All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Cold Sweat (1970)

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Charles Bronson is Joe Martin, a happily married Army vet whose black-market/ex-con past comes back to haunt him when a former associate breaks into his home. Joe shoots him dead, but he and wife Fabienne (Liv Ullman) have trouble getting rid of his corpse the same way Batman does oceanside bombs.

Before long, bigger trouble arrives in the form of Joe’s other criminal comrades, led by the gruff Capt. Ross (James Mason in a Gilligan hat) who’s come to get what they’re owed. Ross takes a shine to Joe’s boat, which Joe doesn’t like, so they kidnap Fabienne and their daughter instead. Joe doesn’t like that, either.

You know how this all will end, because the first two words in this review are “Charles Bronson.” But hell, it’s fun watching all that come down. Plus, you’ve just gotta hear Mason enunciate “Indochina.” It’s classic, and so is Bronson’s real-life wife (Jill Ireland) as a free-spirited hippie who burns reefer on the open highway, telling him she likes “to smoke what I like, to ball who I like.” To each his own, right?

Given this French-lensed flick can be found on many a public-domain collection, you’d expect it to suck, but really, it’s pretty action-packed. After all, the director is Terence Young, who’d just come off helming three of the first four James Bond films. Most notably, Cold Sweat climaxes in a life-or-death car race against time topping out at over 140 mph — watch a poor cyclist run off the road do a head-over-handlebars front flip — and takes the energy straight to the final moments. —Rod Lott

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Horror

I, Madman (1989)

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Something of a minor cult classic, I, Madman stars The Lawnmower Man‘s mattress mate Jenny Wright as Virginia, a frustrated actress and employee of a used bookstore who’s spending dark and stormy nights with her nose buried in an all-but-forgotten pulp thriller by one Malcolm Brand, featuring a disfigured maniac named Dr. Kessler. She’s my kind of girl, not only because she reads for pleasure, but because she does so wearing only a satin half-camisole and white panties.

Anyway, once she’s through with Much of Madness, More of Sin, she seeks out Brand’s only other novel, titled I, Madman. This being the days before the magic of the Internet, she can’t track it down. Oddly, it shows up at her apartment door one day, but who left it there? In that follow-up book, Dr. Kessler continues a string of murders, seeking body parts from his victims in order to put his own disfigured face back together. These scenes play out before our eyes as Virginia imagines herself as part of the story, with Kessler played by the film’s makeup effects artist, Randall William Cook, later a three-time Oscar winner for The Lord of the Rings.

Much to the consternation of Virginia’s cop boyfriend (Clayton Rohner), the murders begin to play out in the real world. No one believes Virginia when she tells them it’s the work of this fictional Dr. Kessler, especially since he’s described as wearing a cloak over half of his face, and the scalp of a redheaded victim over his bald head.

There’s more than a little Phantom of the Opera flavor to I, Madman, and its bleeding of the garish murders on the page into the real world is an interesting idea. John Carpenter tried it — and failed — with his H.P. Lovecraft tribute In the Mouth of Madness, but here, of all people, The Gate director Tibor Takács succeeds. He didn’t have a lot of money to do so, but he appears to have a grasp on the cheap thrills that paperback thrillers offer, and approaches the movie with the same kind of go-for-broke attitude. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

The Machinist (2004)

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Playing the title role of The Machinist is Christian Bale. Or is that Christian Rail? Yuk-yuk; the guy pulled a total reverse De Niro to shed something like 63 pounds to portray the sickly, skin-and-bones Trevor Reznik, the blue-collar worker who loses weight inexplicably and hasn’t slept for a year.

Stranger still, strange Post-it notes pop up around his apartment, like “Who are you?” and a six-letter game of Hangman. He’s a loner at work — even more so after he causes a bloody accident that costs a guy his arm — and the only real companionship he has is literally bought: regular rounds with a sympathetic call girl, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Which begs the question: Does Leigh have some sort of hooker-role punch card? There’s this, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Miami Blues — what does she get when she hits 10? An automatic Oscar? She’s good in this, as virtually always, but it’s Bale’s picture through and through. He’s totally believable as a paranoiac spiraling deeper into an abyss where reality and fantasy blur for him.

Director Brad Anderson seems to channel a good dose of Brian De Palma to drive this obsessive thriller, with Roque Baños serving as his Pino Donaggio/Bernard Herrmann for a score that has viewers on puppet strings. From an epileptic kid to a co-worker who looks Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, The Machinist keeps you guessing for its whole; even if its twist is a bit of a letdown, all that comes before it is a stylish high. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Book of Blood (2009)

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Well before the end-of-Bush-era housing market collapse, I had the damnedest time trying to sell a perfectly good home. We had spent thousands of dollars in updates; the neighborhood was safe; and the school district was solid. Took me 16 agonizing months.

But in Book of Blood, a young woman gets her face ripped clean off by an unseen force of malevolence in her parents’ home, and professor Mary (Sophie Ward, the little girl from Young Sherlock Holmes, all growed up!) is all like, “Huh, I think I’ll move in and see whassup. So long as it passed inspection!” She invites her hunky new student, Simon (Jonas Armstrong), to move in, too.

This being based on two Clive Barker stories, all is not well. Writing appears all over the walls of the upstairs bedroom, warning not to “mock us.” Plus, flesh carving (just how rough does it Barker like it, I wonder?) and forbidden sex, in which Ward’s nipples are so erect and pencil-eraser elongated, her partner risks ocular trauma.

Adapted and directed by John Harrison of the underrated Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, it has an ending that makes you think, “Who wrote this? Jeane Dixon?” It’s also not scary, unless you’re terrified of dragonflies, in which case you’re totally fucked. It’s no Candyman or even Midnight Meat Train, but it’s decent enough, if senseless. —Rod Lott

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Action

Torque (2004)

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Torque is essentially the same story as The Fast and the Furious, but told with motorcycles. And it’s 2 goofy 2 be any good.

The Ring’s Martin Henderson stars as Ford, a renegade cyclist who ditched his girlfriend (Monet Mazur, too clean-scrubbed to convincingly play white trash) for a romp in Thailand after stealing some motorcycles with crystal meth in the gas tanks from a sniveling, mullet-sporting bad guy named Henry James (not the author of The Turn of the Screw, but Matt Schulze from The Transporter). Now, Ford is back to set things straight with Henry and the feds.

Only it ain’t that easy because he’s also pursued by a rival biker gang known as The Reapers, led by a snarling Ice Cube, who thinks Ford has murdered his brother, because that’s just what Henry wants everyone to believe. And while that may resemble a plot, the script does nothing to forward it. Oh, the characters talk, all right — it’s just everything they say is meaningless, like the words of Charlie Brown’s school teacher, unless it’s a priceless gem of bad dialogue. This movie is jam-packed with exchanges like “Nice bike.” “Nice ass.”

Nice try. With its saturated, slightly washed-out colors, I liked the way Torque looks. I just didn’t like how it sounds, feels, tastes or smells. Every frame is jacked-up and pimped out to resemble a Mountain Dew commercial. Every character lacks peripheral vision and a hearing range beyond two feet so that people and motorcycles can sneak up on them all the time, yet the dudes have no trouble communicating with one another during their loud rides.

But action is the hook for a flick like Torque — unfortunately, it’s ludicrous. Cycles zip and zap everywhere, including through a moving train filled with passengers, but the climactic chase has Ford and Henry James facing off through downtown L.A. at 200 mph and having somehow obtained expert reflexes. This scene flies by at such speed that you cannot tell what the hell is happening … and maybe that’s for the best. —Rod Lott

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