All posts by Rod Lott

Action

The Driver (1978)

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thedriverWhy isn’t The Driver mentioned in the same breath as Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon and other bona fide ’70s crime classics? It’s excellent and — sorry, Warriors fans — easily Walter Hill’s personal best as writer/director.

Never a great actor, Ryan O’Neal (Barry Lyndon) also is atop his game here because he has so little to say. With a stoic face and shirt unbuttoned to his chest, he plays a professional getaway driver, perhaps the finest for hire on the West Coast. We see why almost immediately, as an underground casino heist gives way to an incredible nighttime chase through the streets, alleyways and parking garages of L.A.

thedriver1At the scene, a woman (Isabelle Adjani, Ishtar) clearly sees the wheelman’s face, yet lies to the corrupt police detective (a scary Bruce Dern, Silent Running) about it. This so infuriates the cop that he plots a big-score bank robbery specifically to “catch the cowboy that’s never been caught.”

Moody, confident and quiet until tires squeal and sirens blare, The Driver is awash in so much atmosphere that lots were left over for others to soak up, most notably Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, the 2011 film whose taut opening pursuit in particular pays transparent homage. Until the end, I hadn’t noticed that Hill failed to give his characters actual names — they’re credited with crime-fic descriptors like “The Player” and “Exchange Man” — which only goes to show how engrossing this undervalued gem is. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses — Roger Corman: King of the B Movie

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crabmonstersAnyone who writes off Roger Corman as just a schlockmeister is woefully ill-informed. Whether as producer, director, writer and/or distributor, the man is responsible for some god-awful movies … but he’s also responsible for some legitimately great ones. And even his god-awful ones can be terrific fun to watch.

Because he revolutionized the indie film biz and birthed many A-list careers, he deserves all the accolades he gets, including that honorary Academy Award from a couple years back. Let’s not forget the books, too; many have been written, but Chris Nashawaty’s Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses might be my favorite of them all. It’s definitely my favorite book of the year, fiction or non, for many reasons.

For starters, it’s an oral history of Corman’s career and legacy. Whether the subject is SNL, MTV or ESPN, oral histories on some aspect of the entertainment field are infinitely readable, and Crab Monsters is no exception, star-studded as it is with Corman grads Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, Gale Anne Hurd, James Cameron and a mind-boggling many more.

Sylvester Stallone puts its best on page 145: “Roger was a launching pad of unguided missiles to be launched into space. We were the seeds, and he owned the farm.”

For another reason, it’s also an art book, jam-packed with photos but more importantly, lobby cards and posters — oh, posters, glorious posters! That’s an area in which Corman always excelled; not only would they promise more than the product delivered, but he often commissioned a script after the one-sheet was made.

With coffee-table books, one often finds the text surrounding the visuals to be secondary, if not skipped altogether. That’s not the case here. So well-designed you might mistake it for the work of Chip Kidd at first, Crab Monsters can be enjoyed separately as text or visuals, but is deliciously sublime when consumed altogether as intended.

I fell in love with the book almost immediately; less than halfway in, that affection had blown up into obsession, and I devoured the entire thing in one incredibly enjoyable Saturday. I’ve admired Corman’s work for decades, and Nashawaty’s book sums it up even better than the joyous 2011 documentary Corman’s World.

For movie lovers, Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses not just gets, but earns my highest recommendation. For the Corman faithful, it’s simply an absolute must. —Rod Lott

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Contests

Wanna Win Bounty Killer?

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bountykillerUPDATE: Winner is Sherri Montgomery!

We’re giving away a copy of Bounty Killer on DVD to one lucky summabitch in these United States of America. How to enter? Easy!

Just leave a relevant comment on any review on this site before next Saturday, Sept. 14. That’s when one lucky commenter will be picked at random to have this movie shipped to his or her door. Winner will be notified via email, so make sure the email address you leave to comment is a valid one.

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Kitchen Sink

Mondo Sleazo: The Sleaziest Trailers in the World (2010)

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mondosleazoWTFI am a sucker for trailer collections. The problem with that is one tends to see the same coming attractions pop up, ad infinitum. That is not the case with Video Dimensions’ Mondo Sleazo: The Sleaziest Trailers in the World, which immediately became apparent, as electroshocked nipples tend to do. Even better, unlike a majority of the movies it features, it lives up to its title!

The program’s two hours are separated loosely into six categories that collectively represent a hodgepodge of weird genres, from kung fu (The Flying Killer) to blaxploitation (Disco Godfather), and weirder subgenres that include the sexy swashbuckler (Tower of Screaming Virgins), the spoof film (The Sex O’Clock News) and even puppet porn (Let My Puppets Come), the latter of which can’t be unseen and forces me to rethink my stance on yarn.

mondosleazo1By the time you get to the third grouping, their interchangeability becomes startlingly obvious. See if you can guess what theme links these titles: The Smut Peddler, Blazing Stewardesses and Another Day, Another Man. If you guessed “sex,” you’re correct, and possibly gutter-minded.

Yes, as something titled Mondo Sleazo should be, it is filled with flicks about Child Brides and Street Girls, about Caged Virgins and Girls for Rent. Mind you, this is no complaint — not when something like Sugar Cookies dares to compare itself to Hitchcock (not once, but twice) and when Mundo Depravados pits stripper Tempest Storm against “a sex fiend killer,” the former playing Agent 48-24-36. That’s exploitation genius, as much of this disc is. —Rod Lott

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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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