All posts by Rod Lott

Documentary

Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross (2024)

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Caveat emptor time, kids. The sports documentary Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross should be subtitled Some Stories of Supercross in No Particular Order. After priming the pump with an adrenaline-edited prologue of defied gravity and severed spinal cords, Paul Taublieb’s feature goes into scattered mode, leaping from subject to subject like a dog who’s just had a dozen squeak toys thrown its way.

Want to know how the dirtbike arena competition started? Well, first, we watch a profile of Jimmy Button, a champion who bounced back from paralysis — inspiring, but wholly out of place; given its emotional weight, it arguably would work best at the other end. The whole movie is like that. With each title card rebooting the narrative starting line, the experience is like watching the full contents of a YouTube channel’s playlist.

In quick succession, Pay Dirt’s segments (really documentary shorts) surface-level examine a rivalry among two riders, the amateur kids’ competition at the Loretta Lynn Dude Ranch, another rivalry among two other riders, the dirt on the track, the sport’s version of stage parents, riders without factory sponsors and, buttering its own bread on both sides, Monster Energy’s current sponsorship of Supercross.

As an occasional casual viewer of the X Games and any Olympic event that irks old people, I’m open to this sort of thing. But an ESPN 30 for 30, this is not.

And not for lack of opportunity, as Pay Dirt absolutely chokes when it comes to the single most interesting story: Supercross creator Mike Goodwin being convicted for murdering former business partner Mickey Thompson and the man’s wife. From a prison phone, Goodwin recalls that he “was flabbergasted” and hoped he wouldn’t be blamed. What he doesn’t provide is a reason to believe him. In fact, Taublieb is so unconcerned with the crime, he gives it a minute.

I mean that literally: one minute. To a double homicide. Committed by the guy who started the sport you’re telling the “story” of. Adding insult to fatal injury, the narrator even botches the dead woman’s name as “Judy” instead of “Trudy.”

That narrator? Just one Josh Brolin, whose participation in a project far beneath his Oscar-nominated talents suggests either a big favor or a bet make-good. —Rod Lott

Opening Friday, Jan. 24.

Horror

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024)

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If Timothy Leary and Kenneth Anger made Midsommar … well, who the hell knows what that would turn out to resemble. But I reckon Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, “an underground film by Christopher Bickel,” comes closest in cosmic proximity. Nothing else need apply. 

Alt-AF record store worker Max (first-timer Adara Starr) comes across a vinyl title so scarce, it’s worth a grand: “It’s this weird hippie psych record. This commune put it out in the early ’70s. Rare as shit.” Acting on a tip, she finds a thick stack of four of their five LPs at a thrift store; the missing album, with a rumored five-copy pressing, is supposedly cursed. 

One mysterious phone call later, Max and four friends accept an invitation to visit the commune, Wunderlawn. It’s run by spiritual leader and titular alchemist Pater Noster (Mike Amason, Bickel’s Bad Girls). He’s the kind of unkempt wack job whose followers get hallucinogenic powder blown onto their faces — and, um, into other places.

The trippiness that follows is so immersive, it feels as if some particles of that substance may have blown through the screen and up your sinuses. That not everybody will make it out alive is a foregone conclusion; that you’re ill-prepared for how that all happens is nearly as certain.

Don’t let the initial High Fidelity in-store shenanigans fool you, much as the montage of customers’ stupid questions may try, but this is one wild occult pic. Shot in South Carolina for the price of a used car, Mission of Light finds Bickel carrying over Bad Girls’ propulsive energy, but now it aims squarely to shock. Once that starts happening, his performers’ acting deficits shrink.

The situations Max and friends find themselves in are unsettling enough; add the discomforting soundtrack and we’re pushed, if not shoved, into “Should we even be watching this?” territory — not in the negative “this sucks” way, but with the unshakable feeling that Bickle tapped into Genuine Evil to fuel the frames. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Bloodthirsty Crazy Spider (2021)

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When a new species of spider — your guess to its level of bloodthirstiness — is discovered in Chinese mountain caves, the news piques the interest of college student Qiumu (Zheng Zefei) who’s obsessed with exactly two things: spiders and boobs. He’s only seen one of those things, strictly judging from the Party City closeout web above Qiumu’s dorm room bed. 

Enlisting the help of a documentary filmmaker of the opposite sex (Zhangzhen), he quickly devises a mission: “Let’s go to find the spider.” (sic) They do go, and they do find. The latter is quite easy, on account of it being so large, the thing’s impervious to their swinging knapsacks. It’s also hairy, stabby-legged, big-bootied and, of course, computer-generated. 

As if an eight-legged freak of nature mutated by industrial toxic waste weren’t enough of an antagonist, the movie offers a human villain, too: Mr. Wang. Hey, someone needed to be the literal butt of the diarrhea jokes. Speaking of, as he’s grunting and grimacing on the toilet, the subtitles read, “Why is it so sticky?”

At minute 64, Bloodthirsty Crazy Spider calls it a day with a hard stop. No climax, no ending. Just a harsh rebuke that this is all your fault. You — yes, you — caused the massive creepy crawler by carelessly allowing your can of Juiced Monster Khaotic® to sink to the ocean floor, asshole. 

The creature feature makes good use of abandoned factories and poor use of everything else, particularly whatever program the Youku production company booted up to animate the arachnid. The software’s free trial period appears to have expired since said spider hardly looks fully rendered. When it skitters, viewers titter. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Legend of Hillbilly John (1972)

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Hedges Capers sounds like two items on a country club Karen’s list of things to complain to the help about. In actuality, Hedges Capers is the obscure folksinger who somehow scored the lead role of the weirdo backwoods fantasy The Legend of Hillbilly John. There’s a reason you’ve never seen him onscreen before or since: He’s no actor. Yet out of many, many songs he sings here, the best is the one Capers doesn’t warble, with vocal duties outsourced to Hoyt Axton, whose throat kicks ass.  

In the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Hillbilly John is a balladeer. That’s just a nice way of saying “guy who never stops playing his guitar, even in public.” After Grandpappy (Denver Pyle, TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard) is smote by the devil, John vows vengeance with the only weapon he has: vicious halitosis bluegrass tunes strummed-de-dummed on guitar strings made of pure silver. 

Who knew 100% silver was Satan’s green Kryptonite? Heck, who knew Satan resided in the Appalachians? (Insert Hillbilly Elegy joke here.) 

Originally (mis)titled Who Fears the Devil, the flick draws from a pair of Manly Wade Wellman short stories — and sure feels like it. From meeting a witch (Susan Strasberg, The Delta Force) to fighting a giant prehistoric bird (animated via stop-motion) whose feathers sizzle like acid, our hero and his hound dog saunter from one self-contained adventure to the next. The script by Melvin Levy (The Cry Baby Killer) neglects connective tissue, except for the common denominator of “goddamn mountain superstition” (as Murder at 1600’s Harris Yulin puts it). 

Too bad so little of Legend is fun. Getting acquainted with the movie’s world — one of “salt pork” and “tarnation” — teases viewers into thinking they’re in for a barn-buster, only to drag. Best known as host of TV’s One Step Beyond anthology, John Newland manages to pull off a couple of interesting touches from his director’s chair. One is questionable: tinting a voodoo sequence entirely in yellow. The other is inarguably terrific: having the film violently leap off its sprockets as the devil kills Grandpappy. The whole of Legend cries for such ingenuity, primarily when elongated spells of the film prompt snores. 

The final shot isn’t quite Planet of the Apes, but it’s something of a surprise — and more Billy Jack than Hillbilly John. If you watch this movie, you’re in for a unique experience; just remember that uniqueness does not guarantee success. If you’re allergic to banjos and/or action verbs with dropped Gs, take your Benadryl beforehand, lest ye break out in hives. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

The Damned (2024)

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It’s a hazy shade of winter at the Icelandic fishing station of The Damned. With their meager shelter snowed under ’til spring, no one’s going anywhere, despite dwindling provisions.

But when widower Eva (Odessa Young, HBO’s The Staircase) spots a sinking ship in the distance, she convinces the men to row, row, row their boat toward the wreck. The rescue mission goes tits up, and misery follows them back to shore, haunting and taunting thereafter.

Without revealing details, the plot of this 19th-century story draws from a pair of John Carpenter ’80s classics: The Fog and The Thing. From the former, it takes the harrowing shape of a threat whose identity is obscured by weather; from the latter, burgeoning paranoia and distrust of those sharing a confined space. As one of the fishermen tells Eva, “The only thing I know is that the living are always more dangerous than the dead.” 

Just as the villagers of The Damned attempt to navigate through a storm to safety, only to be thwarted at each turn, the film itself forever stands on the precipice of getting somewhere. Long on atmosphere, this superstition-steeped slow-burner doesn’t build upon initial pressure so much as re-build it in the next sequence — and without surpassing the previously established mark. As a result, by the time it finally escalates toward a payoff, we’re no longer invested.

Like Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, another horror period piece currently in theaters, Thordur Palsson’s first film is visually first-rate. The difference here is the devotion to craft doesn’t compensate for stretches of monotony. —Rod Lott

Opens Friday, Jan. 3.