All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Sisu (2022)

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Finnish director Jalmari Helander already has one modern cult classic under his belt with 2010’s twisted Christmas fantasy Rare Exports. He has another at the ready in Sisu.

As a title crawl explains, practically doubling as a synopsis, the word “sisu” means white-knuckled courage that comes forth only when all hope is lost. In 1944 Finland, a battle-scarred soldier (Helander regular Jorma Tommila, Big Game) deserts the war (WWII, you may have heard of it) and wanders the sprawling vistas of the wild with his trusty dog.

Lucking into a life-changing cache of gold, he needs all the sisu he can muster, which is a lot, when tanks and trucks of Nazis cross his path. (Understandably in today’s topsy-turvy world, it’s not enough for them to be Nazis; Helander makes them child-raping Nazis.) Led by an SS officer with the appropriate name of Helldorf (Aksel Hennie, The Martian), they’re rendered surface-level despicable — more characterization than they deserve.

From there, Sisu is one set piece after another, with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of bloody action. Painted with strokes as mythic as The Man with No Name, Mad Max and Rambo, our rumored-immortal hero exacts justice that’s swift, brutal and cathartic, whether navigating minefields or hanging on an ascendant plane via pickax; not for nothing was he known as a “one-man death squad” while under conscription. Helander knows just how to handle him: as a movie icon in the making, even if his exploits are one or two reels too long in the knocked-out tooth. —Rod Lott

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Action

Short Fuse (2016)

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A rep-tarnished attorney in between at-law jobs, Ares has little choice than gigging as a delivery driver. His shift’s last drop-off takes him to an address bearing the number 13, so you know something’s not on the up and up. He’s knocked out and awakes with timed C-4 explosives strapped to his chest.

Via earpiece, a Jigsaw-modulated voice gives Ares (Apostolis Totsikas) a series of missions to keep the device from detonating. The fun of Short Fuse is seeing the obstacles he’s thrown at — and in between — each step, from cops and gangsters to mines and even a booby-trapped exercise bike.

Co-directed by Andreas Lampropoulos and Kostas Skiftas, the film plays like Greece’s version of David R. Ellis’ 2004 breakneck thriller, Cellular. Totsikas even seems cast from the early-career Chris Evans hothead mold. No kidnapped Kim Basinger exists here, but Evgenia Dimitropoulou (The Two Faces of January) fills the distressed-damsel role with more active participation.

With chases by wheel and by foot, gunfights galore and, yes, explosions aplenty, Short Fuse is less a white-knuckle experience, more a pleasant discovery. It may not knock your socks off, but your toes won’t get cold. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Attack of the Doc! (2023)

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G4, I hardly knew ye.

I knew of you, but never watched you. And what I knew was limited to absorbing media mentions of Attack of the Show!, your channel’s daily flagship program — mostly that you covered video games and launched the career of OKC’s own Olivia Munn.

So when Show! contributor Chris Gore’s look back at the irreverent live TV series opens with a declaration of being made “by the fans for the fans,” I understand I’m not the documentary’s target.

Still, as hagiographies go, I enjoyed Attack of the Doc! all the same. (More still, Gore, where are those Film Threat retrospective projects you talked up years ago?)

Fast and frenzied, the Doc!-umentary functions well as a clip show — a greatest-hits collection for both the fervent and the uninitiated. In an hour and a half, it breathlessly clicks through such highlights as:
• a contest of drinking Cholula hot sauce,
• diving into a giant chocolate cream pie,
• turning someone’s anal canal into a live hot spot,
• James Cameron beating a mannequin with a folding chair,
• James Cameron talking “space dragon sex”
• and comedian Eric André spontaneously demonstrating Buffalo Bill’s dick tuck from The Silence of the Lambs.

Good times. And as the voiceover interviewees emphasize more than thrice, a lot of the things they did then would not go over well today. That’s an understatement, but then again, last year’s Jackass Forever didn’t exactly play it safe (in fact, I haven’t seen that much nut damage since the floor of a Texas Roadhouse after closing).

Whether Attack of the Show! “changed everything” as Attack of the Doc! purports, I’m not qualified to say. (I don’t game. I don’t buy Funko Pops. I don’t worship Stan Lee.) But I’m willing to let them have it on the basis for acknowledging how ridiculous and petty fandom can get. That said, if Show! is truly responsible for Jimmy Fallon’s Celebrity Party Game Ha-Ha Power Hour (formerly known as NBC’s The Tonight Show) as suggested, I reserve to right to take it back. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter

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We like what we like. No excuses necessary. So says Katharine Coldiron in her new book, Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter. One need not explain to others why your tastes lean toward X instead of Y, yet I’m glad she’s chosen to do so in the baker’s dozen of essays making up this Castle Bridge Media trade paperback. Pleasure lives on every page.

Whether discussing the merits of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, the sweat of John Travolta or the litigiousness of Neil Breen, Coldiron’s writing is supremely intelligent. But don’t equate the I word to being an academic slog; the read is a delight. I could see myself having a conversation with her about these movies at a dinner party. And look, if there’s one thing I dread more than social gatherings, it’s talking.

With her wit is as strong as deeming Showgirls screenwriter Joe Eszterhas as “King Shit of Erotic Thriller Mountain,” I’d be more than happy to just listen. As she writes in the book’s introduction, “Without a sense of humor, bad art is unstudiable.”

While she puts that humor to good practice throughout, she takes her subject seriously. A film that fails is worth watching as much as one that succeeds, she argues with conviction. How else can one truly know what makes a movie good without knowing what doesn’t? It’s “an opportunity beyond the obligatory sex and bloodshed, to see something unique and valuable at the purported bottom of the barrel of American cinema.” If I already weren’t aboard that train of thought, her reasoning would win me over.

Many of the movies covered, like Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters (to which the quote above refers), Coldiron actually adores. Fewer pics repel her, and it’s comforting to find another smart person left baffled by Mark Region’s über-enigmatic After Last Season.

I enjoyed Junk Film so much, I don’t care that two chapters aren’t about movies at all. (They’re on Sean Penn’s atrocious novels and Steven Bochco’s short-lived Cop Rock TV show. Also, they’re hysterical.) Hell, I even learned about an entire eight-film franchise I didn’t know existed: Monogram’s “Teen Agers” films of the late 1940s; her play-by-play rundown of these disposable comedies alone is nearly worth the cover price. Plus, as with Castle Bridge’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters, the contents sport expert design from In Churl Yo.

Finally, to address the book’s best-kept secret, Junk Film is actually two books in one, since the piece on Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space was published by UK-based Electric Dreamhouse in 2021 as part of its Midnight Movie Monographs series. Even if that weren’t the case, this remains a real score. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Man-Thing (2005)

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In a gator-infested swamp town (played by Australia), the main employer is a greedy oil corporation drilling on Native American-owned land. According to tribal legend, a swamp monster — a Man-Thing, if you will — comes to life for vengeance on the honkies. And hey, whaddaya know, the myth is true!

Played by 7-foot wrestler Conan Stevens, Man-Thing isn’t shown much until the film’s final quarter, when he’s revealed to look like an upside-down stalk of broccoli with glowing red eyes and ever-flowing tendrils. In the Marvel comic book on which this ecological terror tale is based, the character was more akin to DC’s Swamp Thing: a kindly creature with a human conscience. Here, he’s simply a peakaboo monster — window dressing for the sole purpose of bloodletting. More thought went into how to animate him than what to have him do. No wonder this one skipped theaters.

But Man-Thing’s biggest problem is it’s just a snore, mate. Director Brett Leonard (The Lawnmower Man) gives the flick a slick look, but the script by Hans Rodionoff (Deep Blue Sea 2) gives him so little to work with. This is ironic, considering Rodionoff turned in terrific work with Man-Thing: Whatever Knows Fear …, a then-recent comic miniseries that serves as this movie’s prequel (and its superior).

At one point, a wise, old Native America — you know he’s wise because he draws things with his finger in a pile of sugar — tells the sheriff (Matthew Le Nevez, 2005’s Feed), “Maybe he’s in the swamp. Maybe the swamp’s in him.” This totally reminded me of Wes Studi’s “until you learn to master your rage, your rage will become your master” aphorisms from Mystery Men. This fleeting realization gave me more pleasure than the giant-sized painful entirety of Man-Thing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.