All posts by Rod Lott

Comedy

Bad CGI Sharks (2019)

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With just $6,257.34, Bad CGI Sharks does what the underwhelming fin-fronted film The Meg couldn’t do with $130 million: Be incredibly entertaining.

Matt (Matthew Ellsworth) loses his office job when he loses his cool, thanks to receiving after-the-fact news that Mom and Dad have shipped his no-good older brother to California to live with him. Embodying oil to Matt’s water, Jason (Jason Ellsworth) is a perpetually unemployed, possibly lobotomized man-child with a phallic man bun and a lofty dream on which, unlike his buttoned-up bro, he never gave up: to “make it” in Hollywood by finishing Sharks Outta Water, the 15-year-old screenplay they started writing — in longhand, of course — as kids.

Enter our Ricardo Montalban-sounding narrator, the mischievous Bernardo (a scene-stealing Matteo Molinari, The Silence of the Hams), whose magical director’s clapboard makes people’s movie ideas come to life. (Yeah, yeah — don’t ask. Just enjoy.) Suddenly, cheap-looking sharks are floating through Matt’s neighborhood and seeking human-sized snacks. So what if the creatures sometimes suffer rendering glitches while on the hunt?

Effectively writing, directing, producing and editing Bad CGI Sharks as a musketeer-thick trio, Molinari and the Ellsworth siblings turn many a shark flick’s deficiency into their primary selling point, and I’ve got to hand it to them: It’s kinda genius. The guys go so meta, they not only break the fourth wall, but ruin the soil around it so a fifth cannot be constructed. If you find the propulsive drum-and-bass score of the chase scenes self-aware, wait for the chat-show intermission at the one-hour mark.

Although not every actor in their unpaid cast is quite in lockstep, Ellsworth/Molinari/Ellsworth demonstrate a firm grasp on the rhythms of film comedy, both in camera and on the page, resulting in a knowing parody that earns each of its many laughs. Sharksploitation has never looked this good looking this bad. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

The New Kids (1985)

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With their parents perishing in a car wreck, military-base teens Loren (Shannon Presby, Trackdown: Finding the Goodbar Killer) and Abby MacWilliams (Lori Loughlin, Back to the Beach) move to Florida to live with their slovenly Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones, Invasion U.S.A.). They earn their keep by helping get his decrepit, two-bit amusement park, Santa Funland, off the ground.

They earn something else, too: the ire of the local gang of high school hick thugs, led by the drug-dealing Dutra (James Spader, Avengers: Age of Ultron), all for one unreasonable reason: Abby won’t go out with them. Outraged at this affront to their rapey overtures, Dutra and his fellow detritus pledge to make the MacWilliams siblings pay — quite literally with their lives, after a couple rounds of garden-variety vandalism fail to convince Abby to put out. It all culminates as the viewer would hope: on the after-hours grounds of Santa Funland, with the villains using shotguns and our heroes using jerry-rigged carnival rides.

This late left turn into terror shouldn’t surprise anyone, seeing how The New Kids is directed by Sean S. Cunningham, he of the landmark slasher Friday the 13th. Now, James Spader is no Jason Voorhees, which is to say that while the former’s villainous turn failed to achieve the latter’s icon status, the actor is absolutely slimy to the point of serpentine — a petulant, entitled alpha male whose assholiness resonates even more today with a realism the supernatural slayer Jason can’t even hope to match (not that he would).

As intense as Spader is, treating the B movie as A material (as was his wont), Presby is nearly as magnetic – a surprise since The New Kids marks his film debut, and doubly a surprise since he never did another. In fact, his acting career — all four years of it — ended with the ’85 calendar. Slow-motion shots of his athleticism aside, presumably to showcase his package, Presby has more presence than his ultimately famous screen sister. Among the supporting cast in too-small parts are Eric Stoltz (Anaconda) as a super-dweeb and Tom Atkins (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) as the ill-fated MacWilliams patriarch.

Cunningham’s instincts have always been stronger as producer than director, so he seems mostly disinterested in Stephen Gyllenhaal’s script until the finale places him back within his comfort zone. Viewers will not only sense it, but may think likewise. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

Reading Material: Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies

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If the Vanessa Morgan-edited (and highly recommended) When Animals Attack: The 70 Best Horror Movies with Killer Animals were your Intro 101 to the naughty-nature subgenre, consider Dominic Lennard’s Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies the subsequent AP class.

Part of SUNY Press’ Horizons of Cinema series (as was Lennard’s Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film of 2015), Brute Force examines the be(a)st that Hollywood and off-Hollywood movies have to offer in depicting man’s battle against eight-, six-, four- and no-legged creatures. This type of terror resonates because, Lennard writes, it “hits us with a radical demotion” on the scale of superiority — not to mention the food chain.

He may discuss the sexual politics of 1976’s King Kong and the gender depiction of bears, but don’t mistake Brute Force as a force of boredom or wokeness; it’s a lively and spirited discussion of a particular and peculiar kind of flick. In other words, the contents contain a serious — and seriously engaging — mix of film criticism analysis that just so happens to include Sharknado — y’know, the Syfy shitnado in which, “as the film’s title promises, we see a great swirling tornado flinging sharks around its perimeter.”

Amid chapters on killer insects, snakes and dogs, Lennard takes a mid-book break to focus not on a member of the animal kingdom, but on the eyes — both for the subgenre’s use of shots from the predator’s POV (as in Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen) and for those creatures’ propensity to pluck out our peepers (as in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds).

Lennard’s writing style exhibits humor without snark (“Dark lord among diminutive of terrors is of course the spider”), often coming across as deadpan — a real plus. Other than Brute Force’s investment-style price, the only quibble I have with it is the author’s occasional misclassification of movies to fit the theme; never have I ever heard of The Edge or The Grey or The Ghost and the Darkness referred to as anything but adventure thrillers. Alas, I’m more than willing to throw him a bone. —Rod Lott

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Sex

The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962)

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Something’s afoot — and abreast — in room 229 of the Happy Holiday Hotel, and a cowardly bellboy wants to see for his peeping-Tom self in The Bellboy and the Playgirls. The nudie-cutie film would have no shelf life, if not for being directed in part by Francis Ford Coppola, in one of two such pics the eventual Oscar hat-tricker helmed early in his career.

Also from 1962, Tonight for Sure was the other. Both starred Don Kenney in his only acting credits, here playing the titular bellboy — and, by today’s standards, also an incel, since he admits not knowing how to act around the girls for whom he madly lusts. He’s taking a correspondence course titled How to Be a Hotel Detective and Be Liked by Women, which we know because he flat-out tells the audience; one could say he breaks the fourth wall, but it looks like the production couldn’t afford more than two. His dual studies come in handy when he grows suspicious and aroused over 229’s group of beautiful ladies, whom he wrongly assumes are prostitutes and/or porn stars, because that’s comedy. Right?

Either scantily clad or nude, the women are led by the bountiful June Wilkinson (Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie), who — surprise of all surprises, given her Playboy popularity at the time — is the only one not to appear naked. The bellboy dons a number of disguises, drag included, in order to penetrate the room so he can take the ladies’ measurements and see them in the altogether, resulting in burlesque-ready exchanges like this:

“Get out of here!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’re standing on my foot!”

All of the scenes with Wilkinson’s crew appear in eye-popping color, with the final 10 minutes (with perhaps cinema’s only cold-cream fight) in eye-popping-er 3-D. Most of the rest of the film actually comes from another: 1958’s Sin Began with Eve, a German black-and-white snore about a stage director (Willy Fritsch, Adventure in Rio) schooling his über-prudish actress (You Only Live Twice Bond girl Karin Dor) on the history of sex, with fanciful flashbacks to the likes of ancient Greece and gay Paree, all rendered on cardboard sets. In a poor attempt to tie this repurposed footage to his own, Coppola shot monochrome transitions of the bellboy as a side-gig stagehand.

Surprisingly progressive in some ways and astoundingly conservative in others, The Bellboy and the Playgirls is consistently terrible, and yet less embarrassing than Coppola’s Jack. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Greener Grass (2019)

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When committing to a viewing of Greener Grass, it’s important to know what you’re in for: Not even four minutes in, the lead character gives her baby away to her admiring best friend. This on-a-whim ceding of parental rights is played for laughs.

If you don’t find any humor in that (much less the incontinent grade schooler to come), I offer these irrefutable, inconvenient truths:
1. Greener Grass is most decidedly not for you.
2. You are wrong.

Expanded for the better from its creators’ 2015 short, Greener Grass is not only the funniest film of the year thus far, but destined to grow in estimation as the right audiences find it (versus the other way around) and a fervent cult forms. Much like David Byrne’s initially ignored, now-celebrated True Stories, its loose vignettes form an absurdist whole that redefines deadpan.

Written and directed by its stars, Upright Citizens Brigade alum Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, this satire of the suburbs posits an upper-middle-class middle America covered in a puke of pastels — a neighborhood where golf carts have replaced cars, children bear names like Citronella, and all the adults wear braces on their teeth. Those smiles may be forced, but the movie’s humor isn’t. Lines such as “Do people like my peas?” aren’t read as jokes, because the cast — including current Saturday Night Live utility player Beck Bennett — exudes confidence in knowing viewers attuned to Grass’ admittedly narrow wavelength of peculiarity will catch them.

The ostensible plot — a yoga-teacher neighbor is murdered by the local grocery store bagger — is, much like the characters DeBoer and Luebbe so skillfully skewer, just for show. That both ladies very much look the part makes their pic all the more deliciously subversive. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.