All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

Satan’s Doll (1969)

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Upon the death of her rich uncle, Elizabeth (Erna Schurer, Strip Nude for Your Killer) travels to his castle for the reading of his will. With her fiancé (Roland Carey, The Diamond Connection) in tow, she learns she is the sole beneficiary of his estate, castle included! It’s such an incredible piece of property, if you can pay no mind to the still-in-use torture dungeon or the insane woman in one of the bedrooms.

In the two-day wait for paperwork processing, some locals tell Liz her uncle was planning to sell the place, which is news to her. Others are pushier, needling her about taking it off her hands. At any rate, the requisite strange things begin to occur, from nocturnal visions and a tree bursting through the bedroom window (13 years before Poltergeist) to, yep, that old chestnut known as first-degree murder.

A good reason exists for Satan’s Doll being obscure: so is its writer and director, Ferruccio Casapinta, whose filmography starts and ends here. Despite its nasty-sounding title (no doubt made nastier if confused with an X-rated film from 1982 with almost the same name), the movie is rather cheerful in its coloring and overall harmless — a minor giallo more Scooby-Doo than Sergio Martino. Instantly forgettable, this Doll contains enough of the “old dark house” trappings to interest viewers, even if the mystery at its core is hardly the stuff of Agatha Christie. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Too Scared to Scream (1984)

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In the woefully mistitled Too Scared to Scream, residents of the fancy-schmancy apartment building The Royal Arms in New York City start turning up stabbed to death. Investigating are the grizzled Lt. DiNardo (Nightkill’s Mike Connors, who also produced) and his ineffectual, incompetent young partner (Fatal Attraction’s Anne Archer in a feather-duster hairdo), with a near-invisible sideline assist by a token minority (Leon Isaac Kennedy, Hollywood Vice Squad).

Suspicion quickly falls on the Arms’ odd doorman (Ian McShane, John Wick) who takes his job so seriously that he quotes Shakespeare in everyday conversation and refuses all sexual overtures from the elderly widow upstairs (Play It as It Lays’ Ruth Ford, in her final role). He also lives with his wheelchair-bound mute mother (six-time Tarzan mate Maureen O’Sullivan) and delivers intellectual insults: “You, sir, are a vulgar, feverish little clod.”

While that setup and its marketing materials promise a slasher film, Too Scared to Scream isn’t. Instead, it’s a mystery. More specifically, it’s an old-fashioned police procedural — the kind likely to feature (and does!) an unfazed medical examiner smoking a stogie while handling disembodied limbs. The only film directed by The French Connection villain Tony Lo Bianco, it’s light on true suspense, but likable enough, as it’s fun to watch DiNardo go through the motions of feet-on-the-streets detective work, to witness Archer ridiculously disco-dance in her living room, and to see McShane marinate his mama’s-boy part with more panache than it deserves on paper.

Incidentally, if not ironically, it’s written by Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold, the duo behind The Prowler, one of the more notorious slashers. That they didn’t give Too Scared the same bloody treatment is a shame only in the sense that the mask on the poster never appears. Lo Bianco compensates with a terrific cast that includes Jaws mayor Murray Hamilton, Home Alone dad John Heard, Creepshow bitch Carrie Nye and a couple of naked ladies more than willing to let his camera leer. —Rod Lott

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Action

Savage Harbor (1987)

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Whether known by Savage Harbor or Death Feud, this flick is one of those direct-to-video numbers in which nameless bad guys get shot while standing at the top of hills and stairwells so the camera can catch them taking a tumble, because such action is cheaper than an explosion on the beach. But there’s one of those, too.

And also Frank Stallone (Terror in Beverly Hills), so this sack of garbage already is three-for-three.

Stallone dons a stupid cap to play Joe, a longshoreman on leave who saves a woman named Anne (Karen Mayo-Chandler, Out of the Dark) from being raped. Joe and Anne immediately fall in love, and why shouldn’t they with such deep conversations as this, presented in full:

Joe: “Do you like avocados?”
Anne: “What?”
Joe: “Just a thought.”

Annnnnd scene.

After a romantic montage featuring outercourse in the park, Joe proposes to Anne before he has to leave for six months. She accepts. Unfortunately, Anne is on the run from Harry (Anthony Caruso, Mean Johnny Barrows), a human trafficker whose goons catch up to her, kidnap her from a grocery store and plunge her full of so much smack that she’ll work as a sex slave.

The horse works so well that she thinks every trick is Joe, rubbing her gartered-and-pantied self all over random guys as she groggily coos his name on loop. When Joe returns to shore, he sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong in order to find his beloved. And when he does, ooh, Harry better watch out! I’d say the rest of this sentence were a spoiler if it weren’t a compelling reason to watch: Joe shoots him in the dick.

Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline existing to achieve the magic 90-minute running time, we follow Joe’s fellow sailor buddy, Bill (Christopher Mitchum, The Executioner Part II), who claims he “can eat 40 eggs an hour.” Bill also finds love, with two-bit bar stripper Roxey, she of the Santa-hat pasties. That she’s played by Lisa Loring, The Addams Family’s former Wednesday all grown up (and out), makes the match — and the movie — that much weirder.

One could accuse the final film of writer/director/producer Carl Monson (Please Don’t Eat My Mother!) of being misogynistic … and one would be right. Outside of extras, each and every one of its female characters toils in the trade of transactional flesh. However, it would be unfair to reduce Savage Harbor to that label … because it’s also homophobic. What DTV actioner of the time wasn’t?

By no measure is Savage Harbor good, but it does feature Don’t Answer the Phone’s corpulent killer Nicholas Worth as one of Harry’s minions, another minion being dragged through California traffic by a rope, as well as an attempted assassination by trash truck. Not every movie can make such a double-barreled claim. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Girl on the Third Floor (2019)

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I’m always leery of movies that star pro wrestlers, yet I’m not sure why. After all, Kane killed it in See No Evil, John Cena has become a gifted comedian in the likes of Blockers, and Dwayne Johnson is doing just fine, thanks. So let’s blame Hulk Hogan.

Now comes a WWE star I’ve never even heard of, CM Punk (née Phil Brooks), in the indie haunted-house shocker Girl on the Third Floor. He’s pretty good. The film is great.

With his patient wife (Trieste Kelly Dunn of the brilliant Cold Weather) about-to-burst pregnant, Punk/Brooks’ Don is moving his family to a Victorian home in a picturesque suburb. Because the house needs a lot of TLC, he moves in beforehand for a top-to-bottom renovation. After all, marbles drop from the upper stories, one wall sports splotches of mold, and the electrical outlets throughout look vaginal to the point of Giger-ian, complete with oozing fluid not unlike semen. The place even comes with a built-in seductress (sexy Sarah Brooks, 100 Days to Live) who may be a ghost.

Needless to say, Something’s Not Right. And it’s a doozy.

While a seasoned producer of genre movies like Big Ass Spider! and XX, Travis Stevens has never made a feature before. He’s obviously been observing the craft, however, because in his first at-bat, he reveals a keen eye for composition and a mastery of mood. Part of the latter is knowing when to employ the score (composed in part by legendary music producer Steve Albini), which manages to support the story, rather than telegraph it.

He also gets a semisolid performance out of Brooks (also in the Rabid remake), who seems to know his limitations and tries to stay within the lines. Aside from the farm of tattoos, Brooks looks like Jon Hamm after a 30-day juice cleanse. His character makes an unforgivable choice in Act 1 that feels like a misstep at first, until we gradually learn the man is deeply flawed. As the practical effects keep piling on, the viewer wonders if Don might have earned all the hell coming his way, which makes for a more interesting picture. By the end, Girl on the Third Floor is the film that the Stevens-produced We Are Still Here so badly wanted to be. —Rod Lott

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Action

Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard (1967)

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Two years after his last caper, master criminal and master of disguise Fantomas (Jean Marais) returns with his biggest and bestest scheme to date: Tax the rich on their right to live, under penalty of execution! This he poses to the world’s third-wealthiest man, Lord MacRashley (Jean-Roger Caussimon, The Return of Dr. Mabuse), who’s not too keen on the idea.

Consulting with his sick-money buddies the world over, MacRashley decides to use his supposedly haunted castle as a trap to snare Fantomas, with Commissioner Juve (Louis de Funès), journalist Fandor (also Marais) and Fandor’s fiancée (Mylène Demongeot) as bait …

… which sounds all fine and dandy, except it soon becomes clear that perhaps this was done for budgetary reasons, to keep the story confined to one location, clearing the way for a series of sequences — a séance, a fox hunt and business about hunting bedsheet ghosts — for Juve to bumble his way through. This effectively shoves Fandor to the sidelines as the film basically bides its time until the last 20 minutes, when they return to the plot so things can take off — even literally, what with Fantomas’ escape rocket.

A limp “FIN” to an otherwise fine trilogy, Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard is a lot like having that third child: Yeah, you love it, but no way are you going to make a baby book this time around. After this one, returning director André Hunebelle and the gang called it quits, which is probably for the best, before a mere trifle became a pure trial. —Rod Lott

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