—Rod Lott
All posts by Rod Lott
Madcap Screencaps #37
Angst (2003)
While being date-raped, heretofore virgin Helen (Fiona Horsey) notices suddenly that the pain has suddenly stopped. That’s because her date has been eaten in full by her very hungry genitalia. Such is Angst.
“He vanished, into thin air,” a baffled Helen relates to her doctor, who answers, “Inside your vagina?” Then he, too, tries to molest her, and is, er, snatched up as well. Same goes for her stepfather when he tries to put the moves on her. Once Helen’s private parts start talking to her (“Feed me!”), she tries to silence it by spraying bleach all up in there.
And when that doesn’t work, she simply gives in and becomes a ho-bag to keep her vagina satisfied. About the most graphic it gets is when a john can’t get his now-ridiculously elongated tongue loose from that which exists between her legs. The image is like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon … well, if not for the vagina dentata plot, the rampant nudity, the exploitation of women, the rough language, and all that other stuff.
Originally titled Penetration Angst, this shit- shot-on-video snorer is hardly the first talking-vag flick (Chatterbox, anyone?), but it’s definitely the worst. “What a fucking mess!” screams one woman with about eight agonizing minutes left to go. My sentiments exactly. —Rod Lott
Terror Beneath the Sea (1966)
How do you know Terror Beneath the Sea is science fiction? For starters, newspapermen aren’t proactive adventurers. They’re lazy asses. Unless they’re played by Sonny Chiba, of course, as in this harmless, colorful Japanese/American production that offers a rare glimpse of Chiba keeping his hands and feet mostly to himself.
As Ken, he and fellow journalist Jenny (pretty Peggy Neal, The X from Outer Space) attend an underwater, press-only demonstration of the Navy’s new, state-of-the-art homing torpedo, the Bloodhound, the shape of a man flashes across the screen. What could it be?
Later, Ken and Jenny check it out by boating over to the island where atomic waste products are dumped and get their answer: shiny, silver Sleestak-like creatures with crossed eyes too close together, mouths that do not move, and no genitals whatsoever.
And 3,000 feet below underwater city ruled by Dr. Rufus Moore (Erik Neilson), they respond to turns of the dial, i.e. “WORK” and “FIGHT.” There, madman Moore changes the physical structure of humans into these mutated gill-men. That gives way to weird sequences of stop-motion arm pustules, perhaps topped only by cool scenes of underwater miniatures action, as only the Toei Company could do. —Rod Lott
Spiders (2000)
Stick a spider in a movie, and I’ll see it. While this movie’s title (Spiders, duh) promises more than one arachnid, it really only features one … but the damn thing grows to be about 30 feet tall, so who’s complaining?
Here, a shuttle mission goes awry when the spider on board for experimental purposes goes crazy and kills the crew. The shuttle crash-lands at an Area 51-sorta place, where some annoying college newspaper reporter and her two pals — a hacker geek and a photographer who uses a point-and-shoot number — are snooping around for a story. (For the three leads, Mosquito director Gary Jones cast three of L.A.’s most unappealing young actors, resembling the poor man’s Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser and Chris O’Donnell, respectively.)
They enter the shuttle wreckage and then the bowels of the secret base, only to find themselves trapped and menaced by this very angry, very aggressive, big-ass spider, who seems to be growing in size at an alarming rate. The U.S. Army’s also running around looking for the thing, so the movie quickly becomes a mix of Aliens and, um, itself. Created by KNB, the spider effects are mostly pretty cool, especially in the balls-out finale, where the eight-legged creature terrorizes a retirement home — excuse us, we mean college campus — in broad daylight.
What’s not so hot is the by-the-numbers screenplay, which seems to have been assembled using every stock line from the horror genre. To wit: “We’ve got to stop it!,” “You go that way,” “Let’s get out of here!,” “Save yourself!” and the ever-popular, spoken-too-soon “I think we made it!” Although it doesn’t quite know when to quit, you’ll be cheesily entertained for most of Spiders’ running time. While it’s not scary, a lot of the arachnid’s appearances gave me the shivers. (Aside: See if you can spot all the vaginal imagery in the spider’s mouth.) —Rod Lott