All posts by Rod Lott

Action

Moonraker (1979)

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Moonraker is the James Bond movie I hated as a kid because it wasn’t Star Wars enough. Today, I like it for the same reason.

Coming right smack in the middle of Roger Moore’s roguish run of seven 007s, this adventure tasks Bond with locating an American space shuttle reportedly hijacked while in flight. In his way are giant-sized foe Jaws (Richard Kiel, back from The Spy Who Loved Me) and bearded kazillionaire Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale, The Day of the Jackal), who looks like a Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces toy guise come to life; in his bed is the delectable Lois Chiles (Creepshow 2) as CIA scientist Dr. Holly Phenomenalblowjob Goodhead.

The third and final Bond for director Lewis Gilbert, Moonraker has much to recommend, starting with the cold open’s airborne tussle while plummeting from a plane. From there, one can rely on the nauseating centrifuge sequence, the fight atop cable cars, a musical wink to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a boat chase, Bond’s struggle with a massive python and Q’s exploding balls. On the flipside, the film also boasts a ridiculous gondola pursuit that goes too far over the top by venturing out of water, a pointless Magnificent Seven parody and, ironically, nearly all the scenes in outer space.

Famously, For Your Eyes Only was announced as the next 007 outing in The Spy Who Loved Me’s closing credits, until Star Wars’ stellar success convinced producer Albert R. Broccoli to postpone for a cash-grabbing trip to space. While that worked for the box office, it doesn’t gel well in a movie that does just fine on terra firma; a sense of cohesion suffers. Turns out, in Her Majesty’s secret universe, lasers belong in one spot and one spot only: nearing Sean Connery’s crotch. —Rod Lott

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Skyway to Death (1974)

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Good help is hard to find. That’s true today as it was in, oh, for the sake of argument, let’s say ′74. Palo Alto tramway management finds out the hard way when a disgruntled former employee — fired for being drunk on the job — sabotages the mechanical system, leaving a cable car hovering at 8,700 feet as treacherous winds approach. Lesson learned: Terminated workers should be escorted off the property.

Inside the cable car, the guide (bubble gum popster Bobby Sherman) does his best to reassure his seven passengers. Among them are agoraphobe John Astin (Wacky Taxi), pickpocket Severn Dardin (Saturday the 14th), philanderer Ross Martin (TV’s The Wild Wild West) and old bat Ruth McDevitt (The Birds), whose only concern is her goddamn $8 flower hat.

From director Gordon Hessler (Pray for Death), Skyway to Death was the earlier of two stranded-cable-car movies made for TV in the disaster-film heyday. At 67 minutes, it’s also the shortest; oddly, that does not work in its favor, feeling like a crawl compared to 1979’s three-hour-plus Hanging by a Thread. How the latter’s producer, Irwin Allen, got away with not citing Skyway as source material is a mystery, because Thread copies this one beat for beat, from the jinxed chopper rescue attempt to the them’s-the-brakes conclusion. —Rod Lott

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Fall (2022)

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Having sent two young women to the sea floor in 47 Meters Down, the enterprising producers flip that sleeper hit’s script by sending two young women to the tippy-top of a TV tower for the vertically challenged, survive-or-die suspenser Fall.

In its Cliffhanger-reminiscent prologue, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, Shazam!) watches her husband (Mason Gooding, 2022’s Scream) plummet to his doom in a rock-climbing accident. One year later, Becky is basically a barfly unable to get to that fifth stage of grief, until her fearless friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner, 2018’s Halloween) proposes they climb a 2,000-foot-tall tower in the middle of nowhere.

As Becky and Hunter scale it rung by rung, director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) skillfully wrings every step for maximum viewer discomfort. (From my perspective, the metal contraption stands at such great heights, it’s a real testicle-retreater.) Despite the prologue’s ropey green-screen effects, this main section looks more real and, therefore, harrowing. And that’s even before the girls get stuck at the spire, thanks to the laziest bolt-tightening in construction history, causing the ladder to come loose and collapse. The acrophobia! The wind! The vultures!

Look, Fall is imperfect. At times, it’s cheesy, plus Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” is used as a plot point. But here’s the thing: It would be hypocritical to knock a movie too much when it prompts your palms to perspire for an hour. As escapist, so-glad-that-ain’t-me entertainment, it got on my nerves in the good way. It works. —Rod Lott

Horror

The Dead Girl in Apartment 03 (2022)

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In a Queens apartment, Laura (Laura Dooley, TV’s Mr. Mercedes) discovers her roommate, Elizabeth, is dead — like, a stinky two days dead — but signs of neither struggle nor trauma exist. Arriving to investigate are detectives Miller (Frank Wihbey, 2015’s The Sadist) and Richards (Adrienne King, 1980’s Friday the 13th). Perhaps, Miller suggests, Laura should to a hotel for the night? No go; she can’t afford a room (yet has no qualms about calling crime-scene cleaners minutes later), so she’ll just stay put.

From there, The Dead Girl in Apartment 03 alternates between two things: Laura in apartment 3 (not “03,” title be damned), and Richards and Miller discussing the case. Only one of these branches extends toward intrigue. Naturally, it’s the former, as Laura hears mysterious scratches and doors opening on their own, panics when the electricity go out and sees weird cultists pop up who look straight off The Long Night’s call sheet.

A true narrative doesn’t take hold until the final 20-minute stretch, when Laura learns about her roomie’s favorite hobby. Graft the film’s opening 10 minutes onto that (minus the two-minute Bond-villain speech) and, wow, writer/director Kurtis M. Spieler (New York Ninja) would really have something.

As is, a meandering middle hinders a decent ghost story. It’s also longer on atmosphere than action, which isn’t automatically a strike against The Dead Girl in Apartment 03; good when your eyes dart about the frame to look for an approaching wraith, but bad when the photography is so dark, you have to squint to spot. No worries — the score by Satanic Panic ’81 lets you know each and every time Elizabeth’s ghost appears. —Rod Lott

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Dawn (2022)

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As the near-robotic, deplorable driver-for-hire Dawn of Dawn, Jackie Moore (Verotika) is all crazy-eyed and lead-footed, picking up rides and taking their lives as her fare. (Among her early victims is Eric Roberts, in one of 37 movies he’s made as I wrote this sentence.) Then she uploads the homicidal results to her dark-web channel, as one does.

Nearly all of Nicholas Ryan’s directorial debut follows the backseat travails of a newly engaged couple: salesman (Atlantic Rim: Resurrection’s Jared Cohn, redefining “simpering”) and a first-grade teacher (Sarah French, Death Count). Dawn menaces them with mind games — not to mention schools them on wealthy white privilege — before threatening bodily harm. Neither spouse-to-be (Cohn especially) is interesting enough to follow for a feature. Nor is Dawn.

“The audience loves tension and drama,” says Dawn, yet her namesake film, despite a slick look, is inert. Unless you’re Locke, constant talking in a moving car makes for sluggish, über-dull cinema. Halfway through, respite looks to arrive when Dawn pulls into a gas station, where a demented fan (Nicholas Brendon, Psycho Beach Party) asks for the honor of being stabbed to death, but it’s a nonsensical scene. Dawn fulfills his wish, but not ours. Later, she’s pulled over by a sheriff (Michael Paré, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich). He’s the best part of the movie, so of course he’s swiftly dispatched.

For a raucous rideshare gone wrong that achieves everything Ryan aims for — thrills, dark humor, social commentary — see Spree. —Rod Lott

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