All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

Grand Slam (1967)

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grandslamFreshly retired from a school in Rio de Janeiro, history professor James Anders (Edward G. Robinson, see?) will not go gently into gardening and bingo games. Instead, he returns to New York with a proposition for a childhood chum who’s grown into an über-wealthy corporate criminal (Adolfo Celi, Thunderball): Let’s steal $10 million in diamonds from the place across the street where I used to work, whaddayasay?

Twice a year on the dot, as Anders has noted across three decades of observation, such shimmering loot arrives for lock-up. The upcoming transaction happens to coincide with Rio’s annual Carnival celebration, which could provide welcome distraction for a team of hired experts to carry out the mother of all heists. One of the young guns is an arrogant prick played by real-life arrogant prick Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More).

grandslam1The value of any heist film, needless to say, resides in its heist sequences, and here and elsewhere, Grand Slam delivers on the promise of its title. Our master thieves have allotted themselves nary one second beyond 20 minutes to crack the safe. It’s newly equipped with a series of super-sensitive microphones that trip an alarm upon the slightest sound, and their way around it involves toilet plungers, shaving cream and, in a roundabout way, Janet Leigh’s genitalia.

Directed with an inordinate amount of superimposed frames by Machine Gun McCain‘s Giuliano Montaldo, Grand Slam could have gotten away with letting Rio’s sunny backdrop do the legwork, but chooses to go all in, thereby establishing a solid framework for many a colorful caper to follow. It’s not perfect — from one character’s immediate about-face, the twist is evident in the first hour — but it comes damned close, placing it among the all-time heist classics. It also contains what is, for my money, Ennio Morricone’s all-time greatest theme. To hear it is to know joy. —Rod Lott

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Martial Arts

Man of Tai Chi (2013)

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mantaichiTo paraphrase one of Keanu Reeves’ more famous lines from The Matrix, he knows kung fu … so why not make his own martial-arts movie? In that directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, he proves competent behind the camera, which automatically places him above his skills in front of it. In the department of delivering lines, Reeves does a poorer job here than ever.

His Beijing businessman Donaka Mark is as wealthy as he is secretive, bankrolling an underground fight club broadcast overseas via pay-for-view, for which he constantly seeks contestants … partly because he keeps killing the losers. Fresh talent arrives in lowly courier Tiger Chen (played by stuntman Tiger Chen, House of Fury), who practices the same style of tai chi as 21 generations before him. To get paid to fight using tai chi would be dishonorable, Tiger tells Donaka, but when the young cub’s temple is served with a 30-day eviction notice, he quickly changes his stripes.

mantaichi1No matter what ‘roided foe or fightin’ style Donaka throws his way, Tiger emerges victorious — ironic since tai chi is something your grandma does at the Y for exercise. Tiger wins the bucks needed to save the temple, but at a price: running afoul of a Hong Kong police inspector (Karen Mok, Shaolin Soccer) who’s been investigating Donaka’s biz plan for quite some time and is looking to take down the arrogant Yank.

The big plus of Man of Tai Chi is that in the fight sequences — and there are many — viewers can tell what’s happening. In today’s rat-a-tat editing world, that’s a near-novelty. How much of that is the doing of Reeves or his action director, HK legend Yuen Woo Ping, is unknown, but we’ll give Reeves the benefit of the doubt … because we shall cut no slack for his performance. At one point, he laughs at Tiger with a scoff, and does so stiltedly, the audience practically can see Reeves reading a cue card on which is written, “LAUGH MEAN.” Our Man of Tai Chi, Chen, also is a man of few words, but he does okay — as long as we leave his haircut out of it. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Vacation of Terror 2: Diabolical Birthday (1991)

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vacationterror2Epic mullet intact, Pedro Fernández is the lone cast member of René Cardona III’s Vacation of Terror to return for the wonderfully titled sequel, Vacation of Terror 2: Diabolical Birthday, again as Julio. Alternately (and unimaginatively) known as Pesadilla Sangrienta (Bloody Nightmare), this second helping may be an improvement over the original, but let the record show that no one takes a vacation.

Now under the guiding hand of another director with Roman numerals in his name, Pedro Galindo III, the Mexico-made monstrosity puts Julio in the antiques biz. What to his rapey eyes should appear in his store one day but teen tart Mayra (unimonikered singer Tatiana). He gives her a free plant worth 60,000 pesos in hopes of getting into her pantalones; instead, he gets an invitation to hear her sing that night at the birthday party for her 7-year-old sister, Tania (Renata del Río).

vacationterror21The shindig is horror-themed — because if there’s one thing all little girls love, it’s monsters — and being thrown at the movie studio owned by their father, producer Roberto Mondragón (Joaquín Cordero, Wrestling Women vs. the Murderous Robot). Mayra takes the stage to belt a tune whose pure pop pep belies such grim, gibberish lyrics as “Boys, boys, boys / Clumsy and aggressive / Poor boys / Neurotics, all lost / Boys, boys, boys / Super guys / Surprised by Sunday crisis.”

Then Papa Mondragón wheels out a grande-sized strawberry cake, underneath which hides the creepy doll from the first film. Consuming a swiped handful of the cake causes the doll to lose its hair and shed its skin, thus revealing its true self: a goopy demon with horns, tail and all. (Don’t question it.) Tania vanishes within a wall and Julio swoops into he-man mode, strutting around the grounds in a trench coat, as if he were Van Helsing … but played by comedian Paul Rodriguez.

Making cameos in this frivolous spectacle of special effects — “special” as in “special education” — are Tom Cruise and Heather Thomas, albeit via posters: respectively, the Cocktail one-sheet and the smashed-pancake/white-bikini shot that got me all hot and bothered at the onset of puberty. You know, when I was neurotic, all lost, surprised by Sunday crisis. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

The Psychic (1977)

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psychicWhile driving through a tunnel, wealthy newlywed Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) experiences a terrifying vision of a woman being walled up, “Cask of Amontillado”-style, by a man with a limp. It’s hardly Virginia’s first brush with clairvoyance, having “seen” her own mother’s cliffside plunge to suicide 18 years earlier. (Never does The Psychic top that prologue sequence in shocks.)

As a surprise for her husband (Gianni Garko, Devil Fish), Virginia plans to restore a mansion he hasn’t used since bedding babe after babe in his playboy bachelor days. To her horror, she recognizes a wall there as the one from her blackout dream; sure enough, inside is the skeleton of a female believed to have been in her 20s. When it’s revealed that the mystery woman was one of Mr. Ducci’s numerous conquests, Virginia works with her shrink and authorities to prove her spouse’s innocence and find the true killer, not to mention decipher the remainder of her clue-filled hallucination.

psychic1That’s the problem with The Psychic, a mostly mainstream effort from excess specialist Lucio Fulci (The Beyond): It spells out its own denouement with alarming simplicity. If viewers pay any reasonable degree of attention, they’ll have the ending solved by the second scene — not an exaggeration. I thought surely Fulci’s story would have more to it than that. It did not.

While she is quite the knockout, O’Neill’s abilities as an actress stand in indirect proportion to her looks. Fulci’s camera asks little of her but to stand still with eyes widened and mouth agape, so he can zoom in for a close-up. Over. And over. And over. Just because his film is about a psychic and titled after a psychic doesn’t mean it should settle for predictability. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Belphégor: Phantom of the Louvre (2001)

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belphegorAs he would do in 2004’s Adventures of Arsène Lupin, director Jean-Paul Salomé updates a French pulp favorite in Belphégor: Phantom of the Louvre, based on Arthur Bernède’s 1927 mystery novel. Perhaps owing to the success of Stephen Sommers’ American Mummy franchise, this treatment is first and foremost a fantasy.

In a prologue set in 1935 Egypt, a 3,000-year-old tomb is unearthed, with a sarcophagus intact. Near instantly, the mummy unleashes a virus that causes hallucinations with anyone who dares stare directly into its eyes, like Medusa. Said hallucinations are based upon the individual’s fear, from dogs to needles, and can lead to suicide. In present-day France, the mummy’s spirit exits its dirt-dry corpse, enters the electrical system and causes all kinds of havoc throughout the world-famous Louvre Museum.

belphegor1Per an on-the-case inspector (Michel Serrault, Diabolique), the floating specter is a belphégor — that is, Satan in human form. Whatever it is, it steals Egyptian amulets from the Louvre’s Egyptology collection and possesses the body of an on-the-rebound woman (Sophie Marceau, The World Is Not Enough) after she chases her cat inside the museum. While she’s soaking in the tub, the spirit makes her scribble hieroglyphics with bath crayons. It also makes her have wild sex with the electrician (Frédéric Diefenthal, Luc Besson’s Taxi comedies).

Belphégor is ridiculously silly, but knows it; why else would a frightened Julie Christie (Don’t Look Now) be made to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in an elevator? With its overly convoluted story, inconsistent computer effects and game cast, Salomé’s film is right in line and on par with Russell Mulcahy’s Tale of the Mummy, another gauze-wrapped project that’s problematic, but nonetheless a mild kick to watch. —Rod Lott

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