All posts by Rod Lott

Mystery

Death Occurred Last Night (1970)

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deathoccurredIn Milan, a middle-aged man by the name of Berzaghi (Raf Vallone, 1969’s The Italian Job) is not only widowed, but the sole caregiver for his mentally handicapped daughter, Donatella (Gillian Bray, The Bod Squad). Although she is 25 years old, her mind is stuck at 3; she can’t even put on a brassiere without her father’s help. Innocent flirting on her part is misread as sexual invitation from strangers, so Berzaghi must lock her up in their apartment when he goes to work.

One day, however, he returns to an empty home. The doors and windows remain locked; there’s no sign of forced entry. He fears the worst, as he should: that she has been abducted from his well-intentioned prison to one that has only the worst intentions in mind.

Enter the sinus-infected police captain (Frank Wolff, Once Upon a Time in the West) and his younger, shaggy-haired partner (Gabriele Tinti, Black Emanuelle), who have a feeling Donatella may have been kidnapped into a prostitution ring, so they tour the area’s buy-before-you-try bordellos.

deathoccurred1The mystery of Duccio Tessari’s Death Occurred Last Night is not whether Donatella will be found among the whores, but who will find her and/or her captors first: the police or Berzaghi? The increasingly desperate father doesn’t think the authorities are acting fast enough, so he takes matters into his own vengeful hands.

Tessari (A Pistol for Ringo) directs this grim yet gripping polizia picture with a straightforward objective that makes its story timeless: suspense. So do the colorful supporting players who weave in and out of the story, not always by their own volition, including a suicidal “Negro prostitute,” a former pimp stooping to a less respectable career (that of car salesman) and a teddy bear with an ugly face. However, the show belongs to Wolff and Vallone; the former for portraying how a cop’s professional life infringes upon his personal one, and the latter for showing how an honorable man in his position gives up his own life to focus on that of his only child. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Boogeyman (1980)

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boogeymanRather infamously — or ineptly, to be blunt — Ulli Lommel has directed nearly five dozen films. So barrel-bottomed is his CV that only one of them managed to leak through and achieve any semblance of relevance. That is The Boogeyman, and one could argue it clicked only because the country was still on a horror high from the boogeyman in Halloween two years earlier. Hell, Lommel does everything he can to ape John Carpenter’s indie smash, from the synth-driven score to sequences shot from the POV of a boy holding a butcher knife.

That kitchen utensil comes in handy for young Willy, when he and li’l sis Lacey catch Mom (Gillian Gordon, The Sister-in-Law) fooling around with some dude in pantyhose pulled over his head, presumably for a spirited round of rapist role-playing; Willy stabs the guy in the back over and over, thereby putting a halt to Mom’s erotic mood. Twenty years later, Willy (Nicholas Love, Jennifer Eight) is mute and living with Lacey (co-writer Suzanna Love, then married to Lommel) and her hubby and child in an Amityville-looking farmhouse.

boogeyman1Haunted by memories of That Night triggered by a letter from their estranged mother, Lacey can’t function in daily life, so a psychiatrist (John Carradine, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula) encourages her to revisit her childhood home where the deadly deed took place. She does, but shatters the still-there mirror through which she witnessed the fateful knifing. Naturally, this releases the vengeful spirit of Mom’s lover, and whenever a shard of the glass glows, someone dies, like that horny teen boy in the Triumph T-shirt, who may deserve it just for a poor taste in music.

Maybe this is accidental, but The Boogeyman overcomes the trappings of a low budget and does something interesting. Oh, it’s still rough around the edges, which are as jagged as those pieces of the broken mirror, and it bursts at the seams with terrible performances, yet its mix of the slasher and the supernatural offers viewers an experience that’s not entirely expected. —Rod Lott

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Action

Chinese Zodiac (2012)

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chinesezodiacIn this third Armour of God film, Jackie Chan can’t wait to get his hands around a big ol’ cock. And a snake. And a monkey. And a rabbit. And the remaining eight animals of the Chinese zodiac, rendered as a set of rare bronze heads prized by precious-artifact collectors the world over.

As JC, Chan is tasked with retrieving the heads scattered around the globe; a corporate slimeball (Oliver Platt, 2012) offers him 1 million Euros for each of the national treasures he’s able to obtain and/or steal, so off JC goes! Plot holes extend as wide as canyons, over which Chan gladly leaps. As director and co-writer, he’d likely do without a story entirely if he could get away with it; he almost has.

chinesezodiac1In a cinematic environment that demands its action pictures to be fast, furious and expendable, Chinese Zodiac is out-of-vogue, but either no one told Chan or he didn’t care. He remains true to the same unapologetic mode of the 1986 original and 1991’s Operation Condor, both goofy-smiled variants of Indiana Jones and James Bond, which is to say this overdue leg of an inadvertent trilogy is great fun, loosely bundled.

Right out of the gate, the film goes for broke, with a prologue that sees JC escaping a military base by playing human skateboard. From there, the star and company impatiently zip from one inventive set piece (and country) to the next, constantly vying for oneupmanship of itself. If Chan isn’t being chased by guard dogs while trapped in a garden maze, he’s dodging live ammo and busy beehives in the forest, all building toward a finale that ask the near-sexagenarian to skydive toward a lava-spewing volcano. Hell, why not? —Rod Lott

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Sex

College Girls Confidential (1968)

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collegegirlsOn the basis of College Girls Confidential, I clearly went about my higher education all wrong, as my four-year stint at a university was nothing like this. Then again, I didn’t pledge a fraternity, whereas sexploitation specialist Stephen C. Apostolof (Orgy of the Dead) sets most of the black-and-white tomfoolery within the walls of one: Lambda Sigma Delta, for the record. (For those slow on the draw, that shortens to LSD and passes for cleverness.)

But first, Professor Bryce (Sean O’Hara) has eyes (among other parts) for his female biology students. (We know this because of the “Boing!” sound effect Apostolof employs.) One of those young women is failing the class and, therefore, dooming graduation, so a fellow coed encourages her to use her coochie-coo to sway Bryce into passing her. She does; he accepts; and the following conversation takes place in his office as clothes are shed:

Bryce: “You are a lovely biological specimen.”
Clueless Student: “Oh, professor, what a tiger you are! I didn’t know that advanced lab required so many experiments!”

collegegirls1The rest of Confidential — some prints drop that word from the title like trou — is one big-breast fest that interprets the “big man on campus” label anew. A guy rolls around on a bed with two busty babes, who then go downstairs to put their goodies in the face of LSD’s newest pledge. Apparently, this passes for initiation. (What, no latent elephant walk or circle jerk with a saltine?) A real happenin’ shindig is thrown, with topless girls bouncing around everywhere, and one dude taking a bad enough trip to end up in the hospital where he is admonished by a real tsk-tsk of a doctor.

Only at this tail end does Apostolof seem to condemn the behavior of the student body upon which he has capitalized in the preceding hour; you won’t buy his sudden about-face, but you’ll certainly enjoy it. Go looking for skin, not plot, as the characters have about as much need for identities as they do belts. —Ed Donovan

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