All posts by Rod Lott

13 Observations About the 4 Movies in the All Night Movies DVD Collection

allnightmovies1. Bikini Med School and Bikini House Calls look like they’re cobbled together from some really awful Skinemax series.

2. In both, various sexual couplings occur in a frat-house room among a stock group of med students.

3. Downstairs, horse-faced strippers who don’t strip dance to excruciating butt-rock tunes.

4. Occasionally, the movies cut to old stock footage of medical whatnot, sometimes in the middle of a line, for no discernible reason.

5. They also share the same group of unappealing characters.

6. In 1994’s Bikini Med School, two guys bet each other $100 that they can trick a girl into sex.

7. This being a film with “bikini” in the title, they succeed.

8. Writer/director (to use those terms lightly) Michael Paul Girard loved this plot so much that he repeated it in the second half.

9. 1996’s Bikini House Calls is more of the same, except with a fantasy sequence, more panty-sniffing, a fake orgasm contest and a prank pulled with itching powder.

10. Girard is also to blame for 1993’s Illegal Affairs (aka Divorce Law) and A Brief Affair.

11. Those films offer the same sophomoric episodic romps where the comedy is as simulated as the sex, but set in a law firm so that, as one friend put it, the characters can “go to court and fuck on desks.”

12. B-movie regulars Jay Richardson and Monique Parent star, perhaps regrettably, in both.

13. I like to refer to the guy on the right of the DVD cover as Vo-Tech Mullet Party Dude. —Rod Lott

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Terror at Tenkiller (1986)

tenkiller“What the hell is a Tenkiller?” asks everyone unfamiliar with the state lakes of Oklahoma. Yet one must admit the alliteration of the title Terror at Tenkiller is catchy, and few words sound as ideal a setting for a slasher movie — a thought shared by the thought-challenged college girl at this film’s well-intentioned heart.

Because the busty Leslie (Stacey Logan, in her only credit) is having troubles with her abusive boyfriend, her BFF Janna (Michelle Merchant, ditto) takes Les for some R&R at her family’s cabin at Lake Tenkiller (located seven miles from the appropriately named town of Gore, incidentally). There, they can swim, boat, fish, ski and talk to a redneck in a Beech-Nut cap and dubbed voice.

tenkiller1They also can get in some exercise by fleeing the resident killer, Tor (Michael Shamus Wiles, TV’s Breaking Bad), who plays the harmonica. (Speaking of music, the score is dominated by a cue that sounds like the Casio was unplugged abruptly each and every time.) Even if the murderer’s identity weren’t revealed in the prologue, the character’s name alone would give it away — well, that and the fact that Terror is nearly a three-character piece.

One of the earliest made-for-VHS horror films, Terror at Tenkiller is another low-budget wonder from the Blood Cult gang, this one directed by first-timer (and last-timer, in keeping with the majority of the cast) Ken Meyer. I’m guessing he shot it out of sequence, since Janna’s first bikini top is quite filled out by fake breasts, which subsequent scenes reveal as all but deflated. Strangely, that adds to its charm — free of varnish, but entertaining. —Rod Lott

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Project A 2 (1987)

projectA2Director Jackie Chan’s Project A 2 doesn’t live up to 1983’s pirate-laden original, mainly due to a period-piece setting that bogs down the story like a wet blanket.

Returning as super sailor Dragon Mao, Chan is recruited by the government to go undercover to expose a crooked inspector who stages his own arrests and murders the innocent. Meanwhile, Dragon’s being hunted by the pirates he defeated in the first film, although this is really just a weak throwaway link in order to justify the addition of a numeral to the title.

projectA21The first two-thirds of Project A 2 are heavy with dull dialogue, although it occasionally comes alive with an action scene, like when Chan and another man are handcuffed to one another and chased by half a dozen hatchet-wielding baddies. The final 20 minutes or so almost redeem the picture, with an extended set piece involving a giant hamster wheel, chili peppers and a toppling facade (a famous nod to Buster Keaton).

Ultimately, however, the sequel suffers from the same problem as Chan’s Miracles, a 1989 film set in the 1930s: too much period, not enough exclamation. —Rod Lott

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Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

silenthillrevI’m totally paraphrasing, but the worried and protective dad played by Sean Bean (TV’s Game of Thrones) firmly and completely warns his teen daughter, Heather (Adelaide Clemens, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), “Do not to go to Silent Hill. Never, ever. No matter what occurs, no matter what happens. Dammit, girl, don’t go there. Got it? Don’t. And don’tcha even think it!”

So of course she goes there. I get it; otherwise, Silent Hill: Revelation would be a short. And maybe it should have been.

2006’s Silent Hill is one of the better big-screen adaptations of a video game, mostly because director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) bathed the creeps in ambience, and let mood do most of the legwork. In this belated sequel, writer/director Michael J. Bassett (Solomon Kane) tries to tell a story about the foggy, ash-snowing town’s inhabitants and their shadowy Order of Valtiel.

silenthillrev1However, this is all convoluted to a point of making the audience not care. If it makes total sense to you, I suspect you’re a serious student of the games, in which case will you please put down the controller and take a shower? Your mother’s asked you three times already!

Clemens, a Michelle Williams doppelgänger, walks through the movie with her mouth agape in perpetual shock as she encounters the franchise’s various iconic creatures, which look like a mixture of Clive Barker’s Cenobites, recovering plastic-surgery patients and diagrams from your geometry textbook. Bassett introduces some new ones, ranging from a spider composed of mannequin parts to a tapioca-complected Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix trilogy) as the cult’s leader.

Neither Moss nor Clemens were in the first film. That was fronted by Radha Mitchell (The Crazies), who shows up just long enough for a cameo in a mirror. At least someone was wise enough to heed Bean’s advice. —Rod Lott

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Equilibrium (2002)

equilibriumThe few people who saw Equilibrium in theaters openly compared it to The Matrix, as if that were the first action film to feature martial arts, guys dressed in black or thumping techno music. Although Christian Bale’s blank-faced performance does suggest an ace Keanu Reeves impression, Ultraviolet director Kurt Wimmer’s film really owes more debt to dusty books with numbers in their titles — namely, George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The Dark Knight himself, Bale stars as John Preston, a “cleric,” which is a fancy-sounding term for a futuristic government/sentry/cop type charged with finding and burning anything that allows people to experience emotions. All feelings have been outlawed, see; the powers that be keep the public pacified and zombie-faced through daily injections of a sedative.

equilibrium1But when Preston accidentally breaks his dose and can’t get another, he begins to question his ways, allegiance and life. Heck, he even begins to feel and sniff Emily Watson’s red ribbon when no one’s looking.

If it sounds all thinky-schminky, well, yeah, it is. But it’s not bogged down in Matrix-type explanations that are so wordy, they cease to be explanations at all. The high points are the action scenes, in which Bale engages in a kind of turbo-charged gunplay we hadn’t seen before (at least at the time). He’s also skilled with the sword, neatly slicing off Taye Diggs’ face toward the end.

While not great, it’s certainly better than either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, which alone should make it worth a rental. —Rod Lott

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