All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

The Boy (2016)

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theboyFleeing an unhealthy relationship, Greta (a pretty but perfunctory Lauren Cohan, TV’s The Walking Dead) takes a babysitting job overseas in jolly old England. An older couple, the Heelshires (played by Diana Hardcastle of Good People and Jim Norton of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs), are overdue for a much-needed holiday and need her to watch their young son, Brahms.

And oh, he’s such a doll — an actual, literal, life-sized doll they treat as flesh and blood, despite its creepy face. Rather than hightail it with an “Um, I think I left my socks in the States, BRB,” Greta stays — an admirable work ethic for a millennial, if also ragingly stupid.

theboy1More Michael Myers in visage than Mortimer Snerd, Brahms is “playful,” according to Mrs. Heelshire, which is quite the euphemism for “homicidal.” Nevertheless, Greta tends to her to-do list of daily duties with Brahms, from waking him at a precise time and reading him poetry to tucking him in bed with a goodnight kiss. (Insert your own wood joke here.) Not on the Heelshires’ numbered, typed tally: second-guessing every strange sound heard or unusual flash caught by peripheral vision in the Heelshires’ palatial estate — two things on which our au pair understandably spends an excessive amount of time.

Overcoming its thought-free title, The Boy exceeds expectations, as long as they’re set on low. After all, it is the work of William Brent Bell, director of the much-loathed The Devil Inside. Here, he toils not in the gutter of found footage, but the Gothic governess ghost story, except this modern update … well, I’ll never tell. I will say that the movie has more going on than first appears, especially for PG-13 studio fare, and that the built-in creepiness of Brahms boils to a twist that, while may not be dictionary-definition original, at least qualifies as unexpected. When’s the last time that adjective applied to mainstream horror with a teen-friendly rating? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Killer Legends (2014)

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killerlegendsAfter the acclaimed 2009 documentary Cropsey, what does filmmaker Joshua Zeman do for a follow-up? More of the same, with emphasis on “more.” See, rather than spend an hour and a half investigating the truth behind another urban legend, Killer Legends sees Zeman investigating four of them. The film’s style continues in that Cropsey vein, meaning I was glad I wasn’t watching this at night or alone.

Again acting as narrator and on-camera interviewer, writer/director Zeman gains a co-conspirator in researcher Rachel Mills. Together, they form a true-life Mulder and Scully, as they travel across the United States to dig into each case, in hopes of separating the myth from the mystery. Only the occasional and obviously staged bit of setup or transition strikes a false note; it’s no coincidence that both times they venture into pitch-black wooded areas, Mills manages to frighten herself.

killerlegends1As for their subjects, the Killer quartet entails the Texarkana Phantom, as depicted in 1976’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown; tampered Halloween candy; killer clowns; and the terrorized babysitter, popularized by 1979’s When a Stranger Calls. Clips of these films, their remakes and related movies — from Campfire Tales to The House of the Devil — give the doc added production value, but Legends manages to elicit enough chills on its own. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Treasure of the Amazon (1985)

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treasureamazonAs an opening title card informs us, René Cardona Jr.’s Treasure of the Amazon takes place in 1958 South America … yet the follow-up card states that the site of the story we are about to see is a “fictitious place.”

Okay, sooooo not in South America? Not along the Amazon? To what water-based landmark does this supposed Treasure belong? Help me out here, René!

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Cardona and co-writer Jacques Wilson soon distract you from those nagging questions by piling on undeveloped characters and storylines they won’t fully see through. Treasure of the Amazon is one of many old-school, serial-inspired adventure films that arose in Raiders of the Lost Ark’s whip crack of a wake. You want lucidity and motivation? Stick to Spielberg. You want the introduction to our hero be him purposely slicing off another character’s finger for reasons never fully explained? Cardona’s your hombre.

treasureamazon1That “hero” is Gringo, played by Stuart Whitman, whose barking delivery is set at maximum-Nolte and whose Invaders of the Lost Gold from 1982 also falls into the Indy-wannabe sweepstakes. Grizzled, bloated and forever sweaty, Gringo is making his second sojourn into the jungle to hunt for diamonds, after the first try some years before resulted in all his pals ending up as shrunken heads. Also looking for these gems is … well, everyone, but among the notable are a tight-shorted adventurer named Dick, who looks like George Michael on safari (Clark Jarrett, Hot Moves); a Nazi anxious for a Third Reich revival (Donald Pleasence, who would play a Hitler acolyte again in 1989’s River of Death); and two beautiful women, one of whom goes the whole movie without a top (Sonia Infante, Cardona’s Beaks: The Movie) and the other of whom goes without nostrils (Ann Sidney, Performance).

Treasure is so underwritten, it somehow appears complex — meaning, if you whiteboarded all the disparate narrative threads that pop up, you’d end up with a bunch of straight lines running parallel, from left to right. This is the kind of action flick that’s all about the points along those lines — the points at which alligators eat the expendable slaves, at which white people are felled by poisoned blow darts, at which a man is ripped apart by crabs (the film’s highlight, as if guest-directed by Lucio Fulci). It’s a fungal jungle of spiders and snakes and natives who look like they just came from a paint party. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Whiskey Mountain (1977)

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whiskeymountainAfter hitting his marketable peak with the 1976 Jaws imitation Mako: The Jaws of Death, Florida-based filmmaker William Grefé (Death Curse of Tartu) latched onto Deliverance’s hillbilly-hell vibe for Whiskey Mountain, his final feature. Although its depictions of the class battle between the rural and the (sub)urban may not make you squeal like a pig, the cut-rate thriller works all the same.

Diana (Roberta Collins, Caged Heat) and Bill (Christopher George, Pieces) are on the hunt for some 200 Confederate muskets her granddaddy supposedly buried up yonder in the North Carolina wilderness, durn near ’round Whiskey Mountain; before he died, he left a map to lead her to that fortune.

whiskeymountain1Bringing along camping equipment, motorcycles and their couple friends (Preston Pierce and Linda Borgeson of, respectively, Angels’ Wild Women and no other movie ever), Diana and Bill attract the ire of the local yokels just by being in their town. Challenged mentally and dentally, the rednecks harass the quartet to no end, setting fire to their camp as they sleep, attempting drowning in a raging river and, heck, even stealing a pair of women’s panties!

Swapping dueling banjos for an original Charlie Daniels tune, Whiskey Mountain stands mighty tall by the standards of the hicksploitation subgenre and regional indies overall. In a rather good way, Grefé catches us off-guard when the danger dial gets rudely cranked in the second half; see, he doesn’t have to do much to make his antagonists seem threatening, because general skeeviness tends to achieve that just fine by itself. And yet, he throws us for an arty loop with a double-rape scene that’s doubly disturbing because technically, we only hear it. All we are shown is a stationary series of Polaroids developing before our eyes; our mind fills in the rest. The effect is unsettling and raises the movie above the usual drive-in fodder, as does its purposely bitter final shot. —Rod Lott

Get it at Ballyhoo Motion Pictures.