All posts by 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

Buy it at Amazon.

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

Buy it at Amazon.

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

Buy it at Amazon.

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

Buy it at Amazon.

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

Buy it at Amazon.