All posts by Rod Lott

Fantom Kiler (1998)

How many Pollacks does it take to make Fantom Kiler? I don’t have the answer. Regardless, Fantom Kiler — yes, that’s right, only one L — has to be the single most fucked-up movie I’ve ever seen.

In a bus station, two bumbling janitors — one of whom looks like Super Mario, so we’ll call the other one Luigi, for the sake of balance — push their mops and imagine what all the women there look like naked. Among them is a skinny brunette, who then slips in front of them and rejects Mario’s painful advances. So he imagines the woman walking through a spooky forest at night, gradually losing her pieces of clothing to tree branches and barbed wire before she is stark naked, whereupon she meets Fantom Kiler. With his trenchcoat and bandaged face, he looks exactly like Darkman, except you can’t see his eyes. He slashes her body all over and rapes her with a knife.

Back in reality, Mario (who resembles SNL’s Seth Meyers with a fake mustache) is in his office (since when do janitors have offices?) when the new cleaning woman arrives. She comes to work in the acceptable maid attire — namely, a short tube top that barely covers her breasts and cut-off shorts. Much to Mario’s delight, she starts scrubbing things up in suggestive positions, often exposing her breasts. Then she offers to demonstrate why she is the reigning Miss Butt Beautiful and does something with a wooden spoon that I just can’t bring myself to put into words; let’s just say “spoontang” and leave it at that. Then Mario dreams she meets the Fantom Kiler. She dies, while buck naked.

This cycle repeats, with Fantom Kiler ready to “kile” any naked woman he meets. He picks up one blonde in a car, which then conveniently stalls. While checking the oil, the Fantom Killer needs a rag, so the hussy offers her pantyhose. Oops, she isn’t wearing any, so she takes off her shirt, too. Her shorts mysteriously disappear, only to reappear underneath the car, thus not only allowing the viewer to see what her gynecologist sees in horrifying close-up, but also allowing Fantom Kiler the prime opportunity to ram a metal spike all up in her pooper with a mallet.

This goes on and on, later with Ms. Spoontang reappearing to get intimate with Fantom Kiler’s mop handle. Then Mario, too wrapped up in his imagination, chokes on a peanut and dies. And so does the Fantom Kiler. Meanwhile, Luigi has been investigating this string of murders, even though they were all in the mind of Mario, who again, met his untimely demise by choking on a peanut.

I know you think I just made all this up, but I swear to you I did not. —Rod Lott

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The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)

I knew I was going to dig The Black Belly of the Tarantula from the opening credits, which depict a beautiful woman, fully nude, getting a professional massage under the unmistakable bed of Ennio Morricone music. To address the title, this giallo really should have used a wasp instead of a spider, given its subject matter and midway explanation. But hell, I get it: “Tarantula” sounds way cooler and way scarier.

Anyway, the movie: Someone is killing off Italy’s hottest naked women. We see little more than his (her?) mannequin-esque hands. This wasp (not WASP) fellow employs a one-two punch: first, a needle to the back of the neck of his victims to paralyze them, followed by a knife to the tum-tum for the kill. They’re alive and aware of the whole bloody ordeal, but physically unable to move. That’s hardcore!

Investigating the murders is Inspector Tellini, played by Giancarlo Giannini, whom I always get confused with Marcello Mastroianni, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s. Directed by Paolo Cavara (Mondo Cane), it has little wrong with it. Definitely near the top is Barbara Bach somehow managing to hide all her good parts, while all the other ladies in waiting (to die) have no such problem.

Interestingly, she’s one of three James Bond girls in the cast, alongside Thunderballer Claudine Auger and Barbara Bouchet from the 1967 version of Casino Royale. All are as Royale-y sexy as this thriller is twisted. The one scene with an actual tarantula and a pair of tongs gave me the shivers. —Rod Lott

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Stagefright (1987)

You know that rock musical for the stage? The one that begins with a mop-headed hooker being pulled into an alley by a man in a giant owl head who does flips? And a Marilyn Monroe lookalike playing the sax while her dress billows up? No? Good, because it only exists in Stagefright, so you passed the liar test.

The Italian horror film follows the foibles of the cast and crew attempting to mount this ambitious production. Rehearsals aren’t going great, and that’s before their troupe is infiltrated by a crazed killer. A wardrobe lackey is the first to be murdered (in the face!), and the director eats up the idea of using the publicity to his advantage, because he’s in dire need of a hit.

That’s before he and the thesps get locked in the theater with the killer, who’s now using the aforementioned owl head as his trademark, so take that, hockey mask! Members of the musical get stabbed, drilled, sawed and axed, and they all wonder who, who could it be? (That’s an owl pun.) Meanwhile, the oblivious cops sit outside, talking about James Dean and Popeye.

With its behind-the-scenes setting most of us never see, Stagefright feels more unique than it would otherwise. (The owl head doesn’t hurt, either.) As with many ’80s Italian horrors, it’s heavily stylized — read: MTV-influenced and, therefore, awfully and wonderfully dated. Director Michele Soavi (The Church) hails from the Dario Argento school of filmmaking, so people bleed and get torn apart in graphically gruesome ways. It’s slow as first, but once the killings started, I was prepped to cry, “Bravo! Bravo!” —Rod Lott

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8 Ways Final Destination 5 Is Exactly Like TV’s The Office

1. The characters work at a paper company experiencing hard economic times, to the point where their department may be shut down.

2. The boss is kind of a clueless figurehead nobody respects.

3. A talented young man is slumming it by working there, and obviously would be happier employed in a more creative field …

4. … but stays because of mousy girlfriend who also works there, but isn’t slumming.

5. A nerd wrongly thinks he’s God’s gift to women who clearly are out of his league.

6. An African-American man suddenly lands in middle management, where he oversees the plant/warehouse area.

7. A possibly crazy employee quietly dates an intern.

8. Occasional appearances by David Koechner. —Rod Lott

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Confession Stand with Dwight H. Little

Dwight H. Little is the director of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Marked for Death and the new, live-action, video-game adaptation Tekken.

FLICK ATTACK: Where did the H go? The credits just read “Dwight Little.”

LITTLE: I think it was after Rapid Fire, maybe. I got bored with it.

FLICK ATTACK: It’s been a lot of years since your last feature, so why Tekken?

LITTLE: It was a chance to re-collaborate with Alan McElroy, the screenwriter, who I did Halloween 4 and Rapid Fire with, and he and I have a great, common creative interest and rapport. I thought the Tekken world was a great platform for a martial arts movie. I had some success with Marked for Death and Rapid Fire, and it looked like it was in my area of expertise.

FLICK ATTACK: Were you familiar with the video games at all?

LITTLE: Only in sort of a passing way. I wasn’t like a hardcore player, but my two boys are into it, so I get into it vicariously. There was a mythology about the family and the Tekken corporation like you get inspired by a short story or a novel. I also love the ever-changing, interactive fight designs, so that was visually interesting to me. I thought it’d be a way to freshen up the genre of a martial arts action movie.

FLICK ATTACK: So then how do approach turning a video game into a movie?

LITTLE: You look at the exiting source material and find the thing that makes you passionate or gets you excited. I made the movie like I would make Rocky or Gladiator: The goal is to make a good movie, not a good video game. You have to commit to the characters to keep viewers actively commited to the story. Poppy visuals are not going to do it for 100 minutes. Alan and I said, “You know what? Jin and his devil wings and the boxing kangaroo — let’s leave that for a CGI or an anime movie. Let’s leave these heavy supernatural items on the table.”

FLICK ATTACK: Are you disappointed it’s coming out on DVD instead of hitting theaters?

LITTLE: Sure, but that reflects the world we live in. This movie, made 10 years ago, obviously would have been released on 2,000 screens. To market and release a movie now national is a $35 million to $40 million commitment in marketing. Our world is changing so fast, but Tekken will be platformed on Blu-ray, on Redbox, on iTunes, on VOD and Netflix and pay-per-view, and that’s how movies go into the world unless it’s Warner Bros and they have that massive marketing muscle.

FLICK ATTACK: You know a movie of yours I really liked? The Phantom of the Opera.

LITTLE: That was a movie that really kind of opened and closed without generating much interest at the time. It’s kind of startling to me, because on DVD, I guess it’s found a second life. I guess the reason is that movie is artistically very odd. You take a Robert Englund slasher movie and kind of do a mash-up with a very literary, opera-art movie, and put those two movies together. A lot of people really didn’t like it, but other people loved it, so it’s a challenging movie. If you’re a straight-up slasher movie, you’re suddenly going to be watching Faust on stage at the Budapest opera — I like it because of that, because it’s unpredictable.

FLICK ATTACK: So you’ve directed Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers. In a fight between those two, who’d win?

LITTLE: Between Freddy and Michael … Freddy’s too smart. He would outsmart Michael.

FLICK ATTACK: I think Halloween 4 is among the best of the sequels, but you never got to do another one since.

LITTLE: I think it’s time, honestly, to put it to bed. What Alan and I did is we went back to John Carpenter’s movie and said, “What made this movie?” And we just looked at it over and over and it was Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence. If you have that investment in the characters and you care about them, then everything else is going to fall into place. That’s a movie. I think people sometimes lose sight — it’s just like in Tekken: If you find your way into Jin and his dilemma and his search for vengance against his mother’s death, then the rest of it, you’ll just follow him into the world.

FLICK ATTACK: Yeah, but Tekken doesn’t have Kathleen Kinmont taking off her shirt.

LITTLE: Yeah. —Rod Lott

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