All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Fantomas (1964)

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While based upon the French anti-hero created in 1911, the 1964 incarnation of Fantomas seems more influenced by 007. As portrayed by Jean Marais (Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast), the master criminal trades the top hat for a proto-Blue Man Group visage as a man-of-a-thousand-faces supervillain set to rival Dr. No and Auric Goldfinger in all things deadly and dastardly.

Arriving with a pair of OSS 117 secret-agent flicks already under his belt, director André Hunebelle gets the hardly gauche Gaumont picture going with a prologue ripped straight from the pulps, as a disguised Fantomas makes off several million francs of jewelry by “paying” with a check written in disappearing ink.

Two people in particular are intrigued by this brazen crime. One is the hotheaded, bald-headed Commissioner Juve (the delightful Louis de Funès, The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob), eager to bring the madman to justice. The other is Fandor (also played by Marais), a newspaper reporter eager for a good story — eager enough to make it up, complete with fake photoshoot, with the help of his decorative girlfriend (Mylène Demongeot, The Giant of Marathon).

Unamused at the front page that follows, Fantomas has the journalist kidnapped and brought to his underground lair, laden with high-tech spy-fi gadgetry (where do these evil masterminds find their contractors?), and explains a few things to his captive:
• He wants to control what the press writes about him. (How prescient!)
• He can re-create human skin, from face to fingerprints, which he dons to perpetrate felonies under the guise of upstanding citizens — like, say, Fandor.
• He “may kill people, but always with a smile.”

For fans of crime thrillers coated in camp, that smile may prove contagious throughout, as Fantomas-as-Fandor pulls a daring diamond heist during a rooftop beauty contest in broad daylight. As Fantomas-as-Juve terrorizes Paris with acts of random violence. As Fantomas gives Tom Cruise a run for his face-switching, Mission: Impossible money. As James Bond-ian submarines and helicopters come into play. As a silly slapstick car chase grows increasingly inventive until it’s nearly worthy of Buster Keaton.

Full of action, light of heart and swift of feet, Fantomas begins and ends as a good caper should: fun. One could argue it doesn’t end at all; rather, it presses pause on its own cat-and-mouse tale, as if awaiting the projectionist to switch reels and start the sequel (Fantomas Unleashed, unleashed the next year by the same team), but assuming you’re already “in,” you’ll hardly mind the inconvenience. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Family (2019)

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Take one middle-aged misanthrope with a block of ice where a heart should be. Mix in one child with unconventional social skills. Shake lightly. Let simmer for 90 minutes, give or take.

That’s hardly a new recipe for the movies (see: The Bad News Bears, Bad Santa, St. Vincent, et al.), yet one good reason exists for its refusal to fade away: When made correctly, the end result can be most satisfying.

Laura Steinel’s Family is most satisfying. Its initially loathsome, crusty center is Kate (Taylor Schilling, The Prodigy), so career-driven she apparently has never met — nor knows the name of — her only niece, Maddie (Bryn Vale, TV’s Red Band Society). While that’s hard to believe in real life, it’s the stuff of cringe comedy, which kicks into high gear when heretofore-absent Aunt Kate is forced to babysit the tween Maddie for a few long days and longer nights. Naturally, the two have little have in common; Kate likes her 401(k) and perceived superiority, while Maddie is more into, oh, chicken parmesan and magic swords.

Wise beyond her years and awkward as a three-dollar cryptocurrency, Maddie desperately seeks a familial connection that neither her parents nor Kate can provide. Mom and Dad (Krampus’ Allison Tolman and Jurassic World’s Eric Edelstein), while loving and well-meaning, don’t understand her; Kate simply doesn’t give a fuck. Well, at least not at first. She starts to turn around once Maddie entertains becoming a disciple of the hip-hop act Insane Clown Posse — you know, a Juggalo.

Having only seen Schilling in dramas, I found her to be revelatory. She is not afraid to go deep on portraying the hateful Kate, and that devotion is key to making her character’s arc work. She’s even funnier than the film’s real Kate, as in McKinnon (Office Christmas Party), who plays the nosy next-door neighbor. However, both ladies have Family stolen right out from under them by 20-year-old Fabrizio Zacharee Guido (World War Z) as Dennis, the convenience store worker who introduces Maddie to Insane Clown Posse and, accordingly, calls himself Baby Joker. Family is never more hilarious — and it is often that — than when he’s onscreen.

You’ll be glad this Family isn’t yours, but grateful of the time spent together. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Brain of Blood (1971)

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As the elderly ruler of a fictional Middle Eastern country, Amir (Reed Hadley, Zorro’s Fighting Legion), has a grand plan to beat his fast-approaching death — and, more importantly, the means to fund it: After his passing, he is to be wrapped in tin foil, be shipped to the United States and undergo secret surgery in which his brain will be transplanted into the body of a virile, strapping young lad. Amir’s scheme is quite ambitious; Al Adamson’s Brain of Blood is not.

Dr. Trenton (Kent Taylor, The Mighty Gorga) performs the illegal experiment, painstakingly protracted and presumably shown in real time. Although the doc has been blacklisted from every major medical institution, we know he is a legit cutter because of the anatomy skeleton and other science-class accoutrements in his laboratory. He’s just not the most ethical. When this mad scientist needs to “buy some time” to find that hot bod Amir desired, Dr. Trenton sticks the politician’s gooey gray matter into the nearest temporary brainpan: that of local simpleton Gor (John Bloom, Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein), a human can of Beefaroni whose face has been ravaged by redneck-poured battery acid. Sorry, Amir — consider your People’s Sexiest Man Alive dreams dashed.

As usual, Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol (Blazing Stewardesses), all big breasts and mile-high hair, corrals the female lead. Playing Amir’s wife, she’s not thrilled with her hub’s new makeover; it’s a toss-up whether she has it worse than the women chained like pets in Trenton’s basement by his pint-sized assistant (Angelo Rossitto, 1947’s Scared to Death).

Everyone in the movie speaks with weird pauses, as if waiting for the cue cards to be turned (“There is no chance … for failure”), and the outdoor climax is filmed not unlike a high school play. In that scene, you’ll hear the words “That’s a very noisy little gadget you have there,” which double as a descriptor as good as any for Brain of Blood, an Adamson project so unmemorable, I didn’t realize until afterward that I had already seen it a decade ago, under the alternate title of The Oozing Skull. While we’re discussing titles, it’s worth mentioning that Brain of Blood often is believed to belong to the Blood Island franchise. Girl, it wishes it could be that good. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

King Kung Fu (1976)

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According to producer Robert Walterscheid, King Kung Fu lost all but 20% of its roughly $200,000 investment. For regional indies, them’s the breaks; in this case, it is also totally deserved. Good job, American moviegoing public!

However, I discovered one good reason to see the massive turd that is King Kung Fu: You live or have lived in Wichita, the Kansas city in which this miserable monstrosity was made, and are curious about recognizing the local landmarks. Everyone else should be spared the agony by avoiding the film as they have avoided, well, Wichita.

As if the title failed to tell all, this movie thinks itself a spoof of King Kong by way of TV’s Kung Fu,* insomuch that a gorilla has been trained in the martial arts. Just as Kong was trotted out from Skull Island to big, bad New York City, Jungle Jumper (John Ballee, who should be thankful the gorilla costume hides his face) is shipped from the Orient, and set to make a promotional stop in Wichita. There, wannabe TV reporter Bo (Billy Schwartz) and camera operator Herman (the Michael Jeter-ish Tim McGill, Three for the Road) live in an attic and plot to leverage the ape’s appearance to jump-start their nonexistent careers, starting with renaming him King Kung Fu, which they have no legal right to do.

Bo and Herman’s scheme strikes the viewer as illogical for several reasons, not the least of which is it appears Walterscheid and writer/director Lance D. Hayes struggled to wrangle more than maybe two dozen people to show up at the Sedgwick County Zoo for KKF’s big unveiling scene. Said plans require the assistance of a shapely Pizza Hut employee (Maxine Gray) named Rae Fey.*

Other than Rae nicely filling out a bikini, things do not go according to plan. Herman loses his britches due to spilt banana oil on them. KKF escapes and the authorities follow. The police captain (Stephen S. Sisley), who acts like John Wayne, is named Officer Pilgrim.* KKF uses his karate on flag-helmeted cops while he wears an old lady’s fruit hat. KKF dons cowboy hat and neckerchief during a gunfight show. KKF disrupts a baseball game and frightens grocery store patrons. KKF kidnaps Rae and scales the downtown Holiday Inn, giving Bo a chance to play hero with a helicopter — and Hayes to play with dolls for “special” effects.

Every scene of King Kung Fu is a joke, yet not a single line coaxes a laugh. I suppose a preschooler might find fleeting delight in its feeble attempts at slapstick, but why purposely expose a child to pain? Hayes and his cast of nonprofessional, never-before/never-since actors try so hard … just at the wrong thing. Rather than aim for witty or funny, they want to be wacky and zany. In doing so, King Kung Fu stands (albeit in a hovering squat) as the screen’s equivalent of a clown in oversized red shoes, dancing a jig as it honks a handheld horn.

John Landis (speaking of helicopters*) already had unleashed the similarly themed, yet legitimately creative and amusing gorilla-amok comedy Schlock on a mere $60,000 in 1973. While both movies are equally inoffensive, King Kung Fu is infinitely more inept. —Rod Lott

*GET IT?

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Reading Material

American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography

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To cut right to the chase, as many skinflint movies of the studio in question did, any AIP fan is going to want to own Rob Craig’s American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography, and their desire will not go unrewarded. Ignore the off-putting cover, because the hefty McFarland & Company paperback delivers the proverbial groceries, thereby earning that penultimate word of its subtitle.

In nearly 450 pages, more than 800 projects are discussed, whether AIP made the movie from scratch or merely picked it up for quick-buck distribution. Although the studio was known for biker, beach party, sword-and-sandal and Poe pictures, it also dealt in European spy thrillers and Mexican kiddie matinees, in kaiju and mondo, in Larry Buchanan and Larry Cohen, and even S-E-X, from Dagmar’s Hot Pants to Deadly Weapons.

I’ve been mixed on Gutter Auteur author Craig’s previous books on B movies, but with this behemoth, he’s done the Lord’s work. All but a scant few of the titles are reviewed in full, which is quite an undertaking when you think about it (and I do). While reading a paragraph that goes on for more than half a page can start to play tricks on your mind, at least his write-ups don’t waste time with rehashing the entire story; plot synopses are limited to a line or two, straight from the AIP pressbooks.

For every name familiar to film fans (Roger Corman, Jess Franco, K. Gordon Murray, Doris Wishman, etc.) are several who never got close to such status. The mark of this kind of movie guide is whether you’re exposed to titles you haven’t heard of, and that’s where Craig’s book pays off big, putting me on the hunt for Bring Me the Vampire, Slave Girls of Sheba, The Hong Kong Cat, The Wife Swappers and so many, many more.

In mining so deep, Craig occasionally shares an opinion so contrarian and aggressively, as if there were no room for debate, it seems calculated. For example, the Joan Collins vehicle The Devil Within Her is “far superior” to “the pompous, humorless Rosemary’s Baby,” while Dario Argento’s Suspiria is summarily dismissed outright as “that artfilm bore.” Of Ivan Reitman’s Cannibal Girls, he writes, “Hard to believe this was produced and directed by the same guy who bored us to tears a decade later with Ghostbusters.”

A book this colossal is bound to have a few errors, with perhaps the most egregious being three spellings of The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini starlet Deborah Walley (Wally, Whalley). Ditto a few miscalculations; Hallucination Generation’s Daniel Steinmann is noted for having moved from acting “to direct a very few obscure features,” which makes one wonder in which world is Paramount Pictures’ hit sequel Friday the 13th: A New Beginning considered obscure?

On the mitigating side, Craig does offer the most apt description of Al Adamson’s work I’ve run across yet (“the viewer is advised not to attempt to understand, but to experience”), as well as a standalone chapter on AIP’s ventures into television programming, which is so oddly fascinating, I gladly would have accepted a book on that, too. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.