All posts by Rod Lott

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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.

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.

Mystery

To Catch a Killer (2023)

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Auld acquaintance should be forgotten, not sniped. Someone in Baltimore failed to get the message, killing 29 celebrants on New Year’s Eve from a downtown perch several stories up. As soon as the authorities determine where, the place explodes, leaving no DNA for them to trace.

What’s an FBI chief investigator to do? If you’re Agent Lammarck (Ben Mendelsohn, Ready Player One), you recruit beat cop Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley, the Divergent trilogy), because you sense the destructive force within her. Whereas the killer turns the harmful urge against others, she turns it against herself (i.e., she’s a cutter); therefore, she’s exactly who he needs.

To Catch a Killer, Wednesdays this fall on NBC.

Kidding about the TV part, although — generic James Patterson-esque title and everything — To Catch a Killer is the definition of crime procedural as comfort-food viewing. A couple of factors elevate it above network-tube fare. For one, Mendelsohn. Always fantastic, he’s a pleasure not only to watch, but to hear; his voice betters the material, as does the hands-and-fingers acting on display here — magnetic once you notice.

I run hot and cold on Woodley, but she’s fine as what is essentially a more paternally influenced take on Jodie Foster’s iconic role in The Silence of the Lambs. Woodley’s pairing with Mendlesohn is like Clarice Starling had spent hours with Agent Jack Crawford instead of Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

The movie’s other pinch of je ne sais quoi is Damián Szifron, the Argentinian director of 2014’s sharp, acidic anthology, Wild Tales, rightly Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. His camera is fluid and adept at zeroing in on unusual angles; showdown sequences in a mall and a drugstore ring with discomforting tension and demonstrate an impeccable control of timing. That’s why it’s so disheartening to watch Szifron give the eventually discovered killer the opportunity to deliver the de rigueur speech on Why He Is Who He Is.

Oddly, To Catch a Killer represents Szifron’s first gig since Wild Tales — an alarming, near-decade gap! How he went from something so unhinged to something that could end with Dick Wolf’s production company logo (not to mention a three-hour programming block along its spin-off series, To Catch a Killer: Seattle and To Catch a Killer: Behavioral Science Unit) is an even greater mystery than this one poses. Unlike Killer’s, it remains unsolved. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.