

From Youku, China’s equivalent of The Asylum, Kingkong Is Coming Back is cheaper than cheaply made, with poorly layered effects that scream “rush job” (or “加急工作!” per the Google machine). Although sitting at 63 minutes, they are a punishing 63 minutes, capped by an anti-ending that’s written like a transition into an actual ending. Take the title’s passive voice as a sign of the action’s quality. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

UFO (2018)

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And now for the movie in which Gillian Anderson helps investigate a government cover-up of flying saucers … yet doesn’t play an FBI agent!

Rumors of a UFO sighting at a nearby airport fire up Derek (Alex Sharp, How to Talk to Girls at Parties), a brilliant University of Cincinnati student who witnessed such a close encounter as a wee lad. What the feds deny, the socially awkward genius obsesses over trying to prove … using math! Naturally, he thinks exposing the truth is more important than paying attention to the one female who shows interest in him — despite her being Ella Purnell (TV’s Fallout), out of his league by a good 20,000 of them. 

Imagine Roy Neary crunching numbers instead of mashing taters, and you’re vibing with the sober tone of Ryan Eslinger’s procedural. Despite math running front and center throughout UFO’s plotting, knowing it as a viewer matters not an iota, so you can enjoy the conspiracy thriller aspect of it all, no matter your GPA. (That said, if you’ve waited decades for the fine-structure constant to get its due onscreen, holy crap, are you in for a treat!)

Anderson, whose mere presence brings The X-Files to mind whether she likes it or not, fills the supporting role of Derek’s professor. Rather than the usual rah-rah feel-good mentor the movies usually turn educators into, she can barely tolerate Derek. He is less than appealing, which is perhaps part of Eslinger’s intent in not following usual sci-fi tropes. No little green men here — just lanky, pasty-white ones. You may even want the FBI, led by the always fine David Strathairn (L.A. Confidential), to catch the meddling kid. 

UFO is nothing to phone home about, but it’s a solid surprise, good for one watch. Eslinger — whose first film, Madness and Genius, also dealt in equations — does a more than credible job of making an unbelievable tale seem as though it’s based on true events. (Psst: It is!) —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Spider (2023)

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Fret not, Pather Panchali! Your status as the icon of Indian cinema remains unabated and unchallenged by the screen’s introduction of Mustafa in Farhan M. Khan’s Spider. It’s 59 minutes of digital video garbage.

As played by Afzaal Nabi, a name you need not remember, Mustafa is a “chartered accountant” for a pharmaceutical company, a fact you need not remember because Mustafa keeps bringing it up. Professional though he may be, he’s dressed like either a cabbie or a Newsie.

Per the result of an abduction, he’s also stranded in a “forest” (actually a rural road with well-tread tire path) and stalked by a giant arachnid (actually a test-level animation of what looks like an ant with an extra pair of legs). Like Tom Hardy in Locke, Mustafa spends the bulk of Spider stuck in a car, albeit one that cannot move.

Also like Tom Hardy in Locke, much of this movie is yelling at people on the phone. Mustafa calls his country’s version of 911, the police, his boss, his wife, her friend and, finally, his mom, to whom he says, “You used to cook me sweet noodles!” (And to his son, via an awkward goodbye video: “I wanted you to grow up and wear my clothes and have a fight with me.” Huh?) 

Now, unlike Tom Hardy in Locke, Mustafa reads the vehicle owner’s manual, eats one page and takes a couple of naps — all riveting. Then it just kinda stops.

But what about the spiders? They’re largely incidental. Even if Khan got a buddy to do the effects for free, he overspent. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Birthday (2004)

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Although he has certainly given us many reasons not to, don’t let Corey Feldman keep you from celebrating The Birthday. The running time, too long by a quarter, might take care of that. 

Resurrected from oblivion by Jordan Peele, this 20-year-old film went unreleased after earning good notices on the festival circuit. It’s positioned as “the most amazing 117 minutes in the life of Norman Forrester,” a New York pizzeria employee (Feldman) who resides on the social ladder’s lower rungs. Not so for his spoiled, snooty longtime girlfriend, Alison (Erica Prior, Second Name), who comes from money. 

At a lavish birthday for her father (Jack Taylor, Pieces) at the grand hotel he owns, Norman is to meet Alison’s parents for the first time. Needless to say, he’s a nervous wreck. We’ve all been there, feeling like the fate of the world rests on our shoulders. 

Except here, it does. 

We know instantly that something about the night feels “off” for Norman, but it takes an hour to get to the why. Ironically, this first, more enigmatic half is close to terrific — as cartoony as it is menacing, bristling with the enough quirky energy as if retroactively campaigning to be the fifth segment of Four Rooms.

As the bombastic secrets spilled forth with hour 2, so goes the wind from these sails. Until the abrupt end, Norman’s extended nightmare starts to resemble a run on a treadmill, forever heading toward a destination without achieving an inch forward; that may be why the movie feels an act short of the standard three. The Birthday bears that first-film lack of discipline in wanting to throw everything into the mix in case another chance never comes. As unrestrained as Eugenio Mira’s hand is here, he had it figured out by his junior effort, the short, taut, high-concept hitman thriller Grand Piano.

And as for Feldman, his voice for Norman is a real choice, but he commits and delivers. It’s unfortunate The Birthday didn’t see release before now, because he’s given something the tabloid fixture hasn’t had since the days of Stand by Me: an honest-to-God role. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.