All posts by Rod Lott

Documentary

The El Duce Tapes (2019)

Leave a comment

Sometimes, a great project falls into your lap. Less often, it falls into your bushes.

Yet such was the case for struggling actor Ryan Sexton (The Toxic Avenger) when, outside his apartment, he found one Eldon Wayne Hoke blackout-drunk. As Sexton soon discovered, Hoke was not only better known as El Duce, leader of shock-rock band The Mentors, but also quite a character whose wayward, doomed-for-brevity life was worthy of chronicling with a camcorder. Some two dozen VHS cassettes later, shot between 1990 and ’91, the resulting shenanigans and conversations live on as the documentary The El Duce Tapes.

Whipped into fine narrative shape by directors Rodney Ascher (Room 237) and David Lawrence, who also edits the film, The El Duce Tapes begins with a crash course in the executioner-hooded Mentors and the bald, bearded, bulky frontman who proudly salutes Hitler and more proudly brands their music as “rape rock.” His lyrics are simple yet juvenile rhymes one would expect from drunken high schoolers — to wit, “My woman from Sodom / Lets me fuck her in the bottom.”

His zeal for misogyny and white supremacy is matched by perpetual homelessness and full-blown alcoholism, resulting in not just a warts-and-all doc, but an all-warts look at the raucous L.A. club scene and the sad reality awaiting Hoke between gigs, from which he tried his best to numb. A product of abuse, Hoke admittedly spits back the kind of hatred he received growing up. While not exactly smart, he was certainly shrewd, knowing how to push PC buttons and slam them into disrepair.

Judged from a standpoint of “any publicity is good publicity,” his antics worked, landing him on the hostile stage of The Jerry Springer Show and, his lyrics, decried in U.S. Senate hearings of Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center. A decade later, with major-label backing, the likes of Marilyn Manson rode a similar strategy all the way to the bank; El Duce got no further than the welfare line. (That’s not a metaphor, either; visits to pick up his government handout are in the film.)

Although The El Duce Tapes isn’t the only documentary on this ever-colorful character and his awfully patient bandmates, Sexton strikes something akin to gold with the unfiltered rawness of his subject. It’s as if a particularly vile segment of Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization trilogy were spun off into a full, free-standing case study of the anthropologic and anarchic. On its own, Sexton’s footage would be captivating, but Ascher and Lawrence amplify it with clips of Hoke’s influences — everything from Walking Tall to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (!) — and his cultural environment, informing or reminding viewers of what was in the water — or cesspool — at the time. In the closing moments, the line they draw from Hoke to, well, today is staggering. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

A Stranger Is Watching (1982)

Leave a comment

To borrow a phrase from Oprah Winfrey, what I know for sure about director Sean S. Cunningham is how lucky he was to strike gold with Friday the 13th. Because having watched three of his other films recently — The New Kids, DeepStar Six and his Friday follow-up, A Stranger Is Watching — a throughline bubbled to the surface: Directing just isn’t his thing. His gift — one arguably more valuable — is commercial instincts; the creative execution is best left in the hands of others, like Wes Craven with The Last House on the Left and Steve Miner with House.

A Stranger Is Watching seals my thesis with a pat of the cement trowel. Based on a huge bestseller by Mary Higgins Clark, queen of the PTA-mom-approved thriller, the movie opens with a little girl named Julie Petersen (Shawn von Schreiber) watching from the stairs as her mother is murdered by an unknown male assistant with a hammer and point-and-shoot camera. A couple years later, Julie is living a normal life with Dad (James Naughton, The Birds II: Land’s End); Dad is getting serious with a TV anchor (Kate Mulgrew, Star Trek: Nemesis); and Mom’s supposed killer (James Russo, 1988’s Freeway), who proclaims his innocence, is about to be put to death. Then the real killer (Rip Torn, Dodgeball) shows back up to terrorize the Petersens once more.

So much of Stranger seems like it’s been grafted from Friday the 13th’s still-fresh corpse. With Friday creator Victor Miller co-writing this script, perhaps that’s to be expected. But one also can imagine the MGM executives asking Cunningham to do what he did with that smash-hit slasher, but this time for grown-ups, so you can still ventilate a throat, but don’t make it look real — just have the actor push his chin as hard as he can to his neck to hold the fake weapon in place.

And instead of a summer camp, set it at a homeless camp. And instead of the bad guy in a hockey mask, put him in Eric Von Zipper’s get-up from Beach Blanket Bingo. And instead of someone going to the restroom and being met with an ax to the face, have someone be confronted by a thug who bops in time like he’s going to burst into song. And instead of depicting people having sex, can you just have William Hickey play a bum who asks to see Rip Torn’s “pecker”? (You can have him yell “Pussy!” with each hammer blow he takes to the head; it’s okay.)

Oh, one last thing: Instead of sending chills up the spines of audience members, can you make it really, really boring?

He could and he did. Stranger’s true legacy is a move it made from page to screen: flipping the kid’s gender so the world may be introduced to von Schreiber. The girl had an empty filmography before this big debut, anchoring a feature from a major studio, and never added another. Why? It’s as if she were so good, everyone told her afterward, “Shawn, you did it! This performance can never be topped — not by you, not by anyone. You should stop acting now.” Because you can’t tell a kid like that the truth, which would be “Your acting style is completely unnatural. I ask for tears of sadness and you give me an impression of a losing struggle with a painful grumpy.”

A Stranger Is that awful. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Collision Course (1989)

Leave a comment

Rather famously, producer Dino De Laurentiis lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the late ’80s dropping bomb after bomb through his then-new De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Among DEG’s epic critical and commercial failures? The too-late sequel King Kong Lives, the James Clavell adaptation Tai-Pan and the garbage-bag gimmickry known as Million Dollar Mystery.

As bad as those movies are, what does it say about the ones DEG deemed unreleasable? In particular, I speak of the Pat Morita/Jay Leno vehicle Collision Course, which drove direct to video in the U.S. in 1992, after sitting on Dino’s shelf for what I now understand to be not nearly long enough. My guess is De Laurentiis thought he could make Leno, then a white-hot stand-up comic, into the next Tom Hanks. In one fell swoop, Leno went from killing it on Late Night with David Letterman to killing his chances at headlining further films.

As Detroit police detective Tony Costas, the skunk-haired Leno is objectively terrible in this buddy-cop disaster opposite Pat Morita as Fujitsuka Natsuo, Costas’ Tokyo counterpart. In Japan, a rogue engineer for an automotive giant has stolen a turbocharger prototype and made his way to the Motor City to sell it to an American rival; Natsuo follows. Inevitably, cultures clash — until they team up.

Leno is laughable at playing a tough guy (!), and not at all laugh-worthy with, one assumes, improvising his dialogue. For example, surprising Natsuo by emerging from behind a door with gun drawn, Costas offers the nonsensical greeting “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.” He may as well have just said, “Crunch all you want! We’ll make more,” because at least we have evidence Leno was comfortable with that.

In another scene, Natsuo is interrogated by Costas’ colleague (Al Waxman, Iron Eagle IV), who says, “I speak some Jap: Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, teriyaki,” which is clever and hilarious — or so say second graders on the playground at lunch. The line is not just indicative of how the script (by producer Frank Darius Namei and The First Power’s Robert Resnikoff) treats Morita’s race, but also the degree of humor at which said script simmers: the lowest possible setting.

Pity poor Morita, reduced from an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor to running around a hotel lobby with a plastic garment bag over his head. I mean, at least the guy found work between Karate Kid sequels, but ouch. Another actor who deserved better: Tom Noonan, here as a villain after embodying evil in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, one of the few DEG projects enjoying a life today. Did Dino weasel Noonan into some bad-guy twofer deal?

Appropriately opening with the sound of a car wreck, Collision Course marks an odd entry in the filmography of Lewis Teague, the Roger Corman protégé known for horror films (Alligator, Cujo and Cat’s Eye), not comedy. This dud bears no stamp of his previous proficiency. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Synchronic (2019)

Leave a comment

Whereas the directing duo’s first feature, Resolution, centered on drug withdrawal, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s fourth, Synchronic, enables and endorses a pharmaceutical bender. But, hey, as you’ll see, it’s for a good cause!

In New Orleans, word on the street is all about a new designer drug called Synchronic. Like DMT, it’s highly hallucinogenic, pummeling the user’s pineal gland into psychoactive submission. Side effects include venomous snakebites, sword stabbings and elevator-shaft dismemberments. That’s because the drug transports the user back in time — prehistoric, even — at seven-minute intervals with lasting real-world results.

As paramedics, best buds Steve (Anthony Mackie, Avengers’ Falcon) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan, Fifty Shades of Grey’s BDSM BMOC) have seen the worst of that damage. But when Dennis’ sullen teen daughter (Ally Ioannides, TV’s Into the Badlands) disappears after a dose and doesn’t come back? Steve starts experimenting to see if she can be retrieved. That’s when things get — in his words — “kangaroo-shit loony.”

Rich in New Orleans tradition and superstition, Synchronic’s story is haunted by the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina. The filmmakers shoot the city as if in recovery — under a woozy, narcotized haze, with a camera that sometimes floats like a week-old helium balloon and the sky coated in an unnatural baby-aspirin orange. The sudden merging of time periods in a Bourbon Street slipstream gives the movie its strongest and most memorable visuals, as worlds collide with an unsettling weirdness as “off” as the mutated flora and fauna of Annihilation, to name another extraordinary modern film that doesn’t play by sci-fi’s standard rules. As a viewer accustomed to every templated move of the genre, I like not knowing quite where a film is headed.

Although initially a two-hander, Synchronic shifts focus to Steve and his time-travel tests, which Mackie is amiable enough to sell. You can’t help but like his deeply flawed character as over and over, he embarks on what increasingly looks to be a suicide mission, strictly out of brotherly love for his lifelong friend. That sidelines Dennis to cope and mourn — more or less offscreen — with his wife (Katie Aselton, 2015’s The Gift). Effectively hamstrung against Mackie’s magnetism, Dornan is a bit of a nonentity as Dennis, but in the works of Moorhead & Benson (as they now bill themselves, like a cigarette brand), the concept is the star. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

Tonight, on a Very Special Episode: When TV Sitcoms Sometimes Got Serious — Volume 1: 1957-1985

Leave a comment

If you can’t look at a bottle of vanilla extract without thinking of Tom Hanks, I get it. Same. And have I got a book for you!

Every book bearing Lee Gambin’s name on the cover is worth purchasing, but Tonight, on a Very Special Episode: When TV Sitcoms Sometimes Got Serious — Volume 1: 1957-1985 is the only one whose mere introduction gave me goose bumps. Those initial pages aim to define what constitutes a “Very Special Episode” (hereafter abbreviated as “VSE”), but also weave a big, warm blanket of nostalgia for members of a certain generation or two: those weaned on afternoon reruns of sitcoms older than we were, and whose evenings were determined — if not outright dictated — by the grids in that week’s TV Guide.

As Gambin (We Can Be Who We Are: Movie Musicals from the 1970s) explains, the VSE represented a break from the show’s norm to present something different, whether a backdoor pilot, a series finale or a character’s life milestone, from the birth of the baby to a wedding or funeral. But more often than not, the VSE saw a seismic shift in tonality, however temporary, to tackle a Big Social Issue; the laugh track was given seven days’ rest so the creative powers could address not-funny situations of real life, like getting cancer, hating minorities, contracting the herp — you know, that sort of thing.

Nowadays, an entire network series can be built upon such a single hot-button issue (yes, you, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), but in more sheltered times, devoting a half-hour to STDs or ICBMs was considered a risky movie best left for parents, schools and churches to handle quietly … if handled at all, which may account for why the boob tube — increasingly the nation’s babysitter — stopped every now and again to take up the cause, to face reality with bravery, to stand up for what’s right, to fight the good fight, to give Barney Miller a werewolf.

Gambin’s overview ticks through some of the greatest hits, conjuring memories of treasured shows and particular VSEs I must have seen four or more times growing up. I remember learning about child molestation from Diff’rent Strokes, cerebral palsy from The Facts of Life, blackface from Gimme a Break!, speed (and the alcoholic properties of the aforementioned vanilla extract) from Family Ties and media manipulation from The Brady Bunch. (That Jesse James was one bad hombre. Who knew? Mike and Carol, of course.)

All those and more are here — many, many more: 124, if I counted correctly. Each episode in Tonight, on a Very Special Episode merits a stand-alone essay from Gambin or one of his contributors. (Bittersweetly, one is the recently departed and much-loved Mike McPadden, author of Teen Movie Hell, who takes the good and takes the bad of a couple Facts of Life episodes.)

The contents — which, honestly, could really use a detailed table of just that — include an expected surfeit of Norman Lear creations, namely All in the Family and Maude, both giants in the VSE field. As enlightening as the pieces on those VSEs are, I found the best to be about half-hours I somehow missed or forgot.

Four of these essays stand out as tops in terms of being informative, critical and passionate, all while detailing and deconstructing scenes that make one think, “This actually aired?!?“:
• the Beav palling around with a booze-soaked hobo (Leave It to Beaver);
• Tabitha and a Black playmate switching races, much to the chagrin of Darren’s racist client (Bewitched);
• Fred and the boys unknowingly auditioning for a porno movie (Sanford and Son);
• and Monroe being repeatedly raped by two obese women (Too Close for Comfort).

The Bewitched one won awards; Comfort, yanked from syndication.

From examinations of M*A*S*H to transmissions on WKRP, Gambin and friends pour their hearts into their work, because these shows mean as much to them as they mean to you. If Tonight, on a Very Special Episode leaves you wishing it didn’t end in 1985, great news: BearManor Media has simultaneously published Volume 2: 1986-1998, so The Golden Girls can co-exist beside your Good Times. Ain’t we lucky we got ’em? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.