All posts by Rod Lott

Sex

Cool It Carol! (1970)

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At 17, the cute and comely village gas station attendant Carol (Janet Lynn, In the Devil’s Garden) is desperate to move to London to parlay her recent beauty contest victory into a modeling career. Her bored friend, the butcher’s assistant Joe (Robin Askwith, Queen Kong) seizes the moment, lies about having a big job lined up there, invites her and off they go!

I forgot to mention Carol’s also an exhibitionist. They fuck on the train.

Livin’ it up in London, they quickly run out of cash and begin to starve — nothing a quick dip into sex work can’t fix! Joe becomes her de facto pimp as “just this once” soon snowballs into a not 100% consensual train ride of another kind: five guys, some with unruly eyebrows thicker than my thumb. Luckily offscreen, the encounter is icky … and then possibly worse when the depressed, defeated Carol makes Joe the caboose after he professes his love to her minutes later. Dude, read the room.

As odd as this sounds — and as nude as Lynn often is — the sexploitation aspect of Pete Walker’s film seemed secondary to me. I got really invested in these two crazy kids. Both are likable, even with every stupid step they take.

Cool It Carol! captures Askwith just before he became a huge UK box-office draw with the four-flick Confessions series of sex comedies. This is the first time I’ve seen him in action. I was prepared to hate him based on his atrocious haircut alone, but I gotta admit, he had something. His face suggests Mick Jagger shagged Matt Damon. No telling from whom he inherited the hairy ass. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Lobster Man from Mars (1989)

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Co-opting more than a cue from Mel Brooks’ The Producers, a studio mogul played by Tony Curtis faces debt so deep, his only hope is to make a movie guaranteed to fail in order to claim it as a tax write-off. In walks a nebbish kid filmmaker (Dean Jacobson, Child’s Play 3) with his latest opus, a 1950s-style sci-fi cheapie called Lobster Man from Mars.

As you can guess, Lobster Man tonally plays like the titular spoof of Amazon Women on the Moon. But that all-star comedy has the good sense to include about 20 other sketches. This sticks to its one, only occasionally cutting to the studio screening room where Curtis watches the mess unspool. The look on Curtis’ face is so pained, one can infer he’s thinking of the great works of art he used to be in, like Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Janet Leigh’s cleavage.

In the movie within the movie, the red planet’s king (Bobby “Boris” Pickett of “Monster Mash” fame) sends the giant crustacean creature (S.D. Nemeth, RoboCop) to Earth to steal our air supply. Witnessing the alien’s crash-landing are an all-American sweater girl (Valley Girl’s Deborah Foreman, adorable as ever) and her British beau (Anthony Hickox, Foreman’s Waxwork director). Few believe their story, other than Tommy Sledge, P.I., played by comedian Tommy Sledge, which is to say he performs his stand-up routine parodying noir detectives. He’s also the best part.

I put off seeing Lobster Man from Mars for decades because I had my fill of its trailer while working at Blockbuster Video in college. For months on the store’s overhead TVs, management played a preview tape with a spot pairing the movie with Girlfriend from Hell, presumably due to their schlocky titles. With the opening notes of “Rock Lobster” announcing its arrival, I heard it multiple times a shift. To this day, any second of The B-52s’ hit elicits a Pavlovian shudder, although the flick uses a soundalike band in place of the real cosmic thing.

There’s a reason the radio version of “Rock Lobster” trims two minutes or more. I bring that up because here, Stanley Sheff (Vincent Price: The Sinister Image) and co-writer Bob Greenberg grossly misjudge audiences’ tolerance for their lampoon. It suffers from the same problem as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: The joke just isn’t good enough to drag into lollygagging territory, wearing my goodwill down so much, I turned on it. That leaves me without the patience to discuss Billy Barty in swami get-up, narration by Dr. Demento, a clown named Nose-O, former Playboy Playmate Ava Fabian, future Price Is Right model Mindy Kennedy, Robot Monster’s space gorilla or opening credits that feature scissors-cut faces of the actors next to their names. —Rod Lott

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Action

Redneck Miller (1976)

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A radio DJ conveniently named DJ Miller is at risk for being squelched after his flame-emblazoned motorcycle is, unbeknownst to him, “borrowed” to steal a shipment of dope belonging to local drug kingpin Supermack (Lou Walker, 1979’s The Visitor). Presumably named after Super Fly, this gangster looks like that blaxploitation icon on a Whataburger Patty Melt diet.

In between ducking Supermack’s jive-talking henchmen and deposits of dynamite, Miller stops to aid a stranded female motorist. She offers to pay, but Miller refuses cash; instead, he says he’ll take it out in trade, and forces her into some backseat bangin’. Mind you, this is played for laughs. Also mind you, the woman is Supermack’s best gal, thus further enraging the smack slinger.

Al Adamson regular Geoffrey Land (Blazing Stewardesses) has no charisma as Miller, who hops around the clubs and beds of Charlotte, North Carolina, like he’s King Shit. Dude, he’s a DJ. And it’s not like we’re talking Wolfman Jack territory here. IRL, Mr. Miller would be appearing at an appliance store’s “everything must go” inventory sale, then doing spokesman duty on an UHF TV commercial for a roofing company, and maybe introducing the sneak preview of Silver Streak at the twin-screen bijou.

From Summerdog director John Clayton, the hicksploitation obscurity Redneck Miller is most likely to find favor with those who delight seeing a honky outsmart a bunch of Black guys for 90 minutes. It’s pretty dull. You really have to be into banjos, slide whistles, ahooga horns, canary-yellow bedsheets, floral-print couches, stars-and-stripes trucks, astrological necklaces, shag carpets as wall art, pool halls with Elton John posters, canned Schlitz, fake tits and those rock-hard stuffed animals people “win” at carnivals. In other words, not I. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Watari, the Ninja Boy (1966)

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Watari, the Ninja Boy is based on a classic Japanese manga, which I could tell just by looking at the kid’s haircut. Played by Kaneko Yoshinobu (who was a different child ninja in the similar, superior Ninja Scope), Watari lives with his sickly grandfather, plays the flute, jumps around, swings on ropes, flies through the air, walks up trees and, in a musical number, even grows to Jolly Green Giant height to touch a rainbow of Skittles.

But mostly, with the aid of his trusty metal ax, whose blade is bigger than his head, Watari spends his days and nights warring against adult ninja and monster ninja who want to kill him. He also decapitates a black cat, but TBH, that pussy had it coming.

Watari undergoes a litany of traumas in these colorful adventures, including surviving an earthquake, sinking in quicksand, finding dead dudes floating in the river, seeing a naked lady and meeting a grown man with lots of eye shadow.

Needless to say, this is one weird kiddie matinee — one that begins with a blue-skinned ninja losing his tongue for breaking the law. It’s also confusing, what with all the Japanese names thrown around of this clan and that clan, and not knowing who belong to which. Even with the benefit of crisp English subtitles, I was all like, whaaaaaaaaa … —Rod Lott

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Action

Man of Violence (1970)

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With a title like Man of Violence, Pete Walker’s third feature gives no indication of its driving conflict: dueling British property developers. Smart move, Pete! Same goes for slapping your opening credits atop footage of a woman’s navel shot in such extreme close-up, it verges on the gynecological.

A real estate war may sound like a snore, but fear not, readers: These property bros aren’t above resorting to murder to get shit done. One side hires a freelance fixer named Moon (Michael Latimer, Hammer’s Prehistoric Women) to do their dirty work. The other side also hires Moon to do their dirty work. Moon being Moon, an opportunist crook, he plays both sides. After all, despite his tousled hair and a water pistol loaded with Heinz Tomato Ketchup, he’s got a taste for life’s finer things, and London’s clothiers don’t just give away collared tangerine shirts, luv.

The plot involves ax-clutching gangsters, a protection racket, a smuggling scheme — all a MacGuffin, as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps Walker felt the same, tasking the yowza Luan Peters (Hammer’s Twins of Evil) to deliver a chunk of exposition while undressing. (Like, are we supposed to pay attention? If so, that’s not playing fair.) Functionally, the story is more about biding time to get to the next set piece. My favorite among them might be Moon subduing a threatening passenger by braking so hard, the poor guy’s forehead smashes against the dash. Perhaps Schizo Walker felt the same, having Moon quickly drive forward and backward to brake again, over and over, making good on the film’s title. (Speaking of, its alternate one is, stupidly, Moon.)

A sign outside a club owned by one of Moon’s clients reads, “IF YOU DON’T SWING, DON’T RING.” The rhyme could double as a gatekeeper for viewers, too, as Man of Violence explores sexual kinks (hetero- and homo-) and spontaneously jet-sets to Marrakesh for the third act. This trip temporarily turns the movie into something of a freewheeling travelogue à la Harry Alan Towers’ 1960s espionage adventures (see Code 7, Victim 5!; Mozambique; Five Golden Dragons; et al.) — by no means a complaint. Walker’s conclusion bears so many twists, you’d think he’d installed a turnstile. It may be more complicated than necessary, yet also more clever. —Rod Lott

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