All posts by Rod Lott

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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Comedy

Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven (2011)

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showgirls2I get why Showgirls 2 exists. What I don’t get is why it has to run for an utterly unbearable two and a half hours. Full of sequins and glitter and fake tits, the movie is so intentionally camp, prepare to be asked to write your name in your underwear.

An unofficial sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 flop, Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven focuses on the minor Showgirls character of Penny Slot (get it?), played by Rena Riffel, who also serves as writer, director, producer and editor of this mess. Just because it is in on its own joke doesn’t mean its creative chaos can be overlooked.

showgirls21After a testy exchange will a fellow dancer/stripper (“You stole my customer!” “You stole my G-string!”), Penny flees Vegas for Hollywood to chase her dream of being the gooey center of the Star Dance television show. But first, she has to pour hot sauce on her bare chest, become an escort, learn ballet, have a lesbian relationship, consider taking part in a snuff film, and so on and so on.

I’m guessing that maybe the underfunded but overstuffed movie plays better for those who have turned the original Showgirls into a contemporary cult classic, since I don’t remember Riffel even being in Showgirls. (She wrangled three other actors into reprising their roles; I remember only one.) Nonetheless, when it comes to matching the original’s atrocious dialogue, Riffel strikes the right chord. Example: “I don’t know what’s worse: your dancing or your camel toe.” Another: “You know, there’s an art to a good wiener.”

See, Showgirls 2 doesn’t even try to be a glitzy melodrama as Verhoeven did and failed; instead, Riffel goes straight for the self-aware comedy. In Penny, Riffle has the ditzy-sex-bomb thing down pat, and for the movie’s first several minutes — 15, 20 at the most, maybe? — I laughed along with her as she brushed her teeth with cocaine or tried to think of how she old she is. But even the best joke gets old when you keep telling it, and that’s what Riffel does, ultimately dooming its prospects. Something like this should be 75 minutes, tops, especially for projects with porno production values. —Rod Lott

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Horror

I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013)

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ispit2To the surprise of no one, I Spit on Your Grave 2 tells essentially the same story as its 2010 predecessor (itself a remake of the notorious 1978 grindhouse classic): Pretty girl gets kidnapped, raped and left for dead; pretty girl doesn’t die; pretty girl gets revenge on her captors/rapists. And yet, returning director Steven R. Monroe improves upon it. Who knew this tale was worth franchising?

Just another struggling, aspiring model in the jungle that is New York City, Katie (newcomer Jemma Dallender) is lured to a shady photography studio with the promise of a free portfolio shoot, only to find that the three brothers running it want nudes. She politely declines. Later, one of them makes his way into her apartment, where Katie’s grueling ordeal of degradation begins.

Things get worse when she’s shoved in a box and wakes up handcuffed to a pole in a dingy basement in the siblings’ home. In Bulgaria. Eventually, but not soon enough, the tables turn and an unrated, gory vengeance is hers — the only reason viewers stick around for such exercises in brutality.

Although undeniably unpleasant, I Spit on Your Grave 2 emerges as a stronger film in all respects, with the exception of Dallender’s performance in the third act. Until then, she sells it; at that point, she veers on parody. Whereas the first film pasted elements of Saw atop Meir Zarchi’s original, this sequel borrows liberally from Hostel, culminating in an ending that’s nuts — pun definitely intended. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

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disasterartistI wish I could say I’ve been eagerly waiting the release of Greg Sestero’s The Disaster Artist since he mentioned it on a 2011 episode of the How Did This Get Made? podcast, but really, I’ve been eagerly waiting it longer than that — in fact, mere minutes after I saw 2003’s The Room, this millennium’s arguably strongest candidate for Best Worst Movie.

Someone, I reasoned, just had to write a book to answer all my questions surrounding such a misbegotten production, not the least of which was simply, “What the hell?”

Sestero does not disappoint. As one point of The Room‘s wretched love triangle and inadvertent line producer, the actor had a front-row seat not just to the chaos of shooting of the $6 million vanity project, but the chaos that was (is?) the life of Tommy Wiseau, “mastermind” of the movie. Years before The Room said, “Oh, hi” to an unsuspecting world, Sestero was a friend and roommate of Wiseau.

The author’s recollections (undoubtedly goosed by Disaster co-writer Tom Bissell) are hysterical from the start. On page 2, I was already laughing out loud at Sestero’s descriptions of the … how you say, “unique” look of Wiseau: “Gene Simmons after three months in the Gobi Desert? The Hunchback of Notre Dame following corrective surgery? An escaped Muppet? The drummer from Ratt?”

A terrific sense of humor is the book’s greatest asset. Unlike The Room, the laughs are intentional. Laughter was something every poor soul who had the unfortunate experience of working on the picture struggled to stifle — everyone, of course, except Wiseau, who failed to see his acting/screenwriting/directing/producing debut as anything but life-altering brilliance.

So delusional is Wiseau that he paid for The Room to play a theatrical run (to empty houses, no less) for two whole weeks, because that time frame is required to qualify for Academy Awards consideration. That’s merely one baffling decision of a thousand that Wiseau makes over the course of The Disaster Artist’s pages. God bless Sestero for taking mental notes the whole time.

So harsh is he on Wiseau at times (“The only casting directors who’d be willing to call Tommy in on the basis of this headshot were the ones curious about what it was like to be murdered”) that I wonder if their friendship experienced a fatal falling-out after the film’s premiere. If so, it goes unaddressed, but that’s about the only thing readers will be left wanting to know. Sestero even sheds light on the enigmatic Wiseau’s past, to disturbing detail.

All of this might come off as an exercise in petty cruelty, if not for two things:
1. Sestero is quick to point out his own shortcomings, e.g., “It’s pretty obvious that I mailed in my performance throughout the entire production, but during this scene I didn’t even bother to lick the envelope.”
2. The Room deserves it. Anyone who’s seen it, knows it, and anyone who’s seen it needs to read this book on its making. Apologies to the word “making.” —Rod Lott

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Action

The Doll Squad (1973)

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dollsquadAfter an American rocket is blown to smithereens shortly after launch, an IBM computer so big that it fills a room suggests the “most capable” persons to call upon in this time of government crisis would be … The Doll Squad!

Leading that bevy of big-haired, big-breasted beauties is redhead dynamo Sabrina Kincaid (Francine York, The Centerfold Girls). The president of the United States gives the sexy six exactly two weeks to track down the man behind the deadly sabotage: Eamon O’Reilly (Michael Ansara, It’s Alive), an impotent madman who lords over an island compound. With the help of many rats and agents with skull-implanted silver disks, he’s plotting to take over the world via bubonic plague.

dollsquad1Because Sabrina and her fellow Dolls (including Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!‘s Tura Satana, The Thirsty Dead‘s Judy McConnell and The Corpse Grinders‘ Sherri Vernon) do the snoop-and-shake thing, writer/director/producer/editor Ted V. Mikels long has claimed that his Doll Squad was ripped off by ABC’s Charlie’s Angels. I fail to see concrete evidence of theft, but The Doll Squad already feels like a TV series of its own, given the presentation of its credit sequences, the bargain-bin effects and dialogue that calls back to previous (nonexistent) episodes, i.e. “Sabrina! I haven’t seen you since the blasted U-2 affair!” Then there’s Nicholas Carras’ brassy, blaring theme song that paints the illusion of more action than actually exists.

Mikels wrings production value out of two major elements: blood and boobs. The former carries the color and consistency of Campbell’s tomato soup; the latter is accentuated by having Sabrina appear in a different outfit every couple of minutes, most of which are cleavage-driven. This changes for the island siege, for which the Dolls don matching green jumpsuits (the uniform idea fits since only Sabrina was given a personality); victory is celebrated with bikinis, as it should be.

Keep in mind we’re talking Mikels here, but those things combine to make the flick his most accessible. It certainly goes down easier than his other stab at portraying the adventures of a girl group, 1982’s 10 Violent Women. —Rod Lott

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