All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

Tenants (2024)

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Apartment life sounds like misery to me. After all, hell is other people. With “seven floors of terror,” Tenants takes this idea to heart. 

Its terrific credits sequence introduces us not only to the apartment building serving as the horror anthology’s setting, but a young woman (the appealing Mary O’Neil, 2023’s Malum) who emerges from a sac of goo in its parking garage. With no memory, she roams the halls, stairwells and other common areas in search of her sister; in doing so, encountering renters along the way, she threads the heptet of stories together. 

Most of them work, some even quite well. In the realm of body horror, a former child star (Christa Collins, Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman) attempts to get a gnarly rash under control while prepping for the audition of her life. On the darkly comedic side, the warring roommates played by Fayna Sanchez (OJ: The Musical) and Clarke Wolfe (Deathcember) yield as much of a ball as they do blood. 

My favorite, from Jonathan Louis Lewis (Black Devil Doll), crawls into creature-feature territory. It depicts a post-miscarriage woman (Tara Erickson, American Satan) finding quite the scary surprise while doing laundry.

In the middle of all these strange occurrences, Blake Reigle offers a welcome respite by unofficially adapting Eddie Murphy’s classic “Too bad we can’t stay!” bit from Delirious. Finally, O’Neil’s amnesiac wraparound earns a wrap-up in her efforts to evade a smoke monster and reach the top floor — more difficult to do when the building’s architect may have been M.C. Escher. 

Despite coming from four directors (including Sean Mesler and Psycho Storm Chaser’s Buz Wallick, both of whom wrote the screenplay with O’Neil, aka Mrs. Wallick), Tenants excels in visual and tonal consistency. This holds true even in the pair of segments that don’t properly pay off. It’s a lesson more low-budget horror anthologies — which number (too) many these days — would be wise to follow. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Lost in the Shuffle (2024)

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Now here’s a twist on the true crime genre: the solution to a 525-year-old murder mystery hidden in the art on a deck of cards. That’s what world-champ magician Shawn Farquhar believes, at least. In Lost in the Shuffle, documentarian Jon Ornoy follows Farquhar simultaneously investigating his theory and creating an elaborate card trick based on the crime. 

The cold case at hand (as it were) involves the suspicious death of France’s King Charles VIII, perhaps killed by his queen, Anne of Brittany. Farquhar’s quest takes him to Belgium, Britain and beyond, with the occasional and fully intentional tangent into magic theory. 

Ornoy and his globetrotting star almost magically transform deep-niche nerd shit into an engaging detective story, with wonderful animated segments subbing for reenactments. Although not as Da Vinci Code-y as initially set up, their symbol-conspiratorial Shuffle holds appeal to history geeks, homicide geeks, game geeks, travel geeks, sleight-of-hand geeks and even just process geeks.

To whichever group(s) among those you belong — and even if you find Farquhar’s ultimate assertion to be a mighty leap of assumption — you’ll probably fall into the movie’s net. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

The Black Room (1982)

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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)

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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)

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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.