All posts by Rod Lott

The Deathless Devil (1973)

Mere minutes after learning his long-dead father was the celebrated superhero Copperhead — a secret, despite the costume being left in the top of his adopted dad’s desk drawer — Tekin carries on the family tradition of fistfighting, leaping onto moving trains, and dressing in a sparkly silver mask and flowing red neckerchief. He leaves a novelty snake figurine at the scene of each skirmish, like a parting gift for kicking your ass.

Under the guise of Coppherhead, Tekin seeks to avenge the murder of his two dads by Dr. Satan, because that’s just the kind of thing people with monikers like Dr. Satan are born to do. The Borgnine-ian buffoon Bitik gets assigned to assist Tekin in his mission — a move akin to appointing Jerry Lewis to the G8 summit — so he dons a Sherlock Holmes outfit.

Sporting a mustache that suggests a raccoon tail protruding from within each nostril, Dr. Satan gets others to do his bidding of theft and murder via remote-control devices that he can detonate. (He calls them “explosions,” but if farts were visual, they’d look like this.) Unbeknownst to authorities, the doc has assembled a bowlegged killer robot. It’s so primitive-looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if director Yilmaz Atadeniz ordered it filched from a local first-grade class art room.

Logic figures nowhere in The Deathless Devil, but makes up for it with open-to-close action (intended) and lunacy (some intended). Comic-book colorful and charming in its pure ineptness, the Turkish picture has lots to offer, from Dr. Satan’s booby-trapped lair to an out-of-nowhere love scene. And I want it for all time. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)

With cinema attendance then taking a licking at the antennas of free TV, director Frank Tashlin literally stopped the story of his 1957 comedy, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, to take a swipe at his competition’s inferior nature to the magnificence of the movies. Delivered by star Tony Randall, the pointed jabs include mentions of a tiny picture, constant commercial interruptions and the nagging menace of horizontal hold.

Not mentioned is the main advantage movies had over TV: Jayne Mansfield. A year after they hit it big with The Girl Can’t Help It, Tashlin again called upon the bleached-blonde bombshell to infuse his sex comedy will all the sex it needed. She rose to the challenge with resolute effervescence and her trademark ditzy noises, which will either endear or enrage. The result, while subordinate to Girl, is one big ball of fluffy fun.

Although her character is named Rita Marlowe, Mansfield more or less plays herself — or her Hollywood public persona, at least — an actress whose “oh-so-kissable lips” mild-mannered ad exec Rock Hunter (Randall) wishes to exploit in a job-saving campaign for a cosmetics client. She agrees, but also uses him to get even with her high-profile boyfriend, a Tarzan-esque actor (real-life hubby Mickey Hargitay). Whereas most straight males would be unable to resist Mansfield’s advances, Hunter’s heart aches for his secretary (one-time Cary Grant spouse Betsy Drake), whose curves can’t compete because they’re practically nonexistent.

Forever underappreciated, Randall excelled at these kind of underdog, cog-in-the-system roles, and he provides Success with the majority of its laughs, both verbal or physical. Mansfield excelled at dumb, too, which unfortunately got her typecast, but this is one of her very best showcases. As satire, the film is lightweight — just like the Madison Avenue world it spoofs with kid gloves, and never more memorably than in the commercial parodies that wreak havoc with the opening credits. As with Help It, Hunter holds no “real” ending, yet it made me smile so wide, this guy can’t fault it. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Arachnoquake (2012)

As if New Orleans didn’t have enough problems already, what with the occasional hurricane, frat-boy vomit in the streets and the constant smell of hobo urine, the city has to deal with an arachnoquake — that is, an earthquake that unleashes giant spiders, doy! — in … wait for it … Arachnoquake. It’s one of those made-for-Syfy movies, but you probably knew that.

These eight-legged freaks mostly harass a tour group on a trolley driven by Bug Hall (Alfalfa of 1994’s The Little Rascals). His passengers include a grumpy old man, an airhead woman, her Not LL Cool J hubby, two smirking teens and their asthmatic mom (Tracey Gold of TV’s Growing Pains), whose job as an eighth-grade biology teacher comes in handy to provide exposition during the requisite dissection scene. Elsewhere, her husband (Edward Furlong, Terminator 2) drives a bus of high schoolers that also is menaced.

Spiders are so creepy that the concept doesn’t require a big budget to exploit audiences’ readymade fear. (Take, for instance, 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders, the greatest depiction of the arac war yet, which sends chills up the spine.) They need only look real, if not be real; Arachnoquake‘s only could look more fake if they were cutouts on sticks. They’re completely computer-animated, with rounded edges and as white as a KKK costume. They breathe fire and dog-paddle in water. They look like cartoons.

On that note, director G.E. Furst (Lake Placid 3) colors his crap with touches befitting a ‘toon, despite Arachnoquake‘s relatively serious tone. Just one example: When one spider traverses a crosswalk, the street sign makes a cuckoo-clock sound for no good reason. It’s as senseless as Furlong’s big wisecrack after taking a baseball bat to a dead spider on the road: “Now that is how you make jambalaya! Yeaaaaahhhhh!”

Nooooo. —Rod Lott

Demon Lover Diary (1980)

What happens when a speedometer-cable factory worker mortgages his house, car and furniture, and takes two weeks of “sick leave” to make what he’s certain will be “a masterpiece” of horror cinema? Something far short of that, as demonstrated by that eventual film, 1977’s The Demon Lover, and this warts-and-all documentary on its making, with apologies to the word “making.”

Never officially released commercially and not likely to, Demon Lover Diary was captured by the camera of Joel DeMott as her boyfriend, Jeff Kreines, volunteers to shoot the debut film of his friend, the aforementioned toiler Donald G. Jackson, who co-directed with Jerry Younkins, an arrogant hothead who cut off his own finger to get $8,000 of insurance money to fund their dream. They should have dreamed harder.

Don and Jerry are revealed less as creative geniuses and more as temper-prone diva babies. For some reason, they don’t want the donated efforts of a sound man, Jeff’s buddy Mark Rance; Don deceives his kindly mother, at whose house they’re crashing; and one of their recruited female stars is missing one of her front teeth. Plus, she’s 14 — a year for every scheduled day of principal photography.

While Don and Jerry claim to have worked their asses off, Jeff, Joel and Mark instead find an extremely disorganized set. Don won’t help move any equipment: “A director really shouldn’t be carrying anything. I’m carrying the weight of the whole film.” The only continuity among their scenes, Jeff notes, is stupidity. Don and Jerry are all talk and no action: “We think we’re going to come up with the best low-budget horror movie ever made,” says Jerry.

They didn’t. All this and a cameo by a belching Ted Nugent! —Rod Lott