All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

The Seduction (1982)

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For whatever reason*, I watched The Seduction several times after its short theatrical run on a local UHF station, where it somehow aired with Morgan Fairchild’s nudity intact. Back then, pre-internet and with no HBO, that was like striking gold. Today, naked Fairchild doesn’t hold as much excitement, but those scenes have aged well compared against things in the movie that pretty much no longer exist: pay phones, department stores, Jacuzzi sex, Michael Sarrazin.

Fairchild’s Jaime Douglas anchors the news in Los Angeles, where the 6 p.m. time slot affords her visibility in the public eye. Not all of it is wanted, particularly that of the zoom lens of nosy neighbor Derek (Andrew Stevens, 10 to Midnight), whose snooping, screwed-up head has concocted a romantic fantasy he attempts to will into reality with heartfelt gifts of trinkets and trespassing. Just not into stalkers, Jaime doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, so Derek reasons if he can’t have her, well, no one can.

An early, tamer template for the erotic thrillers that bought Stevens’ groceries throughout the 1990s, The Seduction is high-gloss trash from writer/director David Schmoeller (Tourist Trap), but blandly enjoyable as he explores the contradiction of a woman so amazingly attractive, she can’t help but garner the male gaze — in fact, she makes a living off this ability — yet isn’t always fond of the gaze she garners. This thesis is set up in the first two lines of the film (Dionne Warwick’s singing of Lalo Schifrin’s overproduced ballad doesn’t count) as Jaime’s boyfriend (Sarrazin, The Gumball Rally) tells her, “I like looking at you,” to which she breathily replies, “I like being looked at.”

By the third act, Jaime is done being the victim, turning up the heat to 98 degrees of tease in order to turn the tables on her would-be paramour. While Fairchild plays this tough-cookie portion with the same smoldering indifference as the hot-tamale preamble, the flick certainly becomes less interesting in the switch. That could be reason enough for Schmoeller’s Seduction beginning and ending Fairchild’s big-screen career as leading lady; after this, she really only connected with movie audiences in the likes of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, playing — and spoofing — herself. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we’re all still looking. —Rod Lott

*Hormones.

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Martial Arts

Pray for Death (1985)

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When Franco Nero declined to return for an Enter the Ninja sequel, Sho Kosugi raised his hand and rode that shuriken-throwing train as far as it would take him: more or less to 1989, as the Bruce Lee of the two-night-rental era. However, Kosugi did more than just play ninjas in the Cannon Group’s Ninja trilogy; he also played ninjas outside of it, including Pray for Death, a stand-alone from unlikely helmer Gordon Hessler of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

In Japan, Akira Saito (Kosugi) is a loving family man and hardworking salaryman, but his wife (Donna Kei Benz, Looker) longs to move to Los Angeles. So they do, with the intent to open a restaurant, but without the intent to be in an area so seedy, it could be a Chia Pet. Unbeknownst to the Saitos, an abandoned annex of their rundown place is where some crooks have hidden a valuable necklace. When those jewels disappear, the local mob boss known as — brace yourself for a name that screams “rejected Dick Tracy villain” — Limehouse Willy (Airport ’77’s James Booth, who also wrote the screenplay) wrongly assumes Akira and his family have something to do with it and will kill to get the necklace back.

Seeing as how Pray for Death is a revenge picture, take a good guess where things go from there. This is the kind of movie in which a low-speed fender bender causes a vehicle to explode as soon as bumpers touch. In which Akira always knows where to find his enemies. In which a woman is knocked unconscious before being fatally stabbed, with a quick round of sexual assault in between. In which the ultimate showdown takes place in a warehouse full of mannequins.

It’s in that last 20 minutes when Pray for Death comes, um, alive, as Kosugi drops the pacifism, applies the black eyeliner, puts on enough armor to resemble a Mortal Kombat character and ninjas up the place. Before that, thanks to the genial but cardboard acting of Kosugi, the movie is desperate for action. It could use a lot more of Akira leaping and flipping over a moving pickup truck, which Hessler shows in slow motion — as it should be, being the pic’s coup de grâce as far as visuals goes. Heck, I’d settle for just a little more of Akira’s kid’s tricked-out bicycle with jets of red smoke, a dashboard slingshot, hidden blow darts and more, all to make buffoons of mob goons and help Ninja Dad extract vengeance, sweet vengeance. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Pit (1981)

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In the Canadian horror film The Pit, Jamie is one of those rare kids who does know his ass from a hole in the ground. That’s because the insufferable 12-year-old boy (Sammy Snyders, The Last Chase) has discovered the titular site in the woods, in which carnivorous troglodytes dwell and hangrily await food to fall in for the gnawing.

Having zero friends and being sexually frustrated makes for a lethal combo, as Jamie uses the wide cavity to his own advantage, leveraging it for acts of cruel revenge. Whether someone has picked on him, insulted him or romanced his live-in babysitter/therapist (Jeannie Elias, Deadline), it’s into the hole! His means of luring each victim to their gravity-assisted doom — and their inability to see the double-wide abyss directly in front of their feet — stretch the concept of suspension of disbelief to its breaking point, which makes the movie even more fun. (Also pushing us in that direction? The oompah-style score comedically punctuating such sacrifices as Jamie dumping a blind old lady out of her wheelchair.)

The lone fiction feature for director Lew Lehman (who wrote John Huston’s feeble Phobia the year before) and screenwriter Ian A. Stuart, The Pit is filled with situations that challenge common sense and ideas that come half-baked — for example, did I mention Jamie’s teddy bear is apparently sentient? Therefore, this one’s best viewed as a wildly whacked-out-of-its-gourd metaphor for puberty. A major player in Bad Seed cinema, Jamie is not only overly petulant and thoroughly unpleasant to be around, but sends pornographic images to the hot librarian (one-and-doner Laura Hollingsworth) and later tricks her into posing for some of his own via Polaroid. The kid is irredeemably abhorrent.

If you don’t want to cheer at the Canuxploitation chestnut’s final shot, we shouldn’t be pals anyway. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Record City (1977)

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Record City pays tribute to a time when Americans bought recorded music — on vinyl, cassettes and eight-track tapes — from national chains with food-based names like Peaches, Coconuts and the scalp-scratching Licorice Pizza. The store in the lone film from TV director Dennis Steinmetz (he of the notorious The World of Sid & Marty Krofft at the Hollywood Bowl special), however, is simply Record City, fittingly generic.

Despite a then-all-star cast of dozens, Record City has no plot, being nothing more than a snapshot of a single day inside those poster-covered walls. As with the same year’s lamentable Skatetown U.S.A., which shares a cast member in comedy vacuum Ruth Buzzi, it abstains from story to present a loosely strung collection of low-stakes bits. Jumping from character to character with barely an arc in its way, it resembles one of those “A Mad Peek Behind the Scenes of” two-page spreads Mad magazine used to do, in which the totality of the place in question was presented in a single image from a God’s-eye view; no matter where you looked, something was happening.

Here, that includes:
• the greasy store manager (Michael Callan, 1988’s Freeway) sexually harassing employees and forcing himself on customers
• the nice-guy employee (Dennis Bowen, Van Nuys Blvd.) pining for the attention of the good-girl employee (Wendy Schaal, Munchies)
• a cop (Sorrell Booke, Boss Hogg of TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard) standing on a toilet in hopes of catching a serial shoplifter called The Chameleon (Frank Gorshin, Hollywood Vice Squad) while a hick goober named Pokey (Ed Begley Jr., Amazon Women on the Moon) plots a robbery
• F Troop second banana Larry Storch as a deaf customer and Alan Oppenheimer (1973’s Westworld) as a blind customer
• L.A. DJ Rick Dees wearing a gorilla arm while hosting a parking-lot talent contest featuring the likes of Gallagher, the Chicken Lady, Razzie Pee Willie and other Gong Show-level acts
• singer-songwriter Kinky Friedman playing himself and copping a feel
• Ted Lange, aka Your Bartender of TV’s The Love Boat, doing a robot dance
• Harold Sakata, aka Goldfinger’s Oddjob, basically playing Oddjob again, but as a homosexual

I don’t even have room to mention the skateboarders, the hookers, the Nazi engineer or Tim Thomerson’s testicular trauma. There’s a lot going on, and yet nothing going on. It’s the kind of movie whose screenplay (by Ron Friedman, Murder Can Hurt You!) ends by asking the ensemble cast to run in single file and yell, which, mood depending, is not necessarily a negative. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

VHYes (2019)

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To watch VHYes is to watch what happens when a boy named Ralph is gifted with a VHS camera for Christmas ’87 and proceeds to use his parents’ wedding video to record his harmless household pranks, all whoopee cushions and watermelons. Then he learns you can hook the camera up to record live TV, and the clips he captures as he channel-surfs is what we see.

That includes an aerobics exercise show, a crime procedural, a cowboy-themed kids’ series, a local newscast, a cloning sitcom titled Ten of the Same and the QVC-esque Goods Channel (complete with Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich’s Thomas Lennon playing pitchman). The standouts are the Antiques Roadshow-style What You Think This Might Be? (“This was a receptacle for hearts …”) and the Bob Ross parody Painting with Joan, with Role Models’ Kerri Kenney as an unhinged artist.

Not everything Ralph (Mason McNulty, Assimilate) lands on is worth a flip; Interludes with Lou, a public access broadcast of an awkward teen (Charlyne Yi, Knocked Up) interviewing punk bands, goes on too long. That goes double for Blood Files, spoofing the true-crime documentary with the story of a supposedly haunted sorority house. More than making up for the dip are SFW scenes from a pair of porno movies, Sexy Swedish Illegal Aliens from Space: XXX and the global warming-themed Hot Winter, both expertly played to the deadpan hilt.

From a hair-growth product to a home security system, commercials appear here and there, none more notable than the Susan Sarandon-narrated spot for the Soundwall 2000, which shields your lover’s ears from hearing you poop. You get all of this and more — psychotic break included — in an über-economical 72 minutes! Director and co-writer Jack Henry Robbins (son of Sarandon and Tim Robbins, unrecognizable in his cameo) may not know how to end his cathode-ray circus — and I didn’t want him to — but up until then, he expertly orchestrates the anarchy in which anything goes … as long as everything takes a dark turn. Fans of modern absurdist humor like The State, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and, well, anything on Adult Swim will take to it like metal fillings to a magnet. It’s like Amazon Women on the Moon with injections and/or ingestions of AFV, ADD, LSD, OMG and WTF. —Rod Lott

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