All posts by Rod Lott

Action

The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

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mightypekingHong Kong King Kong! This Shaw Brothers take on the giant-monkey-gone-ape story is so unintentionally hysterical that even joking about it in print doesn’t do it justice.

In a remote jungle, an earthquake — simulated via unbelievably bad rear-screen projection — unleashes a giant gorilla from the mountain. If you’re fishing for an explanation as to why, how or what a giant gorilla was doing in the mountain in the first place, forget about it. Just know that he doesn’t care much for being out of the mountain, so he steps on a lot of screaming villagers and destroys a lot of obviously miniature miniatures.

The Mighty Peking Man (I’m not sure how he got that name, either, but I’ll just call him “Peking” for short) befriends Samantha, a little girl whose parents’ plane crashes in the jungle (or rather, lands pretty gently for a toy model). Thanks to Peking’s unparalleled parenting skills, she grows up to be quite the sexpot. Played by Evelyne Kraft (The French Sex Murders), she looks like Farrah Fawcett crossed with a Barbie doll, which I admit is kinda redundant. Samantha wears nothing but an all-too-skimpy loincloth and (inexplicably) makeup. She communicates only through primitive words and grunts, but since she’s not shy at showing her ass, the guys who meet her don’t mind her language limitations.

mightypeking1Specifically, I speak of Johnnie (Danny Lee, City on Fire), the helmet-haired man sent by some organization to find this Peking man, reputed to be mighty. Johnnie succeeds — and then some, as he mates with Samantha in no time, making Peking jealous when he catches them mid-coitus. (Do you really want to be copulating with a woman who’s lived in the jungle all her life and, therefore, doesn’t have access to all the fine hygiene products we take for granted?) The lovebirds celebrate their coupling by taking part in a syrupy, slow-motion montage, in which they twirl tigers draped across their backs and run across sun-bathed fields, so that Kraft’s nipples can slip in and out of her costume and preserved for historical posterity.

Then they chain Peking to a large boat and take him to Hong Kong, where they will reap riches by showcasing him in a variety of games in a stadium setting, like a monster truck pull — literally a monster truck pull, as what is Peking but a monster, and he is shown yanking on several trucks chained to him. Combined with all the prodding with sticks, this pisses Peking off to the point where he escapes and goes loco in downtown Hong Kong, ultimately climbing atop a tall building so that — having seen any King Kong movie — the viewer knows exactly what will happen.

And it does, but in such a laughably cheap and shoddy technique, in order to stay within the context of this incredibly goofy, incredibly fun film, known in some circles as Goliathon. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Mundo Depravados (1967)

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mundoOn the night of a full moon, poor Arlene is murdered. One of her socks is missing from the scene, proving we live in such a Mundo Depravados — that is, depraved world. Need further proof? Before the crime photographer snaps his pic, Arlene’s dress is lowered to bare a nipple. Say “cheese,” ya hot corpse!

Then our nonsensical, Naked City-wannabe narration kicks in: “Yes, this is your city. It has more than a million eyes. … But tonight, all these eyes are blind. They listen, but they do not hear. They touch, but they do not feel.” Whatever. All viewers need to know is that a killer of lovely ladies is on the loose; all of his victims belong to the Temple of Beauty Health Club; and everyone refers to him as “the sex monster.”

mundo1The good news is that two police detectives (“comedy cops” Johnnie Decker and Larry Reed, reunited from Al Adamson’s Psycho a Go-Go) are on the case. The bad news is that the two police detectives exhibit as much horndoggedness as the film’s multiple Peeping Toms, so of course they’re eager to partner with Tango, a stripper pal of Arlene played by real-life stripper Tempest Storm, whose pendulous breasts keep Mundo Depravados from being completely inert. They cannot distract, however, from her emotionless line readings.

Who would give her such a plum role? Singing cowboy Herb Jeffries, in his one and only attempt at writing and directing. He was married to Storm at the time — but just barely, as their union dissolved the year of Mundo Depravados’ release. Semi-sleazy for its time, the movie plays rather static today, peekaboo nudity and all. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Sorority House Massacre II (1990)

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SHMIIWhereas 1986’s Sorority House Massacre was serious, Sorority House Massacre II takes the self-aware, scream-queen route. That’s bound to happen when you put Jim Wynorski (1988’s Not of This Earth) at the helm.

So will abnormally large breasts, which makes him the perfect director for such an imperfect project. Who else would have the foresight to place all the cops’ expository dialogue in a strip club?

Five sorority girls buy a new-to-them house for their chapter. They’re able to afford it because the abode has been on the market for five years, what with being the site of multiple murders and all. When they’re informed by the creepy neighbor what went on there, Wynorski cedes screen time to clips from a previous movie … but not the previous movie. Instead of footage from the film to which SMHII is ostensibly a sequel, we see a condensed version of 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre. Slumber, sorority — slutty all the same, right?

SHMII1After the girls take showers (Stacia Zhivago, who kind of looks like Laura Dern with double Ds, soaps herself up to squeak-toy noises on the soundtrack), they don lingerie to play with a Ouija board, which reawakens the evil of the home; ergo, the “massacre” portion of the title can come into play.

None of the actresses can act; they’re here to scream and let the camera leer over their bodies. For example, for a simple shot of three of them ascending a staircase, Wynorski chose a lower-than-low angle for maximum ass-cheek exposure. More than the blood that squirts like a ketchup dispenser being squeezed too hard too fast, skin is the most special effect of all in SHMII, from Melissa Moore (Repossessed) to former porn star Gail Harris. Wynorski didn’t need much more that that, except the same ol’ crashed-lightning stock footage producer Roger Corman has used since his Edgar Allan Poe pictures. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made the World’s Most Notorious Horror Movie

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chainsawconfidentialNearly 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gunnar Hansen, who forever will be known as Leatherface in the 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. While his iconic character is terrifying and evil, Hansen himself is not. He’s a teddy bear, nice and gracious as can be.

Therefore, it’s not a surprise to me that his book on the making on that movie, Chain Saw Confidential, is like its author: well-spoken and informative, yet also politely quiet and respectfully subdued. Those hoping for a Fangoria-style exercise in gore will be disappointed.

I didn’t, so I wasn’t. After all, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t nearly as violent as its title or reputation suggests. It’s an intense film, no doubt, but so much of its brutality isn’t onscreen — it’s filled in by viewers’ minds. The movie is also not a cult film, because, as the book reminds us, it simply was far too successful to qualify.

Success was hardly on the minds of any of the cast members, all unknowns just happy to be making a Real Movie, even if they didn’t think anything would become of it. Financed in part by drug money, Tobe Hooper’s Massacre proved tougher to make than it is to watch, thanks to the unbearable summer heat of the Lone Star State and, during the now-famous dinner scene that took 26 hours to shoot, the smell of dead dogs and headcheese.

With remarkable clarity and detail for something that took place four decades ago, Hansen recounts the treacherous, unpredictable shoot, plus the squabbles over profits the creatives never saw when the film hit big. Given the flick’s monster grosses, they thought they would be rich; “Instead,” Hansen writes, “things just got weird.”

The book retreads a lot of the info from documentaries on the various DVD editions over the years, but gives readers much, much more. (Example: learning that Hooper and company wanted and thought they were going to get a PG rating.) Hansen leans on co-stars for quotes and recollections (but not, tellingly, Hooper), yet the story is told from his frontline perspective. It’s a tale uniquely his own. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony (2012)

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broniesDepending upon where you stand on the subject, the documentary Bronies can be viewed either as a celebration of the fandom or a portrait of it presented for your mockery.

A “brony,” for those of you with better things to do with your time, is a male fan of the current cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a show aimed at children, and primarily girls at that. The guys featured here don’t just like it — they live it, from collecting figurines and attending conventions to creating their own songs and immortalizing the characters on their car windows. (Perhaps “immortalizing” is too strong a word when the windows get busted by homophobes.)

Bronies1Funded by Kickstarter and featuring Pony voice stars John de Lancie and Tara Strong, Bronies is not without interest to the viewer curious about ways of life that are alien to them. The level of fandom on display is as bewildering to me as suspending oneself by hooks in the nipples or surgically altering your face to resemble a celebrity; while I support one’s freedom to pursue such adventures, I do not get what compels one to take it to such an extreme. Hobbies are good; obsessions are unhealthy.

The kids of Bronies are likely to outgrow the phase as fast as a previous generation did Pokémon, but the adults … I mean, what good can come out of calling yourself Starlight Ironhoof? Something about that strikes me as deeply sad — an emotion with which the film does not intend to leave you. —Rod Lott

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