All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Invisible Boy (1957)

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The Invisible Boy refers to Timmie (Richard Eyer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), the 10-year-old son of a cold, emotionless workaholic. (But really, aren’t we all?) The kid hangs out at his dad’s top-secret intelligence office, which houses a talking supercomputer containing the sum of all human knowledge.

Left to his own devices while his father works, the kid reassembles Robby the Robot (from Forbidden Planet), who becomes his new friend. At first, they do things together like flying kites, but after the supercomputer downloads a big batch o’ evil into Robby’s electrobosom, the robot is getting the kid to drink a potion that turns him invisible.

It’s every kid’s dream to have a robot and be undetectable to the human eye (or maybe just to have a robot; the invisibility part is ideal for teenage boys who wake up with sticky sheets), which is what makes The Invisible Boy an enjoyable, old-school science-fantasy film, particularly when the kid starts pulling pranks on his parents.

But in the final half-hour, this squeaky-clean exercise ceases to be fun when it no longer focuses on the boy, but his dad and his co-workers. Thus, what was playful and mischievous turns into something political and menacing — in other words, just like real life. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Eden Lake (2008)

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The UK thriller Eden Lake enjoys the fortune of having cast two leads just prior to their big breakouts: Kelly Reilly (Mrs. Watson of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes franchise) and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds). She’s Jenny, a preschool teacher with a radiant smile and bad hairdo; he’s Steve, her slick boyfriend taking her away for a romantic weekend of camping, during which he intends to pop The Question.

He takes her to the picturesque Eden Lake, a beautiful beach surrounded by miles of forest, soon to be leveled to make way for executive homes. While sunning in their swimwear, they encounter the worst kind of hoodlums: asshole teenagers. There’s six of them, animal abusers all. Their bad behavior escalates from purposely playing their music too loud and leaving dog droppings behind to puncturing Steve’s back tire and later stealing his car.

And that’s just child’s play compared to the horrors these attention-starved demon kids have in store for the couple. Needless to say, Eden Lake plays like Deliverance with villains cast from juvie hall, and you wish that our heroes would Hulk out and kick in their teeth. When Steve and Jenny get separated, we wonder what might save their hides: her child-psych training or his knocking the teens senseless with his python-esque penis?

Neither. Jenny’s forced into Wrathful Ginger mode, rendering her as much as an animal as her predators, and you’ll be glued to her every step, whether she’s walking or running. She and Fassbender and excellent actors, so the film is not some garden-variety genre trash, even if its setup sounds so familiar. Writer/director James Watkins (The Woman in Black) wasn’t about to let it be average, as the work is not only taut, but plays for keeps. Even a viewer as jaded as I had to wince a couple of times. That’s high praise. —Rod Lott

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Action

Hellbound (1994)

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Hellbound opens with a Star Wars-esque crawl that reads in part, “When time began the soul of darkness was thrust into the depth. Its evil split from the light of humanity to be called forth in times of weakness and despair. Satan’s emissary, Prosatanos, would prowl the Earth searing all before him with fire and blood.”

Blah blah blah. That’s a dull, wordy way of just spitting out the movie’s lone selling point: Chuck Norris battles the spawn of Satan. Hell, yes.

The evil dude in question is Prosatanos (Christopher Neame, Licence to Kill), who’s a lot balder than I would’ve pictured the devil’s envoy to be. Sealed in a tomb in a Crusades prologue, he vows revenge and gets it after pesky minorities unknowingly let him loose in 1951, and he shows up in modern-day Chicago to ball a hooker (Zoe Trilling, Night of the Demons 2). Nearby are two of Chi-Town’s finest: Sgt. Shatter (Norris, natch) and his cornrowed African-American partner, Jackson (Calvin Levels, Adventures in Babysitting). The duo battles drug suppliers and pimps with their fists, feet and tuff-talkin’: “Watch this, you little piece of shit!”

Prosatanos rips the heart out of a rabbi and high-tails it to Israel, where Shatter and Jackson are summoned for questioning. While there, they attempt to track down the supernatural slayer — or at least Shatter does; Jackson just wants to eat, but the white man keeps foiling those plans. Food is all Jackson talks about, but at least it makes for the film’s best lines, from “Why don’t you just cut my nuts off with a dull-edged butter knife?” to “Either this guy’s nuttier than a Snickers or there is some real heavy shit goin’ down.” (Note I didn’t say they were any good — just the best of what there is.)

A similar sentiment could apply to Hellbound, which finds Norris squarely in both the phases of mullet-donning and formula-tweaking. With his bankability days behind him, the bearded big cheese experimented beyond mere action, but action with kids (Sidekicks), canines (Top Dog) and demons (this). It is as silly as you would expect, which is precisely what makes it stand out among his filmography. Where else will one find such a matchup of the prince of darkness vs. the prince of Cannon Films? (Just to clarify amid his extreme right-wing views of today, Norris was the latter at the time.) —Rod Lott

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Comedy

The Stepford Wives (2004)

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From 1975, the original film adaptation of The Stepford Wives was a feminist horror film, with an intriguing story, palatable suspense and a jolt of an ending. The 2004 remake by Frank Oz (Little Shop of Horrors), however, is allegedly a comedy — a broad, Broadway-camp goof shot with the same color palette as a bag of Skittles, just as disposable and with about as much nutritional value.

Katherine Ross’ sympathetic photographer Joanna has morphed into Nicole Kidman’s bitchy and cutthroat TV network executive, whose five-year reign at the top comes to an immediate end when an embittered participant from one of her reality shows tries to kill her. Fearing bad press, the net lets her go. One nervous breakdown later, Joanna and husband (Matthew Broderick, about as convincing as Kidman’s significant other as Tom Cruise was) uproot their two rarely seen kids and move to the gated town of Stepford, Conn.

The suburb is quiet, the homes are magnificent and the wives are robotic, subservient hotties in floral dresses from the ‘50s. A snooping Joanna — along with her nosy pal Bette Midler and, because In & Out‘s Paul Rudnick wrote the script, a gay man (Roger Bart, Hostel: Part II) — discovers that the Stepford Men’s Club, headed by Christopher Walken, is behind the transformation of the city’s women into large-breasted, no-questions-asked automatons.

The movie itself is about as brainless. There are a few good one-liners, but the tone is all wrong, the editing awkward and the whole production looks cheap and rushed. I felt not like I was watching a Stepford remake, but rather a MADtv parody. And, MADtv being what it is, not a particularly good one. Script problems aside, much of the blame has to fall on Kidman. She’s no comedienne. Hell, she’s hardly even a “she,” looking like death in a dress. She’s not supposed to be pretty early in the film, but even following her Stepford makeover, the woman looks unhealthy, emaciated and decidedly un-Stepford-sexy.

All in all, this glorified sitcom is a miscast failure. It’s not quite a train wreck, although it is an insult to Ira Levin’s still-great 1972 novel. Stepford Wives, I want a divorce — no, wait: an annulment. —Rod Lott

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