All posts by Rod Lott

Kitchen Sink

Girl on a Chain Gang (1968)

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WTFNearly a decade before Macon County Line brought in bank, notorious exploitation producer Jerry Gross rounded up a few pennies to tread similar territory with his debut, Girl on a Chain Gang. Just as his Teenage Mother isn’t really about a teenage mother, Girl on a Chain Gang is equally misleading and just as scandal-minded.

In the (too-)simple story, three young activists driving through the Deep South get pulled over in Carson’s Landing, a backwater town of shallow-minded people. The corrupt, cigar-chomping sheriff (William Watson, 1978’s Stingray) steals their cash and tosses them in the hoosegow. He also sets traps for them, both metaphorical (using hooker Arlene Farber, the Teenage Mother herself, to pry a false confession) and physical (“forgetting” to lock the cell door so he and his deputies have justification to shoot if the youths escape).

What I haven’t mentioned yet is one of the trio is Black, the least favorite skin color of Carson’s Landing residents. Thus, Gross’ little black-and-white picture is a race-charged look at the antiquated-moralled. His heart is in the right place, but Girl on a Chain Gang, which he also wrote and directed, is as slow, meandering melodrama with only the scarce blip of activity. The proceedings look not unlike a local stage production.

The only memorable moment is an uneducated, bigoted presentation (read: “pree-zen-tay-shun”) to the already uneducated, bigoted law enforcement on the visual difference between Black and Caucasian “spermatozoa.” And that’s not nearly enough to merit the long sit. —Rod Lott

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Action

Stingray (1978)

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Let Stingray be a lesson to all coke dealers who, fleeing a deadly vice raid, temporarily hide $1 million worth of smack in a little red Corvette overnight: The used car lot is under no obligation to protect your contraband inventory.

Hoping the heat has cooled, the criminal duo (The Sword and the Sorcerer’s William Watson and Stewardess School’s Bert Hinchman) returns the next morning to retrieve the stash, only to witness the titular convertible being purchased by fine young pals Al (Christopher Mitchum, Savage Harbor) and Elmo (Les Lannom, Shoot to Kill). As was the wont of Smokey and the Bandit imitators, a movie-long chase ensues.

Distinct and memorable, Al and Elmo’s pursuers soon number four with the addition of a greasy hit man (Cliff Emmich, Hellhole) and their lady boss (Sherry Jackson, The Mini-Skirt Mob); the latter is disguised as a nun, prefiguring Shirley MacLaine and Marilu Henner’s cloak of choice in Cannonball Run II. (Speaking of clothing, Elmo spends the movie in a bumblebee-striped shirt made of terrycloth, like a cheap child’s bathrobe.) Throw the cops in there, too, and we lose count of the amount of heat on Al and Elmo’s combined tail.

Dollar for dollar, minute by minute, of the many Bandit also-rans, Stingray ranks among the finest — or at least the “funnest.” Well-executed in the same can-do manner as the tragically few films of H.B. Halicki (1974’s Gone in 60 Seconds), it wastes no time going from zero to 60, as the characters encounter various rural rats, hippies, the occasional bulldozer, a student driver, Playboy Playmate Sondra Theodore and, in a rather inventive bit, an ill-timed trip through an automatic car wash.

Somehow the only feature for writer and director Richard Taylor, Stingray continuously plows forward as a four-cylinder good time, due to his keen sense for stunts and the ability to stage them. Part of what makes them so impressive is the palpable danger viewers can sense as people jump out of the way of speeding vehicles at the Very Last Second, or as a motorcycle zig-zags through the woods in a sequence so immersive, you can smell the exhaust. There’s something admirable about Taylor’s casual depiction of recklessness, with such juxtaposition as live grenades thrown at farmers while the soundtrack busies itself with hoedown circus music — and admire it I do, as a scrappy yet standout example of ’70s car-fetishization cinema where whoever sits behind the wheel matters not a lick. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Blood, Guts and Sunshine: The History of Horror Made in Florida (2022)

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In shooting second-unit underwater footage three time zones to the east of Universal Pictures’ home, Creature from the Black Lagoon kicked off a semi-rich tradition in the annals of horror history: filming in Florida. A Florida filmmaker himself (Naked Cannibal Campers, Die Die Delta Pi, et al.), Sean Donohue attempts to herald the unheralded in his ambitious documentary, Blood, Guts and Sunshine: The History of Horror Made in Florida, with (extremely) brief commentary from the likes of Joe Dante, John Waters and John Landis.

From Blood Feast to The Uh-Oh! Show, gore godfather Herschell Gordon Lewis often gets a lot of the credit for planting his camera in the Sunshine State, but Donohue aims to spread the love around — perhaps most notably to name-brand directors George A. Romero (Day of the Dead), Bob Clark (Deathdream) and William Grefé (Death Curse of Tartu). A step lower in quality, but not watchability, we find such cult items as Zaat and Satan’s Children.

The most interesting segment shares the coming of age of the VHS generation, primarily Twisted Visions collaborators Tim Ritter and Joel D. Wynkoop. Deservedly something of Florida flick royalty now, Ritter recalls selling Day of the Reaper from a car trunk and remembers his Killing Spree lead, Asbestos Felt, as “always intoxicated, barely coherent.” (And that uproarious movie is better off for it, I should note.)

Most of the doc is devoted to those who followed in Ritter’s footsteps to carry on the Florida horror scene as it stands today, many of them wearing their very best tees and button-down Spider-Man shirts for the interviews. In general, Gustavo Perez’s bargain werewolf epic Light of Blood aside, their efforts look less like fun watches and more like exercises in misery and misogyny.

And that’s where Blood, Guts and Sunshine lost me. The clips Donohue chooses to showcase his own oeuvre would give Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis an aneurysm — maybe two. They range from an OB-GYN’s POV of barbed wire-wrapped bat headed for a phony round of genital mutilation (Death-Scort Service) to actual sexual assault captured on camera (Cannibal Claus). Regarding the latter, the titular actor Bob Glazier happily boasts of his improvisational skills that day: Getting turned on during an attack sequence, he pulls out his penis to masturbate over his female scene partner, even slapping her bare skin with it — all too underground for my comparatively delicate tastes.

Whether ’80s pastiches or truly exploitative exploitation, the aggression and attitudes of the newer, convention-crowd movies are not for everybody. Donohue acknowledges as much by including a rant from Unearthed Films’ Stephen Biro, presumably drunk, against their less-than-committed creative process: “None of these motherfuckers are taking acting lessons!” —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Long Night (2022)

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Hoping to learn about a family she never knew, Grace (Scout Taylor-Compton) is invited to a plantation home for a weekend by someone claiming to possess the answers she seeks. With her boyfriend, Jack (Nolan Gerard Funk, House at the End of the Street), in tow, she arrives to find the mansion spacious, yet empty of people. Oh, well — when in Rome (or South Carolina) …

Neither snakes nor satanic-looking symbols about the property scare them from B&Bing. Soon, a dead cat turns up gutted on the porch; next, robed figures hiding their faces with animal skulls and espousing a Cenobite-level obsession with pain do their best Purge formation stance surrounding the backyard; at each glance, their circle seems to get tighter. No wonder the movie is titled The Long Night; one hopes utilizing Ancestry.com isn’t this eerie.

More or less resigned to a horror-from-here-on-out career after earning the lead role in Rob Zombie’s rebooted Halloween pair, Taylor-Compton appears to have grown into it admirably, able to carry these films — workable or not — on her all-in shoulders. With The Long Night, she gets to check both “milky-eyed contacts” and “Regan MacNeil levitation” off her to-do list, as well as ground the weirdo-hallucinatory sequences that lend the flick a fentanyl-laced dose of the cosmic.

As director, Rich Ragsdale (The Curse of el Charro) makes prodigious use of drone footage and a score rivaling Cowboy Junkies for somnambulism to properly establish a definitive, deliberate mood before delving into story. The script, however, gets stuck somewhere around the second act, treading the same ground without actually progressing until the mouth finally catches the tail. In their small parts, Deborah Kara Unger (Silent Hill: Revelation) and Jeff Fahey (Body Parts) bring flashes of respite, but not surprise. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy (1971)

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There’s a reason Mexico’s masked wrestler numero uno, Santo, never wrote a business book titled Who Moved My Queso? or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Luchadors: He was a terrible leader.

Seriously! In Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy alone, the man proves time and again that he was a master of the ring, but not HR. Within an hour and half, consider that he:
• adheres to a dress code different from everyone else
• values looks above lives
• shows that violence is always the answer
• mandates a 3 a.m. clock-in
• tells his followers, “I can assure you horse meat is very tasty.”
• has a child perform manual labor
• and, when the child’s grandfather is murdered, consoles the kid with these words: “Men don’t cry.”

Despite that, his 31st star vehicle — directed by Santo regular René Cardona Sr. (El Vampiro y el Sexo) — is quite fun, provided you skip the wrestling matches that bookend it. Outside the ring, Santo is recruited by professor Romero (César del Campo, The Exterminating Angel) to join an expedition to the jungle crypt — and its expected treasure, so says a freshly deciphered codex — of Nonec, an Apache prince from thousands of years ago.

Also aboard are an engineer, a photographer, a secretary (and her notepad) and another scholar, professor Jiminez (Carlos Ancira, The Living Coffin). Looking not unlike he’ll be fiddling on the roof any minute, Jiminez is present for “comic relief”; from wondering how to milk a horse to mistaking a menu being in French, when he’s merely holding it upside down. Har-de-har.

Guided to the tomb by local boy Agapito (Niño Jorgito, Santo’s real-life son), the group discovers the mummified Nonec draped with an ornate necklace threatening death for removal. They take it anyway, so a resurrected Nonec takes revenge on their camp. Bread-crust face aside, he’s not your everyday mummy, skilled as he is at archery.

Of course the silver-masked Santo will defeat the thing by close of business, just as he does everything else thrown at him, from a black panther to Buffalo — not an animal, but a wrestling opponent. Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy makes for a semi-lively Mexploitation adventure into terror, from the storied Cinematográfica Caldéron, S.A. Ask for it by name. —Rod Lott

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