All posts by Rod Lott

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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Thriller

The Secret of Dorian Gray (1970)

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Rather than being a straight (no pun intended) adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel, Italy’s The Secret of Dorian Gray is credited as “a modern allegory based on the works of Oscar Wilde,” whose name the characters even drop. Ditch the Picture of Wilde’s title; give the greedy protagonist a Secret. Even more than one.

Set in London at the dawn of the ’70s, Dorian (Helmut Berger, The Damned) is a well-off, but level-headed 21-year-old who seems to have it all. He’s fallen in love with a virginal actress (Marie Liljedahl, The Seduction of Inga), doesn’t want for money, and enjoys his youthful good looks, which are freshly captured on an oil painting done by an artist pal (Richard Todd, Stage Fright).

When an arrogant art buyer (Herbert Lom, the Pink Panther franchise’s seven-time Dreyfus) admires the work and its shirtless subject, he notes, “one day, you will become an old and hideous puppet.” A suddenly overly vain Dorian responds that he wishes he could stay forever young while the painting ages, and lo and behold, that’s what happens … provided he delights in vice and immoral activity. The more he humps — no regard to either gender — the older his canvas visage gets, to the point where it resembles a zombie from an EC cover of Tales from the Crypt.

This is one big Piccadilly Circus version of an 1890 tale that only could have been made when it was, at the peak of the sexual revolution (just before the birth-control pill became available for all in the UK), but before anyone ever heard of AIDS. A gay club is not-so-subtly named The Black Cock, but the actual depiction of sex is less graphic than what the movie’s controversy (and porno-theater bookings) would suggest. In its swingin’, groovy, right-place-at-the-right-time world, this Secret is the finest interpretation of that Picture I’ve seen. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Roost (2005)

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About the only thing The Roost has going for it are its wraparound segments, aping the old-school horror-host TV showcases of yesteryear — in this case, the fictional Frightmare Theatre!, a black-and-white affair with the great Tom Noonan as our guide. He knocks the film that will follow, calling it “truly wretched” and getting in a pun or two as he teases that it is “hot on the entrails of four young people on their way to a wedding.”

Cut to The Roost — in color, but über-grainy — with said four young people exhibiting zero personality while driving through rural roads at night. Crossing a bridge, the car’s front windshield comes glass-to-face with a bat, causing them to veer off the road. They go off to find help, but just find more and more bats.

Yep, bats. Have such things ever been frightening on film? That was meant as rhetorical, but no, they haven’t, not in 1979’s Nightwing, and certainly not in 1997’s Bats, in which Lou Diamond Phillips looked forever constipated. But scariness — or lack of — is not The Roost‘s real issue; slowness is. It’s the deathly pace that kills it.

Even at only 80 minutes, the movie drags. Had writer/director Ti West (who reunited with Noonan to great effect in 2009’s creepy The House of the Devil) broken up his thin story with more bits from the horror host, rather than just having him bookend the thing, The Roost could rustle up some enthusiasm among viewers. A giant in indie horror, West wields considerable talent — just not here in this, his first feature. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010)

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As if Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, weren’t deliriously entertaining enough, the director follows it up with the equally outrageous Machete Maidens Unleashed! Whereas Quite cast its probing eye on Australia’s deep history in exploitation film, Unleashed examines the Filipino revolution in moviemaking, even if much of that wave was due to American invaders — namely one Roger Corman.

While the Philippines was home to many a native production, it wasn’t until director Eddie Romero dipped his toes into horror with the likes of Terror Is a Man and the Blood Island trilogy that local audiences gave a damn, not to mention dollars. When Corman launched New World Pictures, he found he could make his cheap women-in-prison opuses even cheaper by shooting there, bringing an authentic bungled-jungle look to his Hollywood product.

Chock full of interviews with the movement’s filmmakers and performers who remain alive (plus John Landis), the excellent Unleashed also considers the careers of Cirio H. Santiago (Savage!, TNT Jackson), Bobby Suarez (Bionic Boy, One-Armed Executioner) and pint-sized actor Weng Weng (For Your Height Only, The Impossible Kid), all of whom helped keep the industry busy. So active was the Asian republic that Corman eventually parodied his productions there with Hollywood Boulevard, and Francis Ford Coppola turned it into a war zone with Apocalypse Now.

With intriguing sidebars on the safety measures not taken by Filipino stuntmen and the film fandom of shoe addict Imelda Marcos, Unleashed showcases so many movies of questionable quality — Twilight People, Beyond Atlantis, Vampire Hookers (“Blood isn’t all they suck!”) — that you’re advised to keep a notebook handy. Your “must-see” list will grow by the dozens. —Rod Lott

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