All posts by Rod Lott

Martial Arts

The Dynamite Brothers (1974)

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dynamitebrosLeave it to schlock director Al Adamson (Satan’s Sadists) to merge the kung-fu and blaxploitation genres with The Dynamite Brothers, marketed as the first movie of its kind to pair a black and Asian lead. Timothy Brown (aka M*A*S*H’s Spearchucker) is Stud Brown, “the black cat from Watts,” while Alan Tang is Larry Chin, “the kung fu cat from Hong Kong.”

No sooner has Chin arrived in San Francisco than he’s handcuffed by the cops to Stud, if only to allow the characters to meet cute and then bond as they escape and run around the woods like so many Defiant Ones.

dynamitebros1The duo gets mixed up in a drug war too complicated for the film to adequately explain. Needless to say, the cop after them (Aldo Ray, The Centerfold Girls) is racist and corrupt, and James Hong (Blade Runner) plays a narcotics kingpin who kills his enemies with an acupuncture needle. The final confrontation takes place at Hong’s castle, if only so several henchman can fall from it.

One poor guy gets his scalp ripped off; a mute girl gets her face mutilated with a straight razor; and several honky bitches get naked. Dynamite is more competent than the usual Adamson fare, and comes complete with a groovy, ass-shakin’, jazz-funk soundtrack and a wild, Pop Art, quasi-animated title sequence. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Pieces (1982)

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piecesA young boy is caught by his mom working on a nudie jigsaw puzzle. She threatens to burn all the porn she finds in his room and asks him to get a trash bag; he returns with an ax and chops her to pieces, digging out a saw for those extra-pesky bones. Then he returns to his puzzle.

And so begins Spanish auteur Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces, an unintentionally hilarious slasher that manages to make even its excessive gore scenes exceedingly comical.

Forty years later, things are pretty idyllic at the college campus, where the students demonstrate their higher education through such lines as, “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on the waterbed at the same time!” One fine morning, a girl skateboards through a plate glass window — a bravura scene, sure, but it has nothing to do with the story, which has female college students who are quick to get naked for the camera start dying at the whirring blade of a yellow chainsaw.

pieces1Who’s the culprit? Is it the burly groundskeeper? The university’s anatomy professor? The mousy British dean? The killer is mostly cloaked in shadows or shot from the ankles down, yet the gore is indeed gory, with limbs and noggins lopped off before your very eyes. One girl pisses herself before her torso gets cut in two. Following each kill, the murderer retreats to adding more pieces of that nudie puzzle, working his way down from the top. (And here I was always taught to the do the borders first and work inward.)

It all leads up to the expected climax, wherein the killer is shot just in the nick of time, before he can kill the hero (Pod People’s Ian Sera, playing a college student who snares an unbelievable amount of chicks, despite looking like Screech from TV’s Saved by the Bell). But then something unexpected happens that had me rolling in hysterics. And then that’s followed up by a final shot that also was greeted with unbelievable laughter, even if it makes no sense. If only all those Friday the 13th sequels had been like this. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Corrupt (1983)

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corruptBefore he was the Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel played another bad lieutenant in the Italian-made Corrupt (aka Bad Cop II, Copkiller, Order of Death and an easy paycheck) as Lt. Fred O’Connor.

He works in the narcotics division, where members of his team have been offed by a cop killer. When Leo Smith (John Lydon, aka Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten) shows up at his apartment and claims to be the culprit, O’Connor gets all Keitel on his ass, tying him up and holding him hostage in his bathroom.

corrupt1Corrupt is one of those psychological cat-and-mouse games where the tables are continually (but not surprisingly) being turned. Unfortunately, when the fortunes shift from Keitel’s character to Lydon’s, the movie grows tiresome (not to mention confusing, as their interaction borders on a homosexual relationship, as does the one between Keitel and his secret live-in cop roomie).

As evil as his O’Connor becomes, it’s hard not to root for Keitel throughout the whole thing — namely because he’s not Lydon, who comes off as a snot-nosed, insufferable prick whose acting is annoying as his music (yeah, I said it). Speaking of music, Ennio Morricone’s score? Not among his best. —Rod Lott

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Martial Arts

Shaolin vs. Manchu (1984)

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shaolinmanchuGood ’n’ bloody ’n’ cheap, the martial-arts movie Shaolin vs. Manchu begins with a five-minute introduction of all the various Shaolin kung fu styles. Only then do we get to the (as the uproarious trailer puts it) “excellentent plot,” in which the young monk with the entirely indigenous name of Rocky (Ling Man-hoi) is selected to be the Shaolin temple’s new chief abbot.

This move pisses someone off, so Rocky is wrongly accused of rape and thrown out of the monastery with broken feet, but only after a nighttime attack by ninjas, one of whom has an exposed butt crack. It’s all a setup by one of the crooked prince’s spies, of course, so Rocky must clear his good name, oust the evil abbot and retrieve the Shaolin’s stolen relics.

Does he succeed? You know the answer. But I bet you didn’t know a Manchu warrior gets drunk to the point where he dumps a bowl of greens on his head and laughs about it. C’mon, admit it. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old

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remakinghorrorSomewhere before I’ve stated that I’m not automatically against horror remakes, because without them, we wouldn’t have such modern-day classics as John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly. It’s nice to know I’m not alone, now that James Francis Jr. has expanded my thought into an entire book with Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old.

It’s too bad the trade paperback’s cover captures Anne Heche in what appears to mid-salute to the Führer, but Gus Van Sant’s infamous, shot-for-shot redux of Psycho is one of four main examples the author explores. The others are, naturally, Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In doing so, Francis devotes a chapter to each to explain the differences between the original and the remake, and what worked and what didn’t — mostly according to general consensus, although he freely offers his opinions, which prove more lenient than the average academic.

The real meat of the book is the chapter immediately following, in which he takes the same approach, but shorter, to roughly two dozen more examples, from all the Island of Dr. Moreau movies to 2011’s Fright Night. Consider it the “lightning round” — a lot of fun.

Following are brief Q-and-As with six “industry professionals,” including Evil Dead captain Bruce Campbell and former Fangoria editor Tony Timpone, but the questions are staid and untailored to the subject, leading to mostly curt responses that lend no insight. Skip these and proceed to the “Remake Catalog,” a comprehensive table comparing budgets and grosses (pun not intended).

Francis makes his share of questionable blanket assumptions (“When people hear the name Michael Bay, they are interested to see what he has made …”), dubious statements (“[Rebecca] De Mornay — as fans may remember — came to fame … in the suspense-thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle …”) and outright errors (he’s under the impression that the 1973 telepic Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a foreign film) sprinkled throughout the text, but not enough to kill the overall buzz. —Rod Lott

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