All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Big Ass Spider! (2013)

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Big Ass Spider (2013) movie posterBig Ass Spider! needs a lesson in basic punctuation. Its title includes an exclamation point that is not needed, yet excludes the hyphen that is. After all, this is a movie about a big-ass spider, not an ass spider that also is big. (I do not know what an ass spider is. Oh, if only a porn parody existed to explain it!)

As an L.A. exterminator named Alex, Greg Grunberg (TV’s Heroes) gets the Bill Murray/Vince Vaughn role of the affable, dumpy slob who nonetheless saves the day and gets the girl (in this case, Bring It On’s Clare Kramer). With the aid of a hospital security guard named José (Candyman: Day of the Dead’s Lombardo Boyar, who makes not-that-funny lines funny in his scene-stealing delivery), Alex chases a deadly spider that gets exponentially larger over the course of one crazy day.

bigassspider1Even before this arachnid has grown large enough to scale the Deloitte office tower King Kong-style, the military is summoned. Immediately, it’s clear the troops have little to no experience dealing with giant spiders that spray some liquid with the power to melt your face like the Ark of the Covenant and take out a public park full of volleyball-playing bikini hussies in nothing flat. (That last part is the best.)

Working from a script by Centipede! scribe Gregory Gieras (I smell a trend), Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers) directs with such a featherweight touch, one practically can sense him smiling from behind the camera. The eight-legged freak’s utter CGI phoniness keeps Big Ass Spider! from venturing beyond a comic vibe into anything approaching fright; I doubt the giving of the willies ever was a goal. At times, the movie feels like you’re watching a video game — the Call of Duty-esque first-person shooter POV sees to that — and that sensibility ultimately seeps into an overall verdict of harmless.

After 75 fleet-footed minutes, the end credits begin. A few seconds later, a stinger suggests a sequel, presumably to be titled Big Ass Cockroach! Fine, boys, but let’s not neglect the hyphen again. —Rod Lott

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Western

Adiós, Sabata (1970)

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adiossabataDepending on who you ask, Adiós, Sabata may or may not be the second entry in the series that began with 1969’s Sabata and ended with 1971’s The Return of Sabata.

The reason? Whereas the bookend films starred Lee Van Cleef as the master gunslinger, Adiós cast Yul Brynner as not Sabata, but Indio Black. The title change was just a cash-in. Still, it works logically enough as a sequel; under the Americanized name of Frank Kramer, Gianfranco Parolini directed all three and, more importantly, Brynner’s character is every bit the stoic badass Van Cleef was.

adiossabata1In 1867, Mexico is a hotbed of revolution, and some of its participants (some of whom sport Afros) aim to steal a chest full of gold from your average detestable Austrian colonel (Gérard Herter, The Big Gundown), he of the mustache and monocle. Never one to make an honest buck, Sabata Indio agrees to help.

“Can I go with you?” asks a boy in the village. “I make very good tortillas!”

As with the original Sabata, gimmicks play a large part of Adiós‘ appeal, from Indio’s sawed-off shotgun hiding a cigar compartment to one of his hombres being a man who hurls metal balls with pinpoint accuracy, using his foot. These touches and others lift this spaghetti Western above the fray. When gold is glimpsed, Parolini’s camera spins ’round and ’round; it’s easy to feel the joy with this one. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Nest (1988)

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thenestNewspaper ads for The Nest got my attention in ’88, depicting a giant cockroach mounting a busty blonde in her bra and panties — sold! Even then, as yet uneducated in Roger Corman’s business practices, this Honor Society high schooler was smart enough to know that odds were, neither that beast nor those breasts appeared in the finished product.

They don’t. Disappointment likely would reign even if they were.

Still grieving over her mother’s death four years earlier, Beth (Lisa Langlois, Happy Birthday to Me) returns home to the New England island town of North Port — just in time for the Fish-a-Whack Festival! But this burg has bigger fish to fry: cockroaches — hissing, killer cannibal cockroaches that can take a man’s arm clean off in seconds.

thenest1The townspeople could turn to Beth’s dad, the mayor (Robert Lansing, Empire of the Ants), for help, but he’s partly to blame, being in bed with the corporation whose experiments resulted in the superpowered roaches. Their only hope is Beth’s ex, a second-generation sheriff (a blank Franc Luz, 1988’s Ghost Town).

Even on a Corman budget, I’d expect a full-length feature to out-creep that one segment of Creepshow in which the bugs so memorably got E.G. Marshall’s tongue, but The Nest is unable to rise to the challenge. Director Terence H. Winkless (Bloodfist) works in a few fun gore scenes, most notably in a cat-cockroach hybrid that solidifies The Nest‘s intent as a throwback to monster movies of the Atomic Age. However, here-and-there moments fail to bond into a interest-held whole. —Rod Lott

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Action

National Treasure (2004)

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nationaltreasureWhat to do if you can’t get the rights to turn Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code into a movie? If you’re Walt Disney Pictures, you strip it of religious concepts and make a Da Vinci Code knockoff in National Treasure, which doesn’t work hard enough with a wide-open premise.

Teaming with Con Air producer Jerry Bruckheimer for the fourth time, Nicolas Cage stars as Benjamin Gates, a third-generation treasure hunter, hopping the globe in search of a rumored bounty o’ historical booty buried by the nation’s founding fathers that his ancestors failed to find. When we meet him, he’s unearthing a pirate ship in the Arctic Circle. The boat doesn’t contain the goods, but merely another clue — one that, as he deciphers, suggests the map to said loot is printed in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

nationaltreasure1Upon this discovery, Gates is double-crossed by his partner, Howe (GoldenEye villain Sean Bean), who leaves him and wisecracking sidekick (Justin Bartha, The Hangover) for dead. Knowing that Howe will steal the priceless document and destroy it, Gates has no choice but to steal it in order to preserve it. In the film’s best set piece, he does, but unwittingly pulls National Archives hottie Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger, Inglourious Basterds) into the dangerous cat-and-mouse pursuit that results.

The hunt takes Gates and company clue by clue to all sorts of touristy stops in Washington, D.C. Somehow, despite having the FBI after him for the theft of the Declaration, he’s able to hang out at all these unguarded public places with ease. It’s a reminder of the pre-9/11 glory days when people could shoot guns at each other on the city streets and no one would bat an eye.

Although overlong, National Treasure somehow feels underwritten, partly because it tries to be too many things — heist, adventure, chase, action — doing better in some areas than others, yet not outright succeeding in any. It’s by no means bad; it just is. You may be entertained without being fully engaged. Director Jon Turteltaub (3 Ninjas) doesn’t do the enough with the clues and the codes, wasting too much of 131 minutes on repetitive getaways and close calls. This one squeaks by much the same.

In the end, Abigail presents Gates with a map to her vagina. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Horror Films FAQ / Armageddon Films FAQ

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horrorfilmsfaqJohn Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films FAQ will appeal most to those who have read his many, many books on scary movies before, yet they will gain little from it. There are better starting places for newcomers to the genre, many of whom I would bet already know more about the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein than this guide assumes.

To be fair, the Universal Monsters and their archetypes are hardly the only cinematic bad guys the book covers; also under the spotlight are aliens, animals, serial killers, zombies, ghosts, kids and ol’ Scratch himself (aka Satan).

Later in the book, and this is where Muir excels, he turns more toward trends than creatures to give brief rundowns of torture porn, Asian remakes and adaptations of video games and Stephen King novels. There’s even a chapter on TV shows, despite the fact they’re not films and that Muir already has written an entire book on the subject (2001’s cost-prohibitive Terror Television).

In his introduction to Horror Films FAQ, he writes, “Countenancing a good scary movie is not just fun, it’s actually cathartic.” I’d be inclined to agree if I knew exactly what he meant; “countenance” means “sanction,” but that doesn’t quite fit the line. No big deal — it’s just the first of many odd choices, opinions and phrases that pop up throughout, whether classifying Lovely Molly as found footage (only in part, but not overwhelmingly) or deeming the TV series Dexter and The Walking Dead as soap operas.

armageddonfilmsfaqWith only a little overlap, worth exploring more is Dale Sherman’s Armageddon Films FAQ. Because “armageddon” is not a genre as “horror” is, the canvas is comparatively blank, allowing for surprise.

Yes, Sherman delves into the expected disaster films and/or nearly the entire CV of Roland Emmerich, but also zombie uprisings, ape planets, Martian invasions, killer viruses and body snatchers. His scope is so wide, some titles are included that might not have come to my mind for “end of the world” viewing even after hours of thinking: Fight Club, Judge Dredd (the Stallone one) and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy.

As with Muir’s book, Sherman also includes a chapter dedicated to examples on the tube, plus adds one on music videos. Again, these aren’t films, but I guess whenever civilization does collapse and we’re without electricity, we’ll all need more to read, right? —Rod Lott

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