All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Supersonic Man (1979)

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supersonicmanLook, up in the sky! It’s a turd! It’s a shame! It’s Supersonic Man!

And it’s a must-watch for those who enjoy a foreign-born larceny of an American blockbuster, with this bane-from-Spain import courtesy of Pod People progenitor Juan Piquer Simón. His Supersonic Man wouldn’t exist without 1978’s Superman, the iconic sci-fi fantasy that made us believe a man could fly. By contrast, Supersonic Man reinstills all doubt. ¡Viva España!

To save the planet Earth, aliens send one of their own, in the “almost invincible” human form of Paul (Antonio Cantafora, Demons 2), a reporter with a pornstache and a nifty watch. Whenever Paul presses it — the watch, just to clarify — and speaks the magical phrase, “May the force of the galaxies go with you,” two things happen:
1. Shazam!-style, he instantly turns into the superhero named Supersonic (no “Man,” thank you), noticeably buffer and vibrantly costumed, including a blue tint on what little of his face remains exposed.
2. Viewers realize Simón was not content cashing in on Superman, so he went for Star Wars, too.

supersonicman1Supersonic’s Lex Luthor is Dr. Gulik (Cameron Mitchell, Night Train to Terror), a madman who wants nothing more than to get his evil hands on a formula that will transform lasers into death rays. As it just so happens, Professor Morgan (José María Caffarel of Simón’s Jules Verne adaptation, The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth) is close to completing said formula, so Gulik commands his minions in color-coded jumpsuits and one boxy, slow-moving robot to kidnap the friendly scientist and hold him ransom for the Dr. Evil-esque sum of $5,000!

Meanwhile, this turn of events puts Morgan’s single and sexually available daughter, Patricia (Diana Polakov, The People Who Own the Dark), in danger, so Paul inserts himself into the picture in order to protect her. Initially, she resists, because she doesn’t talk to strangers. “Stranger? I’m Paul!” he responds, as if that says everything. “I’m no stranger!” He’s also the one and only Supersonic, so Patricia unknowingly gets the best of both worlds: free dinner at a French restaurant, and being saved from a head-on collision with a steamroller.

When Paul becomes his alter ego (portrayed by José Luis Ayestarán, star of a couple of unofficial Tarzan pics), Supersonic Man naturally stands at its shoddiest and most stirring. Although the likes of corrosive gases and hot lava prove no match, he is felled by a pool cue to the noggin. When Supersonic is put through a ringer of challenges as he attempts infiltration of his archenemy’s lair, Dr. Gulik manically claps and laughs like the half-senile idiot he fully resembles. You very well may do the same — if not then, perhaps during the chase scene involving a Volkswagen Bug, the appearance of a killer shark for no good reason, a recurring gag with an alcoholic bum, any of many green-screen depictions of flight or … hell, the film’s entirety. For sheer entertainment, it beats the $225-million Man of Steel any day. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Beyond Darkness (1990)

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beyonddarknessIn the same year they inadvertently made movie history with the troll-free Troll 2, director Claudio Fragasso and predominantly freckled child actor Michael Stephenson went Beyond Darkness. Actually a sequel to 1998’s goofy-ass Ghosthouse, this Italian-financed haunted-house retread bears more relation to the Hollywood horror shows it rips off.

Rev. Peter (Gene Le Brock, Metamorphosis) moves his wife (Barbara Bingham, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) and their two tots into a beautiful, spacious Louisiana home. On their first night, they enjoy a dinner of beans, about which their tiny daughter, Carole (Theresa F. Walker), says with glee, “And then you make stinkies!”

beyonddarkness1The downside to the fam’s newfound Norman Rockwell existence is all the paranormal activity that takes place there, thanks to a witch (Mary Coulson, Lucio Fulci’s Door to Silence) recently executed for murdering several children and swallowing their souls. The unexplained gift that greets them upon move-in day — a swan-shaped rocker, as fugly as it is a satanic shade of black — should have been their first clue. Same goes for the breathing wall, which Carole claims has a blow dryer behind it, not to mention the radio that attacks them. I kinda miss the clown.

What we have in Beyond Darkness is a beyond-shameless pastiche of The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist. When harm comes to the kids, Peter enlists the help of a fellow reverend (David Brandon, Lamberto Bava’s Delirium), a gap-toothed man of God who’s fallen from the flock and hitting the hooch hard after an encounter with the witch on Death Row. And then the film becomes Italy’s umpteenth take on The Exorcist. And then you make stinkies. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

Redeemer (2014)

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redeemerRedeemer is your standard vengeance-is-mine tale with an above-average lead in Chilean fight choreographer Marko Zaror, the screen’s brightest martial artist most people don’t know about. Had he been born at the right time — say, 10 to 20 years earlier — he would have been a late-’80s action star in the ranks of Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme. As is, he’s quietly making fight flicks that have yet to catapult him beyond a cult following. Most fruitful is Zaror’s collaboration with Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, who’s directed him in four films to date, all wild and most recently the one at hand.

As the savior of the title, a heavily tattooed and soft-spoken Zaror brings a portable altar and a knack for Russian roulette with him to a coastal town that effectively shuts down after the summer season, save for the drug cartels lording over its slopes and slums. While an American hustler (Noah Segan, Looper) pulls the strings, the Redeemer’s true nemesis is the grease-slicked goon known as Scorpion (José Luís Mósca), who killed our hero’s pregnant wife.

redeemer1In structure, the film is almost mockingly repetitive: The Redeemer approaches a group of bad guys, takes them down with hand-to-hand combat and swift kicks that land with a violent crunch, goes away for a bit, repeat. (We must ignore the fact that his signature hoodie would impair his peripheral vision.) Espinoza casts these sequences in his flashy, ultra-kinetic style that revels in a veritable ballet of blood spurts, yet leaves one with the belief that an essential ingredient of previous efforts was overlooked; Redeemer lacks the metaphorical punchiness of their 2007 superhero story, Mirageman, and the zip of Mandrill, that 2009 tweak of secret-agent thrillers, and soaks in the well of self-pity a few minutes too long.

Zaror isn’t that good of an actor to pull it off; physically, he’s a stick of dynamite, and that is what he’s put in front of the camera to do. More of a sense of humor, which Segan provides in his every scene, would bring Redeemer up to Zaror and Espinoza’s usual level. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Metamorphosis (1990)

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metamorphosisIn the professorial environment of higher ed, the ol’ chestnut is “publish or perish.” It’s not meant to be taken literally. In defense of Dr. Peter Houseman, he doesn’t set out to take it that way.

Played with narcotized indifference by Beyond Darkness’ Gene LeBrock (as Tom Cruise-ian as Peter Facinelli, but with era-apropos feathered hair), Houseman is a Virginia University genetics professor on the verge of creating an anti-aging serum. When the administration threatens to cut his funding if he can’t cough up findings, he skips further studies on monkeys and proceeds directly to introducing modified DNA to his own bloodstream. Using a footlong syringe, he injects the juice through his eyeball, and doesn’t so much as blink or flinch, presumably because he’s a Sexy Faculty Member bursting with testosterone-soaked spermatozoa. Because we’ve seen David Cronenberg’s The Fly, we know things won’t go well.

metamorphosis1Directed by George Eastman (screenwriter and star of Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagus and its Horrible sequel), Metamorphosis doesn’t place The Fly on the Xerox machine as much as it openly copies off its test paper. Subbing for Geena Davis is Catherine Baranov, remarkably adequate for a one-credit actress (and if the Internet Movie Database is to be believed, a waitress at the hotel where the cast and crew slept during the shoot). Look for former Emanuelle Laura Gemser in a bit part as a prostitute overpowered by our truly mad scientist.

While we’re on the subject on all things overwhelming, the synth-driven score (with occasional cowbell) by Pahamian (aka Women’s Prison Massacre composer Luigi Ceccarelli) is so loud, it possesses the power to drown out dialogue. Worthy of praise, however, is the effects work by Maurizio Trani; a frequent collaborator of Lucio Fulci, Trani provides rather impressive makeup for the metamorphosing Houseman as he ventures from mere Hulk eyes to Sleestak face to … well, you’ll just have to see it. And fans of maniacal-medicine movies should. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood

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edwoodmisadvI thought that Rudolph Grey’s now-classic Nightmare of Ecstasy was the only book one needed to read about Ed Wood. I was wrong.

Andrew J. Rausch and Charles E. Pratt have proven as much with The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood — not a biography, but a film-by-film examination of the crazed career of the legendary “bad” filmmaker. What sets it apart is the authors’ assertion that while Wood’s talent could not match his ambition, his passion is worthy of respect. After all, here we are, decades later, still watching and talking about his much-maligned movies, even if his reputation is not entirely earned or fair. For example, as wanting it is in polish, 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is hardly the worst picture ever to grace the cinema screens, as it has been called.

Or, as Ted Newsom puts it in his immensely lively foreword, “How much can you say? He tried, mostly failed, then died.” But he gave it a shot.

In covering each movie in which Wood was involved (including those he did not direct), Rausch and Pratt note recurring themes that pop up throughout his CV: a distaste for homosexuality, despite his own plea for his cross-dressing fetish to be accepted; apple-pie morality, often forced with heavy hands; and a rather peculiar idea as to what passes for erotic, including the actual pornos he scripted.

Other themes don’t pop up until a rock-bottom Wood entered his X-rated phase: namely, “grotesquely hairy” asses.

More often than not, the authors’ synopses provide more entertainment than the movies. This is evident from the start, when they intro Wood’s 1953 debut: “With Glen or Glenda? Wood first proved his unique inability to tell a coherent story.” Later, 1969’s Love Feast makes the most out of what sounds like the least sexy scenario in sexploitation history: “The two beautiful women are completely naked while [Wood] resumes crawling around amongst them wearing only unappealing baggy underwear. … When he leaves to answer the door, the two models left on the bed begin to kiss each other passionately in an overly-long scene that reminded us of a mother bird trying to feed her hungry chick.”

Most memorably, of his faux sex-ed skin flick of ’71, The Undergraduate: “One of the film’s most (only?) interesting scenes features a narrator quoting from the Bible as a man’s testicles are massaged on screen. This is surreal as all hell.”

No matter the movie or the era, expect “illogical” and its variants to be bandied about like a badminton cock.

Quibbles with the BearManor release are minor and twofold: Too many rhetorical questions are posed, and it doesn’t quite make sense to me that 1978’s Hot Ice is excluded from the circus just because he served as assistant director. No matter, though — Misadventures still has plenty to offer, finishing off with a handful of interviews that includes the aforementioned Grey and one-half of the screenwriting duo behind Tim Burton’s Oscar-winning Ed Wood biopic.

For those keeping track of such things, Misadventures marks Rausch’s second book this summer, following Trash Cinema: A Celebration of Overlooked Masterpieces, also heartily recommended. Based upon this pair, I hope he keeps forgoing sleep. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.