All posts by Rod Lott

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

Get it at Amazon.

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.

Action

Russian Raid (2020)

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Among the events crammed into the needlessly distended Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen is a fun moment in which Charlie Hunnam’s drug-trade enforcer runs afoul of — and trades blows with — a group of street thugs. Russian Raid feels like an extension of that scene into nearly two hours of its own, turning a standout bit into mere status quo. Do you want to settle for that? Nyet.

This Russian actioner’s story is somewhat less thin than its setting’s doors, which look to be made of packing material: Former military sniper Nikita (Ivan Kotik, Chinese Zodiac) takes a freelancing assignment to rob a missile factory of its riches. Reluctantly assisting him on this nighttime heist is a rowdy, ragtag pack of tracksuited hooligans with authority issues. While they target a massive safe — and even attempt its penetration via medieval battle ax — Nikita has personal reasons for retribution as well.

Justifying the assumed titular nod to Gareth Evans’ The Raid, but hardly as vertical, reaching the well-fortified bounty requires moving from room to room and level to level through the factory. Wearing a blue-striped tank top that registers as ridiculous to this side of the world, Nikita and his hired charges go to hand-to-hand combat in one skirmish after another.

While I have no doubt of the guys’ real-life fighting abilities, the choreography isn’t as supportive; in fact, it’s pretty clunky. In his first feature, writer/director/producer Denis Kryuchkov not only errs by hitting “play” on a distractingly obnoxious soundtrack when shit hits the fan, but speeds up the footage to a telling degree. Worse, he gives the camera a slight bump to punctuate the points he wants viewers to react to with a sympathetic “Oof!”

It’s so obvious, it’s Pavlovian. The overall effect is punishing, as the sequences near-instantly wear out their welcome, with a respite of flat humor or preening villainy before returning to more of the same song, different room. In a fight film, the fights are everything. And sometimes, as in Russian Raid, nothing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 (2020)

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With a single-take fight sequence running 77 minutes, what are the odds Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 isn’t largely a gimmick? The answer aligns with the second half of the title.

Given that those 77 minutes constitute 84.6% of the Japanese film, the setup is as thin as the blades the samurai wield: In a prearranged duel, swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (Versus’ Tak Sakaguchi) faces hundreds and hundreds of students and mercenaries of the Yoshioka clan. Once the swords start slinging, the camera keeps going as Musashi keeps fighting, pausing only for gulps of water. He wipes his nose. It rains. And that’s all, folks!

It’s only natural your question to be, “Can they really sustain that for more than an hour?” The answer is yes and no, in that yes, they do, but no, it doesn’t hold your attention. In fact, the flick grows extremely trying within its first few minutes of battle. Things might be different if Death Trance director Yûji Shimomura had swayed to an extreme, whether to go for complete realism or leap over the top, Shogun Assassin-style.

Instead, he stays on neutral ground, where every spray of digital blood looks pixelated and the men surrounding Musashi do that thing heavies in kung-fu movies tend to do, which is exhibit wait-your-turn hesitancy as they rock back and forth, hoping to trick your peripheral vision into telling your brain more action is happening than actually is. Watching is like attending a Civil War re-enactment: Maybe it’s fun to participate?

It’s not clear whether we’re supposed to root for or against Musashi, given that he kills a child — a fraction of a second after cleanly bisecting a butterfly — in the prologue. The epilogue is the only section of Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 that lives up to the hype; those balls-out final five minutes crackle with more motion, energy and engagement than everything before it. Then again, I might not be so spry after sitting on the shelf for nearly a decade, either. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

The Man from Hong Kong (1975)

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Hong Kong cinema entered the American mainstream when the cultural phenom Enter the Dragon added a dose of 007 DNA. However, it was Australia that best ran with Golden Harvest’s formula, producing the Ozploitation classic The Man from Hong Kong. To underline the Bond-ness of it all, they give it a catchy theme song in Jigsaw’s “Sky High” and even cast one-and-done 007 George Lazenby as the villain.

Hong Kong Special Branch Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu, Master of the Flying Guillotine) travels Down Under to extradite a scar-faced drug dealer (Sammo Hung, Eastern Condors). Crossbow-savvy crime lord Jack Wilton (Lazenby, Death Dimension) makes Fang’s assignment most difficult, if not downright impossible.

Another influence of Ian Fleming’s most famous creation? Putting Fang horizontal with beautiful women he’s just met. Chief among them is a journalist (Ros Spiers, Stone) who literally swoops into their first meeting on a hang glider; “Your kite is confiscated,” he says, ever the smooth-talker. His next conquest is a college student (Rebecca Gilling, Spiers’ fellow Stoner); “You’re my first Chinese,” she says, ever the statistician. (Let’s try to ignore how she then pulls her eyes back to slits, shall we?) In his sex scenes with both, Fang exhibits an interesting lovers’ technique: dragging his tongue across their face. Whatever works!

The first feature for Turkey Shoot director Brian Trenchard-Smith, The Man from Hong Kong contains some incredible action sequences. Aside from the hand-to-hand-to-foot combat on display, audiences get a couple of high-speed chases, a man on fire, a leap from a tall building and, yep, more hang gliding. One could draw a direct line from this ball-kicking bone-crusher to the groundbreaking work of Jackie Chan in the ’80s with Police Story, Armour of God and the like, so much so that a line of Wilton’s can be thrown back at the film: “Thank you for coming. You’ve been very entertaining.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.