All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Obex (2025)

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In 1987, Baltimore elected its first Black mayor — not that a resident like Conor Marsh (Albert Birney, I Saw the TV Glow) cast his vote. After all, he’s a shut-in who chooses to experience life through screens; when he’s not watching TV, he’s on his computer, earning a meager living by turning people’s photos into ASCII art. Watch, type, sleep, repeat.

One day, a floppy diskette with the game Obex arrives in the mail. The objective: Defeat a soul-eating demon named Ixaroth. The game literally changes Conor’s sad, lonely life! But by kidnapping his dog. 

Conor’s mission to save his four-legged best friend takes him outside his comfort zone of dot-matrix printers and computer magazines bagged with shareware, and into the forest. It’s a fantasy world all its own, with an animated fairy, a Zelda-ready elf (Callie Hernandez, Alien: Covenant) and a walking, talking RCA television set (Frank Mosley, Don’t Look in the Basement 2).

Written and directed by Birney himself (Strawberry Mansion), Obex revels in the 8-bit aesthetic. But it’s not all about that. Its sound design, black-and-white visuals and extreme close-ups of cicada bring Pi to mind, not to mention that film’s loner protagonist. Heck, so much absurdity is planted within Obex, it could have oozed from the mind of Pi’s protagonist after his DIY trepanation.  

Birney’s film is imaginative throughout, although significantly more winsome in its first half, before Conor ever leaves the house. Not that the video game-inspired environment is a loss. Turns out, a cursor floating in the sky can be a beautiful thing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

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Built by the U.S. military for defense, an animatronic Santa Claus goes haywire to turn homicidal on Christmas Eve. Why? Like the old joke about a dog licking its testicles, because it can.

And also because Joe Begos’ movie is titled Christmas Bloody Christmas, shot through a head-shop haze. 

The Final Girl of this self-knowing slasher is Tori (Riley Dandy, 2022’s Interceptor), owner of a record store patronized by hipsters. After a night of liquor and oral, she and cashier Robbie (Spiderhead’s Sam Delich, here a dead ringer for John Oates), find themselves targeted by the fire ax-wielding RoboSanta+ (a mute and committed Abraham Benrubi, The Belko Experiment).

Bloody’s highlight arrives all too early as we see the robotic Kris Kringle awaken through its POV, each metallic boot step clunking as it hunts its first fornicating victims. From there to the bitter end, when RoboSanta’s green laser eyes come in handy, Begos (Almost Human) hasn’t supplied a story to hold attention between slaughters. He opts for that laziest of indie-horror solutions: time-biding NSFW conversations, from Robbie telling his boss to “flick your bean” to a toy store employee ordering her boyfriend to “eat my ass out” — all so utterly uhh-noy-ing and free of imagination, you’ll root for RoboSanta just to be done with the thing.

Fatally pitched as a Silent Night, Deadly Night reboot, Christmas Bloody Christmas seems conceived as a seasonal Terminator parody. That kernel of an idea is all Begos has, though, short-circuiting any chances of holiday horror immortality. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Fast Food (1989)

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Kicked out of college for running a casino party and crashing a sleep study on nocturnal penile tumescence, eighth-year seniors Auggie (Clark Brandon, My Tutor) and Drew (Randal Patrick, Weekend Warriors) are forced to devise a full-time scam. Their answer: Turn Drew’s family’s gas station into a gas station-themed burger eatery. That it looks like a set from kidcom Saved by the Bell is of less concern than hiring Michael J. Pollard (Tango & Cash) to man the grill.

Col. Sanders had his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices; Auggie lucks upon a formula that unlocks the brain’s repression of sexual urges. He tests it by mass-Mickeying their catering gig for a sorority cotillion. It works so well, the hired band vocalist tells the crowd, “Wait a minute, I feel a little different! Let’s rock and roll!”

Because Auggie already radiates rapey vibes (“Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women” is his pickup line) and no scruples, he slathers it on the restaurant’s patties. I don’t understand that business plan, but lo and behold, neither does Fast Food. This Zapped!-inspired setup doesn’t really take hold until the final third, and even then, nudity is as absent as healthy menu items. Otherwise, this thing contains all the ingredients for your (below-)average 1980s teen comedy: wet T-shirt contest, record scratch on the soundtrack, fast-speed montage, guy playing broom guitar, timely W.C. Fields impressions.

If history remembers Fast Food, it’s only for being former porn star Traci Lords’ first movie with an MPAA rating tamer than an R. She’s stunt-cast as a spy for competing burger franchise mogul Wrangler Bob Bundy (Jim Varney, who’s basically doing Ernest P. Worrell in different headwear). Under the spell of the sex sauce, she strips to a PG-13-friendly bra and panties.

Director Michael A. Simpson ports over several members of his Sleepaway Camp II and III cast, including Pamela Springsteen (sister of Bruce) and Tracy Griffith (half-sister of Melanie). The latter gets the movie’s single laugh, asking Auggie, “Don’t you have somewhere else to be? Like in custody?”

Brandon and co-star Lanny Horn (Homework) wrote the screenplay. Their collaboration is so artless, Hamburger: The Motion Picture looks like the Dardenne brothers by comparison. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

Class of ’74 (1972)

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Three coeds live a credo espoused by the Rolling Stones (and, um, The Soup Dragons): They’re free to do what they want any old time. By “what,” they mean “whom,” of course, and the ladies urge their brunette Gabriella (Barbara Mills, The Suckers) to do the same. So she does.

Don’t expect much from Class of ’74 in plotting. After the on-campus prologue introducing us to our heroines (Sondra Currie, Marki Bey and Pat Woodell), the movie depicts their episodic, nudity-laden forays into college hookups and heartbreaks. Consider it a countercultural stepsister to Roger Corman’s Nurses pics in structure and spirit, yet sapped of all the fun. For example, the biggest bummer of a sequence finds a gay man in a Han Solo vest recalling how he was molested by his coach.

Arthur Marks’ films bear a distinct look, with a vivid palette of greens and oranges like peas and carrots from a piping-hot Swanson TV dinner. (I’m certain drive-in screens did his palette no justice.) That visual resemblance is all Class of ’74 has going for it, because his other works don’t play this staid. In fact, the following year’s The Roommates is even a sequel, but you wouldn’t know it; it’s a real blast to this movie’s utter drag.

In the last few minutes, Gabriella exercises her true sexual freedom by bedding a senior citizen (Phillip Terry, The Leech Woman) on a boat. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Confessions in Static (2025)

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Told through interrogations, surveillance tapes and general camcorder clowning, Bob Freville’s Confessions in Static isn’t your usual found-footage project. Despite teaser trailers selling otherwise, it isn’t even horror, but a crime story in which the wattage matches the fidelity of the format.

Four friends — including an annoying conspiracy bro and a loathsome crypto investment bro — are questioned separately about the events of Easter weekend, particularly their whereabouts in relation to the Dekker house, the site of a famous Long Island murder spree. As we’re shown via the pals’ videos, which are intercut with the third-degree questioning in a nonlinear fashion, they’re sickened the home is now exploited as an Airbnb to true-crime fanatics, so they decide to do something about it.

While certainly interesting from a square-one premise, Confessions in Static covers acres and acres of conversational ground — from philosophy and dark tourism to Kitty Genovese and Pootie Tang — before viewers are able to form a baseline of understanding, Once you’ve got your bearings, though, you have the twist figured out, halfway before arrival.

That might not be such a problem if the dialogue throughout weren’t so stilted and ostentatious in the key of Kevin Smith, where everyone’s a comedian. It might work for one character, but not all characters, especially as the cast members struggle to deliver lines in the manner intended. Then again, Freville hails from the not-for-everyone’s-taste world of bizarro fiction, where not everything has to jell … and doesn’t. That explains why Static often feels a couple steps removed from the experimental — perhaps the best way to approach it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Janice.Click or Relay.