All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Ginger (1971)

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gingerAcross three adventures in the early ’70s, twentysomething tramp Ginger McAllister was the 007 of 42nd Street. Written and directed by Don Schain, the titillating trilogy starred his then-wife, Cheri Caffaro (Savage Sisters), a living Barbie doll without the winning smile or sparkling personality. In the eponymous first flick, Ginger, our rich, pampered heroine is completely unqualified for her dangerous mission, but the authorities hire her anyway to the tune of $50,000 because she’s a statuesque blonde who’s more than happy to show off her tanlines.

Her assignment: At a posh New Jersey resort, she is to infiltrate a snatch-and-smack ring — with the infrequent foray into blackmail — run by seven bored adult children of the jet set. The mealy mouthed mastermind behind it is Rex Halsey (Duane Tucker, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), who might be wearing a dog collar at one point, but definitely looks like the bastard offspring of comedian Andy Kaufman and Rocky Horror Picture Show transvestite Dr. Frank N. Furter.

ginger1The undercover work requires Ginger to get naked a lot, which is not a problem for her or Caffaro; I suspect her disrobing to full-frontal nudity is the movie’s raison d’être. If it’s not to trick a bad guy into castration by piano wire, it’s to have her nipples violently nursed by Rex as foreplay to being raped. Which is more disturbing:
a) that Schain’s framing and Caffaro’s acting via false eyelashes suggest Ginger ultimately enjoys being sexually assaulted, or
b) that Schain later became the producer responsible for Disney’s High School Musical franchise? (The answer is “a,” just to be clear.)

Good side or bad, the characters speak haltingly, less for dramatic effect and more for struggling with words they’ve been tasked to repeat; thus, everyone. Talks. Like. This. Specializing in that delivery — as wooden as the paneling on the walls of a ’70s porn set — is our leading floozy. Caffaro closes the initial chapter that is Ginger by confessing, “Right now, I just feel sorta blah.” Sentiments shared, Ging. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Cut! (2014)

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cutIf we are to believe the opening titles of Cut!, the indie thriller found inspiration in real-life events. Either writer/director David Rountree took no more than a fraction of a kernel of the truth or he’s planted it as a joke as the Coen brothers did with Fargo. Whichever option is correct, credibility is the picture’s largest liability, because so cockamamie are the main characters’ actions, I was unable to suspend disbelief. That crucial scripting mistake gets in the way of one’s enjoyment.

Cast as his own leading man, Rountree (Cameron Romero’s laborious Staunton Hill) plays Travis, an average Joe who toils in the film industry. Okay, so it’s just renting equipment, but what he really wants to do is direct, man!

Cut! Credibility Killer #1: Travis enlists the help of co-worker Lane (David Banks, who co-wrote and co-produced), an ex-con who purposely alienates customers to Travis’ utter annoyance, in the creation of a low-budget project.

cut1Cut! Credibility Killer #2: Name-dropping the ROI bonanzas of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, Travis and Lane decide to make not a piece of found-footage fiction, but a dead-serious Scare Tactics-esque prank movie consisting of scenes in which they frighten unwitting prostitutes.

Cut! Credibility Killer #3: On parole and ever-psychotic, Lane convinces Travis that it’d be a good idea to give a homeless man $100 and a really sharp knife to “wave around” one of the whores. This leads to a lady of the night having no nights left to live.

But won’t that gory “accident” make for captivating cinema? Well, no. Although Rountree attempts to explain away all the motivations that simply do not jibe with basic human behavior and logic, his resolution does not work. Cut! climaxes with the kind of ludicrous, pull-the-rug exposition dump-cum-narrative twist that since 2004 has become known and ridiculed as “the Saw ending.” As if the heap of preposterousness hasn’t been piled high enough, his own Saw ending begets another Saw ending! The rubber band of rational thought broke long before.

Removed from the film, the core premise has potential; its details just need redressing. Rountree’s donning of so many hats — he also edited and produced, in addition to the three aforementioned duties — likely was a matter of necessity in bringing Cut! to fruition; ironically, in doing so he has spread himself too thin, leaving viewers with a weak plot and weaker performances, yet also a finished product that looks great. The multihyphenate has an eye for composition, but a deaf ear for dialogue. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Nude for Satan (1974)

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nudeforsatanRight away, as in mere seconds, the genius-titled Nude for Satan delivers on the “nude,” with a woman fleeing something at night. We’re not made to wait too long for the “Satan” part of the equation, either, assuming Ol’ Scratch is that guy who won’t cut out the cackling and has the blacked-out tooth — a safe bet, wouldn’t you agree? (As for “for,” well, let’s just give this slice of Italian cheesecake the benefit of the doubt.)

How does one get au naturel for the Antichrist in the first place? Per writer/director Luigi Batzella (The Devil’s Wedding Night), the first step is to be like Dr. William Benson (Stelio Candelli, Demons) and assist a confused beauty like Susan (Rita Calderoni, Delirium), who’s just been injured an auto accident. Then you seek help at the nearest spooky castle, preferably inhabited by Beelzebub (James Harris of Jess Franco’s Kiss Me Killer) because the pieces naturally fall into place from there.

nudeforsatan1Inside the Gothic estate, time is suspended, which means Susan and the doc meet alternate-reality versions of themselves. That’s just for starters, as other strange stuff happens, from seeing painted images on canvas move to falling down a hole and into a room-sized spiderweb. The latter happens to Susan; upon landing with a bounce, her life-affirming right breast pops free and hangs out carefree for the remainder of the 82-minute wonder of softcore surrealism.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so back to that web: Susan nearly becomes a midnight snack for a giant spider, so poorly made it would not be out-of-place in a small-town church spookhouse. The arachnid has somewhere between 10 and 12 legs, and looks like a dog turd rolled in hair. It also emits sound effects that merge space transmissions and sirens. Basically, it makes the robotic spider from a similar scene in 1965’s Bloody Pit of Horror look good.

Batzella’s work makes about as much sense as Batzella’s last name; he’s like a vo-tech Mario Bava, which equates this project to junior-college performance art, complete with dime-store fireworks, but tell me you don’t want to see that! Research tells me the Dutch added hardcore inserts to push Nude for Satan in full-on porn, but given the extra limbs the spider got, I shudder to think at what the humans might acquire in their triple-X translation. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Rape Squad (1974)

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rapesquadAlso known under the far less exploitative title of Act of Vengeance, the AIP release Rape Squad is one of those strange drive-in thrillers that packs a feminist message of female empowerment, but only after giving audiences gratuitous images of the women being groped and molested.

Lunch wagon proprietor Linda (Jo Ann Harris, The Beguiled) is the film’s first and foremost victim, raped by a man dressed right out of a slasher series, what with his hockey mask and orange jumpsuit. During the assault, he creepily “requests” that she sing “Jingle Bells” because — his words here, so don’t shoot the messenger — “Music is always good with ballin’!”

rapesquad1When she finds other women who underwent similar trauma, she excitedly poses the hence-the-title question, “How do you feel about forming a rape squad?” Even without Linda explaining what a rape squad is or does, and what privileges its membership possibly could have, the ladies are all-in. It entails taking karate classes, followed by a nude group Jacuzzi bath, then turning the tables on predatory dudes via such methods of dying their dicks blue. Activism never felt so … I dunno, primary-hued?

Bob Kelljan of AIP’s Count Yorga pictures directs from a script credited in part to Betty Conklin. Don’t be fooled thinking a woman had any creative say on this uncomfortable revenger, as that’s a nom de plume for David Kidd, scribe of The Swinging Cheerleaders, which I’m guessing isn’t to be found on Gloria Steinem’s shelves. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Fear Clinic (2014)

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fearclinicIf it’s Tuesday, it must be a new straight-to-video horror film starring Robert Englund. In this case, it’s Fear Clinic, born from the short-lived web series of the same name, in which the former Freddy Krueger traded Nightmares for phobias.

Englund reprises his role as Dr. Andover, renegade brain researcher and inventor of a coffin-like machine that animates one’s fears into vivid hallucinations, in hopes of curing his patients of that which frightens them to the point of crippling. This being a horror movie, the contraption doesn’t work as planned. This being from the same creative team as the 2009 series — namely, director/co-writer Robert Hall, the man behind the effective throwback ChromeSkull slashers — it arrives as a missed opportunity and a major disappointment. What worked in episodic bursts does not gel as one shared story, which concerns the struggling survivors of a tragic diner shooting that left several dead, including one child.

fearclinic1In shedding the serial nature of its source material, Fear Clinic the feature loses its base appeal. While it’s not required viewers have the show under their belt before watching the movie, this project does serve as a direct continuation. Yet it doesn’t even follow its own internal logic, so fans may be as lost as newcomers as to just what the hell is going on. I was, and I happily devoured those episodes as they premiered five years prior.

Budgetary issues are apparent, and may be somewhat to blame for the script not being up to snuff. I am assuming that a poor showing in crowdsource funding are why once-attached Kane Hodder and Danielle Harris are no-shows in reviving their series characters; in their place is Slipknot vocalist Corey Taylor — not exactly a fair trade. Casting issues aside, one can’t help but notice how fake the CGI spiders look: so pitiful, the intended scare effect is anything but. Speaking of the arac war, a special effect Hall is able to pull off seems swiped from the Venom portions of Spider-Man 3. Oh, what a tangled web … —Rod Lott

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