All posts by Rod Lott

Comedy

Scary Movie V (2013)

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ScarymovievLook, either you find an infant with his head aflame funny, or you don’t. Same goes for a ghost sticking a toothbrush up a German Shepherd’s butt, drunken pool vacuums playing beer pong, and Ashley Tisdale humping a microwave oven. Against my better judgment, I do.

I cannot tell a lie: I like all of the entries in the Scary Movie series, even Scary Movie V. Admittedly, like the four previous chapters, it’s spotty fare, but fair enough to entertain. Taking over the lead ditz role for Anna Faris, High School Musical grad Tisdale stars as Jody. She and her husband, well-meaning dufus Dan (Simon Rex, playing a different character than he did in SMs 3 and 4), become guardians to his two nieces and one nephew, found living feral in the woods yet raised by a malevolent spirit that follows them to their new home.

scarymoviev1Thus, the comedy gets to parody the then-recent horror hits of Mama and the Paranormal Activity franchise all at once, and to a lesser degree, The Cabin in the Woods, Evil Dead, Insidious, Sinister and The Devil Inside. Also spoofed? Those utterly terrifying fright flicks known as Inception, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Help; it also leans heavily on Black Swan — an odd choice since Scary Movie V‘s target audience isn’t likely to have seen it.

In no way am I suggesting Scary Movie V is up to the level of co-writer David Zucker’s classics (primarily Airplane! and The Naked Gun) — or even to director Malcolm D. Lee’s Undercover Brother, for that matter — but I did laugh out loud a couple of times, and smiled pretty much throughout the rapid-fire delivery, strewn as it is with foul balls and strikes. I can’t say the same of SM vet Marlon Wayans’ near-simultaneous release of A Haunted House, which takes aim at several of the same targets.

Caveat emptor: This fifth Scary Movie barely qualifies as a feature film; the 15-minute crawl of end credits begins at the 73-minute mark. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Rewind This! (2013)

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rewindthisWhen the last Blockbuster Video in my neck of the woods closed recently, I smiled on the inside. Then I got nostalgic for the era of movie-watching that corporation exploited and killed: the VHS revolution. Anyone who recalls the days of frequenting mom-and-pop video stores or now spends weekends trolling flea markets for unwanted tapes will feel that joy return in a rush from Rewind This!

Josh Johnson’s documentary chronicles the VHS format from birth to death, and those for whom the words on its “Be Kind Rewind” sticker remain a way of life. In 94 minutes, he covers a ton of ground: the Beta vs. VHS showdown, the porn explosion (pun intended), the dawn of sell-through tapes, the lost art of cover art, the proliferation of the aforementioned Blockbuster, the legion of DIY filmmakers inspired, the tape-trading and bootlegging circuits — heck, even how the sudden glitch on a tape signaled that a lucky renter was seconds away from seeing sure-as-shit nudity.

rewindthis1Among Johnson’s interviewees are Something Weird Video’s Mike Vraney; Basket Case director Frank Henenlotter; Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark; Full Moon’s Charles Band; Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman; and a number of film programmers, shop owners and obsessive collectors still touting VHS’ dominance. What I can’t tell — and it’s impossible to know — is if their love is misplaced; the format is inferior, but the sheer volume of titles it brought to their homes is mind-boggling.

Rewind This! is rife with clips, including oddball releases and outright obscurities. It’s a kick to see snippets of Bubba Smith’s workout video, Until It Hurts; Corey Haim’s misbegotten vanity project, Me, Myself and I; Leslie Nielsen’s Bad Golf Made Easier; a shot-on-video Western titled Death Rider; the first SOV adult film, Football Widow; 1984’s tasteless “horror” movie Black Devil Doll from Hell; and other atrocities, now preserved for the enjoyment and delight of future generations. —Rod Lott

Buy it at iTunes.

Horror

Blood Bath (1976)

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bloodbathOnce you’ve electrocuted a woman through her nipples and sucked brains through a straw, what do you do for an encore? Blood Bath, the sophomore movie of Joel M. Reed, director of the rightly notorious Bloodsucking Freaks. As extreme as that phlegm film was, Blood Bath stands on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s even rated PG, which should give you a good idea at how successful it is as a horror anthology: not.

The great character actor Harve Presnell (Fargo) is unrecognizable as a fright-flick director who states on set his utter disbelief in the supernatural, black magic and fate. That night at dinner, his cast members share stories to convince him otherwise. Nary a single tale is worth the time; the third is notable only for its appearance by future sitcom star Doris Roberts (Everybody Loves Raymond).

bloodbath1The first follows a professional killer on his unbeknownst-to-him final hit; the second, a henpecked novelist who wishes to disappear into his own fiction to escape his shrew of a wife, who gets off Blood Bath‘s lone amusing line from their marital bed: “I am not one of those cheap, immoral swingers who work in accounts receivable!”

The aforementioned third segment centers on an unscrupulous businessman locked in a vault with an African-American ghost who looks like he leapt off the poster of The Harder They Come. Finally, a Wonder Bread-white master of kung fu infuriates his shaolin masters by opening a supermarket; Reed stages martial-arts sequences as well as a pre-K class could Pippin. The entire project is dull and incompetent — a tough sit that disproves that ol’ showbiz adage of, “Any movie that ends with a rampaging goat boy can’t be all bad.” —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

Eroticide (2013)

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eroticideWTFHappy nine-month anniversary, Yan and Elise! My gift to you two lovebirds is this glimpse into your immediate future: It’s gonna suck!

So goes the game of Eroticide, a truly twisted tale of romance by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Saliba, ringleader of 2009’s underseen Frankenstein Unlimited anthology and director of the 2011 Italian exploitation homage Amy’s in the Attic.

This short begins with Yan (Jocelin Haas) and Elise (Stephanie van Rijn), our heretofore happy couple, celebrating their momentous occasion at a restaurant. Who should walk in and interrupt but Kendra (Lisa Di Capa), Yan’s ex-girlfriend; she evidently hasn’t let go of their half-decade together, because she delights in disparaging Elise in general and Yan’s erectile dysfunction.

eroticide1Later that night, as Yan and Elise make love (she puts it rougher, actually), Saliba skillfully intercuts their thrusts with Yan’s imagined submissive activities with Kendra rather than his “silver medal” gal. But the real weirdness doesn’t kick in until the next morning.

Saliba’s specialty isn’t off-kilter subject matter; it’s whatever lies at taking a hard left turn when one reaches off-kilter subject matter. Viewers never can be sure what awaits them in the next scene. What does can be shocking, but never just for the cheap sake of doing so; it serves the story.

And this story hints at a lot that it does not depict, adding layers of mystery to an unsettling surface. It’s suggested that Yan and Elise had their “meet cute” via gruesome car crash which may have resulted in his bedroom troubles; says the French-speaking Elise, “The road to your heart was paved with my blood.”

That you want to know more about its origins speaks highly of Eroticide. All three cast members do great work, but Di Capa gets the juiciest role as the manipulative rhymes-with-blunt. She also gets the last word at the harsh ending — abrupt but appropriate. If you’ve seen Brad Pitt deliver the denouement of Killing Them Softly, you have a hint of the cruelty to come. —Rod Lott

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