All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Wake of Death (2004)

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Admits Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character several times within the opening minutes of Wake of Death, “I’m tired.” Dude, we’ve noticed.

Van Damme’s Ben Archer is former mob muscle gone legit, now a club bouncer, loving father and devoted husband. His wife, Cynthia (Lisa King, Love N’ Dancing), is a cop who, upon discovering a boat of Asian refugees at the harbor, bring a scared young girl home for the night, as if test-driving a puppy from the pound. Unfortunately, 14-year-old Kim (Valerie Tian, 2012’s 21 Jump Street) is no ordinary refugee; she’s on the run from her father, who unfortunately is Triad crime boss Sun Quan (Simon Yam), who unfortunately slit his wife’s throat post-coitally as Kim unfortunately watched.

“I’m going to get Kim back my way,” says Quan, and boy, does he try, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake — a wake of death, one might say — including Cynthia’s. As you’d expect, that leaves Archer in reluctant but devoted charge of Kim, protecting her from own father. It’s not unlike Boaz Yakin’s Safe, the 2012 movie in which Jason Statham also protects a young Chinese girl from the Triad while also taking revenge on the goons who murdered his spouse. The difference is Safe is far smarter and better made, but it’s not like Wake of Death didn’t have a chance.

Shot in South Africa, the cheap actioner has four credited writers and went through three directors, the first being Hong Kong great Ringo Lam, reuniting with Yam after Full Contact and with Van Damme after three films, including Maximum Risk. Lam walked after a couple of weeks, so who knows which scenes are his; my guess is the film’s best: a motorcycle chase through a shopping mall, including up the escalators and jumping from level to level. A sequence as bravura as that rises above Wake’s other set pieces, which are so poorly staged and edited that the viewer is never given the chance to invest oneself. Since Philippe Martinez (The Chaos Experiment) holds the directorial credit and also produced, we can pin the failure on him.

Van Damme himself is fine. Ironically, the further time removes him from his box-office heyday, the better an actor he becomes. Every now and again, one of his DVD premieres pops with some acclaim — like 2008’s JCVD and 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning — but not enough to fuel a career comeback. Wake of Death isn’t one of those standouts, lumbering with so many slow-motion shots and needless scenes — like watching Yam practicing tai chi for a hot minute — that the running time keeps calling attention to its own padding. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Bermuda Depths (1978)

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Made for television, The Bermuda Depths is one of those siren-o’-the-sea stories, with Connie Sellecca (Captain America II: Death Too Soon) doing the honors as Jennie, who swims like a serpent, apparently lives in the Bermuda Triangle and — as local legend has it — sold her soul to the devil. She’s not a mermaid, but she may as well be.

In fact, The Bermuda Depths may as well be a proto-Splash of sorts. Just shove Fraternity Vacation’s Leigh McCloskey in what would be the Tom Hanks role and extract all humor. And instead of John Candy, we get Burl Ives, looking like a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew Big Bowl made human.

Adorned with an ever-present puka shell necklace, McCloskey’s Magnus Dens (huh?) is a perennial college dropout who returns to his childhood home of Bermuda, where he romped on the beach with a girl named Jennie and a sea turtle as big as a rocking horse. Orphaned as a child after his scientist father perished in a freak and vaguely supernatural accident, Magnus receives an overly hearty welcome — and a big exposition dump — from his marine biologist pal (Action Jackson himself, Carl Weathers).

Jennie pops up, too; now played by Sellecca, she’s all grown up and, well, weird. How much of that is in the script or Sellecca’s blasé performance has us shrug, but Jennie’s presence raises a lot of questions, like:
• Is this all in Magnus’ head?
• Why does her hair have a sheen?
• Why do eyes glow?
• Hey, what’s up with the now-Gamera-sized turtle?

I’ll address the last one: Because The Bermuda Depths is less a true example of Trianglesploitation and more about kaiju, following in the big footsteps left by The Last Dinosaur. Both were directed by Tsugunobu “Tom” Kotani for Rankin/Bass, the noted purveyor of those creepy yet cherished stop-motion Christmas specials from the late 1960s and early ’70s, so it’s only natural the miniatures and mattes carry some of that brand’s distinctive visual magic. At its best points, Bermuda imparts a narcotic quality; at its worst, it’s narcotized. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Wrong Turn (2021)

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Not that 2003’s Wrong Turn is any sort of classic, but any degree of effectiveness in conjuring cases of the heebie-jeebies has been dulled by the mild hit film’s five sequels. All made for the direct-to-DVD market, those increasingly silly — but comfort-food satisfying — installments made the predators the stars instead of the prey. Now, original screenwriter Alan B. McElroy (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers) returns to press the reset button. Hard.

The result, also titled Wrong Turn, follows Jen (Charlotte Vega, American Assassin) and five of her millennial friends — “goddamn hipster freaks” to the locals — as they arrive in Virginia to hike the Appalachian Trail. Even if there weren’t a six-weeks-later prologue of Jen’s father (Matthew Modine, 47 Meters Down) attempting to locate his missing daughter, we know not all these beautiful young people will make it to the final frame. In fact, we count on it!

Rather cleverly, McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson (The Domestics) use your knowledge of the original and/or its sequels against you — or at least for the benefit of their reboot. What you expect to be a slasher instead becomes something of a folk horror tale. Still, the filmmakers are not above smashing someone with a runaway log. An ominous warning of “Nature eats everything it catches” resonates as Wrong Turn ’21’s theme, sacrificing characters to other booby traps in the forest.

The surprise is how solid the movie is — for the first half. Its initial scenes of Jen and her pals exploring a quiet town of deer hunters and Confederate flags are more frightening than anything happening along the trail, in part because rural folks not taking kindly to tourists from the city isn’t just some trope. Modine’s quest finds deep roots in realism as well. From there, McElroy and Nelson’s pivot toward the road not taken is an admirable one, yet not as gratifying as their movie’s steps to get there. As well-made as this seventh installment is, I never thought I’d end up missing dear ol’ Saw-Tooth, One-Eye and Three-Finger, but I do. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Cosmoball (2020)

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By title alone, Cosmoball sounds like you’re in for dull science fiction or novelty porn. For the record, the movie in question is sci-fi, but either way, it’s not something you’ll want to admit to watching.

As depicted in the Russian film Cosmoball, the future plays home to one of those sci-fi dichotomies where one environment is all super-high-tech and tricked-out, while the other dresses the populace in pieces of scavenged Tupperware. In the former, elite athletes play Cosmoball; in the latter, our unemployed teen scamp of a protagonist, Anton (Evgeniy Romantsov, free of charisma), waits in line for rationed water amid fellow commoners who appear to be doing Hook cosplay in the lobby of Rainforest Cafe — the one in Gurney Mills, Illinois, at that.

But back to the spectator sport of Cosmoball: Played in an indoor arena, the game is like soccer, except the players must have the power of teleportation. Also, only after five consecutive kicks does the opponent’s goal materialize. Also, it’s broadcast in the sky. Also, exploding balls of fire delight an all-alien audience only a Lucas could love. Also, a Rip Taylor-esque announcer pies himself in the face like a self-loathing clown whenever a goal is scored.

But other than that, just like soccer. Hell, even one player is named Pelé!

Because Anton needs money for his ailing mom’s Rx, because Anton crushes hard on Cosmoball star player Natasha (Viktoriya Agalakova) and because the team has an opening on the roster, it should surprise no one that Anton:
• can kick good!
• can teleport!
• will be recruited to join the team!
• will win Natasha’s heart!
• will be assigned a pet that looks like a tentacled ViewMaster!
• involuntarily teleports whenever he gets an unexpected boner!
• possesses a microscopic particle that the villain Cherno — who looks like a fist mated with Thanos — needs to complete a “protogene” that, once fully assembled, will grant Cherno power over the universe!
• will have his DNA attempt to be, um, “extracted” by a sexy waif (a WILF?) actually working for Cherno!

Okay, so maybe those last four fall under “Wait, wha-huh?” And for good reason: Director Dzhanik Fayziev and his writers’ room — repeat: writers’ room — pile one suffocating element atop another atop another, as if they’re world-building as they go … because they are, continuing the process until enough punishing minutes have passed that they risk using up the world’s entire supply of pixels if they don’t get to the climax. Folks, this isn’t storytelling; it’s rule-sharing.

With a cloying English dub and each frame green-screened into a cartoon artifice, it comes off possibly the most imbecilic family-friendly fantasy since that space-kangaroo movie a quarter-century ago. Somewhere, Soviet SF king Andrei Tarkovsky cries, “The fuck you say?” (Or, per Google Translate, “Какого хрена вы говорите?”) —Rod Lott

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Horror

Aquaslash (2019)

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If I were a betting man, I’d place all my chips on the theory that Renaud Gauthier’s Aquaslash came into existence because of one scene. Admittedly (not to mention literally), it’s a killer: the one where most unfortunate watersliding teens meet a big, bladed “X” on their trip down the tube, and the bratty popular girl at the front immediately gets quartered into nice, neat (but bloody) pieces shaped like pie slices, as if the gods were playing Trivial Pursuit with dismembered humans.

Placed there on purpose by a gloved person unknown, the blades are inserted many, many minutes before Aquaslash gets around to paying them off. Gauthier even periodically cuts (no pun intended) to show them in wait amid rushing chlorinated water in an otherwise empty flume; no shot has been teased so mercilessly in cinema since Catherine Tramell’s Great Leg Uncrossing of 1992.

When the carnage arrives, it’s easily the movie’s highlight — but almost by default, because Gauthier (Discopath) has no other comparable bit to offer. Everything in this waterpark-set story appears to have been written around that novel death — and forced if necessary, as if Piranha 3DD already claimed every other possible waterslide gag. (Come to think of it, yeah, it did.)

Of course, originality is not on Aquaslash’s to-do list. Being an exercise in 1980s nostalgia, the movie takes place at Wet Valley Water Park, where the class of 2018 continue its high school’s decades-old tradition of a weekend-long party at the site, seedy motel rooms included. Several characters are introduced at once with little delineation beyond who hates whom, who gets high with whom, who’s fucking whom and who’s playing in the cover band (TRIGGER WARNING: Corey Hart). Key affiliations among them aren’t made clear until well into the last 20 of its rather expeditious 71 minutes, but really, when everyone is this unlikable and you know they’re mere pawns awaiting execution, does it matter?

French-Canadian to the point of seeming alien, Aquaslash attempts some comedy, only one line of which truly succeeds: “You’re built like a Swiffer.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.