All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Dark Asset (2023)

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For its early years, starting in 1995, the fledgling UPN network operated on a business model leaning heavily on cheesy, ultimately short-lived sci-fi/action series, like Nowhere Man, The Sentinel and Deadly Games. In title, concept and production quality, Dark Asset feels like one of those shows, albeit never aired and salvaged by cobbling several episodes together into a faux feature. The first hour is so overstuffed with flashbacks, collectively introducing close to a dozen characters, that if not for the three-decade difference, my comparison wouldn’t be out of the question.

Total charmer Byron Mann (2018’s Skyscraper) stars as calm, cool, collected John Doe. He’s ex-Special Forces — “a soldier’s soldier,” we’re told — and the latest recruit for a shadowy super-spy operation in which Dr. Cain (Robert Patrick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) shoves a microchip into the brain. Said chip allows Dr. Cain and his iPad to implant ideas into said brain — not quite control, but the power of suggestion.

Should’ve gone with control, Doc! Doe disobeys orders and punches, kicks and chops his way outta the lab and to a hotel bar where he meets Jane (Helena Mattsson, Species: The Awakening), a beautiful blonde in town for the requisite “business conference.” As with writer/director Michael Winnick’s superior Guns Girls & Gambling, his camera loves — and I mean loves — Mattsson. If you’ve ever wanted to see her fight open-bloused, may I direct your attention to Dark Asset.

But it’s not likely to keep it. With a two-thirds-in twist you’ll guess upon Clue One, the structure of John Doe telling most of the movie’s story to Jane with constant cutaways that show it — flashy cars, pulsating lights, fisticuffs with swarthy bizmen — interrupts any gained momentum, if not derails it. The flatness of digital video doesn’t assist Winnick in achieving his B-pic vision; ergo, the UPNity of it all. At Dark Asset’s best, the Mann-as-machine fight scenes, I was reminded of Jet Li’s similarly action-driven The One; at its worst, well, UPN’s The Burning Zone, I guess? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare (1964)

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For nearly an hour of its hour, The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare consists of a naked woman being drawn or photographed for artistic purposes. How does the narrator make that interesting? Beats me, because he doesn’t. Director and writer Sande N. Johnsen (Teenage Gang Debs) doesn’t seem to know, either, although he tries by inserting props like guitars, beach balls, African ritual masks — you know, the usual. At least the constant jazz music’s hep!

The narrator of this New Yawk story, Leo (Tom Signorelli of Michael Mann’s Thief), is an artist who convinces his buddy Pete (Jack Lowe, Johnsen’s The Twisted Sex) to put his heavy-haired arms to good use as a nudie shutterbug. Although visually the type of guy who says, “Now look here, lady” three times a day with incontestable derision, Pete agrees.

All goes fine for a while — a long, long while to the viewer — as Pete takes pictures of so many undressed dames with such varied shapes and slopes of breasts, you could CLEP out of freshmen geometry. Then Pete’s aversion to the color red rears its fangs. From a model’s fiery hair to another’s freshly coated fingernails, each appearance of the crimson makes him go wonky, resulting in one of cinema’s greatest worst reaction shots as Pete’s struck speechless for a full 10 seconds! By the time yet another model cuts her finger, Pete acts like he’s just been told he has a dead mother, tummy cancer and a disappearing penis.

So Johnsen can justify the Bloody portion of the title, Pete starts murdering the gals. It’s similar to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red, but a year earlier and really, really boring. Exception: the end’s rooftop chase and Pete’s final freakout, in which he slathers himself up like the Peanut Butter Baby. The production is so cheap, city streets and walls play home to painted and markered credits, far outlasting this nudie cutie’s run. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

Kick to Death: Death Kick (1998)

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Give Kick to Death: Death Kick this: It tells you upfront redundancy and ineptitude are afoot. What it doesn’t tell you: Prepare to see one man’s ego deep-tissue massaged as his apparent sexual fantasies are enacted. I speak of former St. Louis cop Michael Hartig, credited as the movie’s writer, main producer and lead actor. Considering this marks director William Patrick Crabtree’s lone IMDb entry, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were Hartig’s pseudonym.

Although he looks more like a toupée model or someone who must knock on doors to inform you he’s moved into the neighborhood, Hartig plays kickboxing attorney Adrian Lane, who’s pissed off too many clients: five, to be exact. So two of them, Robert (Chickboxer’s Jesse Bean) and Teal (Earnest Hart Jr., “Four Time World Kickboxing Champion” according to the opening credits), organize quite the revengefest by kidnapping Adrian — while what sounds like a rejected B-side to Alannah Myles’ “Black Velvet” cassingle warbles on the soundtrack — and tying him up in a federal safe house located in the back of a tile store. (Hardened criminals never purchase tile, right?)

All attractive women, the three other clients plunk down $50,000 apiece for a turn torturing Adrian with drills and spray-can flames before a hired fighter kicks his ass — to death, if we’re to believe that title. Instead, the ladies tease him with their nude bodies, which is an unusual play, but we’re in the Show-Me State, after all. With an oddly specific sexual kink repeated throughout like a spank-bank deposit committed to film, his narcissism makes that of attorney-at-law John De Hart — and his respective vanity project, GetEven — look tame. Death Kick plays like the Craftsman power tools catalog accidentally printed a rambling missive from Letters to Penthouse.

A choice exchange of dialogue between captor and captive as “Revenge time starts at 9”:

Robert: “I have a plan.”
Adrian: “The best laid plans of mice and men.”
Robert: “What? What? Shut up! Fuck the mice and fuck the men! You’re going down!”

Up first, a redhead (White Palace stripper K.C. Carr, reading her lines like a 45 record run at 33 1/3 speed) is so angry about losing custody, she unhooks her bra, straddles Adrian and says, “If I had spurs, we’d go for a ride.”

Sexier by a mile, a wealthy blonde (frickin’ gorgeous one-timer Corinne Malcom) in a purple leather suit walks in heels so slowly that she looks in fear of forgetting the foot order required for the act of walking. Upset because post-divorce, she no longer gets invited to the right parties, she and her sizable bust put on a “private fashion show.” In between changing four outfits, she wavers between complimenting Adrian’s “tight ass” and threatening, “I’m gonna eat from your eyes.”

Speaking of eyes, a literal tear is coaxed from Adrian’s by the exposed breasts of Matty (Deborah E. Loveless), whose Taco Tico wrapper-patterned blouse screams “PTA treasurer.” In between these teasing faux seductions, the aforementioned freelance tuffies force Adrian to:
• spar with a hired stickfighter in genie britches (Terry Cramer, “American Kumite and Kata Champion”)
• trade blows with a guy in an ill-fitting Everlast shirt (Michael Stocker, “North American Light Heavy Kickboxing Champion”)
• and nut-punch a sweaty, coked-up mullet man (Greg Oldham)

Are you not entertained? Because Robert also saws a board in half, then roars through gritted teeth, “JIGSAW PUZZLE, ANYONE?” At the end, everybody fights everybody else while Adrian’s noosed, presumably to give him time to go flaccid. Naturally he escapes and quips, “Whaddaya think — is it too late for med school?” Fade to the rest of your life.

The last two and half minutes of credits have no actual credits, because Hartig lets the song he paid good money for play out, by gum. Since Kick to Death: Death Kick kicked its way into, I dunno, maybe 14 or 15 VCRs nationwide, Hartig hasn’t appeared in front of a camera — a damn shame, especially if you’re sitting on a script for a John Astin biopic. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama 2 (2022)

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Fans of the VHS classic Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama were clamoring for a sequel. Well, in 1988, maybe. Three decades too late comes Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama 2.

Caught committing sex crimes against the sorority members of Pi Epsilon Delta, three frat boys thirsty for T&A agree to join the ladies in a little B&E: an after-hours trip to the local bowling alley to retrieve a hallowed trophy. Yes, it’s the same trophy that unleashes the same foul-mouthed imp, now made of minimally articulated foam, quoting MLK and voiced by Derek Jeremiah Reid (Bad Impulse).

One by one, the imp grants their wishes as literally as possible, to fatal results. Por ejemplo, a guy expressing desire to be “a famous rapper” is magically and moronically turned into a — wait for it — candy bar wrapper, which the imp then eats.

Scripted by Full Moon regular Kent Roudebush (Ooga Booga), Bowl-O-Rama 2 isn’t so much written as it is written over. More remake than sequel, it repeats the events of the original, but shorn of half an hour, the horror elements and, frankly, all of the fun. Given its general nonchalance and low production values, you’d be forgiven for assuming David DeCoteau returned to the director’s throne, but those duties fell to Brinke Stevens. She and fellow Sorority Babe Michelle Bauer reprise their roles in cameos, albeit separate from the action since they’re ghosts and not on the set. Linnea Quigley, however, is a no-show, so Kelli Maroney (Slayground) takes her part as the Pi Ep house mom.

Unless you want to see what Full Moon’s round of starlets look like in a group shower, skip it, as Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama 2 rolls straight into the gutter. Its use of clips from the ’88 film serve as flashbacks, as well as a sad reminder of how producer Charles Band keeps lowering the bar for the Full Moon brand. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Rage (1995)

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In a right-place/wrong-time scenario, family man and schoolteacher Alex Gainer gets kidnapped by an enigmatic tech company secretly developing a super-soldier serum. After injecting illegals in this clandestine experiment, the firm moves to perfect physical specimens like Gainer, seeing how he’s portrayed by British kickboxer and American straight-to-video action hero Gary Daniels.

Gainer has everything to lose, so when he’s framed as a cop killer, he’s willing to do anything to avoid capture and clear his name, like:
• steal an 18-wheeler to penetrate a police barricade
• then steal a school bus as a follow-up
• fight an S&M-practicing couple in their own kitchen
• scale a skyscraper while being shot at from a helicopter
• trust a TV journalist (Kenneth Tigar, Phantasm II) whose camerawoman (Jillian McWhirter, Strangeland) wears a vest that might be a Pizza Hut tablecloth

Rage isn’t content with stopping there. Perhaps out-Commandoing Commando, the climax’s all-out brawl takes place in a multilevel shopping mall with many, many plate-glass windows for Gainer and his pursuers to bust through — some in glorious slow motion. No freestanding table or merry-go-round in the place is spared, nor are the VHS shelves of the video rental store offering only PM Entertainment titles, like Zero Tolerance and C.I.A. Code Name: Alexa.

Naturally, Rage not only was built at the PM Entertainment action factory, but more than competently directed by PM co-founder Joseph Merhi. In its decade of pumping these scuffles-and-’splosions pics out for Friday-night Cinemax premieres, his production company caught flak as a purveyor of schlock, but that reputation wasn’t always warranted, with Rage serving as proof. Presumably, its price tag came in below seven figures, yet the movie doesn’t act like it; with actual scope and scale, Rage is barely discernible from lower-tier wide theatrical releases that year — I speak of Fair Game, Top Dog and The Hunted. The one glaring exception: the lack of a household name.

Not that Daniels didn’t try! Like many of his co-stars in The Expendables, where he played the antagonist, he may not have razor-sharp thespian skills, but he’s got something. In Rage, that’s apparent right away — not in a kablooey set piece, but in teaching second graders about monkeys, even if it takes a dark turn into Jeffrey Dahmer’s dietary choices. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.