All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

Atrocious (2010)

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With America rocking the found-footage business, Spain gets into the act with Atrocious. Its concept is that sibling urban-legend investigators Cristian and July (unknowns Cristian Valencia and Clara Moraleda, respectively) are dragged by their parents to spend Easter weekend in a nearby village, where stands the family’s castle, empty for 10 years. Certain to be bored to death, the brother and sister shoot video of the entire trip.

Legend has it that a girl disappeared from the grounds decades before, never to be found. Also, there’s a gated labyrinth adjacent to their property they can’t wait to explore, but their father forbids them to step foot there. So naturally, they do, and find a lot of prickly branches there. Oh, and a well. And anyone who has seen The Ring knows those things are bad news. Especially later when they find a fresh trail of blood leading to it.

That’s not all. The kids hear weird sounds emanating from the maze while they’re trying to sleep. Things really escalate when their 8-year-old brother can’t be found, leading to a too-long run through the dark. (Hope you like night vision!)

The mere title of Atrocious invites trouble (I assume it was chosen to resemble the smash Insidious), but actually, the movie isn’t even close to awful. It’s not great, either, but it is muy bueno, with a rather effective final 10 or 15 minutes that are undeniably creepy, even if you’re short of being scared. —Rod Lott

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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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