All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

The French Sex Murders (1972)

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One has to love how direct The French Sex Murders is, not only in title, but making good on that title. Viewers will get healthy doses of all three things in B producer Dick Randall’s shot at a giallo. Heck, the opening of a man leaping from his death (partly rendered in crude cartoon) from atop the Eiffel Tower is even repeated at the end. What scenery!

And I don’t mean just the Eiffel Tower, either, because much of the film is set in an exclusive Parisian brothel headed by Madame Colette (Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita). One of its hottest whores (Barbara Bouchet, Don’t Torture a Duckling) is discovered murdered, and her last client (Peter Martell, Death Walks at Midnight) is fingered for the crime. He accidentally beheads himself fleeing the police, yet the call-girl killings do not stop with his grisly death.

Inspector Pontaine (Humphrey Bogart lookalike Robert Sacchi, in his debut) continues to hunt for the real killer, taking him from the bosom of Lady Frankenstein‘s lovely Rosalba Neri to the laboratory of Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon, The Awful Dr. Orlof), who proposes an intriguing theory.

The mystery is so easy to crack, it hardly qualifies as one. But that’s not the point; a giallo is less about the killer, and more about the kills. Director Ferdinando Merighi likes his so much that he shows you the exact same shot of the violent act in several times’ succession, but each in a different colored tint. He also shows you many women in the altogether nude, but keep in mind that some of them are French, which means their armpits match the drapes. —Rod Lott

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Action

Maximum Risk (1996)

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Ringo Lam (City on Fire) brought his might as one of Hong Kong’s most noted action directors to the West for Maximum Risk, the first of three assignments starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Said Muscles from Brussels plays the cop Alain Moreau, twin brother of Mikhail, the guy who’s killed in the kick-ass prologue. (And before we proceed, with this, Double Impact and Replicant, just how many double-trouble movies does Van Damme intend to make?)

To find out — about his sib’s death, not the number of twin movies — Alain travels from France to New York, where he enlists the help of a possibly autistic cabbie (Zach Grenier, TV’s Deadwood) who’s writing the Great American Novel. Everywhere he goes, Alain is mistaken as his brother, a “big-time gangster” who evidently betrayed the Russian mob.

Even club hostess and former stripper Alex (Natasha Henstridge) assumes he’s Mikhail, and thus, throws herself at him because she’s the dead dude’s GF. Alain, however, backs off from her advances, which is how you know this is not based on a true story. Later, however, after he spots a peek at her fabulously real breasts while she changes clothes, Alain’s into the idea of letting her rub her Species DNA all over his parts, and allows it.

But this is an action movie, and generic though much of may be, Maximum Risk does deliver in that department, with Lam excelling at staging the car chases more than the gunplay. As so many of these flicks tend to do for no discernible reason, its climax is set amid hanging animal carcasses. I’m a bit surprised Van Damme was willing to share the screen with another slab of meat. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Beer League (2006)

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What’s Tina Fey doing in a vehicle for a Howard Stern staffer? I know what Seymour Cassel’s doing — enjoying his face being planted in the giant breasts of a hooker — but Fey? The reigning queen of intelligent comedy? She has no business — not even at this one-line cameo level — being anywhere near a script that delights in throwing around “fucknuts” and “shitnuts.” Such is Beer League.

Also the co-screenwriter, Lange stretches to play a lazy schlub named Artie, who still lives with his mom (Laurie Metcalf), constantly smokes and drinks, and plays softball with his blue-collar Joisey friends — Ralph Macchio among them — in a two-bit league where he espouses such theories as “Practice is for fags.”

On and off the field, Artie’s rival is mayoral candidate Mangenelli (Anthony DeSando, New Jack City‘s Frankie Needles), mostly because the guy once slept with the loose girl (Cara Buono, TV’s Mad Men) for whom Artie has a soft spot.

Beer League reeks of sitcom scripting, where every line is a pitch at which Artie is to swing. Whether he hits depends upon whether you find his shtick — potentially racist, sexist and homophobic, but certainly simple — to be funny; I don’t. The Lange litmus test may be the movie’s use of porn star Keisha as a slab of bachelor-party entertainment known as Pitching Machine, so named for shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina. Batter up? —Rod Lott

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Horror

Mahakaal (1993)

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If you thought Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was a fine concept, but needed an extra hour to pad with the Bollywood dance numbers it sorely lacked … well, so did India. The result is Mahakaal, which lifts entire scenes and musical cues, but also adds a Michael Jackson impersonator in a Puma sweatshirt who has no “off” switch.

The knife-fingered glove is worn by Shakaal — that’s right: Shakaal, not Mahakaal — whose face looks like a topographic map and whose head sports one mean mullet. Instead of a child molester, he’s a black-magic practitioner. My friend Richard also thinks Shakaal looks like Fangoria‘s Tony Timpone.

Anyhoo, Anita (Archana Puran Singh), the girl whose dreams he torments, resembles a Miami Sound Machine-era Gloria
Estefan, yet remains kind of hot; her authority-figure dad is played by the Hindu version of Fred Armisen. She attends a local college where all the T-shirts — Iron Maiden, Siouxsie and the Banshees, cute owls — apparently have been flown in from an American record store with whatever was left over from its closeout sale.

With a late-game possession angle and camera moves swiped from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, Mahakaal certainly upsets the tonal apple cart with sudden, happy musical numbers (“Come on now / You know you want to / Come and have a picnic with me”), especially when they follow scenes of near-rape. Mahakkal is always baffling, but never, ever boring. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

The Secret of Dorian Gray (1970)

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Rather than being a straight (no pun intended) adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel, Italy’s The Secret of Dorian Gray is credited as “a modern allegory based on the works of Oscar Wilde,” whose name the characters even drop. Ditch the Picture of Wilde’s title; give the greedy protagonist a Secret. Even more than one.

Set in London at the dawn of the ’70s, Dorian (Helmut Berger, The Damned) is a well-off, but level-headed 21-year-old who seems to have it all. He’s fallen in love with a virginal actress (Marie Liljedahl, The Seduction of Inga), doesn’t want for money, and enjoys his youthful good looks, which are freshly captured on an oil painting done by an artist pal (Richard Todd, Stage Fright).

When an arrogant art buyer (Herbert Lom, the Pink Panther franchise’s seven-time Dreyfus) admires the work and its shirtless subject, he notes, “one day, you will become an old and hideous puppet.” A suddenly overly vain Dorian responds that he wishes he could stay forever young while the painting ages, and lo and behold, that’s what happens … provided he delights in vice and immoral activity. The more he humps — no regard to either gender — the older his canvas visage gets, to the point where it resembles a zombie from an EC cover of Tales from the Crypt.

This is one big Piccadilly Circus version of an 1890 tale that only could have been made when it was, at the peak of the sexual revolution (just before the birth-control pill became available for all in the UK), but before anyone ever heard of AIDS. A gay club is not-so-subtly named The Black Cock, but the actual depiction of sex is less graphic than what the movie’s controversy (and porno-theater bookings) would suggest. In its swingin’, groovy, right-place-at-the-right-time world, this Secret is the finest interpretation of that Picture I’ve seen. —Rod Lott

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