All posts by Rod Lott

Documentary

The Nightmare (2015)

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nightmaredocSkepticism prevented me from seeing how Room 237 director Rodney Ascher could make a compelling feature documentary on the subject of sleep paralysis. The Nightmare is not only a mind-grabber, but a sphincter-clencher. Even those viewers who do not struggle with sleep paralysis — read: about 93 percent of us — should find it unsettling all the same. After all, bad dreams are bad dreams: relatable, no matter what might scare you.

Yet sleep paralysis is more than mere bad dream. It’s a condition in which the sleeper hallucinates a terrifying scenario, yet feel physically unable to move a muscle in reaction. In interviewing eight people spread about all jagged corners of our nation, Ascher finds startling commonalities in their stories, which Nightmare re-enacts with disturbing precision and visuals simultaneously simple and creepy as hell: shadows, static, glowing red eyes. (Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk to you again, about why on earth you’re doing this to me!)

nightmaredoc1I should have known better; the guy made an eerie, hair-raising short about the Screen Gems logo that, after three viewings, still gives me the shivers. The Nightmare scares while serving the interest of science, and raises an intriguing theory about the correlation of events reported by sleep paralysis sufferers and by people claiming to be alien abductee; in other words, the latter may “just” be the former and don’t know it.

Anyway, good night! Sleep tight! Don’t let your anus be probed! —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Five Golden Dragons (1967)

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5goldendragonsFor one of his myriad adaptations of Edgar Wallace works, brand-name producer Harry Alan Towers takes us to Hong Kong to meet Five Golden Dragons.

Our inadvertent tour guide is Bob Cummings (Beach Party) as American bachelor Bob Mitchell, whose sole purpose for hanging at the Hilton seems to be to charm the bikinis off the lovely women he meets. Through a roundabout way — one that the iconic Hitchcockian characters played by Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart knew all too well (and, in the latter case, too much) — Bob finds himself inexplicably implicated in the death of a man, soon followed by several more for heightened intrigue. He’s innocent, of course, but the local police inspector assigned to investigate (Roy Chiao, Bloodsport) isn’t easy to convince.

Who’s to blame? The members of the titular international syndicate that controls the illicit gold market. This society of “the most evil men the world has ever known” is so secretive, even its quintet of members don’t know one another. When they do meet, they lumber around in ill-fitting, parade-ready dragon heads that look utterly ridiculous instead of threatening.

5goldendragons1The film’s marketing raised much ballyhoo over who was underneath those disguises, each “a great international star”: Christopher Lee (1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles), Brian Donlevy (The Curse of the Fly), Dan Duryea (The Burglar) and George Raft (that year’s Casino Royale). Unhidden is the film’s most terrifying villain: Klaus Kinski (Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu) as Gert, chain-smoking his way through daily duties of assassination and intimidation.

A bumbling everyman, the affable Cummings was a big TV sitcom star at the time, and plays his lead role less like an action hero with global smarts and more like Bob Hope with a bubble gum habit. He cracks wise at every opportunity, even though said cracks elicit no laughs and the movie by Towers’ four-time collaborator Jeremy Summers (The Vengeance of Fu Manchu) is assuredly not a comedy, despite evidence to the contrary in one life-or-death chase sequence scored with slide whistles and bass drums.

I have no clue if Wallace’s source material was set in Hong Kong, but I do know Towers sure got his money’s worth shooting there, as the picture doubles as a big, bright travelogue that captures the flavor of the Chinese city’s exotic locales, indoors and out. Illuminating the foreground are three criminally beautiful women in Margaret Lee (Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs) and, playing sisters, the drop-dead gorgeous Maria Perschy (1972’s Murders in the Rue Morgue) and Towers’ wife, Maria Rohm (1974’s Ten Little Indians). Each had me mentally booking a one-way ticket. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

The Gorilla Gang (1968)

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gorillagangAlthough today’s audiences know him for co-scripting 1933’s classic King Kong (if they know him at all), the prolific Edgar Wallace once held name recognition so powerhouse-high, he was his own brand, with hundreds of his novels and short stories adapted for the screen. Some of them, The Gorilla Gang included, even begin with an audio welcome from the man as his blood-spattered logo appears over the action.

So what if he had been dead for more than 30 years? The Wallace moniker made bank, baby! It’s easy to see why. His mysteries are simple, often deceptively so, as is the case of this Gang, alternately known as The Gorilla of Soho.

gorillagang1Represented by Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert, in a role he reprised for the following year’s The Man with the Glass Eye) and his investigation partner, Sgt. Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen, No Survivors, Please), Scotland Yard is baffled by a string of slayings in which the victims — all males traveling from other countries, yet with no UK relatives — are killed only on misty nights and retrieved from the Thames. Our heroes also possess knowledge of a syndicate whose members work solely under the shroud of fog and dressed in gorilla costumes, but Perkins and Pepper fail to consider potential linkage, despite it being as obvious as a connect-the-dots page torn from a preschooler’s coloring book.

It takes the translation skills of former nurse and current African language specialist Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas of Wallace’s The College-Girl Murders, also directed by Alfred Vohrer) to realize that 1+2=homicide, after she is brought in to decipher semilegible hieroglyphics scrawled on a plastic baby doll discovered on the waterlogged corpse of a millionaire wool merchant from Canada. Bringing Ms. McPherson along for assistance, romantic possibilities (for Pepper) and eye candy (for you, dear viewer), the law enforcers track leads that take them to a Salvation Army-esque nonprofit, a nudie bar, a nunnery and — none too soon — the lair of the acrobatic “apes.”

Aided tremendously by a swingin’ Peter Thomas score as big and brassy as some of the ladies for hire in the aforementioned club, The Gorilla Gang is colorful with its criminals, both in characterization and eye-popping appeal. Going down smooth, just a tad naughty and (in case you weren’t paying attention the first time) involves murderers disguised as goddamn gorillas, this is one Bacardi-and-dice-game of a killer krimi. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Chosen Survivors (1974)

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chosensurvivorsI’m not going to, but one could make an infographic with all the numbers Chosen Survivors throws at you in its opening scenes:
• one global thermonuclear war
• 214˚ F heat on Earth’s radiated surface
• 168 men and women selected by the U.S. government to be saved
• for confinement terms of five years
• across 12 locations
• 1,758 feet underground
• in an 18,000 square-feet space
• with a shitload of vampire bats

Okay, so “shitload” is a little vague, but those bloodthirsty bastards move too damn fast — even the fake ones! — for the viewer to count. Let’s call it “thousands” and leave it at that. Besides, they’re not supposed to be there; it’s important that the 11 humans residing in the bunker (in which the film is set almost entirely, save for a disorienting elevator ride at its bookends) repopulate the planet. Mostly unlikable, they receive the lowdown via prerecorded bits read by an inexpressive blonde woman (Kelly Lange, Spy Hard) who provides instructions and activity tips as if she were Julie, Your Dystopic Cruise Director.

chosensurvivors1Played by such names as Jackie Cooper (Superman’s Perry White), Bradford Dillman (Joe Dante’s Piranha) and Richard Jaeckel (John Carpenter’s Starman), these handpicked sperm donors/receptacles are largely scientists of one specialty or another, except for the one African-American man who happens to be an Olympian (Lincoln Kilpatrick, Stuart Gordon’s Fortress), because somebody’s gotta do all the rock climbing in the climax.

In one of his scant few movie gigs, prolific TV director Sutton Roley (Snatched) displays the guiding hand of someone who appears to be as disengaged as you or I. Whether thousands of bats or millions or billions, those creatures only get you so far through the dull stretches of bickering, and that unscientific distance is not very far for a thriller as confining — both physically and creatively — as its sterile-white sets. What Roley’s doomsday picture doesn’t convey — yet absolutely should — is claustrophobia. Chosen Survivors is too mundane and stuffy to approach such low-hanging levels of tension. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Last Slumber Party (1988)

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lastslumberpartyOne week after prom, the school year is over and three girlfriends decide to celebrate with a slumber party … The Last Slumber Party, if the scrubs-wearing maniac with surgical scalpel and frontal lobotomy has anything to say about it. (He so does.)

Despite strict parents who oppose boys and booze, Izod-clad good girl Linda (Joann Whitley) hosts the party for her two bitchy, sexually active friends who don’t seem all that friendly toward her: Tracy (Nancy Meyer) and Chris (Jan Jensen). You can tell these two apart because Tracy is blonde, while Chris is the redhead consistently grinding out the gay slurs — “faggot,” “homos” and “queerbait” being among her go-tos. In the less-PC 1980s, that kind of talk was standard vocab among young people, delivered without dripping in prejudice marinade; I believe this was the case here, too, since the shot-on-video movie is boneheaded in so many other departments as well.

lastslumberparty1Even lines lacking dirty talk remain crouched in dumbness, from “I’m going to the kitchen to munch out” and the twice-spoken “Let’s go rustle up some men folk” to the coup de grâce worth the price of admission, when Chris whines to someone on the other end of the phone line, “Who’d the hell you think it was, Shelley Hack?” That’s my pick for the most unquotable quotable line in a Z-grade movie, and trust me: Reading it is not the same thing as experiencing it. And this movie is an experience — granted, an experience for which most haven’t the fortitude, but that’s their problem.

Shot in the Louisiana suburbs by writer/director Stephen Tyler (who also plays the mute maniac and is not to be confused with Aerosmith walking corpse Steven Tyler), this 99 Cents Only Stores version of The Slumber Party Massacre feels less like a slasher movie and more like a loosely strung-together collection of its characters climbing in and out of the window of Linda’s room (notable for its Sesame Street poster) and/or walking up and down the stairs. The many scenes shot in that garishly wallpapered stairwell and adjoining hallway are so underlit and overgrained, you’d expect Andy Milligan to earn a credit as guest director. Tyler sure shares and exercises Milligan’s grasp on tension, which is to say one slathered in Astroglide. Fittingly, the monotonous score sounds as if Tyler’s cat walked across a synth and managed to hit “record.”

Actually, the whole of The Last Slumber Party reeks of that, down to its sudden, nonsensical ending. And more power to it. —Rod Lott

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