All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

Self Driver (2024)

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Surrounded by the detritus of ever-accumulating fast-food wrappers, rideshare driver D — just D, thanks — might be the saddest bastard of all the freelance motorists on the Vrmr app. He’s behind on rent and utilities, and has a new mouth to feed at home. With each trip to the tank running him $90, he can’t get ahead, no matter how many hours he puts in on the road.

Enter a passenger (scene-stealing Adam Goldhammer) who reps a competing startup app, promising D (Nathanael Chadwick, The Last Porno Show) earnings of thousands a night driving for them. It doesn’t require a fancy car — just utmost discretion and following orders to a T, lest D lose $50 per missed command.

If you assume taking the job makes D complicit in criminal activity and abhorrent behavior, well, duh! And therein lies Self Driver’s fun, as D tools around town, running dubious errands and picking up questionable fares, all while Antonio Naranjo’s score nearly wraps tension into White Lotus-tight knots. With the script’s one-crazy-night setup, writer/director (and editor) Michael Pierro grants his first feature a significant After Hours vibe, right down to its Möbius-strip end, although leaning more into the lane of danger.

If only D were a quarter as likable as Paul Hackett. Sure, Griffin Dunne’s character in that Martin Scorsese black comedy lived in a buffer bubble of yuppiedom, but he wasn’t an asshole by trade. That’s my one nagging issue with the otherwise impressive Self Driver: Its protagonist is a full-time asshole. D’s rude to customers; his car is a pig sty; he urinates in public — none of which endear us to him the way abject poverty alone would.

Still, as D, Chadwick is well-cast. So are all the actors portraying riders of varying sanity and sobriety who flit in and out of his backseat until day finally breaks. Among them, Christian Aldo and Catt Filippov (both Last Porno vets) stand out as, respectively, a high-strung drug dealer and an enigmatic young woman bearing angel wings. I know, I know: That last one seems like a metaphor so on-the-nose, you can taste the Afrin drip. But before that can happen, Pierro’s indie takes a major turn you won’t anticipate. —Rod Lott

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Action

Fear Is the Key (1972)

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Vanishing Point’s Barry Newman takes the wheel of Fear Is the Key as John Talbot, a man who has nothing to lose — because he already has. In the first scene, he’s mid-conversation via radio with his wife when her plane is shot down, killing her.

Cut to: rural Louisiana. Now, Talbot gives zero fucks. While driving through the Deep South, he runs afoul of the law and ends up hauled to court. So he simply shoots his way out, taking an unlucky spectator named Sarah (Suzy Kendall, Circus of Fear) hostage.

Stealing a ’72 Ford Gran Torino, Talbot kicks off an extraordinary car chase with a brassy Roy Budd score. Seriously, this sequence is an all-time great, nipping at the trunks of Bullitt and The French Connection. It’s great distraction to keep viewers from realizing screenwriter Robert Carrington (Wait Until Dark) lets a whole act pass before letting us know what the heck Talbot’s even doing in Louisiana, much less start plotting.  

Sarah’s the daughter of an oil baron (Ray McAnally, Taffin) with several heavies on his payroll. Rather than send Talbot six feet under for kidnapping, they enlist him on a deep-sea salvage mission for millions in jewels. The scene when Talbot glimpses their target on the ocean floor is a thing of beauty — so breathtaking, it’s odd director Michael Tuchner (1971’s Villain) soon found himself toiling for the tube.

Something of an outlier for an adaptation of Alistair MacLean, the novelist responsible for every existing movie with “Navarone” in its title, Fear Is the Key hums with quality. Although Newman is not the “SUPER COOL DANGER-FREAK” as the Australian one-sheet proclaimed, he’s a reliable presence and — necessary for highly flawed heroes — affable. At his side, Kendall possesses great beauty, great lungs for screaming and an awful Louisiana accent.

John Vernon (Dirty Harry), Dolph Sweet (Brian De Palma’s Sisters) and, in his first film, that Sexy Beast Ben Kingsley nail their supporting roles. Apropos of nothing but Key’s overall quality, their characters bear incredible names: respectively, Vyland, Jablonksi and Royale — no cheese whatsoever.

An unheralded crime film awaiting discovery, Fear Is the Key transitions baby-butt smoothly from action to adventure while staying sublime all the while. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Communion (1989)

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As played by Christopher Walken in the film Communion, with nary a Jesus cracker in sight, Whitley Strieber tries to write the Great American Novel. Because Strieber is a real-life author of The Wolfen and The Hunger, we know he won’t. But he does write the book Communion, the work of nonfiction — 😉 😉 — that ultimately will take his career to the stars.

Why? The answer’s in the butt, Bob. No Walken film is more Walken, for reasons that shall become apparent.

At a post-Christmas weekend visit to the family cabin from their NYC apartment, Whitley endures a sweaty nightmare of being visited by gray-skinned, big-eyed aliens from outer space. After returning home, his wife (Lindsay Crouse, The Arrival) notices he’s just not himself anymore — and for good reason, which surfaces under hypnosis by Misery’s Frances Sternhagen: That was no dream. And following that logic, that means the anal probe … gulp!

This causes a fissure in his rectum marriage, which may be for the best, considering the missus has a fashion sense I’d dub “Annie Hall meets Carmen Sandiego.”

The first glimpse we’re afforded of the alien is merely partial — and wholly terrifying. This bodes well for Communion. But as Whitley’s obsessions and breakdowns increasingly unhinge him from reality, Walken goes full Walken, and so does the movie! From the director’s chair, Philippe Mora (Howling II and III) approaches lucidity more liberally than his star tackles diction.

I don’t quite know how to convey the odd-as-a-$3-bill nature of Whitley’s experiences on the aliens’ ship. He parties with them in a pilgrim hat. They hang in a steam room. He high-fives an E.T. and then dances. I realize these sound like scenes from a stoner comedy where Seth Rogen might blow aliens’ minds with bong-hit lessons and, in exchange, they infuse his with, like, algebra and shit.

Seriously, these too-close encounters of the WTF kind feel as though Mora and Strieber (who adapted his own bestseller for the screenplay) are just fucking with us to see if we’re willing to swallow. I am not.

In fact, I’d steal Whitley’s ominous threat to public transit riders — “Let me tell you, you folks are in for a big surprise, one very big surprise” — and throw it right back at this maladroit movie, aiming to knock that goddamn pilgrim hat into a galaxy far, far away. That’s more action than the third section gives, and still no Jesus crackers. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Phobias (2021)

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What are you afraid of? Outpost 37 wants to know. Wrapping around the five stories of Phobias, the government testing facility conducts experiments of extracting fear and turning it into a gaseous weapon. Anthologies have had dumber setups, but the well-crafted Phobias pays its more mind.

Have your dictionary of choice handy, because the segments arrive with the names “Robophobia,” “Vehophobia,” “Ephebiphobia,” “Hoplophobia” and “Atelophobia” (and I swear I didn’t sneeze while typing those). You’re likely able to guess what the first one is about — and if not, I’ll tell you: A Korean man (Leonardo Nam, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) is befriended by an AI entity offering to take care of his racist bullies.

And the other stories, respectively? A jilted young woman (the Pitch Perfect trilogy’s Hana Mae Lee) is astonished to find a car that controls itself. A teacher (Lauren Miller Rogen, Sausage Party) is menaced in her own home by students angry at her extracurricular exploits. A cop (Martina García, ABCs of Death 2) is forever haunted after a child is mistakenly, fatally shot in a police raid. And singer Macy Gray runs an architecture firm — poorly, of course, given the subject matter.

Each ends on a note of shock or stress, yet something short of closure. Such is the feeling for the whole of Phobias. More tonally and visually cohesive than most anthologies these days, its bits come courtesy of the directors of Monster Party, Black as Night, Stray and The Astronaut, and in her first at-bat, actress Camilla Belle, perhaps best known as the beleaguered babysitter of 2006’s When a Stranger Calls remake. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Hollywood Boulevard II (1990)

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It’d be tough to follow up Joe Dante and Allan Arkush’s Hollywood Boulevard, a self-deprecating paean to the Roger Corman filmmaking machine coming from inside the house. So Hollywood Boulevard II doesn’t try. It kinda just shows up, stands in the corner and shuffles its feet ’til it’s time to go home.

Directed by Steve Barnett (Scanner Cop II), the in-name-only sequel that’s actually a remake leverages the combined star power of Ginger Lynn Allen, Eddie Deezen, Robert Patrick and Morgan Freeman … ’s name on a Lean on Me marquee to once again spoof low-budget filmmaking.

In particular, its soft target is the bread-and-butter junk genres that carried Corman straight to the bank’s deposits-only line throughout the ’80s: your jungle war epics, sword-and-sandal-and-sex adventures and marked-down space sagas. The latter appears right away, flaunting four breasts in the first minute as part of a Star Trek parody aboard a spaceship shaped like a uterus and fallopian tubes.

As aspiring actress Candy Chandler, Allen gets her big break when a stuffed-animal bomb explodes, taking Miracle Pictures’ reigning starlet off the cast list, forever. And that’s hardly the last of the “accidents.” Taking a page from Traci Lords going legit via Corman with the 1988 makeover of Not of This Earth, Hollywood Boulevard II represents Allen’s own sprint for mainstream stardom after nearly a decade of hardcore porn (Beverly Hills Cox, Poonies and Supergirls Do General Hospital). She doesn’t embarrass herself, but Candice Rialson she is not.

Three first-time screenwriters follow Dante and Arkush’s template, including judicious use of B-roll from other Corman flicks, but not jokes that land. This second stroll down the Boulevard simply isn’t funny. I found one exception in a romantic ballad. Playing over Candy making sweet, sweet love amid rear-projected footage, its mocking lyrics include “Two hands / Two breasts / C’mon, don’t tell me you don’t know the rest” and “There’s passion in the air tonight / I know, I know, I know cuz I can smell it.” Hardly enough to take a whiff. —Rod Lott

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