All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992)

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Sixth in the Amityville Horror series, Amityville 1992 is, in my suspect estimation, worth watching at least once for four reasons:
1. Former Miss USA Shawn Weatherly gets naked;
2. Megan Ward strips to her underwear;
3. You have to admire a movie with the balls to use its release date and a pun in its title; and
4. It’s supremely silly.

Lipless architect Jacob Sterling (Stephen Macht, The Monster Squad) returns home from a work trip to Amityville with an antique clock he purchased there. I’m sorry, did I say “clock”? I meant an evil clock!

Once placed on the mantle, the evil clock screws itself put and immediately unlocks a time/dimension rift, causing the family members to do strange things. Jacob gets cinema’s nastiest dog bite and goes insane, while his goody-two-shoes daughter (Ward, TV’s Dark Skies) turns into a sex vixen overnight, yet turns her would-be fluid-swapping partner into a puddle of acidic goo.

The Macht vs. Doberman duel is something to see, especially when it ends with him stabbing the pooch with a broken glass bottle; PETA members will applaud later when Weatherly penetrates his leg with a fireplace poker. You’ve also got to enjoy the irony of the wacky neighbor lady narrowly missing getting creamed by a diaper truck, only to be impaled by the stork figure that then falls off it.

The proceedings are pretty bloody, which one expects from Hellbound: Hellraiser II director Tony Randel. However, thanks to a leaden script, you feel like the movie might be a victim of the clock’s time/dimension rift as well. But moments are moments, and the bare, sweaty, hanging bosom of Ms. Weatherly (Police Academy 3: Back in Training) certainly counts for something. —Rod Lott

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Action

The Tuxedo (2002)

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The Tuxedo is not the worst of Jackie Chan’s American movies — that’d be The Medallion and The Spy Next Door — but close enough.

Chan plays Tong … James Tong, a mild-mannered cabbie with a lead foot and a Hooters T-shirt who one day is hired as the driver for billionaire Clark Devlin (Harry Potter vet Jason Isaacs), a secret agent with a gadget-equipped and strength-empowering techno-tuxedo. When he’s nearly killed by a skateboard bomb, James takes it upon himself to don the tux and continue Clark’s espionage work.

Said work has something to do with the world’s water supply being threatened, but it’s so poorly explained that you won’t know what’s going on until the end. Pairing up with James is the wonderful pair of Jennifer Love Hewitt (Can’t Hardly Wait) as an agency chemist. Although she initially has the air of being miscast, she acquits herself fairly well; all the cleavage shots work toward that admirable goal.

Even if Jackie’s English were good (every time he said “Clark Devlin,” I thought he said “Cock Devlin”), The Tuxedo still would be a difficult movie to understand. I’m not sure it ever intended to tell a lucid story; rather, its aim seems to be to put him in one demonstration of physical prowess after another. The ones that are 100 percent Chan are fun; the ones that are 50 percent CGI, not so much.

And that’s the movie’s biggest problem: It doesn’t quite know how to use him, and when it does, it muddles it up with confusing editing and poor direction by first-timer Kevin Donovan. By not using its star’s massive physical potential, it might as well be, I dunno, Craig Sheffer in The Tuxedo. As with the Rush Hour franchise, the most enjoyable part comes with the end-credit outtakes. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews

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I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed that I’ve seen so many of the movies covered in Brian Albright’s Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990, a state-by-state reference guide to fright flicks made independently of the studios, major and minor. I just assumed that the titles covered would be completely obscure.

To a majority of moviegoers, I’m sure they are. Yes, they include Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Troma’s The Toxic Avenger, but those are exceptions to the rule — one populated by the likes of Zaat, Terror at Tenkiller, Dungeon of Harrow, Don’t Go in the Woods and Mardi Gras Massacre. Home video may have extended their audience greatly, but rarely so far to have penetrated the mainstream.

But before Albright gets to those, he gives a great introduction in “I Hear America Screaming,” offering a quick overview as he establishes the definition and criteria for the films covered. Why stop at 1990? Because the explosion of digital video and iMovie would have necessitated something the size of the Yellow Pages for the greater Los Angeles area. That’s a smart decision, because in my view, the luster seems to have been lost when the technology is no longer something people had to work to get.

Blood, sweat and tears inform these films — not trust funds, iPhones and Kickstarter campaigns. That’s not to say the end results are all good — heavens, no; in fact, the opposite is often the case. And it’s refreshing to hear the filmmakers admit their own faults in the 13 Q-and-A-style interviews that compose roughly half the trade paperback’s 336 pages. Among the most notable are, in order of ascending talent, J.R. Bookwalter (The Dead Next Door), William Grefé (Stanley) and Lewis Jackson (Christmas Evil).

The back half contains the state-by-state rundown (ignoring California on purpose, save for one), with the flicks presented in capsule format, but not as reviews. To his credit, Albright doesn’t pretend to have seen all of them, especially when one considers how difficult many are to acquire. His entries make me want to see scads of them.

With poster art galore, this is a reference book that horror-film fans didn’t know they needed. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Terminal Invasion (2002)

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During a blizzard, a group of people is trapped inside a tiny airport. As a felon named Jack (Evil Dead icon Bruce Campbell) learns following a trip to the men’s room, some of the airport’s inhabitants are really aliens disguised as humans. Thus, the group has to simultaneously trust each other and figure out who among them isn’t the real deal. If it sounds like John Carpenter’s The Thing meets the TV sitcom Wings, you’re right!

All the stock characters are present in Terminal Invasion: the kindly old woman, precocious kids, harried businessman, insensitive husband, nagging wife, scaredy-cat security guard — right down to the token black guy who says things like, “This is whack!” and “Yeah, now that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!”

Campbell is the bad guy who is forced by circumstances to become the good guy, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine starlet Chase Masterson is a feisty alpha-female pilot. They try to find out who’s got the alien inside them by taking turns going through the X-ray machine, and not one of them brings up the sterility issue. Kids, don’t try this at home!

The first half of this straight-to-cable movie is actually pretty decent. It’s not until it becomes the standard cat-and-mouse game that things get … well, standard. Friday the 13th‘s Sean S. Cunningham directs better than usual, while Campbell is, as always, terrific fun to watch, even when mired in dung. —Rod Lott

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