All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

The Wicker Tree (2011)

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In his lifetime, Robin Hardy directed a genuine cult classic in 1973’s The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, he made only two other films. Worse, the last of them was The Wicker Tree.

While the quasi-sequel is based on Hardy’s 2006 novel, Cowboys for Christ, who’s he kidding? If you’ve seen the original Wicker or its bug-nuts Nicolas Cage remake, you know exactly where this new one leads, even without the benefit of Edward Woodward as your guide.

In The Wicker Tree, that role falls to young Christian country starlet Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol, apparently a for-the-better one-and-doner). With her purity-ring cowboy fiancé (Henry Garrett, Red Tails), Beth accepts a two-year missionary position in Scotland. She’s even tailored her message to her audience: “Jeezus was braver ’n Rob Roy!”

Not everyone in the pagan village is happy to host the Americans, but town employer/nuclear magnate Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish, Aquaman) and his wife (Jacqueline Leonard) put on game faces and trade insults behind her back: “I bet she smells like a dairy.”

If only there were … oh, some kind of, I dunno … “May Day festival” planned for which they could trick the hicks into, um, “participating.”

Hopes that Hardy may approach the material with a wicked sense of humor rise early with a glimpse of Beth’s Britney Spears-esque pop-tart past (via a video for “Trailer Trash Love”), but when you later see well-to-do Scots line-dancing at a posh party, those hopes have long been torpedoed. So go any chances of the filmmaker beating the odds by capturing lightning in a bottle twice. While technically competent, the movie doesn’t go anywhere approaching the unexpected; this Tree takes root, but never sprouts.

Hardy’s on the record for calling his final film “very horrifying.” That’s very generous … and perhaps very delusional. The Wicker Tree offers some gorgeous scenery, a super-brief Christopher Lee cameo, a sex scene with a toy horse’s head and nothing else of note. Folk horror is rarely so wearisome. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Ghastlies (2016)

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A good quarter-century after the Gremlins knockoffs had run their course, prolific Canadian filmmaker Brett Kelly (Konga TNT) unleashed Ghastlies. Regardless of time period, it’s consistently unamusing and unimaginative.

A UFO drops the Ghastlies (aka thrift-store puppets) in the woods, near a cabin rented for the weekend by some sorority girls (aka four women in their late 20s to mid-30s). Before too terribly long, Ghastlies gotta Ghastly (aka positioned stationary or moved by someone out of frame).

They number a scant three, but at least each is unique: a five-eyed purple dragon, a green gator with a Mohawk and an orange rectangle with downturned horn. (By comparison, they make the hobgoblins of Rick Sloane’s wretched Hobgoblins look like frickin’ Jim Henson.) They murder the bitchiest woman with a plastic spoon. Also killed are a pizza delivery guy, two bicycle cops and other things (aka your valuable time). —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Bad Girls (2021)

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If Christopher Bickel’s Bad Girls fails to hook you in its first five minutes, here’s a list of things you must despise seeing in movies: attractive women in their underwear, attractive women out of their underwear, violent strip club robberies, car chases, car crashes, coke trips, acid trips, violent convenience store robberies, violent bar fights and violent deer collisions.

After murdering their instantly former employer and taking “a shitload of money and drugs,” three exotic dancers make a run for the Mexico border: the blonde Carolyn (Shelby Lois Guinn), the Black Mitzi Anne (Sanethia Dresch) and brunette leader Val (Morgan Shaley Renew), she of the double-height eyebrows. As one citizen tells the TV news, “They’re just like Bonnie and Clyde, but they’re all Bonnie and there’s three of ’em!”

With Bah-stun accents, bad puns and broken beer bottles galore, the ladies go from one brutal encounter to another. No male is spared, at least of humiliation, from a blue-balled frat boy to a white supremacist running a 24-hour donut and ammo shop. Stops are made for shows by bands like Christmas Tits and Poltergasm, if only to kidnap their members. The movie is one long chase, with two federal agents (Dove Dupree and Mike Amason) on their tails. “We’re gonna find ’em, fuck ’em, fry ’em and forget ’em!” vows the nasal spray-addicted agent to his partner. “Figuratively!”

Obviously influenced by Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Bickel (The Theta Girl) moves his sophomore film at a jet-propulsion pace, rarely slowing to take a breath. Although stocked with music I wouldn’t listen to, the soundtrack matches the girls’ spring-loaded antics by going into Dexedrine-aggro mode, as does Bickle’s Natural Born Killers-styled editing of excess and overlays. The overall energy he conjures help mitigate deficiencies in a repetitive story and the purposely campy performances. It’s a ride, for sure, and one that dares to kill its babies. Not figuratively! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Legion of Fire: Killer Ants! (1998)

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Who better to help resurrect the nature-run-amok film in the late 1990s than Fox, the television network behind all those glorious When Animals Attack specials? In Legion of Fire: Killer Ants!, the exclamatory bastards in question are feisty and man-eating. When an underground volcano starts rumbling and tumbling, the six-legged South American menaces are forced to the surface. Popping up in the sleepy Alaskan town of Burly Pines, they’re like, “Sweet, this’ll do. Let’s prey.”

Following the telefilm’s docu-shock foreword, a young couple in the forest for an impromptu photoshoot find a heap of trouble when the woman hops atop a giant anthill to vogue. She gets dragged through the hole to die, as does her shutterbug boyfriend while trying to save her.

It becomes painfully obvious to the locals that sinister insect forces are at work, stripping their moose population to the bone in a matter of minutes. Bug expert Dr. Jim Conrad (Eric Lutes, Bram Stoker’s The Mummy) rushes to the rescue. With the aid of a cute, frizzy-haired schoolteacher (Julia Campbell, Opportunity Knocks) and a widowed police chief (Mitch Pileggi, Shocker), Conrad wages war against the largely computer-animated rascals, which are seen at one point walking across a yard while carrying the body parts of their latest victim.

Also known as Marabunta, Legion of Fire sports dirt-cheap effects and leads thrown into one preposterous, predictable situation after another. However, any movie — especially one made for TV — that dares to snuff out so many living things (kids included) in such laughable methods deserves a couple hours of your time. And so does the weeping deputy who shoots at the ants with his gun. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Zero Budget Heroes: The Legend of Chris Seaver & Low Budget Pictures (2022)

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To enjoy the documentary about Rochester-based moviemaker Chris Seaver, you don’t have to be a fan, assuming you’ve even heard of the guy. You need not have seen Anal Paprika or Scrotal Vengeance or even Anal Paprika 2.

Just know he’s made upward of 75 flicks now, and, as one of his regular cast members notes, “most of them have come out.” My sole exposure to his work was a tasteless segment he contributed to the Hi-8 shot-on-video horror anthology. His backyard epics may be hard to like for the average viewer, but Zero Budget Heroes: The Legend of Chris Seaver & Low Budget Pictures is easy to love.

For this introspective retrospective, first-time director Zach Olivares captures the shooting days (all three of ’em!) of the ska-obsessed, rarely not ball-capped Seaver’s then-latest crass comedic opus, A Stoinkmare on Halloween Street. His titles — and penchant for terminology like “clam flaps” — suggest a juvenile approach to cinema. Proud yet humble, Seaver doubles down on this risk-free theory, telling Olivares’ camera, “I am a very immature human being.”

And he doesn’t apologize for it. (Well, except for playing the role of Bonejack in blackface. But hey, when an actor doesn’t show, it’s the director’s job to make lemonade.)

A modern-day Andy Hardy, Seaver enjoys a loyal band of repertory players eager to debase and deride themselves in the likes of Filthy McNasty, Moist Fury and Taintlight — barely scripted vehicles for “boobs and cum and poop jokes” — for no monetary reward.

And you know what? Now I kinda get it.

The more Seaver and company revisit his relative hits, affectionate misses and never-weres, the more you see the appeal — foremost for them; the audience, second. That’s by design, as no one is more surprised than Seaver at the level of success he’s enjoyed in the DIY realm. He and his friends make the movies to amuse themselves; that anyone devotes attention or time after that is pure bonus. One would think the enemy of this real-life story would be monetary deficiencies, but the Low Budget Pictures gang has turned that into an asset. (Also, the true enemy is Troma.)

I didn’t expect this doc to move me. But, like Seaver responding to the magnetic pull of making movies, I couldn’t help it. By the end, Olivares has done an excellent job of getting to the heart of the man’s work and why he and his comrades even bother. You’ll be glad they do, even if Sexquatch and Terror at Blood Fart Lake never, ever land in your queue. —Rod Lott