All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Vigilante Force (1976)

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Baby-faced and butt-cut, White Line Fever’s Jan-Michael Vincent again plays a Working-Class Hero, this one named Ben, in the utterly oddball and oddly rewarding Vigilante Force, from George Armitage (Miami Blues). A farm machinist and single dad, Ben notices something just ain’t right in his small town of Elk Hills, California: namely, that influx of redneck oil workers. They’ve turned the place into a comically lawless swath of blue-collar chaos.

Low on officers because they keep getting killed in broad-daylight shootouts, the police chief (Judson Pratt, Futureworld) suggests Ben recruit some tough guys, starting with that no-good brother of his, Aaron (Kris Kristofferson, Convoy). A Vietnam vet who apparently never met a shirt he liked to wear for more than a few minutes, Aaron agrees and brings along some buds, all of whom are sworn in as lawmen. Initially, Aaron looks like the ideal hire, because he produces near-instant results in cleaning up the riffraff.

Too bad the power goes straight to Aaron’s bearded head. Acquiring a tone-deaf bar floozy (Bernadette Peters, The Jerk) as property, he has the bright idea to start charging local businesses for “protection,” and to shoot shit (and shit-kickers) up as he damn well feels like it, cockfight included! Suddenly, it’s sibling against sibling, Cain vs. Abel, concluding in an all-out war during a bicentennial parade. It looks and feels like a showdown from an alternate reality: On one side, a topless Ben in overalls; on the other, Aaron, wielding a bazooka while dressed like The Music Man. Many, many explosions follow, because producer Gene Corman learned well from brother Roger.

And so did writer/director Armitage, who cut his teeth on Private Duty Nurses (part of Corman’s five-film cycle of RN-fronted sex comedies), because he fills the screen with eye candy and other dirt-cheap visual effects. A drop-dead gorgeous Victoria Principal (Earthquake) plays the girlfriend of Ben, whose idea of romance is greeting her with a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon — a gesture that may make viewers cringe, knowing how Vincent torpedoed his career. There’s also a pre-WKRP Loni Anderson, uncredited as a buxom, brunette casino hussy named, naturally, Peaches.

One of the great unheralded pics in hicksploitation history, Vigilante Force comes packed with an uncredited Dick Miller (A Bucket of Blood) as a piano player, a lot of whores, a guy named Shakey, a girl named Boots, several grown men in coonskin caps, a fake Cloris Leachman and the real Andrew Stevens. Plus, David Doyle (aka Bosley from TV’s Charlie’s Angels) gets run over by a car, so there’s that, too! Now how much would you pay? —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

After Last Season (2009)

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WTFI’m deeply concerned about you, After Last Season. Are you all right? I fear that something is really, really wrong. Please know that I am here for you. What can I do to help?

After Last Season is written, directed, shot and produced by mystery man Mark Region, although those verbs do not accurately describe his actions. His movie is independent, in financing and of logic. Cineasts who salivate over random, static cutaways to improperly framed pieces of furniture are in for a real treat. Everyone else risks an aneurysm. Here are just five reasons why:
• All of the scenes — whether set inside an apartment building, a medical facility, a college classroom and a corporation’s headquarters — appear to have been staged in someone’s house.
• Walls, doors and objects are covered in so much paper, the movie is environmentally unsound.
• Some of those sheets of paper are signs or printouts, suggesting that a healthy line item in the budget was reserved for Kinko’s.
• Several props were constructed from cardboard (and then wrapped in more paper, natch), including an MRI scanner.
• Region claims his budget was $5 million. The only way that figure can be true is if one or more parties, wanting nothing to do with the project, priced themselves way beyond the boundaries of reason, and Region said, “Okay.”

Once Region realizes his story perhaps should at least resemble one, if only tangentially, here is what “happens,” although it takes a half-hour to reach this point: Matt (Jason Kulas, Slaughter Weekend) and Sarah (Peggy McClellan, The Pink Panther 2), meet to conduct a psychology experiment. We know this because Matt makes good on his assurance to Sarah that he will put a sign on the door, and it reads, “PSYCHOLOGY EXPERIMENT.” I mention that detail only because with Matt’s action, viewers are gifted with an actual moment of lucidity. (Unrelated, one of dozens of signs to be glimpsed throughout announces, “PINEAPPLE CLUB.” Rule 1: Do not talk about Pineapple Club.)

In the experiment, Matt and Sarah each affix a computer chip resembling a yellow Chiclet on their right temple. This connects them psychically, or something. As long as Sarah keeps her eyes closed, Matt can see what she’s thinking, or something. He attempts to guide her, like telling her to think of a letter; she answers, “From the alphabet?” Her thoughts give way to lonnnnnnnnnng stretches of rudimentary computer animation depicting slowwwwwwwwwwly floating shapes that, if I didn’t know any better, could come from stock footage tagged “Geometry on Parade.”

Sarah mentions she can see murders before they happen, or something. Before long, we’re shown animated visions of a pinball-faced man with a knife emerge from the wall, as if The Sims: Homicide Edition existed. Then, back in the experiment room, Matt and Sarah hear a Voice from Beyond; a ruler floats; furniture moves on its own; they get sliced by an unseen force; and then a real guy with a real knife enters, but he’s felled by a flying office chair, or something. I suppose I could have had a psychotic break.

It is ironic that a movie so concerned with the scientific topic of brain activity can have none of its own. Bearing a title that doesn’t even make sense, After Last Season operates from a plane of reality different from our own, because I suspect Region may do the same. Characters aren’t established; they simply appear, and most of them serve no purpose, unless Region simply wanted society to absorb his viewpoints on seafood allergies, lecture the audience on magnetic resonance imaging and/or bear witness to the painstaking, real-time conflict of two people trying to agree upon a weekday to meet: Dammit, Tuesday or Wednesday, hmmm?

Like an unmeasured mix of Minority Report, delusional disorder, Poltergeist, a schizophrenia diagnosis, The Invisible Man and Rohypnol dreams, the film may be an anti-film; in fact or in theory, it comes as close to that as my near five-decade existence has encountered. Blessedly Region’s lone effort to date, After Last Season is indescribable psychobabble, a masterstroke of stroke symptoms, the 35mm equivalent of an anus, incompetence cranked to 11 and, finally, Tommy Wiseau’s The Lawnmower Man. Or something. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Reading Material: Short Ends 7/24/17

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Fresh from editing last summer’s Klaus Kinski: Beast of Cinema book, Matthew Edwards follows up with another winner in McFarland & Company’s Twisted Visions: Interviews With Cult Horror Filmmakers. Just shy of two dozen directors sit for probing, lengthy Q&As; none are household names, unless your household is adorned with Nekromantik merch. (And if that’s the case, I politely decline your invitation for a sleepover.) Among the highlights: Alfred Sole reveals one of his actresses tried to kill herself during the Alice Sweet Alice shoot; Don’t Go in the House’s Joseph Ellison recalls facing the loaded rifle of the owner of the house they shot at; Rodrigo Gudiño traces his path from founder of Rue Morgue magazine to full-fledged filmmaker; and, in arguably the most interesting chapter, Jack Sholder spills the details about what an asshole Michael Nouri was throughout the making of The Hidden. Edwards is a strong interviewer, posing questions that have genuine thought behind them, which shows in the subjects’ passionate, candid responses.

In a summer when the overdue Wonder Woman has reigned supreme, one wonders if Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise didn’t give the Amazon princess a boost to smash the multiplex’s glass ceiling. In commemoration of the 1991 Oscar winner, Becky Aikman chronicles every step in its making — and subsequent leaps of influence — in Off the Cliff: How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge. I only wish the Penguin Press release were at least half as compelling as the film it commemorates. While Aikman is a fine writer, initial chapters focusing on screenwriter Callie Khouri alone tend to overstate the stakes or create drama when there appears to be none, assumedly to support one exec’s quote that all the planets aligned for this one-in-a-million moonshot. Her you-are-there approach works once the film’s tortured, elongated, barrier-strewn development process begins, including Scott not in the director’s chair, Goldie Hawn lobbying hard for a lead and failed sitcom supporting player George Clooney auditioning for the small, shirtless role that eventually made a star out of one William Bradley Pitt. One of the strongest parts of Aikman’s book is the epilogue, in which Hollywood remains a boys’ club, despite T&L‘s Zeitgeist success. No argument there.

Another McFarland trade paperback, this one from Lyndon W. Joslin, gets a fresh coat of blood-red paint for its third edition: Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel Adapted. More than half of the book finds the author comparing Bram Stoker’s 1897 epistolary classic to 18 subsequent screen adaptations, to see how faithful (or not) the likes of Tod Browning, Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Jess Franco, Dario Argento and Mel Brooks are — or, as the case often is, are not. While Joslin knows Stoker’s text inside and out, reading scene-by-scene beats of each film is tiresome; I quickly found greater enjoyment skipping these synopses and diving straight into his commentary. Later, less-exhaustive chapters focus on the Universal sequels, the Hammer cycle and notable vampire flicks that owe more to the Hollywood matinee than the Gothic text, from AIP’s Count Yorga to the Wes Craven-presented Dracula 2000. This book inadvertently makes a terrific companion to the publisher’s recent Vampire Films of the 1970s. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Out of the Dark (1988)

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As if a serial-killer thriller in which the targets are phone-sex workers weren’t ludicrous enough, Out of the Dark went one further by making said killer a former circus clown named Bobo.

And that, my friends, is why I miss the ’80s. Sigh …

The L.A.-based Suite Nothings is the dial-a-gasm operation in question, run by the blowsy, Jolt Cola-swilling Ruth (Karen Black, Airport 1975). For a reason that’s not really a reason once All Is Revealed at the end, her employees start to get killed after leaving the two-bit office for the night. First to go (unfortunately enough, because she’s strikingly beautiful) is a naive blonde (former Playboy centerfold Karen Witter, Popcorn) who meets Bobo in the park and plays invisible baseball with him until he cracks her on the noggin with a very real bat. Bobo commits his murders in full clown mask and while dancing jigs. The effect is bizarre, to say the least.

The investigating lieutenant (Tracey Walter, 1989’s Batman) suspects the girls’ headshot photographer, Kevin (Cameron Dye, Fraternity Vacation), but he’s the boyfriend of adorable Suite Nothings employee Kristi (Lynn Danielson, Ghoulies IV). Besides, there’s that drunken photographer (Geoffrey Lewis, The Lawnmower Man) making threats because he’s jealous of Kev’s success. And how about that creepy CPA (Bud Cort, 1987’s Bates Motel) in the same building as Suite Nothings who tries to get close to the ladies …

While Bobo-hunting around a cheap motel, Kevin tells Kristi, “You have to think of this as an adventure in sleaze,” and that advice holds true for the viewer. Full of boobs and blood, Out of the Dark is exactly the kind of un-PC exercise in watching pretty girls die that revolted critics, yet churned many a rental dollar. For a flick this sordid, writer/director Michael Schroeder (Cyborg 2) sure assembled one hell of a cast! Aside from those previously mentioned, the B-movie all-star team includes bits by Tab Hunter (Grease 2), Lainie Kazan (The Delta Force), Divine (John Waters’ muse in his final role) and executive producer Paul Bartel (Chopping Mall), in a wig that makes him look like a bloated Chris Elliott. This one’s not for the humorless, although somehow, Bobo antics aside, it is played arrow-straight. —Rod Lott

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Western

Jack the Ripper Goes West (1974)

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First things first: Jack the Ripper Goes West is a bullshit title. Second things second: I concede it is infinitely more marketable than the film’s original title, Knife for the Ladies, which simply sounds like the misheard end result of a kindergarten game of Telephone.

In the desert town of Mescal, the men and women are all agog and abuzz over losing yet another perfectly good prostitute to murder! The latest victim had her throat slashed not only horizontally, but postcoitally. Now that somebody’s homicide spree has hit the magic number of three and the cantankerous sheriff (Jack Elam, The Cannonball Run) has no cotton-pickin’ idea who’s responsible, Mescal looks yonder to St. Louis to hire curly-haired detective Edward R. Burns (Jeff Cooper, Circle of Iron), basically a Hercule Poirot for cowpokes. Investigatin’ begins; stabbin’ continues.

There’s nothing wrong with grafting the Whitechapel legend of London onto the dusty landscape of the American Western; mixing and melding of genres is encouraged. But director Larry G. Spangler (The Soul of Nigger Charley) and his writing team (one-third of which is Academy Award winner Seton I. Miller, screenwriter of such classics as Here Comes Mr. Jordan and The Adventures of Robin Hood) have no idea how to lasso that into a compelling story. Evidence of this shows in the picture’s schizophrenic nature, undecided if it should go whole-hog mystery or horror or whathaveyou. No amount of eye candy from Diana Ewing (Play It as It Lays) or glee gained from the bonkers performance of Ruth Roman (The Baby) can make up for Spangler’s cattle-drive pacing, which is why the funny ending isn’t worth the sit to get there.

If you’d like to see a true Ripping yarn with equally psychotronic leanings, watch Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper instead. Heck, or just watch the one with David Hasselhoff. Either leaves this in the dust. —Rod Lott

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