All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (1989)

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When push comes to shove, Charles Bronson shoves back hard — a dildo up a pedo’s hindquarters, a $25,000 watch down a pimp’s throat — in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, his wide-release swan song as a leading man. Bronson plays Los Angeles vice cop Lt. Crowe, out to bust an underage prostitution ring run by the greasy Duke (Juan Fernandez, 2009’s The Collector) any way he can; per Cannon Films’ 1980s house rules, that means wanton acts of violence and unchecked police brutality.

In other words, see it!

The plot thickens with the addition of an Asian ingredient, as corporate climber Hiroshi Hada (James Pax, Invasion U.S.A.) and his family are transferred from Japan to L.A., whereupon one of his little girls (Kumiko Hayakawa) is kidnapped and “hired” by Duke. Ironically, days earlier on a public bus, Hada molests Crowe’s teen daughter (Amy Hathaway, Last Exit to Earth), who screams and exclaims, “Some Oriental guy touched my holy of holies!”

Bronson fans eager to see Crowe dish out some serious daddy revenge on Hada will be deeply disappointed, as Kinjite inexplicably abandons the matter altogether. The omission of Death Wish-style payback is all the more startling given Hada is portrayed negatively from the start: a salaryman who prefers the company of bargirls to his wife (Marion Kodama Yue, Troop Beverly Hills) because, as he informs her with robotic matter-of-factness, “Your sexual gifts are few and bitter.”

From frequent Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson (The Evil That Men Do), the film more than earns its reputation of being aggressively sleazy and possibly racist. Collectively, the icky bits — such as a not-yet-legal Nicole Eggert (The Haunting of Morella) in black panties that appear to be cut 3 feet high — become the movie’s star, as Bronson barely seems invested enough to show up and flash a badge. While exhibiting that Cannon touch, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is not among his most memorable, beyond keeping cult favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate company in the small realm of movies whose titles inadvertently translate themselves into redundancy. After this, Chuck continued the aging-cop roles, but mostly in network originals — you know, the kind that don’t open with a sex worker’s jar of Vaseline. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

It’s a Bikini World (1967)

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Although a copycat of AIP’s Beach Party series that AIP eventually scooped up for distribution, It’s a Bikini World stands out for another reason: being the only movie of its kind to be directed by a woman — for the record, Roger Corman protege Stephanie Rothman (Terminal Island). She also co-wrote the screenplay with the producer, Charles S. Swartz, who happened to be her husband.

Pinch-hitting in the Frankie and Annette roles are teen-pic staples Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley, reteamed from the previous year’s The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. On the beach, Mike (Kirk) is instantly attracted to the new-in-town Delilah (Walley), but she’s just as quickly put off by his braggadocio vibe of entitled swordsman. Overhearing Delilah tell pal Pebbles (Suzie Kaye, Women of the Prehistoric Planet) she prefers men to have brains, Mike dons a disguise of glasses and bowtie to pass himself off as his nonexistent nerdy brother, Herbert.

By gum, it works! Delilah starts falling for Herbert while challenging Mike to races in hopes of chipping away at his massive alpha-male ego. Meanwhile, Herbert — er, I mean, Mike — is faced with the dilemma fueling so many sitcom reruns in perpetual syndication: how to show up to one place as two people! It culminates in a 12-event, battle-of-the-sexes competition that finds Delilah and Mike racing one another using various vehicles (skateboards, boats, camels) and driving a motorcycle through an automated car wash. Each event is introduced with smilin’ Sid Haig (Spider Baby) twirling semaphore flags.

While Bikini World is built upon the subgenre’s tried-and-true teen themes, it also doesn’t quite have the off-the-shelf interchangeability of other beachsploitation efforts. The first giveaway comes in the first scene, as a trio of sunglasses in close-up relays frames (no pun intended) composed with true forethought. Oh, the flick is still frothy, but Rothman has infused it with an artfulness — pop and otherwise — and a feminist attitude among all the pulchitrude. If only she didn’t have to ditch the uniqueness in the film’s final seconds!

Possibly because the film came out in the trough of the beach-movie cycle, it boasts arguably the least square music performances from today’s vantage point — in particular The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and The Castaways’ “Liar Liar.” Not even the sight of Bobby “Boris” Pickett (as in “Monster Mash”) dancing to tunes while wearing a comically oversized hat can kill the good taste. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Tread (2020)

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On June 4, 2004, Colorado resident Marvin Heemeyer was mad as hell and was not going to take this anymore. After years of sparring with the “good ol’ boys” town hall and Granby city court over a sewer line dispute at his muffler shop, the middle-aged welder fought back in the only way he felt he had left: with a bulldozer he had secretly modified with enough concrete, steel and fully loaded rifles to become a homemade tank.

It’s quite a story. Although it sounds like Guns & Ammo fanfic, Tread is not pretend. It’s a documentary detailing the whole sordid story as a man-vs.-government squabble in a town of less than 2,000 people boils into worldwide headlines.

Tread spends about an hour interviewing the principals to get both sides of the story. Then we get a third: the truth, with footage of Heemeyer’s two-hour rampage of unbridled property destruction and threats to lives. As it unfolds, director Paul Solet draws upon his background in horror films (including Grace and a segment of Tales of Halloween) to ratchet up a considerable amount of tension and sustain it, even if Heemeyer’s real-life Killdozer moves at a mere 2 mph. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Foes (1977)

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If Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the grandaddy of UFO films — and it is — John Coats’ Foes is the step-grandson who belongs to the daughter who got disowned after she got pregnant — the second time, at church camp. But, hey, doesn’t the kid deserve a birthday card at the very least, with or without an enclosed George Washington?

So let us acknowledge Foes. The sci-fi obscurity was written and directed by Coats, in his only work in those roles to date, more or less as an effects showcase. Today, he’s an Emmy-winning effects artist, so as a calling card, it’s obviously successful. For all its ingenuity of depicting flying saucers for next to nothing, however, the film narratively proves to be one tough sit.

At an island lighthouse, a couple (Coats and Jane Wiley) watches in awe as a shiny, silver disc hovers and moves overhead. Meanwhile, at a NORAD command center, Macdonald Carey (Summer of Fear) does a lot of consulting (and, in close up, a little trembling) with a U.S. Air Force general (Jerry Hardin, aka Deep Throat of TV’s The X-Files).

Matte-shot manna, the dead-sober Foes is easy to admire, in an Equinox-y way of not letting one’s imagination be limited by funds, as much as possible. Even if that means your trippy 2001-esque sequence can only be achieved by having your cast members bounce around on a trampoline. —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

The Oscar (1966)

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WTFFrankie Fane loves the limelight. As played by Fantastic Voyage’s Stephen Boyd in a big, barking dog of a performance, Fane — a mere one letter from “fame,” folks! — is the (self-)center of his own universe at the Academy Awards, where he’s up for his first Oscar as Best Actor, against such stiff competition as Burt Lancaster and Richard Burton. How he got to that big night plays out in feature-length flashback in — what else? — The Oscar.

We watch as Frankie goes from two-bit traveling stripper spieler to accidental actor to hot new thing to box-office poison to (gasp!) pining for a TV pilot before a from-nowhere nomination saves his bacon. Along the way, he uses and abuses everyone in his immediate orbit: the talent scout who discovers him (Eleanor Parker, Eye of the Cat), his agent (comedian Milton Berle, playing it straight), his bump-and-grinder of a girlfriend (a super-sexy Jill St. John, Diamonds Are Forever), his eventual wife (Elke Sommer, The Wrecking Crew) and his best friend and manager, Hymie (crooner Tony Bennett, in his one and only film role not playing himself). Forget The Oscar; the marquee should have read The Asshole.

Thanks to the books The Golden Turkey Awards, The Official Razzie Movie Guide, Bad Movies We Love and their ilk, The Oscar has carried the burden as one of Hollywood’s legendary stinkers since its release, which isn’t playing fair. Oh, the melodrama is overwrought, all right, but I suspect its tarnished rep is more a case of Tinseltown not appreciating the suggestion that all is not golden in the moviemaking biz — especially one with such a nut-kick of an ending!

Immensely entertaining, The Oscar effectively killed the upwardly mobile careers of Boyd and director Russell Rouse, who co-wrote the screenplay with his regular collaborator Clarence Greene (Academy Award winners themselves for Pillow Talk) and some new kid named Harlan Ellison. What’s a revolutionary sci-fi author like him doing in a star-studded pic like this? While not entirely sure, I wonder if he is to blame for Frankie’s lingo-laden hepcat dialogue — to wit:
• “You fat honey-dripper!”
• “I’m up to here with all this bring-down!”
• “You’ve gotta be shuckin’ me!”

More narcissistic viewers might read this cautionary tale as more of an instruction manual, like Valley of the Dolls. While the two don’t reside on the same level of camp, make no mistake: They fucked. —Rod Lott

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