All posts by Rod Lott

Thriller

Emergency Declaration (2021)

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A Sky Korea jet airliner is bound for Hawaii — and doom — in Emergency Declaration, because one of its passengers is a terrorist. Cold, calculated and no doubt crazed, Yim Si-wan’s disgraced biochemist slices open his armpit and sews a container of a deadly virus into it just prior to boarding. Once in flight, he fishes it out and lets ‘er loose, with the intent to kill everyone aboard.

On the ground, a police sergeant (Parasite papa Kang-ho Song) is alerted to a video threat the terrorist uploaded the previous day, and races against time to learn the man’s identity. It’s extra-important considering the sergeant’s wife is on that plane.

Needless to say, Jae-rim Han’s first film since 2017’s award-winning The King is not recommended for anyone with immediate travel plans consisting of a hop over an ocean. To everyone else, however, Emergency Declaration arrives as a slick, mostly satisfactory update on the 1970s airborne disaster film, swapping out the mad bomber for a more modern antisocial scientist.

I only wish it ended around the 1:40 mark, where it felt natural. Instead, the South Korean film continues for almost another hour, as Han throws more problems at the plane’s already fucked-up flight plan. Among this final (over)stretch is a scenario that practically calls for a sweaty, white-knuckled Robert Hays to take the captain’s chair. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

I, the Jury (1953)

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Suitably, I, the Jury begins with a bang — literally, as the sawed-off muzzle of a .45 pokes through an apartment door and fatally plugs a one-armed man. And it should, this being the first live-action depiction of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer character. At the time, Spillane had sold millions upon millions of paperbacks featuring the private dick, so a movie was a big deal — so big, it was made in 3-D!

Biff Elliot (The Day of the Wolves) plays the investigating Hammer like an exposed nerve with a hair-trigger temper. If he’s not shoving a nosy journo into the contents of a china cabinet, he’s throwing a drink in the face of some hood. Equally agile is his mouth, eveready with a salty cutdown of doubt. For example, when a person of interest claims he can prove he was in bed at the time of the crime, Hammer snaps, “How? Take a notary public with ya?”

With a Christmas setting making misery, writer/director Harry Essex (Octaman) keeps the frames moving at a pace approximate to the seemingly effortless swiftness of Spillane’s pages. We follow Hammer as he leaps from informant to suspect and back again, including an alcoholic fighter, a veterinarian, a dance instructor, a Spanish bartender and, most notably, a hotsy-totsy shrink (Peggie Castle, 1952’s Invasion, U.S.A.) who serves as our femme fatale. Everyone is so colorful, the whodunit aspect practically becomes secondary.

Although limited as an actor, Elliot makes for a fine-enough tough guy, excelling in his narration of Jury, which is an admirable way to transition the character from novel to screen. I’d say it’s a shame neither he nor Essex got the opportunity to repeat their jobs as a franchise, but then we wouldn’t have Robert Aldrich’s definitive Kiss Me Deadly two years later. That’s a crime classic; I, the Jury is a pretty solid lead-in. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Mister Creep (2022)

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While making a documentary for a community college project, four students suddenly switch subjects when they learn about a serial killer known as Mister Creep. Possibly an urban legend, he’s said to have slain 200 people in 20 years. He broadcasts unnerving videos starring his victims and a creepy puppet. And he has a clown mask permanently fused to his face. I mean, coulrophobic chillers are so in right now; what enterprising filmmaker wouldn’t pivot?

Living up to its title within minutes, Mister Creepy is twisted enough to make you wonder if a true madman isn’t plucking the strings. It’s only Texas-based Isaac Rodriguez, whose A Town Full of Ghosts earlier this year also impressed with enough menace to make up for deficiencies elsewhere.

Like that movie, Mister Creep falls under found footage, but segmented to move quickly through its 67 minutes. A nighttime sequence inside an “abandoned” police station plays particularly spooky, containing one of the movie’s two alarmingly good shocks; the other, you likely won’t see coming. —Rod Lott

Get it on VOD Dec. 5.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Something in the Dirt (2022)

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I get jealous when people talk about their “COVID project,” even if all they did was stream every episode of Columbo. I didn’t get to pursue a COVID project; I had to work, harder than normal, clocking around 97 hours the week that almost killed me.

All this to say, with Something in the Dirt, the acclaimed filmmaking duo of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (Synchronic) debut their COVID project, one necessitating them to step in front of the camera as well to star. It puts all other COVID projects to shame, so hopefully you didn’t get to do one, either.

Scrappy, down-on-his-luck bartender Levi (Benson) moves into a depressing dump of an apartment in Laurel Canyon. Fellow struggling tenant John (Moorhead), a wedding photographer mending a broken heart, notes Levi’s unit has been mysteriously vacant for a decade.

While moving some of John’s old furniture into Levi’s pad as loaners, the two witness a paranormal event: the levitation of an ungodly ugly ashtray. With both men in need of purpose, this is all they need to fling themselves into a full-fledged investigation — and documentation on video — of Levi’s closet as a potential gateway to an alien dimension.

Like the conspiracy chase of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi as an indie buddy comedy, Dirt follows the neighbors’ descent into a rabbit hole, the design of which may be partly their own. Without spoiling the movie’s pretzel-knotted twists, Moorhead and Benson inject a vial of meta into the mix — one that already includes autumnal equinox claptrap, X-Files paranoia, Big Brother surveillance and cosmic hoo-ha. No theory is so half-baked, it can’t be microwaved later.

Original and unpredictable, Something in the Dirt somehow is able to feel dangerous while also being dryly funny. It also feels improvised, even though you know Moorhead and Benson plan their pictures to a T, pandemic or no pandemic. I may not be 100% bought in to their conclusion, but it’s tough to complain when your mind is blown along the way. —Rod Lott

Get it Nov. 22 on VOD.

Documentary

Journey into the Beyond (1975)

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Mondo movies are known — and in some circles, beloved — for their aggressive exaggeration of (and/or full disregard for) the truth. Journey into the Beyond, however, is dead-on in one instance: when narrator John Carradine promises in the preface that the following “journey will test your sanity.” Amen.

Its negligible thesis is this: Science and technology, phooey; the paranormal, groovy. Before the film jets around the globe to (attempt to) prove it, Carradine warns the squeamish to listen for an alarm before the gory parts, if they wish to hide their eyes. The contrasting sound is pleasant and near-identical to the Tinkerbell notes on the Walt Disney “Read-Along” records of my childhood, prompting tots when it was time to turn the page.

Beyond features footage of gum surgery (under hypnosis instead of anesthetia), an exorcism (kinda), a tribal fertility ritual (with Nat Geo boobs a-floppin’), psychic surgery (memorably debunked in Arthur Penn’s Penn & Teller Get Killed), telekinesis (magnets, how do they work?) and spiritual healers (Ernest Angley-type bullshit). It says a lot about our changing world that the grossest segment — pus emerging from a cyst like an endless piece of slightly liquified linguini — is now the rationale for the long-running cable show Dr. Pimple Popper.  

Six years later, German director Rolf Olsen would make a bigger splash in mondo’s mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world with Shocking Asia. I haven’t seen it, but Journey into the Beyond is such a trying bore, I don’t feel the need to take another trip with Olsen at the helm. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.