All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Gridlock (1996)

Leave a comment

In the opening moments of Gridlock, NYPD super cop Jake Gorsky (David Hasselhoff) foils a hostage situation with little more than a rolled quarter, a janitor’s push broom and a direct threat to a man’s testes. Trouble is, Gorsky’s part of the force’s helicopter unit, so he disobeyed a direct order to let the negotiator do his negotiating. To justify himself, Gorsky argues to his chopper partner that the guy “couldn’t negotiate a hot meal into a starving man!”

What does this have to do with the rest of the made-for-TV movie? Nothing — except to set up that Hasselhoff is basically John McClane (but, of course, isn’t). Gridlock is little more than a third-rate Die Hard clone, with Gorsky cracking wise in the face of danger and woman troubles. Hell, he even goes over the side of a tall building with a firehose tied to his waist.

That building is the Federal Reserve of New York, where his had-it-up-to-here girlfriend (squeaky-voiced supermodel Kathy Ireland) works as a tour guide. Naturally, its gold vault is the target of a team of Euroterrorists in suits and number-based aliases, led by Mr. One (Miguel Fernandes, Ghost Story). From his whirlybird perch in the sky, Gorsky susses out their plan when the bad guys blow up area bridges as distraction. He leaps into action — or as much as an NBC budget will allow — to save his lady and thwart a precious-metals heist.

Much of Gridlock finds Sandor Stern (Amityville: The Evil Escapes) directing Hasselhoff and/or Ireland to walk and/or run down this hallway or that hallway, all while random terrorists shout things like “He’s heading for the coin room!” over walkie-talkies. It’s not as much fun as Terror at London Bridge, arguably the crowning glory of the Hoff’s TV features. But you know what it is more fun than? A Good Day to Die Hard. —Rod Lott

Kitchen Sink

Blast-Off Girls (1967)

Leave a comment
WTF

In Chicago’s garage-rock scene — or at least the one depicted in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blast-Off Girls — Boojie Baker (Dan Conway) wants to rule the roost as the local music promoter du jour. Imagine Scooter Braun, but carrying a cane for show — one that looks two brim taps shy from producing a rabbit.

Boojie’s latest target for his 50/50 contract scheme is a mop-topped quintet he restyles and rebrands as The Big Blast. He succeeds at getting them noticed, written about, photographed, booked, played, recorded and hitting! That’s because Boojie is a master manipulator as a manager, wheelin’ and dealin’ via cooze-slingin’. Every decent-looking woman in the Windy City is willing to move up and down on whomever can help The Big Blast move up the charts.

It works so well, Boojie lights his cigars with cash … but only a dollar bill — and just the corner, if you please, so the thrifty Lewis could still use it as legal tender, of course. The Big Blast soon threatens to implode when they don’t see any of that money. Such one-sided success forms the template of many a rock ’n’ roll movie so in vogue at the time, but only Lewis, free of studio interference, could get away with a bongo pot party.

Certainly no filmmaker other than Lewis would stop his music pic cold for what amounts to a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial with Col. Harland Sanders himself supplying buckets to the band in exchange for an impromptu gig outside the restaurant. Original-recipe or extra-crispy, it’s my favorite instance of product placement in movie history. It would be even if it didn’t end with Sanders winking at the camera. Fourth wall, you’ve just been eye-fucked-through by the Colonel.

The biggest shock of Blast-Off Girls isn’t that Lewis titled the film after minor characters (if characters at all), but that the music is legitmately good. Having amped-up tunes supplying energy takes the onus off Lewis to be concerned with camera placement. For what it’s worth, he saves the group members’ Richard Lester-esque montage of mischief for the closing credits.

Worrying over an absence of gore in a Lewis picture turned out to be moot. This movie frugs! As Boojie says about 12 or 13 times, “Have a blast!” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

The Dead One (1961)

Leave a comment

Filmmaker Barry Mahon primarily dealt in two genres: sexploitation and kiddie matinees. The Dead One is one of his few standing somewhere in the middle. Shot in New Orleans, it’s a Bourbon Street bouillabaisse of zombies and voodoo.

In the last of three movies he made with Mahon (or anyone), John McKay stars as Johnny, who takes his freshly minted bride, Linda (one-timer Linda Ormond), from the altar to a strip club, because women love that shit. As Johnny explains to a cocktail waitress, they’re combining their honeymoon with business, because women love that shit. He’s inherited a working slave plantation (!) from his grandfather, so they’re gonna go check it out.

En route, they pass a stranded motorist who happens to be Bella Bella (Darlene Myrick of Mahon’s Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas), whose strip act they just peeped. Because Johnny’s not mechanical, he invites Bella to join them on their honeymoon, because women that love shit.

At the manse, Johnny’s ice-veined cousin Monica (Monica Davis of Mahon’s Rocket Attack U.S.A.) isn’t keen on the unplanned visitor — or the whole thing, really, because Johnny’s marriage triggered a loophole in Gramps’ will that transferred the deed out of her clutches.

In fact, only in Linda’s death can Monica regain full ownership, so she rounds up all the Black people in her employ to play the drums while she conducts a voodoo ritual. This prompts her dead brother (one-and-doner Clyde Kelly) to rise from his coffin as a lumbering zombie. He sports a mullet, a prom tux and a skin tone somewhere between jaundice and guacamole.

Barely over an hour — and even then only because Mahon shows that ritual twice — The Dead One is no classic of the undead, but bears interest for leveraging the voodoo angle all but forgotten once George A. Romero came into the picture. Plus, how else will you hear Mahon’s gripping newlywed dialogue like:

Johnny: “She’s dead.”
Linda: “Can we help her?”

Being made to look stupid onscreen? Women love that shit. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Deep Water (2026)

Leave a comment

Roughly five minutes after seeing Deep Blue Sea on its opening weekend in the summer of 1999, I couldn’t wait for Renny Harlin to make a sequel. He never did. Deep Water may be as close as we’ll get. At least Aaron Eckhart resembles Thomas Jane enough if you squint, middle-aged dad paunch and all. 

Eckhart (London Has Fallen) and Ben Kingsley (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) are piloting a commercial jet from L.A. to Shanghai with 257 lives aboard. That head count gets slashed by, oh, about 88% when a faulty portable battery sparks a fire in the cargo hold, setting into motion a series of unfortunate events culminating in a devastating crash in the ocean, splitting the aircraft in two (and calling to mind another of Harlin’s greatest action hits: the just-plane-dangerous Die Hard 2).

In the aftermath, first class stays afloat with Eckhart attempting to keep the peace and signal rescue; economy seating is sunk (typical!) with that section’s tail sticking out of the water, creating a pseudo-Poseidon Adventure sitch, which the movie acknowledges with a “Shelley Winters talkin’ shit” joke. But Irwin Allen forgot to surround his oopsie-daisy ship with an untold number of sharks; Harlin has not. 

So we have dual plots at work — twice as many than what most sharksploitation films allow. Although the predators are CGI and the ocean is clearly a set, Harlin is enough of a pro to make many of the attacks at least a tad exciting. Plus, to his credit (or those of the five writers), who gets chewed into chunky bits isn’t always evident. An exception by design is Angus Sampson (Insidious) as the assholiest of asshole passengers whose assholishness causes all the doom and gloom; with this asshole, it’s not a matter of if, but when. 

The disaster sequence itself, at roughly 10 minutes, is really well-done, executed with Final Destination-worthy flair (nice knowing you, Mile-High Clubbers!) that makes you think, “Is it okay I’m laughing here?” That mean streak is not incidental; in fact, I believe co-producer Gene Simmons (yes, as in Kiss) had something to do with its bloody, winking naughtiness.

It’s just a shame that for all its head-chomping and chum-churning, Deep Water pusses out in its coda by going sappy. We’re talking Cancer Kid sappy. It’s so sentimental, they’d probably have Kingsley crooning “Fly Me to Moon,” if the script already hadn’t ordered that twice before. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle (2026)

1 Comment

What do a man-absorbing rock, electrocuted cattle and a fucked-up compass have in common? A 36-square-mile area in South Vermont known as the Bennington Triangle, according to From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle, a Small Town Monsters documentary.

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared from its unmarked borders without explanation. Per narrator Mark Matzke, “The facts are few; the stories are many.”

And how! Interviewees talk of floating orbs, haunted homes, the sound of crying babies in the forest, ancient stone structures and a teleportation vortex. They also talk of UFOs, shadow people and a Bigfoot “built like a brick shithouse.” Covering so many ascribed theories in a short amount of time, it’s a veritable paranormalpalooza!

As always, director Seth Breedlove turns in a well-researched, well-made and largely well-oiled hour or so that explores a ton of questions to leave unanswered. High Strangeness feels more skeptical than his previous efforts I’ve seen, in that Breedlove seems more game to explicitly acknowledge the existence of what his core audience likely doesn’t want: plausible explanations and, quoting Matzke, “how rumor becomes record.”

That said, Breedlove saves the most outlandish Bennington Triangle encounter for last, as composer and vegetable farmer Robert Singley tells of his experience there, when time and distance suddenly became malleable. One of his lines could double as the Small Town Monsters motto: “That don’t make no sense.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.