All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

Scream for Help (1984)

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One of the weapons utilized in Scream for Help is a Swiss Army knife — fitting for the film’s all-purpose refusal to commit to one genre. Ultimately, it’s a thriller, as sleazy as it cheesy. Would you expect anything less from Death Wish director Michael Winner?

At 17, Christie Cromwell (Rachael Kelly) is a regular Nancy Drew in Guess jeans. As she details in her diary (and narrates to us), she’s convinced her stepdad, Paul (David Allen Brooks, The Kindred), is trying to kill her mother (Marie Masters, Slayground) for her wealth. As becomes irrefutable with each increasingly ludicrous scenario, she’s not wrong.

After the film devotes about an hour to Christie’s snooping and sleuthing, screenwriter Todd Holland (1985’s Fright Night) turns the tables into a siege picture, as Paul and his posse trap the Cromwell ladies in their own house. Luckily, Christie holds the home-court advantage, although throughout Help, the girl is at turns crafty and clumsy, per the needs of the story beats, and Kelly (who never graced a movie before or since) makes an impression as the bratty but well-meaning heroine.

Having recruited Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page to score Death Wish II two years prior, Winner this time procures Zep’s John Paul Jones to provide the soundtrack. But it also finds Winner returning to the well for his reputation of being cruel to his female characters. The nudity required of Lolita Lorre (as Paul’s mistress) is udderly utterly humiliating, and when Christie loses her virginity (to her BFF’s BF, played by How I Got into College’s Corey Parker), she emerges from the sheets in horror at the amount of blood — and no wonder, as it appears she has pressed her palm into a full tray of red paint. One wonders if Winner cackled at himself for costuming the underage girl in a shirt emblazoned with the word “MUFFS.” (Probably.)

There’s another thing one wonders, as Christie relies on a bicycle and Polaroid camera as her tools of reconnaissance: What would Brian De Palma do? Better, to be certain, but I’d be lying to suggest I didn’t thoroughly enjoy Scream for Help as is. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Nightmare Cinema (2018)

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With Mick Garris in charge, the anthology film Nightmare Cinema is more or less Masters of Horror: The Movie, so at least you know what you’re in for. As helmed by Garris, the wraparound segments take place in Pasadena’s abandoned Rialto theater, where the projectionist is played by the Expendable Mickey Rourke, yet looks like Val Kilmer. Into this historic single-screen moviehouse wander five people — separately, but all curiously attracted to seeing their names on the marquee outside. Naturally, their individual stories are shown to them — and also to us, each from a director with horror bona fides.

The filmmaker with the least name recognition, Juan of the Dead’s Alejandro Brugués, comes first, getting things off to a roaring start with “The Thing in the Woods.” Beginning as a send-up of slashers, this well-choreographed piece of splat-stick aims for yuks and yucks before turning the tale on its (split-open) head, subverting everything you’ve just seen. It’s also the strongest of the quintet by far, so things are all downhill from here.

Having played in the anthology sandbox before, both successfully (Twilight Zone: The Movie) and less so (Trapped Ashes), Gremlins’ Joe Dante effortlessly offers “Mirari.” In this pleasingly lightweight bit of medical malpractice, a pretty young woman (Zarah Mahler, Beyond Skyline) agrees to let a cosmetic surgeon (a game Richard Chamberlain, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold) do a little nip-and-tuck to her facial scar before her wedding. The result is from-the-start predictable, yet fun to see played out.

In the Catholic school-set “Mashit,” Ryûhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train) turns in quite possibly the bloodiest thing you’ll see all year. Its subliminal flashes are a nice, eerie touch; its elongated end battle featuring a sword-slinging priest (Maurice Benard, Mi Vida Loca) is not. 30 Days of Night’s David Slade follows with “This Way to Egress,” a black-and-white tale that finds the ever-reliable Elizabeth Reaser (Ouija: Origin of Evil) traversing an office building structured like an actual nightmare. Containing a heavy dose of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, the segment may lack cogency, but because that is its point, that also is its greatest strength.

Finally, in directing the last story, Garris generously gifts himself the slot of showstopper. And boy, does he ever stop the show — right in its tracks, unfortunately. “Dead” is an unqualified dud, concerning a piano prodigy (feature-debuting Faly Rakotohavan) nearly killed along with his parents in a carjacking. Well, technically, he is killed, but emergency-room doctors are able to bring him back to life, albeit one in which he can interact with the deceased. It culminates in a twist worthy of a pretzel — the stick kind — and a floating-head speech from his mom (a wasted Annabeth Gish, Before I Wake) so poorly executed, it’s laughable.

Don’t waste your time with Garris’ contribution, which, at half an hour, wastes a lion’s share of the running time. Had Nightmare Cinema ended at four stories instead of five, it would be a dream. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Satan’s Mistress (1982)

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From B.J. Creators (!) comes Satan’s Mistress, a tawdry tale “based on the unusual experiences of a Northern California woman. As passion and love, once the cornerstones of her marriage, eroded, this woman became desperately lonely. There is a growing belief that in the world of psychic phenomena, the loneliness of a human being may be our direct link to…..the supernatural.”

Bond girl Britt Ekland (The Man with the Golden Gun) may be top-billed, but top-heavy Bond girl Lana Wood (Diamonds Are Forever) is the true chewy center of this bland possession confection. As Lisa, Wood is a housewife with a loving teen daughter (Sherry Scott, Swim Team) and a cruel husband (Don Galloway, Two Moon Junction) who prefers to insult her (“Pushy bitch!”) than inseminate her. That leaves Lisa high and dry and horny as hell.

Enter stage left: an evil spirit to take care of all that. First appearing as a crudely animated purple blob that looks like it escaped from the druggiest of John and Faith Hubley shorts, it pulls the bedsheets off Lisa’s nude body and goes to town. Strange things soon occur throughout the household, like tchotchkes tumbling to the floor and the family cat turning aggressive, but mostly, the story is about the sex. Once the spirit manifests in human, mustachioed form (Kabir Bedi, Octopussy), even more closed-door fornicating is had, with Lisa brought to orgasm every. Damn. Time.

Satan’s Mistress (alternately known under the name Demon Rage) may have beaten the über-similar The Entity to American theater screens in a sprint, but has lost the marathon of public consciousness. If you felt embarrassed for Barbara Hershey’s naked writhings as she was ghost-raped in that film, prepare to have that multiplied, because Wood was clearly hired here for two reasons: to be exploited. From her opening nightmare running slo-mo in a silky nightgown to a climax that sees a demon tearing said gown off her body, and with every coupling in between, director James Polakof (The Vals) takes care to present his star as boobzapoppin’ as possible, because let’s be honest: She’s quite lovely, and that’s all the movie has going for it. She appears to be okay with the gratuitousness of the proceedings, perhaps because the opportunity was one her superstar sister, Natalie, never would take. Either way, if “degradation” weren’t already spelled with double Ds, Wood’s pulchritudinous presence would merit an edit to the ol’ Funk & Wagnalls. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Momo: The Missouri Monster (2019)

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After helming nine documentaries on Bigfoot, Mothman and other cryptids, director Seth Breedlove finds a novel approach to investigate the creature that terrorized the small town of Louisiana, Missouri, in 1971 and ’72. Instead of using recreations of events, he lets footage from a heretofore-lost, low-budget, Boggy Creek-style film dramatizing the sightings carry that workload. The trick is that unearthed B-movie doesn’t exist — at least not until Breedlove and his merry band of co-conspirators made it, as part of the end result, Momo: The Missouri Monster.

Momo was a hairy, smelly, three-toed monster who, as one character in the faux footage relays, “looked like a bear mated with Jerry Garcia.” Subsisting on an all-dog diet, the biped was believed to be from outer space, further straining credibility. Cowboy-hatted host Lyle Blackburn (author of Rue Morgue magazine’s Monstro Bizarro) interviews the townspeople about the history and hubbub surrounding the creature. In between, he cedes the floor to hokey scenes from the supposed Momo movie, which depict encounters had by two picnicking young women, a couple of brothers playing outside and a Pentecostal prayer group interrupted midworship.

Breedlove’s print-the-legend conceit deteriorates from initial draw to tiresome gimmick, mostly because the film within the film’s acting is awful. Because the documentary portions are so earnest and nonjudgmental, I am unable to tell whether the “old” footage — treated to resemble a ropey, real-deal grindhouse print — is intended to be as cringingly amateurish as it plays.

With clips from Curse of Bigfoot, UFO: Target Earth and Snowbeast (a made-for-TV movie incorrectly categorized as a theatrical feature), the doc does a good job of luring in those whose believe in the American drive-in, but Momo: The Missouri Monster is really for those whose love of the cryptozoological courses through their veins at a breakbeat-level BPM. Viewers on that wavelength will want in on this hunt no matter what. —Rod Lott

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Action

Cuba Crossing (1980)

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Reads the opening crawl of the geopolitical goofball Cuba Crossing, “This motion picture is dedicated to all people who desire to live in a free democratic society.” Hey, that’s me! Maybe it’s you, too, but that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to like it.

Through chunks of mismatched stock footage, the opening depicts the United States’ botched Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. With his fellow soldiers slaughtered, Hudson (Robert Vaughn, Superman III) cries to the heavens, “Damn you, Kennedy!” Then, in present day, Hudson, now in the CIA, travels to Key West, Florida, to get his revenge; one of the film’s alternate titles sums that up succinctly: Assignment: Kill Castro.

To do that, Hudson hires bar owner and charter boat captain Tony (Stuart Whitman, Demonoid) to drop a couple of assassins on the island of Cuba and come back with a box of heroin. Tony agrees and soon after realizing he’s being played, but also enjoys the process — or at least the part of the process that involves being seduced by My Tutor MILF Caren Kaye.

Cuba Crossing unspools with muddled story points that fail to connect, perhaps keeping with the aforementioned crawl referring to the Bay of Pigs event as “confusing and frustrating.” Director Chuck Workman (the guy behind so many time-wasting Academy Awards montages) contributes to this by exhibiting something less than a sure hand; in one scene at Tony’s watering hole, it appears that three movies are being shot at once, what with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You” as a massive bar fight explodes and two significant-sized iguanas crawl on some dumb guy’s head while he just sits there. It’s a mess — both that scene and the movie as a whole.

Co-authoring the screenplay with Workman was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s Robin Swicord, who clearly got better. Without much thought into other aspects of the recipe, they throw a lot of ingredients into their soufflé, including cockfighting, black-on-black mortal combat, man-eating sea turtles, the badass Woody Strode (Vigilante) the fine-ass Sybil Danning (Malibu Express) and, as the ultimate villain of the piece says, “that Fourth of July gun bullshit!” —Rod Lott

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