All posts by Rod Lott

Sex

The Black Room (1982)

Leave a comment

Why spice things up in the bedroom when you can do it in The Black Room?

“HILLTOP MANSION HAS UNIQUE & EXOTIC ROOM” is all the nightly cockblocked husband Larry (Jimmy Stathis, X-Ray) needs to read in the classifieds to color his horny self intrigued. Upon a tour of the Hollywood Hills home, he slaps down $200 a month to secure the place as a secret fuck-pad, even though the ad failed to state “SHITLOAD OF CANDELABRAS.”

Naturally, it — ahem — comes with a catch: raging gonorrhea. The owners/siblings Jason and Bridget (Necromancy’s Stephen Knight and The Amityville Curse’s Cassandra Gava) sneak peeks and snap blackmail-worthy photos via two-way mirror. Then, unbeknownst to Larry, they murder his conquests and bury the bodies in the yard — yes, even the lady Larry balls while they’re covered in glow paint.

Jason puts it best, young man: “This isn’t the YMCA.”

As writer and co-director, Norman Thaddeus Vane (1983’s Frightmare) can’t help but bring a little horror to this tale of property and perversion. But accidental or not, he more helps establish the template for a phenomenon of the following decade: the straight-to-cable/video erotic thriller. Like the best of those, The Black Room has its cake and lays it, too, with Larry not only living his repressed fantasies, but also blessed with a fabulous — and fabulously beautiful — wife at home in Robin (Clara Perryman, who somehow never scored a movie before or after this).

Perryman’s performance is of a higher caliber than Vane could’ve hoped for. Because she gets more than one dimension to play — and does all of them well — he really lucked out with that hire. When Robin discovers Larry’s infidelity, her devotion to her husband collapses … until she decides the best way to save the marriage is to give the room a ride herself. She picks up a young stud in Christopher McDonald (in the same year he greased up Grease 2) and his mighty white-boy ’fro.

McDonald’s not the only cast member to graduate a long career; soon-to-be scream queen Linnea Quigley (Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) appears as Robin and Larry’s babysitter in a late-film turn that makes her one of the least reliable babysitters in cinema history. Laurie Strode, she ain’t. At least her poor decision skills pave the way for an ominous ending not tied up in a pretty bow. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

Death Game (2024)

Leave a comment

Year after year, warriors from the world over go for the gold — “a thousand taels,” to be exact — in a competition called the Five Poison Trials. These entail booby-trapped events with badass names like Malevolent Scorpion, Prideful Centipede and Suspicious Cicada.

Sounds cool, but Death Game, the Chinese period piece depicting these anti-Olympics, manages to make the most unusual tourney a real snore. That shouldn’t be the case when participants must navigate a maze while avoiding crossbows and snakes, or run up stairs while big ol’ boulders roll down and spears spit from the walls, yet this movie succeeds only in dropping the ball.

Had Death Game been made in the kung-fu craze of the 1970s, it likely would rock hard. That’s because the filmmakers would be forced to use ingenuity, not every CGI tool in the software package. Imagine watching blindfolded characters attempt to swordfight their way across a bridge over a treacherous canyon; here, they look like they’re doing so within a cartoon. Because the surroundings don’t appear the least bit realistic, the stakes never feel real, either.

Don’t even get me started on how the old rich guys running the thing are able to comment on who’s winning when they’re removed from the area of gameplay. It’s not like imperial China had monitors, much less, y’know, electricity.

This brief exchange puts it best:
“Your skills are impressive.”
“You are disgraceful.” 

—Rod Lott

Horror

Dead Teenagers (2024)

Leave a comment

If Roger Ebert didn’t coin the phrase “dead teenager movie,” he famously owns it by virtue of inclusion in his ’80s-filmgoer’s glossary. On this far side of that decade’s slasher craze, you don’t need the term defined; you know exactly what it entails. Quinn Armstrong’s Dead Teenagers knows you know, and sets out to subvert the subgenre with a good upending.

The final chapter of Armstrong’s Fresh Hell trilogy, Dead Teenagers plops five hormone-addled high school friends in a woods-adjacent cabin — the same location for the other two movies, in fact. Right away, cocky jock Ethan (Angel Ray, 2023’s Malum) breaks up with Mandy (newcomer Jordan Myers). After all, he’s college-bound and “pussy ’bout to be, like, pow-pow-pow!” Clearly, the actors are too old to play this young, but rather than being a deficit, the choice soon is revealed as intentional.

Mandy’s heartbreak and Ethan’s thoughtless timing get shoved aside by strange events; in the forest, she finds a piece of equipment from the shoot of Fresh Hell’s first chapter, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick, as well as script pages for Dead Teenagers, the very movie we’re watching. Then a hulking man whose face is hidden behind a welding mask shows up to slaughter; like every slasher villain, he comes with an exploitable name: Torch (Chris Hahn, 2021’s Wrong Turn remake).

Mandy and friends suddenly realize they’re in a movie; this inadvertent act of self-awareness amounts to improvisation, changing the course of what’s supposed to happen. Incidental characters who pop into the story continue to play their part as scripted, because they only exist on the page; thus, most notably, a cop (Beau Roberts, returning from Saint Patrick) exchanges blows with someone who’s not even present.

As you’ve likely already assumed, Dead Teenagers doesn’t just go meta, but doubles, even triples down on doing so. Its postmodern nature is not of the arch Scream variety, but a textbook deconstruction so thorough, its footnotes have footnotes.

Ambitious? That’s putting it lightly. Although Armstrong doesn’t quite wring it into being fully successful, he has enough tricks — such as Mandy happening upon a crew van or entering a time loop — to make the Fresh Hell entry the most fully realized. If you watch only one among the trio, this should be it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! (2024)

Leave a comment

In the department of “Careful what you wish for, because you just might get it … provided you’re willing to part with $40 million,” we have ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! The documentary follows South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — but mostly Parker — as they save the Denver, Colorado-area restaurant from extinction following its COVID-hurled bankruptcy.

Rescuing Casa Bonita is the easy part; restoring it to the beloved kitsch eatery of their childhood memories is another. After all, Casa Bonita — actually started in Oklahoma City, which the doc ignores — was renowned not for its Mexican food, but its amusement park touches, from cliff divers and a built-in haunted cave to a gorilla on the loose. Parker and Stone seek to add their own ideas as well, like an animatronic bird that poops bad fortunes. Which is all fine and good, except the building of “beans and chorine” turns out to be a rotted money pit of disrepair and disaster — some potentially lethal.

Captured by How’s Your News? director Arthur Bradford, a frequent collaborator of Parker and Stone, ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! is largely a contractor’s remodelmentary; aside from the F-bombs, the piece could be mistaken for any renovation hour on HGTV. That’s not necessarily a knock, unless you’re expecting a story as wild and crazy as, say, Class Action Park. Given the famous backers at play here, you might.

But you might also be surprised how sad the doc becomes in its final minutes, as reality catches up to Parker. The turn may qualify as too-little-too-late, but anyone standing in their middle-age era will recognize the folly of chasing your past … the ennui of life passing you by … the acknowledgment of your impending doom …

Anyway, who’s ready for sopapillas? —Rod Lott

Horror

Wolves Against the World (2024)

Leave a comment

So you’ve left your neo-Nazi, death-metal band behind after the suicide of its clown-faced frontman. Congrats! What do you do for an encore?

If you’re Louis (Michael Kunicki, Silent as the Grave), you emerge from rehab, speak to schools and attempt to make amends. You even visit surviving bandmate, Andy (writer/director Quinn Armstrong), at his remote farmhouse, where you see two flashlights wolves’ eyes ominously penetrate the ink of night. That may or may not have something with do with the cult Andy may or may not run on the property.

Second in the Fresh Hell trilogy — “3 realities, same hell,” goes the tagline — Wolves Against the World positions itself as a werewolf movie. This is true, albeit metaphorically rather than explicitly.

Like its predecessor, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick, Armstrong’s Wolves spends much of its running time as a single-location affair. That enables him to stretch his budget, the thinness of which is most obvious in blood the same bright red and semisolid consistency as Betty Crocker icing gel for cookies and cupcakes.

Wolves Against the World’s strength stands in the color and composition of its visuals. The story, however well-acted, is a scattershot mess, ambling around things rather than getting at things. After long, unbroken passages of dialogue, snatches of found footage tease a plot ready to kick in, only to fall back into another tedious exchange. Whether as a middle chapter or on its own, this film heavily disappoints. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.