All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

Superdome (1978)

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For a made-for-TV movie, Superdome sure is rife with vice: Sex! Drugs! Violence! Dick Butkus!

And all that takes place within the five days the fictional Cougars have come to New Orleans to play the Super Bowl, meaning team manager Mike Shelley (David Janssen, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) has a lot on his hands, including a comely reporter (Donna Mills, Hanging by a Thread) who’s not above sex with seniors to extract quotes — or, for that matter, a plate of fried catfish.

Thrown into the suds of Superdome are a marriage on the brink, a potentially exiting star quarterback (Tom Selleck, Runaway), an illegal gambling plot with mob muscle and, above all, murder! Someone is shooting team staff members to death, with poisoned ginger ale and electrocution by whirlpool also on tap for attempts. Curiously, there is next to no football.

In charge of this whole mess is director Jerry Jameson, fresh from Airport ’77 and likely hired for his ability to corral an all-star cast; here, that includes such screen sirens as Edie Adams, Vonetta McGee, Jane Wyman and Bubba Smith.

For all Jameson’s skill at actor control, he is unable to wring any suspense from the stew. Had the script stuck to the killer angle and run with it, he might have something, like the then-2-year-old stadium-sniper thriller Two-Minute Warning. Instead, just as we’re shown a pair of black gloves pulling the trigger, Superdome pivots to a storyline of dramatically lower stakes, like Ken Howard’s aching knee. Fumble! —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Amityville Curse (1990)

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Hard to believe, but until the iPhone opened the floodgates for anyone to make a movie, we had the spread of Amityville Horror sequels pretty well contained. Of those pre-remake efforts, none is widely considered great, but none is worse than The Amityville Curse.

Made in Canada and supposedly based on Hans Holzer’s book of the same name, the fifth series entry has some set of balls in using a house that looks nothing — and I mean nothing — like the iconic, attic-as-eyes, real-life residence of 112 Ocean Avenue. It’s this film’s version of a soap opera’s cast switcheroo, but at least those shows pass it off as the result of plastic surgery. Curse has no excuse.

Married couple Deborah (Dawna Wightman, The Psycho She Met Online) and Marvin (David Stein, Hangfire) buy the abandoned abode as a fixer-upper. Being terrible hosts and even worse friends, they invite a few pals over to stay at the shithole, which has holes in the floor and rust in the pipes. To homeowners on a fixed income, those structural problems are frightening enough — and sadly more frightening than anything else Curse tosses our way: A barking dog! A hairy spider! A wine glass that breaks upon the clink of a toast! Another hairy spider! It’s enough to make Deb and her ESP exclaim, “There’s something evil in this house!”

To be fair, yes, we’re shown supernatural elements as well, but if director Tom Berry (the Shelley Hack vehicle Blind Fear) can’t be bothered to be invested in them, why should we? More attention seems to be paid to the batty, cat-lady psychic with a glass eye (Helen Hughes, The Peanut Butter Solution). Points to Wightman for enacting the hardware-store defense strategy nearly a quarter-century before Denzel Washington made it famous, but too little, too late: The Amityville Curse is one mundane movie. It might work rebooted as a “reality” series for HGTV. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Perdida (2009)

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As a boy, I would’ve loved to have grown up in a family of naked women, robot monsters, Aztec mummies and masked wrestlers. But I’m not Viviana García-Besné.

In Perdida, whose title translates to “lost,” the filmmaker documents three years of learning about — and then coming to grips with — her grandfather and great uncles’ involvement in arguably some of Mexico’s worst movies ever made. That suspect group includes a subgenre known as “ficheras”: raunchy, cabaret-set comedies featuring voluptuous women in various stages of disrobing. They made a fortune, were branded as “pornography,” and then killed the country’s film industry. Go figure.

Through interviews with surviving family members of the Calderón film dynasty, she attempts to ferret fact from fiction; dusty home movies and handwritten letters help fill in the gaps, as does a third-act raid of a film vault.

From theater owners to full-fledged moviemakers beginning in the 1930s, the Calderón brothers’ story is one of rags to riches to rags. The riches come after the men discover the inherent value of female nudity, both to fill seats and to create controversy to fill more seats. The profits proved as substantial as the bosoms.

The brothers’ crooked, oft-controversial path is paved with acts of monopoly, infidelity and forgery, involving personalities like the revolutionary Pancho Villa, actress Lupe Vélez, mambo king Perez Prado, Fantasy Island’s Ricardo Montalban and the pope.

Unsavory cinema aside, the Calderón name also appeared on many entries in horror, science fiction and just plain bizarre. B-movie enthusiasts are likely to know many of the titles Perdida discusses, from the bargain-basement Aztec Mummy trilogy and 1959’s notorious Santa Claus to a franchise starring the silver-masked luchador Santo.

A high point occurs with García-Besné’s search for a then-lost Calderón film, El Vampiro y El Sexo, aka Santo in the Treasure of Dracula. That’s about as dramatic as Perdida gets; her documentary is personal and lo-fi, so it’s stripped of traditional storytelling structure, but its interest to film buffs — especially those with tastes toward the psychotronic — is undeniable. —Rod Lott

Thriller

Lethal Justice (1991)

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After writing an article about a sheep birthing a human baby, Populous magazine reporter Jill Weatherby (Jodi Russell, Blind Dating) and her shoulder pads thirst for “a shot at some real news.” She finds it in sleepy Edmond, Missouri — a town that’s “fictious,” per the misspelled credits — where the elderly, married owners of a mini-mart have been murdered by a trio of traveling hoodlums. While one of the the bad guys (Kenny McCabe, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2) remains at large, rogue cop Cliff Madlock (Larry Williams, 2001’s Heartbreakers) fatally shot the others at the scene.

What Jill doesn’t know initially is that one of Madlock’s kills was a straight-up execution — Miranda rights, schmiranda rights. Edmond boasts a crime rate 40% lower than the U.S. average, yet almost never convicts a criminal. She learns why after witnessing Madlock break into a drug dealer’s house — warrant, schmarrant — and force-feeds spoonfuls of cocaine to the dealer as if it were Cheerios.

Maybe it’s the experience of watching Lethal Justice through a 21st-century lens, but it’s not clear whether Madlock is supposed to be its hero or villain — until the ending, when Weatherby watches Madlock blow away the elusive criminal (“Damn! There goes my exclusive!”) and decides to let the good ol’ boy in blue keep shooting first and asking questions later never. Hey, it was a very different time.

It was also a time when anything could churn profits on VHS, no matter how homegrown. Lethal Justice represents the second and thus far final film from writer/director/producer/editor Christopher Reynolds. As with his debut, the Johnny-come-lately slasher Offerings, it was shot in the Oklahoma City area (including the actual city of Edmond) using its fair share of overemoting locals and exaggerated extras, but also with Russell believably exhibiting that journalist’s pluck, just as Williams does with hotheaded authority; however, they fail to click in the chemistry department. All one can really ask of such cinematic pursuits is an effortless watchability, which Lethal Justice provides, no matter how hard its secondhand-synthesizer score — appropriately referred to by the closed captioning as “sleuth music” — works against it. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

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Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is a documentary about — what else? — Antrum, an European horror movie from the 1970s reportedly so cursed and evil, it quite literally claims viewers’ lives. As a result, the movie never made it past festival screenings and into general release before being pulled and lost … until now.

Of course, it doesn’t truly exist, because Antrum: TDFEM (as we’ll abbreviate it) is a faux documentary. The sequences setting up its premise of legitimately malevolent celluloid achieve that rare mix of being credible and exciting, working just as these things should. Co-directors David Amito and Michael Laicini then succumb to temptation and show us the movie in its entirety.

Grainy, scratched, softly focused and entirely Caucasian, it certainly looks the part. In this fake film within the fake doc, towheaded teen Oralee (Nicole Tompkins, from the fake Amityville Horror sequel The Amityville Terror) takes her mop-headed little brother (Rowan Smyth, from a real 2015 movie titled Fake) deep into the woods on a special mission: to dig a hole to hell in order to save the soul of their newly dead pup, because their terrible mother told them most assuredly, all dogs do not go to heaven. They push their shovels into the dirt where Satan himself was rumored to land after being kicked out of those Judeo-Christian clouds. And as the adage on good intentions goes …

The problem with showing Antrum within Antrum: TDFEM? Amito and Laicini’s preface so expertly builds the sordid history of the cursed film, anything that follows is bound to disappoint your mind’s expectations — and the title’s use of a superlative sure doesn’t help their cause, either. It implies what you’re about to see is more disturbing than The Exorcist, is scarier than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or out-spooks [insert legendary horror film of your choosing here]. On that ladder of fear, Antrum stands one rung above ground level. In fact, I was so bored by its inertness that I fell asleep, even though I had just finished two cups of coffee. Starting over proved no better.

Although Antrum doesn’t satisfy as a movie, I can recommend it as a puzzle. Like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, it is full of subliminal messages and imagery, and Easter eggs galore. Those who enjoy scouring frames to unearth such things should have a field day — maybe even two — with this one. —Rod Lott

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