All posts by Rod Lott

Mystery

Puzzle (1974)

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Puzzle’s title refers to the amnesia of Peter (Luc Merenda, Shoot First… Die Later), a man who recalls nothing about himself eight months after a car accident. Shortly after the film begins, he’s fortunate enough to learn that he:
• has a wife named Sara (the splendiferous Senta Berger, Killing Cars)
• was a con artist who pissed off a lot of people
• is in possession of something for which said people are willing to kill

But whom and what? The movie’s very name clues viewers in that the best way to experience Puzzle is to go in knowing as little as possible, so you can investigate as much as Peter. To encourage that, I’ll reveal no further plot. Besides, you already know Chekov’s principle that if a chainsaw is left carelessly on the kitchen table in Act 1, it’s going to come in handy in Act 3, right?

Hitchcockian on paper, Puzzle comes well-constructed by co-writer Ernesto Gastaldi, who’s penned more great gialli than you have fingers, including Torso, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, et al. If the screenplay can be faulted for anything, it’s that having so few characters makes the perp obvious sooner than director Duccio Tessari (The Bloodstained Butterfly) may have liked. Still, the film’s best sequence arrives after the reveal, with suspense simmering toward a strong boil as three separate elements in a room rather ingeniously threaten to place Sara in mortal danger. Tessari pays it off with intense slow-motion shots that make up for questionable close-ups of mouths (complete with crumbs on lips) early on.

Co-stars include Anita Strindberg (Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin); Bruno Corazzari (Fulci’s The Psychic), whose allergy-ridden character dispenses Kleenex as he does story points; and child Duilio Cruciani (Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling). As usual with the giallo, the setting is so magnificent, Puzzle appears to have been made with the assistance of Italy’s tourism council. —Rod Lott

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Action

Strike Commando (1986)

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Strike One to SAT Eagle! Strike One to SAT Eagle! As Sgt. Michael Ransom, Strike Commando star Reb Brown establishes a four-step schtick for not only his wronged-soldier character, but for the apex of his filmography. It goes a little something like this:
1. Walk a few steps before halting with purpose.
2. Recite the first name of thy enemy with anger.
3. Emit a scream as prolonged as possible …
4. … as you unload a machine gun in a back-and-forth motion to an excessive degree — ideally in equal time to item No. 3.

It works every time. He executes this bit several times throughout Strike Commando because it’s what Sly Stallone’s John Rambo would do, and Strike Commando could not exist without that big bowl of First Blood Part II. As staged by Italy’s primo cinema imitator, Bruno Mattei (Cruel Jaws), Ransom vows revenge on his traitorous superior, Radok (Christopher Connelly, 1990: The Bronx Warriors), for sabotaging a midnight mission in Vietnam that left all Ransom’s buddies dead.

“They all demand justice!” Ransom cries, clearly in a presumption on his part.

Radok thinks Ransom is no longer alive, either, but our hero somehow survives and somehowier slowly floats his way under miles of dirty water to the safety of a village whose populace greets him in mass whiteface. There, Ransom befriends a “Frenchman” (Luciano Pigozzi, the Italian Jack Elam, reuniting with Brown after Yor: The Hunter from the Future) and gains a li’l buddy in the boy Lao (Edison Navarro, Mattei’s Double Target). Lao quizzes Ransom on all things Disneyland; the American tells his young charge that at the park, popcorn and ice cream grow on trees. The fuck they do!

As with everyone Ransom so much as glances at, these poor saps soon are drained of their lifeblood as well, with Lao’s expiration an absolute classic of ’80s he-man cinema. With these deaths at the doing of Russian meat slab Jakota (Alex Vitale, Beyond the Door III), Ransom gains two opponents, and our one movie is all the better for it, affording us a thrifty montage of Ransom undergoing various acts torture; as viewers of the DVD-multipack-bin “favorite” The Firing Line know, these are the type of scenes in which Brown gives it his all.

While he lacks acting skills, Brown gives the movie something — something I failed to notice until watching Mattei’s 1988 follow-up, Strike Commando 2, in which Ransom is played instead by human blank Gwendoline’s Brent Huff. With this switcheroo, the sequel is such a snore, it needs a CPAP machine. Venture no further than original-recipe Strike Commando and all of its Rebness. As Joni Mitchell warned — and we ignored, so Counting Crows and Cinderella had to remind us — you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Also, there’s cockfighting. —Rod Lott

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Horror

1408 (2007)

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In 2007, it was nice to see a Stephen King adaptation at an actual movie theater again, where they belong, instead of the watered-down, overlong miniseries that played several nights on network TV and basic cable. It was also nice to see it contain actual scares, surviving the transition from its source material intact.

1408 comes from King’s 1992 short-story collection, Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. As King notes in his introduction, it was never meant to be an actual story, but an example of how writing progresses from draft to draft. For whatever reason, he finished it, and it’s one of Eventual’s many highlights. It’s easy to see why it was handpicked for big-screen treatment, and its modest success — combined with Frank Darabont’s The Mist later that year — helped usher in another wave of quality King films still going semi-strong more than a decade later.

John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a writer of several midlist books on haunted places. He’s working on one for hotels, rating each on a scare scale of one to 10 skulls. In his research, he’s found that supposed ghost-infested bed-and-breakfasts are just a way to drum up business. That will all change with his stay in room 1408 at New York’s Dolphin Hotel — a room perennially kept unoccupied for a reason: 56 occupants have died in it, none lasting for more than an hour.

Or, as the Dolphin manager (Samuel L. Jackson) puts it, the room is “fucking evil.”

Once inside, Mike’s stay starts off innocently enough: unexplained mints on the pillow, blared Karen Carpenter from the clock radio. But soon, actual bodily harm comes to him, and the clock starts providing a handy 60-minute countdown toward his apparent doom. With a barrage of spirits and phenomena and other things that go bump in the dark, it’s like The Shining compressed into one compact suite.

While King’s original story of the same name is structured roughly into thirds — before, during and after Mike’s stay — most all of the film is concerned with the during. Granting the tale an ominous touch, King relates the goings-on in the room not as they happen, but only afterward, via whatever details Mike left on his voice recorder.

What he doesn’t say makes our imagination run wild. But movies being visual, 1408 shows all, and some of it is very creepy. With the film more or less being confined to one space, Mikael Håfström does a great job of concocting more and more things to make Mike’s night a living hell. Although it includes all of the shocks of the story, it has to expand upon it in order to hit feature-length, adding a subplot about Mike’s ex-wife (Deep Impact’s Mary McCormack) and dead daughter to help fulfill that.

Hope you like Cusack, because the entire movie is on his shoulders. If he weren’t such a talented actor, we’d want to check out of 1408 early. But he makes the skeptic Mike likable, believable and sympathetic. As much as the moviegoer in us likes to see him go through the ringer, we feel bad for him all the same. In fact, parts of the film are real downers, but that just means it works.

The movie’s not perfect, mostly because of maybe two too many false endings. But it’s a smart and stylish chiller/thriller — everything that Håfström’s previous film, Derailed, was not. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey

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While the rest of the country meme-watches its way through the Friends reunion special, the true ’90s nostalgia awaits in the Fantagraphics-published Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey.

The long-awaited, much-anticipated sequel to Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik’s Bleeding Skull! A 1980s Trash-Horror Odyssey, unleashed to molten minds by Headpress in 2013, this sophomore (and proudly sophomoric) follow-up gives ink to the absolute oddest of no-budget obscurities video stores had to offer, most shot on VHS camcorders. With jackers, crystal forces, death metal zombies, psycho sisters, killer clowns, killer nerds and mad scientists named Dr. Kill, the contents are every bit worth the brand’s fractured exclamation point.

This time, Budnik is nowhere to be found, replaced by Annie Choi and Zack Carlson, whose styles meld better with Ziemba’s. (Please note that’s not a slam on Budnik, whose 2017 book, ’80s Action Movies on the Cheap: 284 Low Budget, High Impact Pictures, is a howlingly funny must-have for every B-movie enthusiast’s library.) The trio’s tag-teamed intro states these virtually unseen movies are deserving of cheers, not sneers … even if the 250 reviews don’t quite carry out this credo, as many flicks are most decidedly mocked — with exuberant affection, but mocked nonetheless.

After all, it’s not until the 10th entry (Asylum of Terror) that readers will arrive at anything resembling a “good” review, albeit one in which Ziemba writes, “no one appearing on-screen seems to understand that they’re being filmed.”

Of course, Bleeding Skull! wouldn’t be the tremendously fun read it is without the writers’ often brutal — and brutally hilarious — observations:
• Bad Karma: “The design is one part Etsy, three parts Dollar General.”
• Bloodscent: “The music is the finest junior varsity jock rock that western Pennsylvania has to offer.”
• Blood Slaves: “Looks like it was cast at a baseball card shop.”
• The Laughing Dead: “If a pair of slit wrists got together to make a movie, it would be this one.”
• Psycho Pike: “If you like to watch people drive around in a Jeep Wrangler, Psycho Pike is your movie.”
• The Witching: “The Witching is a saxophone kicking in for 64 minutes straight.”

More or less escaping ire are the DIY directors whose filmographies number beyond “1.” For example, the authors’ collective championing of the Polonia brothers (one of whom provides the foreword) nears idolatry. Fervent enthusiasm also falls to the Jesus-influenced gore of Todd Sheets, the “monstah” movies of David “The Rock” Nelson and the infidelity-themed slashers of Tim Ritter. Not so much for Todd Cook, whose prolificness is overshadowed by his stream-of-semiconsciousness works’ puerility. No matter where the opinions fall, however, the book is never not informative or entertaining; never before has so much thought been placed on explaining why choking is the laziest of murder methods.

No rave for this book is complete without praise for who may be considered its fourth author: designer Keeli McCarthy. With an aesthetic heavy on Magic Markers, highlighters and the purposeful cut-and-paste sloppiness of zines, her design is more aligned with Carlson’s seminal (and sadly out-of-print) Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film than Bleeding Skull!’s aforementioned ’80s edition. Either way, it’s now in glorious, garish full color. —Rod Lott

Like shot-on-video movies themselves, taking in A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey all at once could be overkill — or simply unfortunate, since we’re eight years away from A 2000s Trash-Horror Odyssey if the current between-books gap between holds. If Camp Blood of all things can get 10 installments, I hold out hope Bleeding Skull! at least merits a third. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Beneath Us (2019)

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With Beneath Us, the genius lie entirely in the pun of the title. First-time feature director Max Pachman’s slice of immigrationsploitation leaves subtlety out of the picture, despite the resonance and seriousness of its premise.

Four undocumented workers — including brothers Alejandro and Memo — are hired by the über-wealthy, über-voluptuous Mrs. Rhodes (Lynn Collins, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to finish construction on a guest home at a bargain-basement price. The property she shares with her husband (James Tupper, 2017’s Totem) is well-fortified, cut off from the rest of the world and all its promise with an electric fence. Forced to work day and night with no rest until the job is done, the workers too slowly realize they’re not going to be allowed to leave alive, what with the underground cavern of hired hands past.

To call the bosses are “racist” is to undersell their cruelty, which is hardly a one-off; Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes are essentially serial killers with the highest credit limit possible on a Home Depot credit card. The longer the job takes, the crazier Mrs. Rhodes gets, which is both the film’s greatest asset and liability. From the first scene, Pachman takes care to set up the troubled family dynamics of Alejandro (Rigo Sanchez, TV’s Animal Kingdom) and Memo (Josue Aguirre, Incarnate), then play them out … until he allows Tupper and especially Collins to approach their parts from rail No. 3.

Make no mistake: Collins is enormous fun in an utterly unhinged performance, but her Karen-to-the-nth-degree antics distract from the movie’s message even more than her push-up bra. It’s difficult to make politics stick in horror when your antagonist vamps and tramps her way through what amounts to a Tex-Mex Avery cartoon. —Rod Lott

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