All posts by Rod Lott

Babysitter Wanted (2009)

As Elisabeth Shue so famously warned in Adventures in Babysitting, “Don’t fuck with the babysitter!” It’s a quote that Angie Albright (Sarah Thompson, Cruel Intentions 2) neither utters nor paraphrases in Babysitter Wanted (which should not be confused with the ’80s Touchstone teen comedy), but certainly embodies, if a little too late.

Angie’s a good, Christian girl-next-door type who moves away from her devout mom to study art history at college in a small town where young women have been disappearing. Smooth move! Needing money to buy a bed, she takes a job babysitting one night for Sam (Kai Caster), a cute but shy only child who always wears cowboy gear and drinks buttermilk. He lives with his parents in a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse.

Everything goes well until the some big, bald man with scars all over his face tries to bust his way inside, recalling — how could it not? — John Carpenter’s Halloween. But debuting co-directors Jonas Barnes (who also wrote) and Michael Manasseri have a trick up their collective sleeve, and odds are that you won’t be able to guess at least the most twisted part of it.

Unfortunately, from there, this otherwise better-than-expected Babysitter loses all its juice. Its greatest asset, Thompson, spends most of the remaining time tied up and gagged, listening to one character go into exposition overdrive for a situation that could be explained in just a couple of lines. It’s not the great Bill Moseley, incidentally, who plays a cop sympathetic to Angie’s plight. She’s so darned cute, who wouldn’t? —Rod Lott

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Karate: The Hand of Death (1961)

Quick! What was the first martial-arts movie to unspool across American cinemas? Five Fingers of Death? Fists of Fury? Nope! ‘Twas the no-budget, black-and-white oddity Karate: The Hand of Death.

In it, a Yank named Matthew (Joel Holt) is vacationing in Japan when he mysteriously comes into possession of a coin owned by a former Nazi who was murdered via karate chop the previous night. Because said coin contains hidden secrets surrounding the dead man’s fortune, bad guys come out of the woodwork to prey on Matthew; the one pestering him the most is Ivan Mayberry, a near-7-feet tall homosexual who talks like Mr. Belvedere and smokes all of Matthew’s cigarettes.

Luckily, Matt is skilled in the fine art of karate — black-belt style! Or so says the script. He’s got scars on his knuckles and we see him break a couple of boards, but he doesn’t hit much beyond a teapot, which he assaults in a rage in his hotel room, hilariously. He also stops a taxi cab in its tracks and kills a man simply with a bale of hay, but I don’t think you need a black belt to do that. When Matt fully busts out his kung fu in the to-the-death finale, it’s still so stilted and awkward, it’s like watching Ward Cleaver.

The film’s middle is an extended lesson in the sport of karate, during which Ivan won’t stop asking annoying questions (“Why do those chappies have their fingers extended like this?”). Karate sure doesn’t work as a straightforward action film, because it’s largely in a state of inertia, but it works well as a comedy. —Rod Lott

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Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007)

If you’re ever boarding a commercial airline and the pilot happens to mention it’s his last flight before retirement and a long vacation with the grandkids, turn around and get off! Because there’s a middle-aged housewife zombie locked up in the cargo bay and she. Wants. Out.

The proof is in Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, which is like Snakes on a Plane, minus the snakes, adding the undead, but keeping same the ratio of “fuck” and its variations to all other words spoken. I’m fairly certain the subtitle only exists to hammer this point home, and even potentially confuse/trick viewers too clueless to know the difference.

Soap actor David Chisum is no Samuel L. Jackson, but his FBI agent has a gun. So does Richard Tyson as a federal marshal with a beret that, at certain angles, make his hair look like Princess Leia. There are three super-hot flight attendants (that’s how you know it’s fiction) on the Paris-bound plane, one pro golfer whose carry-on is a golden putter, Kevin J. O’Connor in the John Malkovich role of kooky criminal, several douchebags and, eventually, a jumbo jet full of zombies that just seem to come out of nowhere, despite the confined setting.

Once it gets going, Flight is awfully fun, but it could’ve been more fun, had the whole of it played things as over-the-top as the last chunk of scenes. One moment even veers into the purposely slapstick deaths of the great Final Destination 2. It gives you a lot of simple-minded entertainment for your ticket, but no free bag of peanuts. —Rod Lott

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Eurotrip (2004)

Found National Lampoon’s European Vacation too mature and sophisticated? Then Eurotrip is for you. Not only is it from the producers of Road Trip, its plot seems like a discarded draft of Road Trip. After being dumped by his girlfriend on the day of his high school graduation, Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz) receives an e-mail from his German pen pal, who suggests some face-to-face consolation. Wrongly believing Mieke to be a guy, Scotty tells his online friend to “fuc off,” only to learn that Mieke (Euro pop tart Jessica Boehrs) is, in fact, a hot blonde. His hasty reply results in her blocking his e-mails, so he foregoes a summer internship to hightail it to Berlin to explain himself. (Couldn’t he just have e-mailed her from another account?)

Accompanying him is the requisite annoying/horny best pal, and because no Hollywood teen-trip movie is complete without crazy shenanigans and hee-larious misunderstandings, they also encounter enraged soccer hooligans, a robot mime, a creepy Italian guy (SNL’s Fred Armisen), lots of scraggly naked fat dudes, oft-topless hookers and, most belabored, the Pope.

Eurotrip aims for crude laughs and earns some in gags involving a cymbal-playing monkey, David Hasselhoff and the aforementioned Armisen. But much of it is just being vulgar or stupid for vulgar and stupid’s sake. I guess either you find a near-incestuous encounter between inebriated brother and sister incredibly humorous or you don’t. Ditto a kindergartener who apes noted Jew-killer Hitler, or a impoverished girl peeing while standing up on the sidewalk. I’m sure the kids will eat it up.

It’s worth noting that minute for minute, Eurotrip contains more gratuitous nudity than any movie of recent memory; the film is bustling with breast-rubbing, barely dressed prostitutes and public sexual encounters … and, unfortunately, dozens of uncircumcised Europenises in full view. Not since The Exorcist has the big screen seen such horrors. How in the hell did they get Matt Damon to cameo? —Rod Lott

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