All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Exo Man (1977)

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Remember the first-act origin of Iron Man, where Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark builds a bulky metal outfit while being held prisoner in Afghanistan? Draw that section out to feature length, reduce the budget to equal a 12-year-old’s allowance and you have Exo Man, a superhero movie made the way they generally were in the 1970s: for prime-time network television.

As wealthy old white men are wont to do, Kermit Haas (José Ferrer, The Swarm) instructs his goons to rob a bank so he can’t be outbid in the upcoming auction of the Gutenberg Bible. At said bank is college professor and physicist Dr. Nicholas Conrad (David Ackroyd, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home), who jumps into action as a good Samaritan and catches a fleeing robber. Naturally, this puts Conrad on the radar of Haas’ right-hand man (The Incredible Hulk’s Jack Colvin in women’s sunglasses); in a subsequent skirmish, Conrad not only gets clobbered, but paralyzed below the waist.

Good thing the doc’s been experimenting on how to alter the structure of matter — or something like that. All that matters is he succeeds — depicted through the not-so-special effects of magnets under the table — which enables him to “walk” again. To justify the title, he constructs a protective suit that makes him look like an unholy blend of a Shop-Vac and Conky from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, then goes out at night to fight crime, one sloooooow and lumbering step at a time. His Kryptonite? Toppling over.

Like Iron Man, Exo Man gives us the claustrophobic, you-are-there shots of Conrad’s super-sweaty face within the unforgiving helmet. Whereas Tony Stark’s is top-o’-line and outfitted with a holographic dashboard, Conrad’s relies on switches and buttons, all marked using an old-school Dymo label maker (and one button misspelled as “MALFUNTION”). As an underdog of a telepic, Exo Man carries a similar ambling, DIY aesthetic and plays the material with utter sincerity. Shot as a pilot, it never went further than this and didn’t deserve to — unlike writer Martin Caidan and director Richard Irving’s previous team-up, The Six Million Dollar Man. —Rod Lott

Thriller

Swallow (2019)

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Rosy-cheeked and hair bobbed, stay-at-home housewife Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett, 2016’s The Magnificent Seven) has it all, from the rich and handsome husband to the picture-perfect home — everything a woman could want, it seems … except purpose.

She finds it shortly after her hubs (Austin Stowell, Colossal) gets promoted and she gets pregnant, but it’s neither of these things. It’s a sudden and inexplicable compulsion to swallow random objects — a marble, a pushpin, a AA battery and so on — and, after passing them, to retrieve them, clean them and display them on a tray like precious baubles, as a reminder of what little independence and agency she possesses. As her new secret hobby progresses, the objects grow more threatening in size and shape and potential harm.

Hunter could be the next-door neighbor to Julianne Moore’s Carol White, the equally disillusioned and oppressed spouse at the center of Todd Haynes’ Safe. Looking every bit like a sexier June Cleaver in living color, the timid Hunter dresses the 21st-century part she is asked to play: the upper-class wife, doting yet subservient. She is an appendage of her self-absorbed Crest Whitestrip of a husband, a trophy for his collection, a commodity to be used and consumed and re-used, ad infinitum. That alone is a disturbing predicament — one amplified once writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis introduces the element of body horror.

Graduating from shorts to his first feature, Mirabella-Davis builds Swallow as a slow-burn story, set in antiseptic suburbia yet grounded in reality. With no flashy camera moves, the film’s frames often resemble photo spreads from Architectural Digest, with his Good Housekeeping protagonist suffering on every page.

Bennett is in the unenviable position of carrying Swallow’s weight entirely on her shoulders; its success or failure depends on her. More than up to the challenge, she gives a beguiling master-class performance. Her breathiness and mannerisms initially reminded me of Michelle Williams, which is not to say Bennett’s tremendous work here is any kind of imitation. All else being equal, if Williams were the star, Swallow would shortlist her for a fifth Oscar nomination; Bennett deserves that same consideration. Her film may not be for every palate — and it’s not — but for those whose tastes are amenable to a little arthouse horror in your psycho thrillers, it hits the spot. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

The Social Ones (2019)

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If you consider yourself any of the below, chances are I hate you:
• influencer
• thought leader
• public figure
• storyteller

All are narcissistic labels for that most 21st-century of phenomena: the “internet celebrity,” famous for being famous. Fewer targets mark themselves more ripe for skewering, which is why something like the mockumentary The Social Ones holds delicious appeal. I say “something like” because for all its potential, the movie is toothless where it should be ruthless.

The Social Ones is written, directed and produced by tyro Laura Kosann. She and her sister, Danielle Kosann, also star as the sane ones in this ensemble comedy. Working at the thankfully fictional magazine The National Influencer, they feverishly prep for — and stress-puke over — the following month’s fifth-anniversary cover shoot, which will showcase such superstars of social media as a teen-dream Snapchat king (Colton Ryan), a demanding Instagram fashion model (Amanda Giobbi), a high-strung YouTube chef (Desi Domo, The Conjuring), an insecure vlogger (Nicole Kang, TV’s Batwoman) and “meme god” Kap Phat Jawacki (Setareki Wainiqolo). For the sake of story, the stakes could not be any lower.

Although the film is clearly modeled from the Christopher Guest template, it is difficult to tell whether the jokes are driven by the script or improv. Either way, with few exceptions, they’re simply not funny, no matter how hard the actors try; unfortunately, most of them do so by cranking their exaggeration dials three or four notches further than the illusory nature of the mockumentary subgenre recommends, if not demands.

If Kosann had trimmed her scenes to align with the short attention span of the digital generation, the film could settle into a more natural comedic rhythm. As is, the bits drag on and on, with the most glaring offender being Kap Phat creating a meme in real time from disparate elements on a huge bulletin board — the kind you see on every obsessive-detective crime show, full of clippings and pushpins and string connecting them. The sequence is painful.

The movie is not a complete #fail, even if each occasional plus gets canceled out. Domo’s Holly Hunter lilt is endearing, as opposed to Giobbi’s annoying Judy Garland. Peter Scolari delivers an amusing-enough cameo, whereas Richard Kind grates. I enjoyed the magazine intern (Nicky Maindiratta) harboring a stalker-like same-sex crush on Ryan’s Snapchat kid, but we’re ghosted by a payoff. Kosann nails several aspects of the characters, from the minor (the mangling of “important” as “impor’ant”) to the major (vacuous self-importance), so she obviously knows her subjects well. I simply wish she had followed through on the setup by satirizing them instead of celebrating them. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Hitch Hike to Hell (1977)

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As a child of the ’70s, I remember our family station wagon driving swiftly past the first hitchhikers I ever saw — “dirty hippies,” my dad called them. They looked nothing like the comely, clean-cut cuties of Hitch Hike to Hell. And for the record, my father is nothing like the disturbed driver of this exploitation crime thriller.

As the delivery driver for a local dry cleaners, slow-minded and slap-happy, Howard (Robert Gribbin, Trip with the Teacher) runs across an inordinate amount of female thumb-extenders on his route, and gladly gives each a ride in his boss’ cherry-red van. Lord forbid one of the girls self-IDs as a runaway or talks smack on her mother, because then the lift — and her life — comes to an end. Otherwise, they’re delivered safely to their destination! So don’t accuse him of lacking a moral code.

Why all the fuss? It has to do with Howard being triggered over his missing sister, who up and vanished one day, leaving their mother (one-timer Dorothy Bennett) heartbroken. That’s all the backstory director Irv Berwick and his Malibu High screenwriter John Buckley offer — and maybe even more than we need. After all, from scene one — when, between cries of “You tramp!” Howard backhands a passengers out of her bell-bottoms before raping and murdering her — we just assume Howie has mommy issues and still lives at home … and we are correct.

With its commingling of sex and violence, Hitch Hike to Hell wastes no time proving itself worthy of oozing alongside producer Harry Novak’s more notorious Boxoffice International Pictures offerings like The Sinful Dwarf and The Toy Box. Although nowhere near explicit, the scenes of Howard’s attacks remain sleazy enough to make them unpleasant to watch. Outside of these sequences, Gribbin possesses an odd magnetism, although given his character, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s terrific in the role or just a bad actor. Not up for debate: Russell Johnson (the Professor of TV’s Gilligan’s Island) plays a police captain eager to solve the mystery of his town’s new serial killer, but rarely does anything besides smoke at his desk. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Astrologer (1975)

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Last weekend, while visiting my daughter at college, she asked if I had heard about the FBI study determining that the famous serial killers were all born under the zodiac signs of Sagittarius, Gemini or Virgo. I had to admit I had not … because, of course, it’s not true (God bless Snopes.com). Turns out, however, that’s more or less the concept at the core of The Astrologer, the ambitious, never ostentatious debut for filmmaker James Glickenhaus (The Exterminator).

Tuned to the frequency of The Final Conflict, the moody end-times piece operates on the idea that astrologer Alexei Abernal (Bob Byrd, meekness personified) has cracked the code of determining the “zodiacal potential” — better get comfy with hearing that phrase — of anyone in the world, simply by knowing one’s birthdate. This has enabled him to open the InterZod organization, secretly funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to keep tabs on burgeoning evil ’round the globe.

That task is extra-critical now that a mere 10 days remain before the second coming of Christ, and Sequel Jesus is in a real My Two Dads sitch, in that he could be fathered by one good dude or one bad mofo. Falling into the latter camp: Kajerste (Mark Buntzman, Posse), a mystic Indian with formidable beware-the-stare powers.

If you’re hoping all that starts to make sense at some point, stop. It doesn’t. And that’s A-OK because Glickenhaus, in adapting his father-in-law’s novel, has layered so much mindfuckery into the mix that the science — pseudo it may be (and, oh, do it be!) — need not hold up in court. Watchers of The Astrologer can make an educated guess as to the 23andMe paternal ID revealed in the final seconds, yet also have no clue of what’s coming in each scene before then. For what is essentially an airport paperback of a motion picture, that’s a laudable achievement.

Glickenhaus overcomes the limitations of a five-figure budget with the simplest of solutions; it’s amazing what a few computer blips and photo-negative transitions can do for bizarro ambience, not to mention a score by The Terminator composer Brad Fiedel and some truly unsettling edits by Victor Zimet (The Sex O’Clock News). Only Glickenhaus’ actors let him down; Byrd hatched no other credits, but as Alexei’s incelibate wife, Playboy centerfold Monica Tidwell (1979’s Nocturna) at least exudes a freckle-faced charm.

The Astrologer is not to be confused with another movie with the same name from the following year. The Astrologer is to be confused with Suicide Cult, an alternate, nonsensical title. The Astrologer also features a groovy fondue pot with real zodiacal potential. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.