All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Zombie Fight Club (2014)

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zombiefightclubRule No. 1 of Zombie Fight Club? Do not talk about Zombie Fight Club. Not because it’s secret, but because the Taiwanese flick is not worth talking up.

This being a source for film criticism, however, we’ll break that rule to tell you why. One random day, in a Taipei tenement that makes the Cabrini-Green public housing project of Candyman look cozy, activity is abuzz from floor to floor: a businessman being held ransom, a Halloween party, a raid on a cartel operation, a courier making an inordinate amount of package deliveries for a single address.

One of the latter’s stops is the party-central apartment of sleazebag David (Derek Tsang, The Thieves) and his way-too-cute-for-him girlfriend, Jenny (Beach Spike’s Jessica Cambensy, here as pure eye candy, romping around in a white bra). David receives a bag of bath salts (not the Bath & Body Works kind) from his stateside cousin, and as luck would have it (shades of Bath Salt Zombies!), anyone who swallows the pill turns into a member of the undead, complete with a taste for human flesh; anyone bitten by the undead becomes a — hell, you know how this works by now.

zombiefightclub1The virus spreads through the building faster than the film is paced. No plot exists; director Joe Chien (2012’s even worse Zombie 108) is content with just stacking one zombie attack after another (like a corpulent gangsta getting his penis bitten off) atop one escape attempt after another (such as Jenny and an eventual law-enforcement hero played by Blackhat’s Andy On mowing down shuffling corpses by driving a BMW down a hallway).

The initial tone is such that Sam Raimi could knock something like this out of the park in his sleep, whereas after an exhausting hour of scene-Xeroxing, Chien realizes he has nowhere to go. So he just stops suddenly and bunts his timeline one year forward. At least doing so allows him to justify the film’s potentially litigious title, as the zompocalypse has turned the world into something Beyond Thunderdome, where survivors are forced to battle the undead in gladiatorial games.

Sounds like a different movie? It feels like one, too: one inferior to what we already were watching. In wanting to be everything without earning it, Zombie Fight Club emerges as nothing but a collection of awful clipping paths. As Asian low-budget trash goes, however, it reeks less than that Sushi Typhoon nonsense. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Terror Circus (1973)

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terrorcircusWhat happens in Vegas stays in Vegas — you just gotta get there first. Tell that to the terrified trio of showgirls who find themselves cast in a Terror Circus when their crappy car blows a radiator and breaks down on a rural route frequented only by tumbleweeds.

The interchangeable ladies (played by Buckskin’s Manuela Thiess, Sisters of Death’s Sherry Alberoni and Warlock’s Gyl Roland) are pleased to accept a ride from total stranger Andre (Andrew Prine, Eliminators) … until they realize they’re then trapped. In fact, they’re the latest additions to Andre’s ever-expanding menagerie of “my little bears”: women he keeps chained up in his Barn of the Naked Dead (one of the movie’s alternate titles, with Nightmare Circus being another). Justifies one of the comely captives, “He had nice eyes.”

terrorcircus1Guess what, gang? Andre’s got mommy issues. As a self-appointed ringmaster, Andre dons a top hat, takes whip in hand and works the women over, toward his goal of building a “trained animal act.” And if the ladies don’t obey his orders? Easy: Those deemed “untrainable” are let loose in the field to play tag with his not-so-trained cougar. Me-OW!

Prine’s antagonist is perhaps even more wacko than his serial killer of The Centerfold Girls; regardless, his portrayal is just as committed (no pun intended). As if you needed telling, Terror Circus is not in the greatest of taste, then or now, yet it actually has more in store for viewers than first glance. The most interesting thing about it would be the deformed cannibal freak (wearing a wedding ring!) whom Andre keeps in the shed, if not for the fact that the film is directed by Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph (Breakfast of Champions), who — according to reportage in 2013’s Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree by Michael H. Price and John Wooley — not only disowns it, but denies involvement entirely. Nice try, Alan! He should be proud that his Circus takes an end turn in defiance of both genre beats and audience expectations. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Smosh: The Movie (2015)

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smoshmovieIf you have the short attention span of the average millennial, here’s a three-word review: Shit: The Movie.

If you have more patience: Smosh: The Movie is an extension of Smosh, the YouTube channel of comedy duo Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. My 10-year-old son tells me — and the Internet confirms — that the two’s videos are among the site’s most popular. I haven’t seen any of their clips, so I can judge the Smosh brand only by this maiden feature. And in doing so, I can say three things with certainty:
1. I fail to see the appeal.
2. The bar on YouTube fame is set periously low.
3. I weep for the future of comedy.

smoshmovie1Assumedly playing themselves since they’ve retained their real names, Ian and Anthony are roomies in Ian’s parents’ home. Ian’s a total slacker; Anthony at least has a job, albeit delivering piping-hot pizza pies. With their five-year high school reunion looming, Anthony hopes to reconnect with his unrequited crush, Anna (Jillian Nelson, 1313 Giant Killer Bees!), but he wishes he could remove a embarrassing senior-year video of him that someone posted to YouTube.

Toward that most noble of pursuits, they appeal to YouTube prez Steve YouTube (Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Ian Black, exerting more craft than the material requires), who sends them into the Internet — literally, via magic portal — to retrieve the offending file. This setup is all a silly, disposable comedy should need in order to take off running, poking fun at and deflating dozens of the web’s most infamous viral videos. It all but places the ball at the one-yard line on first down. A wealth of targets awaits the skewering … and stays that way, because the potential for Smosh: The Movie is roundly, soundly squandered.

Actor-turned-director Alex Winter (Freaked) is at a disadvantage from frame one, because the script by Steve Marmel and Eric Falconer (respective TV producers of Family Guy and Blue Mountain State) demonstrates an unwillingness to exercise imagination. Instead, the duo opts for least-common-denominator humor, with much of it depending on Ian’s recurring lust for the well-kneaded rear of Butt Massage Girl (Brittany Ross, TV’s The Middle) in his favorite vid, as well as your familiarity with the Smosh boys’ fellow YouTube celebrities (like Grace Helbig) who make cameo appearances. Let’s not even get into the atrocious opening animation, other to say it looks to have been the losing entry in a crowdsourced contest.

I only laughed once during Smosh: The Movie, and it arrived at the movie’s last line. I’m still amazed I was able to last that long. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Steel and Lace (1991)

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steellaceThrow a rock in any direction in the B-movie pool and you’re bound to hit a rape-revenge thriller. Chances it will involve a hot lady robot with a master’s degree in disguise, however? Infinitesimal. That one-in-a-million shot is Steel and Lace. Praise be it is not one of a million.

On the night of her concert debut, on-the-rise pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren, Season of Fear) is raped in an alleyway by real-estate mogul Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant) while his four “musketeer” buddies watch and egg him on. At the trial, however, the balding, yet ponytailed Emerson is found not guilty. Crushed, Gaily ascends the courthouse stairwell to the roof and purposely plunges to her death. Crushed five years after the fact, her scientist brother, Albert (Bruce Davison, 1971’s Willard), uses his room of blip-de-bloop wall computers to recreate her as a sexy cyborg with instruments of death hiding in her killer bod.

steellace1Donning enough full face masks to outfit the next two Mission: Impossible installments, Gaily seduces her way through the quintet of womanizers, offing each in an unexpectedly gory manner. From drilling straight through one guy to decapitating another, her chintzy methods of disposal give Steel and Lace what little juice sits in its tank; she’s like Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct murderess rebuilt as a Swiss Army Knife model of the Six Million Dollar Man.

Wren is appropriately cold and emotionless, devoting herself to the role with admirable commitment not shown by her fellow cast members — among them, An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton as the cop who investigates the killings because he has to, Luther the Geek’s Stacy Haiduk as a chain-smoking courtroom sketch artist who investigates the killings because she’s nosy, and David L. Lander — once and forever Squiggy of TV’s Laverne & Shirley — as our comic relief (although he doesn’t come close to actually providing it).

For such an impressive CV as an FX artist and animator who’s worked for James Cameron and John Carpenter, debuting director Ernest D. Farino appears to have left his considerable day-job skills back at the office. Steel and Lace is cheap-looking trash that feels so creatively ill-invested, it’s amazing Farino went on to helm bigger and better things … psych! His only other features were parts one and five of Charles Band’s insufferable Josh Kirby … Time Warrior kidventures. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

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lizardwomanskinAlthough an insomniac, Carol (Florinda Bolkan, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) suffers from recurring, claustrophobic nightmares that conclude with her rolling around nude with her sexy, hard-partying neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail). One night, the dream’s bedroom romp even progresses to Carol stabbing Julia thrice in the chest with a letter opener.

So when, in the waking world, police find Julia bloodied and dead, having been stabbed thrice in the chest with a letter opener, guess upon whom suspicion falls? Certainly you answered “Carol,” but as we all know with mysteries, the solution is rarely so cut-and-dry. That goes double — perhaps triple — with the Italian giallo, which A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin most assuredly is. If the nonsensical, zoological title didn’t relay as much, the name of its director and co-writer would: Lucio Fulci.

lizardwomanskin1Although known best for his string — barbed wire? — of horror bloodbaths in the late 1970s and early ’80s (Zombie, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, et al.), the prolific filmmaker earlier plied his trade with a few stylish, if sometimes incomprehensible whodunits. Lizard lounges about on its own groovy beat, immediately distinguishable by the opulent and erotic surrealism of Carol’s dangerous dreams — scored by Ennio Morricone, no less!

Fulci’s direction of these sequences is tops, outdone perhaps only by an extended set piece in which Carol is pursued through an abandoned church by an armed and helmeted assailant. So Hitchcockian is this near-silent chase — recalling everything from Vertigo to The Birds — that the suspense can’t help but grow mighty intense. That’s what will stick with you, rather than the tidy, unsatisfying denouement.

Okay, so the dog vivisection scene might stick with you, too; just do your best not to dwell. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.