Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
All posts by Rod Lott
Death Note (2006)
The Death Note manga has a story so extensive, so twisty-turvy, so dozen-volumey, I wondered how Japan ever could adapt it into a live-action feature film. Answer: It couldn’t. Instead, it had to do it in two: 2006’s Death Note and its immediate sequel, Death Note: The Last Name. Directed by Shusuke Kaneko (one-third of Necronomicon: Book of the Dead and several Gamera films of the ’90s), the first films adheres closely to its source material.
Tatsuya Fujiwara (Battle Royale) plays Light Yagami, a college student who comes across one helluva unique notebook in the rain and takes it home. Clad in black covers emblazoned with the name “Death Note,” its pages are blank. The inside-front-cover instructions explain why: Write someone’s name in the book, and they instantly die. The son of a police detective, Light at first uses this find for good, to rid Japan of its hardened criminals, especially those who’ve slipped through the fingers of Lady Justice. It’s only after he becomes a suspect in this string of serial “murders” that he uses it to save it his own hide.
After the police get nowhere — and lose a lot of their own men in the process — they lean on the candy-addicted, hermit/genius known only as L (Ken’ichi Matsuyama of Detroit Metal City). Thus begins a chess game of wits that also involves a clingy media pop tart, several skeptics and, of course, the so-named shinigami death gods, rendered here through CGI that ranges from fluid to clunky, depending upon the shot.
It’s a crisp, slick slice of crime and fantasy cinema, if a bit too long. The most amazing thing is how much Matsuyama inhabits the L character as originally portrayed on the page by artist Takeshi Obata: his quirks, his stance, his malnourished look, his everything. It’s uncanny. The film marks a killer concept, well-executed — if you’ll pardon the double pun. —Rod Lott
The Corpse Vanishes (1942)
Better than most of Bela Lugosi’s Poverty Row efforts — but still just average — is The Corpse Vanishes, in which he plays a mad doctor who sends poisoned orchids to brides so that they’ll expire on the altar.
He then steals their bodies — hence the title — so that he can extract their youth and inject it into his aging wife, who sleeps in a coffin. A nosy female reporter figures it all out. A cop shoots a midget. —Rod Lott
Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006)
Sadly, Yo-Yo Girl Cop is one of those flicks adorned with a totally awesome title to which it can’t possibly live up. You roll the dice and hope it can, please please please … snake eyes, sucker.
Japanese pop singer Aya Matsuura fills the title role of a no-good street ruffian recruited by the authorities to assume the identity of Asamiya Saki and infiltrate a local high school, where exists an underground student-terrorist movement to blow up places and, thus, overthrow the country.
To do this, she dons a schoolgirl uniform and has a metal yo-yo strapped to her thigh for a weapon. This is the stuff of many a socially isolated man’s masturbatory fantasies, but also a long-running manga (1976-1982) on which this tired actioner is based.
A romance angle further slows things down, but things pick up in the final scenes, particularly where a leather-clad Asamiya uses her mad yo-yo skillz to do battle with the school’s bitchiest girl, also clad in leather. You understand. —Rod Lott
Burnt Offerings (1976)
Dan Curtis’ Burnt Offerings comes from that era in horror when the genre was a chic gig for Oscar winners and A-list talent, rather than any given season’s crop of young, cheap TV supporting players. This one has Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith and even the grand bitch herself, Bette Davis.
Reed and Black portray the Rolfs, who — with son Davey (Lee Montgomery) and Aunt Elizabeth (Davis) in tow — rent a sprawling Gothic manse for the summer for $900. Seems too good to be true? It is, because there’s a catch: Thrice a day, they are to set out a plate for the unseen 85-year-old woman who never comes out of her room. RUN!!!
Not only do they not run, but Mrs. Rolf does what she’s warned not to do: entering the coot’s room. After doing so, she starts acting all weird. Her hubby also starts exhibiting strange behavior — well, if attempting to drown your own kid counts. (Is it? I can’t keep track of things like “laws.”)
You get the idea Reed was just doing this slow stepper for beer money, because he tends not to invest much in it beyond teeth clinching. No one told Davis, however, who overacts the hell out of things, to the point where you can feel her arrogance seething through your TV. At least the ending is kinda cool, if expected. Was that scripted or was Reed so tanked he slipped? —Rod Lott