All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Shock Wave 2 (2020)

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In the first 15 minutes of this Asian actioner, a suicide bomber takes out a government office; two apartment residents are tied to synchronized, booby-trapped explosives; a jewelry store robber threatens hostages with live grenades; and Hong Kong International Airport is absolutely decimated, melting travelers and all.

Shock Wave 2, you have my full attention.

The country cowers in the face of danger as trust-fund terrorist Ma Sai Kwan (Kwan-Ho Tse, Nude Fear) masterminds Resurrection Day, a large-scale nuclear attack against Hong Kong. Sounds like a job for Explosive Ordinance Disposal Bureau Officer Poon Shing Fung (Andy Lau, The Great Wall) … except he no longer works for the police, having been booted from the force after losing a leg in the line of duty.

After a explosion rips through a hotel, Fung is not only found unconscious in the rubble, but accused of planting the C-4. Is he working undercover or has he gone rogue? Awaking from his coma with a concussion and post-trauma amnesia, Fung has no answers; he literally can’t remember, but he’s determined to find out and, if needed, clear his name.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a one-legged, wheelchair-bound Lau escape a hospital siege in his PJs — a blazingly choreographed sequence that gives Shock Wave 2 hard Fugitive vibes, but this time, the protagonist possesses the prosthetic. It pops off an alarming amount of times, too — not all for kicks, but because returning director Herman Yau (The Untold Story) injects the sequel with the message of disability not equalling dispensability.

Make no mistake: This is no sermon wrapped in Trojan-horse coating. It’s a monster of an action film that draws influence from America’s enormously popular mad-bomber blockbusters of the genre’s 1990s peak, primarily Speed and Die Hard with a Vengeance (with the EODB’s bubble-headed uniforms inspired by the science thrillers Outbreak and Sphere). While we have Die Hard sequels on the brain, it’s worth noting that while the forever-fantastic Lau also played the lead in 2017’s original Shock Wave, his character was different, as if Bruce Willis played cop John McClane just once, then was back as, oh, cop Lance Bloodstone or cop Chad Runyon. Either way, yippee-ki-yay. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

What Happens Next Will Scare You (2020)

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It’s Friday night at the offices of the cash-strapped Click Clique website, where the employees have been summoned to a pitch meeting. For Halloween, with layoffs looming, they’ll run a clickbait listicle on the 13 most frightening viral videos, so the staffers take turns passing the wireless keyboard around the conference table to queue up their ideas, and What Happens Next Will Scare You.

In this unique anthology of caught-on-camera moments, “influencer” claptrap and other streaming bits of ephemera, those clips include a ghost ruining a little girl’s birthday party, a DUI traffic stop gone very wrong, a vinyl recording of Native American death song, a clown’s video dating profile, a cryptozoological interruption of a local-yokel fishing show and something that may be the worst fetish ever.

Other videos are longer and more complex, for reasons eventually apparent. In this category fall an Italian Catholic priest reviewing the rites of exorcism, a 911 call from a panicked funeral home director reporting resurrected corpses, a speculative paranormal show on a stuffed teddy bear named Scraps and, in a four-parter broken up across the running time, a mean-girl teen vlogger detailing her encounters with a “troll bitch” at school.

Because What Happens Next comes from Chris LaMartina, director of the immortal WNUF Halloween Special, it’s an incredibly creative mix of horror and comedy. As with WNUF, “story” is less important than structure, and early details gain meaning as the movie progresses. Transitions are often ingenious, and the more attention you pay, the greater your rewards. That refers not only to spotting direct ties to the WNUF world — performers and characters — but the grains of throwaway background gags, such as a screen thumbnail labeled “2 Screwdrivers. 1 Urethra.” —Rod Lott

Get it at WNUF Big Cartel.

Horror

They’re Outside (2020)

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In indie horror’s digital DIY era of today, everyone who wants to make a horror movie can and does. This floods the market with dreck — and because even dreck has a minute’s worth of good parts to craft an appealing-enough trailer and inspire an eyeball-grabbing cover — the market is rewarded with rental dollars from viewers left wanting. They’re Outside offers the opposite experience: File the trailer and poster art under “no great shakes,” but the movie itself is that increasingly elusive, rough-’round-the-edges gem.

Combining folk horror with found footage, the UK film follows pompous YouTube psychologist Max Spencer (Tom Wheatley, Piglet’s Big Movie) and camera-operating girlfriend (Nicole Miners) as they shoot an episode on agoraphobia. This primarily entails traveling to the middle of the woods, where former nursing student Sarah Sanders (Christine Randall, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong) has lived in a little house — and only inside it — for years and years. She’s so terrified to take one step past the threshold, Max assigns himself a 10-day challenge to change that.

Why so scared, Sarah? It all has to do with “Green Eyes” – not the Civil War legend, but folklore nonetheless. As a prologue explains, Green Eyes is rumored to have abducted a child, resulting in a parental mob burning his home, Freddy Krueger-style. As the story goes, he lives in the woods and is identifiable by his wooden mask, cape of leaves and, yes, vacant emerald orbs. Look, glowing eyes in the dark of night is the cheapest kind of scare to make … and when done correctly, as co-directors Sam Casserly and Airell Anthony Hayles have here, ridiculously effective.

Ideally, They’re Outside’s opening card wouldn’t dole out the fate of each main character, but that’s the way of the found-footage film; ultimately, knowing the end does little to hamper enjoyment of the trip there, thanks to Wheatley and Randall’s respective grasps on performing priggish and peevish. For a first feature, Casserly and Hayles do more things right than most, from using subliminal imagery for an extra jolt of creeps to casting Nicholas Vince, Hellraiser’s chattering Cenobite, to deliver the backstory in film-within-a-film exposition. It would be easy to overpraise the movie — and I may have — but these days, “just fine” can be all we ask. —Rod Lott

Reading Material

Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It

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I’ve been a fan of Jason Bailey’s work for several years. To tie me over waiting for his next “real” book, I bought both of his self-published books — extended essays, really; physically thin, figuratively meaty — on Richard Pryor and private-eye pictures of the 1970s — sight unseen.

Now, Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It is finally here! Bailey’s such a terrific writer, the book’s magnificence is a foregone conclusion. But upon its arrival, when I opened the book to a random page, only to find my second-favorite film in history, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, staring back from a dedicated spread, I have to acknowledge this may have been destined in the stars.

Hyperbole? Yes and no. This book couldn’t, wouldn’t exist if NYC were “just” a city; it’s an icon. As Frank Sinatra crooned, if you can make it there, you can make it practically anywhere. When it comes to capturing the city that never sleeps on celluloid, however, you must make it there. (Just ask Rumble in the Bronx, the Jackie Chan actioner actually shot in Vancouver, as the Canadian mountain skyline fails to disguise.)

The movies Fun City Cinema examines and celebrates employ New York City as not merely a setting, but a supporting character. Would Taxi Driver feel as threatening in Dallas? Would the grandeur of Gershwin translate if Manhattan were, say, Boston? Would the suspense of Dog Day Afternoon tick with such piercing intensity if the bank stood in Boise?

All three questions are rhetorical; you didn’t need to be told that. But maybe you don’t know how Bailey goes about managing about 100 years worth of material. Starting with the 1920s, he provides an alarmingly cogent essay of how each decade’s movies reflect the Big Apple at that moment in time — and in grime and in crime, economically, politically, sexually — weaving reality and fiction like an expert tailor.

While he’s picked one film as the encapsulation of the city’s era to front each chapter (not always the title you’d expect), dozens upon dozens of others are recruited to complete the full picture: big and small, commercial and indie, beloved and unknown, Criterion and not Criterion — nary a one is shoehorned in to check a box or fulfill some fan obligations. Not even cult items like Maniac Cop, which other authors would dismiss outright; each serves a purpose.

Like the aforementioned placement of After Hours, a select few films earn end-of-chapter honors for dedicated two-page looks. While this is where you’ll find such top-of-minders as Ghostbusters and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, you’ll also be wowed by some real left-turn choices, from Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart and Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends to Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence. (While I’m slinging plaudits, let me point out if you haven’t heard The Projection Booth podcast’s interview with an irritated and irascible Baron on Blast of Silence, you simply must. It’s all kinds of awkward and hysterical.)

If Bailey’s words alone didn’t already make Fun City Cinema the essential book on New York Movies and the Movies That Made It, the exquisite design work of Eli Mock would push it over the edge. Abrams, the publisher, could have let this project be a “coffee table book,” where the text is secondary to imagery, included to be skimmed if read at all. That’s not the case here; they complement one another to form an irresistible whole. (Intentional or not, Mock’s choice to use sans-serif text for body copy reminds me of the signage for the arterial subway system.) This isn’t one you’ll want to leave on any coffee table, lest it encounters a spilled cup — greatest in the world or otherwise. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

Crazy Nights (1978)

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As the story surrounding Crazy Nights goes, French sex symbol/disco queen Amanda Lear thought she was shooting a documentary about herself. Instead, she was tricked into hosting a mondo movie of most prurient interests.

Why was she targeted? Her ideal last name notwithstanding, one guesses Lear represented the perfect mix of naïveté, narcissism and affordability. How strange to think a director as upstanding Joe D’Amato (Deep Blood) would engage in such chicanery when just a year before, he advanced the art of cinema by filming a woman masturbating a horse. Ethics? Neigh.

The finished product — Crazy Nights, not a wrist coated with stallion semen — is a look at either “sordid pleasures from around the world” or “the wild, wicked world of night.” Take your pick; either way, its bits are obviously staged and embarrassing enough for Lear to bring legal action — an act that earned the picture scads more attention than it deserves, then and now.

After a cape-clad Lear performs her hit song “Follow Me,” we’re supposed to do just that, and believe me when I say strap in, because the ride will be bumpy. By definition, mondo movies are supposed to be weird, but when Tokyo frickin’ Japan is the site of the most “normal” activity of all — a woman and man bite strips of newspaper from the other’s unclothed body — you know something is seriously off. Mondon’t.

Our globetrotting tour of kink, mink and stink begins at a Vegas stage show, where one lucky audience member is bamboozled into fucking a goat. Next, in an underground cavern located in a country I didn’t catch (like it matters), a couple copulates atop an altar, prompting the men watching to hike their numbered black robes up just enough to form a human millipede. Much later, a ballerina act in Stockholm proves to viewers once and for all that, by gum, blue is the warmest color.

An S&M hotel in Berlin affords an unclothed elderly man his fantasy of getting nailed. Oh, I don’t mean intercourse — I mean a woman in leather hammers a metal spike into his genitals. (To each his own, recht?)

Meanwhile, in Beirut, a witch demonstrates her ability to levitate things: first, a toupee (yes, of course the string is visible); then, penises. Move over, Peter Popoff!

Do you like magic? Wait, don’t answer yet! A magician in Marseille produces live doves, colored hankies and more — all from the vagina of his assistant. Okay, now answer.

I have neither the wherewithal nor fortitude to talk about the panther, the suspenders, the gender-switcheroo box, the necrophile or the excruciatingly explicit blowjob. I will tell you that Lear appears in between segments to show off her property. Finally, in a gold jumpsuit and on a motorcycle, she returns at the end to sing another hit, “Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me).” Then, as the credits roll, she tries on wigs. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.