All posts by Rod Lott

Mystery

Nothing Underneath (1985)

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To see Donald Pleasence eat sketti off a Wendy’s salad bar in Milan, you simply must see Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath.

Other reasons exist in favor of loaning your eyeballs to this bizarro giallo, in which Yellowstone National Park ranger Bob (Tom Schanley, Eruption: LA) senses — thanks to a psychic twin link — that his supermodel sister (Nicola Perring, Duet for One) is in big trouble in Italy. Bob’s not wrong; his sis has just been brutally murdered with an oversized pair of scissors! Naturally, she’s hardly the last victim, which further drives his amateur investigation once he lands in Europe to find out what’s what, aided by Pleasence’s kindly police inspector.

The inevitability of the “twist” is redeemed by the bug-nuts circumstances surrounding it. From top to bottom, Vanzina stirs up quite the ’80s buffet, offering not just lurid thrills, but cocaine, Lycra, Magnum P.I., cocaine, cocaine, “One Night in Bangkok,” Russian roulette and Danish dish Renée Simonsen. Plus, Pino Donaggio’s Body Double retread score auto-grants the film a wonderfully perverse mood it otherwise would fail to achieve throughout.

Nothing Underneath’s killer concept was back — even if Vanzina wasn’t — for 1988’s inferior sequel, Too Beautiful to Die — an obvious misnomer considering the whole movie is about models biting it. Despite the implement of doom being upgraded to a weapon from Conan the Barbarian’s closet, the movie’s virtually the same, Xeroxing everything from the broken glass to the frilly-undies montage. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Confessions of a Puppetmaster: A Hollywood Memoir of Ghouls, Guts, and Gonzo Filmmaking

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Whether you love, hate or tolerate the movies of Charles Band, there’s no denying the man has no shortage of terrific offscreen stories to share. Otherwise, his autobiography, Confessions of a Puppetmaster, would not exist — or at least not be a must-purchase.

Subtitled A Hollywood Memoir of Ghouls, Guts, and Gonzo Filmmaking and written with three-time Emmy nominee Adam Felber, the book opens with a line all but scientifically calculated to hook and retain: “Unaware of just how insane things had gotten outside her door, Barbie took a shower.” Move over, “Call me Ishmael”!

Having played a pioneering part in sell-through VHS, video stores, license-based video games, the special-features market and, the name “Harry Potter” and toilet-based advertising campaigns, Band takes the reader on the near-Gumpian journey that is his life thus far — a merry-go-round of risk that has earned him as many fortunes as he’s lost, not to mention wives. You’ll learn about him being babysat by Marilyn Monroe, his affair with the very married Demi Moore, his battles with Klaus Kinski and Gary Busey, and his recalibration with director David DeCoteau after finding his erotic flicks “too damn gay!” (Hilariously, DeCoteau prefers to call them “tighty whitey frighties.”)

He may be the only person to go on record as having nice things to say about Helen Hunt. Outside of his actors, cameos include Liberace, Michael Jackson, John Carpenter, Barbra Streisand and “ancient Japanese horse piss.”

While not quite up there with the autobios of Roger Corman and William Castle (to name two filmmakers as beholden to ballyhoo), Band’s collected Confessions make for a delightful afternoon. While he and/or Felber show too much distrust of the reader (“We’ll get to that,” “More on that in a moment,” et al.), the book flies at 288 pages. I would welcome triple that, easily. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Planet of the Apes: The Complete History

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Sean Egan is hardly the first damn, dirty human to chronicle what is arguably sci-fi’s smartest film franchise, but his Planet of the Apes: The Complete History has the benefit of recency other notable overviews have not. Thus, it’s able to cover the celebrated trilogy that followed the fumbled footsteps of Tim Burton’s remake.

Er, sorry: reimagining.

Published by Applause, Egan’s book works well as a crash(-land?) course in All Things Apes. Beginning with Pierre Boulle’s source novel and moving movie to movie from there, he examines each work, smoothly weaving in insight on how societal changes influenced the story.

Don’t dismiss this as stuffy academia; despite overuse of the word “putative,” Egan’s book is the very definition of accessible, not to mention unafraid to wonder how the monkeys took care of, well, business — toilet business, that is. Speaking of crap, in his chapter involving the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon, the author rightly dubs it “anti-animation.” He’s more enthusiastic about the live-action series, which deserved a better shot; Egan shares all the forces working against it.

Elsewhere, readers will find a near-forensic breakdown of the origin of the 1968 film’s classic twist ending. Many have laid claim to birthing that shocker, including Pink Panther shepherd Blake Edwards, briefly attached as director. Egan considers several what-ifs — that is, unmade Apes iterations and sequels, from Edwards’ own take to Boulle’s out-of-touch Planet of the Men submission and ’89 Batman scribe Sam Hamm going full Howard the Duck with a script that sees the simians patronizing the likes of fast-food chain BK — that’s Banana King to you and me. (Groan.)

Even POTA’s various video games, soundtrack albums, comic books, novelizations and tie-in novels (the latter “an exercise in plugging holes”) earn considerable ink. I can’t imagine someone unfamiliar with the storied franchise would want to go in cold, but as a fan, I’m glad Egan has done more than his fair share to keep it alive. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Ankle Biters (2021)

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Sean Chase is dead. As played by Suicide Squad stuntman Zion Forrest Lee, the “beloved party animal and jackass womanizing pro hockey fuckboy” is laid to rest in the beginning minutes of Ankle Biters. How he got to his grave takes up the remainder and majority of this utterly wicked Canadian comedy.

Five months earlier, retired from the ice after a broken neck, Sean uncharacteristically wants to settle down with his gorgeous girlfriend, a young widow named Laura (a winning Marianthi Evans, Max Payne). In fact, he plans to propose to her at a romantic weekend at his lake house. The only obstacle is Laura’s four tag-along daughters (real-life Reid sisters Lily Gail, Rosalee, Violet and Dahlia): Try as Sean might, they hate him.

When they mistake Mom’s moans and bruises — both the result of sexual pleasure — for domestic abuse, their dislike of Sean festers to all-out war. His resulting tête-à-tête with the tots is like Problem Child times four (except funny) and infinitely more cynical. The girls are adorable, but don’t be fooled as every character is, Laura included; they’re devious monsters — juvenile delinquents with juice boxes.

A comedy as dark as its home country’s flag is red and white, Ankle Biters (aka Cherrypicker, which means zip out of context) marks the first feature for Bennet De Brabandere, who wrote the script from a story by leading man Lee (who, fun fact, is the son of Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe creator Damian Lee). Because their movie doesn’t have to cater to a family audience — or any audience, really — they relish the freedom to be savage.

I was with them almost all the way. You may not like where it goes, but as it crosses the line of good taste — once, twice, three times, who’s counting? — you certainly can’t accuse it of wussing out. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Crack in the World (1965)

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Crack in the World could have been born from a discussion question in your fifth-grade science textbook: “What do you think would happen if scientists broke through the center of the earth with a nuclear warhead? Explain.” Heck, Crack in the World even uses the requisite 10 words from that chapter’s vocabulary list.

Underneath Africa, in a lab not unlike TV’s soon-to-debut Batcave, Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews, The Crowded Sky) runs Project Inner Space, which aims to harness the magma at our planet’s core as a “limitless” energy source. Rather than put a baby in his pregnancy-craving wife, Maggie (Janette Scott, 1963’s The Day of the Triffids), Stephen is obsessed with penetrating the final layer of crust to reach said magma.

His proposed solution — a 10-megaton thermonuclear device — sounds alarms in Maggie’s ex, Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore, Arabesque), who warns the explosion would cause massive fissures, tidal waves and other stuff that disaster-movie dreams are made of. Secretly terminally ill and thereby obsessed with his legacy, Stephen proceeds anyway.

The mission is a success! If the mission were to hella fuck some shit up ’round the globe. The titular crack in the world forms and begins circumnavigating; if not stopped, Earth will split in two, ending life as we know it. In what amounts to a metaphorical dick-measuring contest, Ted suggests fixing Stephen’s blunder by dropping a hydrogen bomb to effectively cut the crack off at the pass. (Trust me: It makes enough sense within the movie.)

As enjoyable as Crack in the World is, which is close to immensely, I can’t help but think what Irwin Allen would have done with it in his prime — likely something as cataclysmic as the poster depicts. In the hands of one Andrew Marton, then on the verge of becoming Ivan Tors’ go-to director, nothing remotely like that occurs, although he does take out a (model) train of evacuating villagers. Prepare not for an effects spectacle, but for a more sober, science-minded clarion call with a coda that leans hard into biblical overtones. After the near-miss of the Cuban missile crisis, it was just the type of Technicolor reminder the Western world needed. —Rod Lott

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