All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

Saturn Bowling (2022)

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Although they share a smattering of DNA, estranged half-brothers Guillaume and Armand could not be more different. Guillaume (Arieh Worthalter, 2016’s The Take), Dad’s favorite, is a police detective; Armand (Achille Reggiani, Miss Impossible), Dad’s ignored bastard son, is homeless. When their father dies, you can guess which one gets nothing.

Inheriting the titular bowling alley, Guillaume offers his little brother a peace offering: a job to run it and a place to live above it. Armand happily accepts, on the condition Guillaume stay away. And that sets into motion an inadvertent cycle of codependence that marks their largest point of contrast: One devotes his nights putting women he picks up at the alley into the ground; the other, devoting his days to investigating who put them there.

This French-language film operates in the lane of crime thriller I’m drawn to most: intelligent and intentionally paced, like a novel that comfortably straddles the literary and the popular. As with many of those books, a formula sits directly beneath the fancy window dressing, meaning when particular elements kick in at particular points of the story, you instantly know the function each is set up to serve. With Saturn Bowling, when Guillaume gains a girlfriend in an animal rights activist (newcomer Y-Lan Lucas), any alarm of predictability isn’t falsely triggered.

That’s not nearly enough for disappointment to overthrow enjoyment; part of such plotting machinations are comfort food. I’m less enthused with the weighty hunter/prey analogy running through the third act — too much symbolism is a thing — but overall, Thick Skinned director Patricia Mazuy, writing with frequent collaborator Yves Thomas, knows what she’s doing. The little film that results is a solid, flawed gem. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Nightsiren (2022)

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In a village in the mountains of Slovakia, superstition long resides. It seems to live everywhere. This, Šarlota knows, having been on the receiving end for much of her life. The scorn started when, as a child, Šarlota accidentally knocked her little sister off a cliff and, ashamed, fled for the city.

Two decades later, called to accept an inheritance from her mother, Šarlota (Natalia Germani, The Devil Conspiracy) returns, only to find everyone in town thinks she’s a witch. (Even if they didn’t, odds are she’d be persecuted anyway, just for her gender.)

Are they superstitious because they fear “the other”? Nightsiren seems to suggest as much. Then it goes one better by pointing back at the accusers, suggesting these monsters we live with are more worthy of blame. Šarlota and Mira (newcomer Eva Mores), the young woman who befriends her, learn this lesson over and over again. Both actresses, it’s worth nothing, inhabit their parts really well.

From Filthy filmmaker Tereza Nvotová, Nightsiren has a lot on its mind, little of which it keeps to itself, even if could loosen its grip on subtlety. Although its feminist themes might scare some potential viewers off, that’s their loss; this is folk horror through and through, what with such elements as scythes, snakes, goats and rituals involving flames.

Like all good folktales, it’s presented in chapters. The literary touch of Nvotová and co-writer Barbora Namerova is palpable, but that hardly means visuals go ignored. On the contrary, Nightsiren pulls off some stunners, most notably as Šarlota experiences a DayGlo-painted nightmare of a forest orgy. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Dark Asset (2023)

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For its early years, starting in 1995, the fledgling UPN network operated on a business model leaning heavily on cheesy, ultimately short-lived sci-fi/action series, like Nowhere Man, The Sentinel and Deadly Games. In title, concept and production quality, Dark Asset feels like one of those shows, albeit never aired and salvaged by cobbling several episodes together into a faux feature. The first hour is so overstuffed with flashbacks, collectively introducing close to a dozen characters, that if not for the three-decade difference, my comparison wouldn’t be out of the question.

Total charmer Byron Mann (2018’s Skyscraper) stars as calm, cool, collected John Doe. He’s ex-Special Forces — “a soldier’s soldier,” we’re told — and the latest recruit for a shadowy super-spy operation in which Dr. Cain (Robert Patrick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) shoves a microchip into the brain. Said chip allows Dr. Cain and his iPad to implant ideas into said brain — not quite control, but the power of suggestion.

Should’ve gone with control, Doc! Doe disobeys orders and punches, kicks and chops his way outta the lab and to a hotel bar where he meets Jane (Helena Mattsson, Species: The Awakening), a beautiful blonde in town for the requisite “business conference.” As with writer/director Michael Winnick’s superior Guns Girls & Gambling, his camera loves — and I mean loves — Mattsson. If you’ve ever wanted to see her fight open-bloused, may I direct your attention to Dark Asset.

But it’s not likely to keep it. With a two-thirds-in twist you’ll guess upon Clue One, the structure of John Doe telling most of the movie’s story to Jane with constant cutaways that show it — flashy cars, pulsating lights, fisticuffs with swarthy bizmen — interrupts any gained momentum, if not derails it. The flatness of digital video doesn’t assist Winnick in achieving his B-pic vision; ergo, the UPNity of it all. At Dark Asset’s best, the Mann-as-machine fight scenes, I was reminded of Jet Li’s similarly action-driven The One; at its worst, well, UPN’s The Burning Zone, I guess? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare (1964)

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For nearly an hour of its hour, The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare consists of a naked woman being drawn or photographed for artistic purposes. How does the narrator make that interesting? Beats me, because he doesn’t. Director and writer Sande N. Johnsen (Teenage Gang Debs) doesn’t seem to know, either, although he tries by inserting props like guitars, beach balls, African ritual masks — you know, the usual. At least the constant jazz music’s hep!

The narrator of this New Yawk story, Leo (Tom Signorelli of Michael Mann’s Thief), is an artist who convinces his buddy Pete (Jack Lowe, Johnsen’s The Twisted Sex) to put his heavy-haired arms to good use as a nudie shutterbug. Although visually the type of guy who says, “Now look here, lady” three times a day with incontestable derision, Pete agrees.

All goes fine for a while — a long, long while to the viewer — as Pete takes pictures of so many undressed dames with such varied shapes and slopes of breasts, you could CLEP out of freshmen geometry. Then Pete’s aversion to the color red rears its fangs. From a model’s fiery hair to another’s freshly coated fingernails, each appearance of the crimson makes him go wonky, resulting in one of cinema’s greatest worst reaction shots as Pete’s struck speechless for a full 10 seconds! By the time yet another model cuts her finger, Pete acts like he’s just been told he has a dead mother, tummy cancer and a disappearing penis.

So Johnsen can justify the Bloody portion of the title, Pete starts murdering the gals. It’s similar to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red, but a year earlier and really, really boring. Exception: the end’s rooftop chase and Pete’s final freakout, in which he slathers himself up like the Peanut Butter Baby. The production is so cheap, city streets and walls play home to painted and markered credits, far outlasting this nudie cutie’s run. —Rod Lott

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Martial Arts

Kick to Death: Death Kick (1998)

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Give Kick to Death: Death Kick this: It tells you upfront redundancy and ineptitude are afoot. What it doesn’t tell you: Prepare to see one man’s ego deep-tissue massaged as his apparent sexual fantasies are enacted. I speak of former St. Louis cop Michael Hartig, credited as the movie’s writer, main producer and lead actor. Considering this marks director William Patrick Crabtree’s lone IMDb entry, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were Hartig’s pseudonym.

Although he looks more like a toupée model or someone who must knock on doors to inform you he’s moved into the neighborhood, Hartig plays kickboxing attorney Adrian Lane, who’s pissed off too many clients: five, to be exact. So two of them, Robert (Chickboxer’s Jesse Bean) and Teal (Earnest Hart Jr., “Four Time World Kickboxing Champion” according to the opening credits), organize quite the revengefest by kidnapping Adrian — while what sounds like a rejected B-side to Alannah Myles’ “Black Velvet” cassingle warbles on the soundtrack — and tying him up in a federal safe house located in the back of a tile store. (Hardened criminals never purchase tile, right?)

All attractive women, the three other clients plunk down $50,000 apiece for a turn torturing Adrian with drills and spray-can flames before a hired fighter kicks his ass — to death, if we’re to believe that title. Instead, the ladies tease him with their nude bodies, which is an unusual play, but we’re in the Show-Me State, after all. With an oddly specific sexual kink repeated throughout like a spank-bank deposit committed to film, his narcissism makes that of attorney-at-law John De Hart — and his respective vanity project, GetEven — look tame. Death Kick plays like the Craftsman power tools catalog accidentally printed a rambling missive from Letters to Penthouse.

A choice exchange of dialogue between captor and captive as “Revenge time starts at 9”:

Robert: “I have a plan.”
Adrian: “The best laid plans of mice and men.”
Robert: “What? What? Shut up! Fuck the mice and fuck the men! You’re going down!”

Up first, a redhead (White Palace stripper K.C. Carr, reading her lines like a 45 record run at 33 1/3 speed) is so angry about losing custody, she unhooks her bra, straddles Adrian and says, “If I had spurs, we’d go for a ride.”

Sexier by a mile, a wealthy blonde (frickin’ gorgeous one-timer Corinne Malcom) in a purple leather suit walks in heels so slowly that she looks in fear of forgetting the foot order required for the act of walking. Upset because post-divorce, she no longer gets invited to the right parties, she and her sizable bust put on a “private fashion show.” In between changing four outfits, she wavers between complimenting Adrian’s “tight ass” and threatening, “I’m gonna eat from your eyes.”

Speaking of eyes, a literal tear is coaxed from Adrian’s by the exposed breasts of Matty (Deborah E. Loveless), whose Taco Tico wrapper-patterned blouse screams “PTA treasurer.” In between these teasing faux seductions, the aforementioned freelance tuffies force Adrian to:
• spar with a hired stickfighter in genie britches (Terry Cramer, “American Kumite and Kata Champion”)
• trade blows with a guy in an ill-fitting Everlast shirt (Michael Stocker, “North American Light Heavy Kickboxing Champion”)
• and nut-punch a sweaty, coked-up mullet man (Greg Oldham)

Are you not entertained? Because Robert also saws a board in half, then roars through gritted teeth, “JIGSAW PUZZLE, ANYONE?” At the end, everybody fights everybody else while Adrian’s noosed, presumably to give him time to go flaccid. Naturally he escapes and quips, “Whaddaya think — is it too late for med school?” Fade to the rest of your life.

The last two and half minutes of credits have no actual credits, because Hartig lets the song he paid good money for play out, by gum. Since Kick to Death: Death Kick kicked its way into, I dunno, maybe 14 or 15 VCRs nationwide, Hartig hasn’t appeared in front of a camera — a damn shame, especially if you’re sitting on a script for a John Astin biopic. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.