All posts by Rod Lott

Comedy

Ghosts on the Loose (1943)

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Legendary one-take helmer William Beaudine (Billy the Kid vs. Dracula) directed Bela Lugosi in Ghosts on the Loose, an alleged comedy starring The East Side Kids, who look to be almost 30. They’re kind of a gang of juvenile delinquents who sing and slap each other and fall down a lot, and are led by pint-sized Leo Gorcey and lanky Huntz Hall.

When Hall’s sister (Ava Gardner in an early role) gets married, The East Side Kids decide to fix her new house, yet they mistakenly enter the one next door that’s rumored to be haunted. It’s not — although the best scenes involve them thinking it is — but rather occupied by a group of Nazis in the cellar who print propaganda on “The New Order” (not the band) and are led by Lugosi.

Watch for when he sneezes and slips in a “Shit!” The loosely plotted Loose is filled with stoopid comedy (“I said sweep, not sleep! Now get to woik!”), to the point that it’s virtually laughless, but also utterly harmless. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

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The Other Side must refer to where the grass is greener, because this sequel is full of manure. JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson return as the heads of the Freling family, now living with her mom after their haunted house vanished into thin air at the close of the original.

Everything’s fine and dandy for a while, until Grandma notices that lil’ Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) appears to have extrasensory powers, and a skeletal-faced preacher named Kane stalks the family. Then Grandma dies, and an Indian (Will Sampson) starts camping out in the backyard and making leaves levitate to help protect the family. Inside, Carol Anne gets otherworldly telephone calls on a toy phone; her brother, Robbie (Oliver Robins), is menaced by his own braces; and Dad vomits up a giant tequila worm with huge testicles.

With the aid of Sampson and pint-sized Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), the Frelings return to the site of their old home and cross over to another dimension, resulting in a ludicrous, laughable sequence, culminating in a return from Dead Grandma as an angel. Williams cries; you’ll laugh.

It’s amazing how something that was mildly disappointing at the time is utter trash today. The original Poltergeist remains one of my all-time favorites, but all of its thrills have been replaced here by Native American mumbo-jumbo, bad acting and wrong turns in every scene. It’s one of the most disappointing sequels in history. Where’s a clown when you need him? —Rod Lott

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Action

The Fast and the Furious (1955)

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Writer/producer Roger Corman’s original The Fast and the Furious should be called The Relaxed and the Rear-Projected. In pure old-school AIP fashion, it’s quick, painless and efficient. And a better movie than the loose Vin Diesel remake from 2001.

Also pulling double duty as director, John Ireland stars as a man wanted for murder, and is given the cold-blooded killer name of Frank Webster. While on the run to Mexico, he stops at a diner and is accosted by a porky cop, so he grabs the nearest hostage he can — dish o’ ice cream Dorothy Malone — and they hightail it in her Jaguar.

She’s headed for the “international” car races, so he thinks that’d be a good place to lay low until they can get across the border. Perhaps — just perhaps — captor and captive will fall in love before 75 minutes is up.

For a delinquent type, Ireland sure does look to be in his 40s. The race sequences are antiquated, of course, but that’s what lends this drive-in movie its charm. It’s hard not to have a good time when it flies by so quickly. Bonus: No Paul Walker saying “bro.” —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Core (2003)

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The premise of The Core would have you believe that the inner core of the earth has stopped spinning, causing massive thunderstorms, electromagnetic surges that stop pacemakers and, well, something that causes birds in London to go absolutely mad. And that’s just for starters! College professor Aaron Eckhart believes that within a year, all life around the world will cease to exist.

He convinces enough military bigwigs that the situation is real and deadly, if they don’t do something — namely, drill down to the center of the earth and jump-start the planet. Hey, whaddaya know, Delroy Lindo’s been working on just such a machine in the middle of the desert! So the two get in the ship with astronaut Hilary Swank, pompous scientist Stanley Tucci and a few others, and get down to business.

For a while anyway, The Core plays it straight enough that you just buy into it. It’s not until the mission is well under way that said suspension starts falling apart, probably because the movie is just too darned long. And the mission — its Armageddon half — is actually the least interesting part of the movie. I much more enjoyed the setup — the Deep Impact half — where the disaster scenes carry a little mystery, the Space Shuttle is forced to land in a Los Angeles sewer ditch, and citizens panic as all of Rome’s monuments are blown to model bits.

The acting isn’t all that bad, just the dialogue. Eckhart makes for a likable all-brains hero, although this must be one of the easiest slum jobs for an Academy Award winner, as Swank has to do little more than sit in a chair and rattle off some numbers. The weakest link here, however, is Road Trip freak DJ Qualls as a hacker named Rat. He likes Xena: Warrior Princess and Hot Pockets, and can do anything with computers — and is just plain annoying. He’s this film’s Jar-Jar. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Maniac (1934)

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Dwain Esper’s Maniac is one of the more notorious early exploitation films, but it’s still dreadfully boring, even at 50 minutes. And while you can cut it a little slack for being from the 1930s, the story still doesn’t make a lick of sense. Maniac is amateurish in all aspects, from the actors (sometimes gazing in the camera) to Esper’s direction (sometimes the performers’ faces are blocked by props).

An old, eccentric doctor and his young assistant are experimenting with formulas to revive the dead. When the doctor wants to kill the assistant and then bring him back with a new heart, the assistant shoots the doctor dead. Instead of shooting him with reanimating juice, however, he holes him up in the wall of the basement and then changes his appearance to look like the doctor so no one will notice his absence.

To help mask the illusion, the assistant-as-doctor keeps seeing patients, including a shy, topless chick and one man who goes mad, kidnaps a formerly dead girl, strips off her clothes and rapes her. Meanwhile, the assistant’s wife hangs out with her friends in their bras and granny panties. The nudity in this must have been shocking way back then; now it’s simply comical.

The high point comes out of no-where, when the assistant grabs a cat and pokes its eye out in graphic detail, admires it (“Why, it’s not unlike an oyster … or a grape!”) and pops it in his mouth. Bon appétit! Then the cops arrive and find the doc in the wall, thanks to the cries of a cat accidentally trapped in there with him, thanks to a storyline swiped from Edgar Allan Poe. Then you get to go to sleep, if you haven’t already. —Rod Lott

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