All posts by Louis Fowler

Le Choc du Futur (2019)

WTFThe retro tribute Le Choc du Futur ends with an onscreen note of thanks to the unheralded women who were pioneers of electronic music in the 1970s, with a list of names that should be immediately written on a piece of paper and taken to your nearest record store to search.

Translated The Shock of the Future, the French film details a day in the life of Ana (Alejandro’s granddaughter Alma Jodorowsky) and her obsession with 70s-era equipment — especially a then-state-of-the-art beat machine — in the attempt to make a commercial jingle. She never gets around to it, instead making a killer disco tune instead.

As she does this, Choc details the constant barriers women faced in that burgeoning age of electronic music, most notably the way every guy, though he seems to take her seriously, wants a sexual favor in return. And while I’m sure not much has changed on that front, the way Ana perseveres is actually quite inspiring.

Directed by French composer Marc Collin and written with Elina Gakou Gomba, Le Choc du Futur portrays Ana as an anachronistic music geek with definite opinions that wouldn’t seem out of place at a Saturday-afternoon record store argument, especially when she’s decrying how, staring in the face of an electronic frontier, rock and roll is dead.

At the time, no matter how short-lived that time was, she might have been right, too. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Kiss My Grits (1982)

With its title based on the popular ’70s catchphrase, you’d think a flick called Kiss My Grits would be a cornpone comedy about a hash-slinging waitress who goes on the sexy run from a corrupt Texas County ranger, with plenty of car chases, car wrecks and car-fornication in a scant 80-minute runtime.

In reality, however, it’s a wholly unlikable drama — it claims comedy, but I don’t believe it — about redneck parolee Dolin (Bruce Davison … what?), a love-’em-and-leave-’em sheep wrangler about to be sent back to Huntsville Penitentiary for three years, presumably for the film’s opening watermelon heist; it’s all a bit unclear.

When he meets gangster moll Baby (Susan George with an over-the-top Texas drawl), they plan to rob her good ol’ boy mafia lover Karkas (Anthony Franciosa, taking a paycheck), whose repulsive, Elvis-coiffed chauffeur calls dogs “faggots.” They drug Karkas, steal his dough and Dolin’s brother, Flash (Bruno Kirby … what?), takes down the sheriff.

Dolin also has a precocious son named Boots (Andre Gower, The Monster Squad) who has a robot best friend named Iron Man, but trust me, he’s not Iron Man. It’s some toy from a bootleg Toys ’R Us that cost $82.50. The price is said numerous times.

Barely directed by Jack Starrett, to be fair, as I said before, this film is labeled as a comedy, but instead of leaving me laughing, I’m left reasonably depressed. I kind of expected more rural action from the director of Race with the Devil and Final Chapter: Walking Tall, but instead got this.

Oh, well, I guess it’s a good way to kill an hour and 41 minutes if you’ve got the time. I really don’t. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Porky’s II: The Next Day (1983)

In 1971, Indigenous people cheered as the half-Native superhero Billy Jack womped whitey across the face with his bare foot. But, sadly, it was over a decade until we were given another group of cinematic heroes, this time in the form of the horny teens of Porky’s II: The Next Day.

That’s right: Porky’s II: The Next Day.

Whereas the original is a veritable cum-storm of sex jokes, sex pranks and sex gags, writer and director Bob Clark decided that, the next day, these turned-on teens should get educated on the non-erect real world by introducing religious hypocrisy, political lies and racial discrimination to their lustful lives. And, like morning wood, it actually works.

After a long night of destruction and demolition to Porky’s swamp-water roadhouse, the lovable louts return to Angel Beach High School to — what else? — join the drama club’s production of various Shakespearian works. This garners the attention of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who considers the Bard a sinful sonuvabitch.

Soon enough, the Ku Klux Klan gets their pointy hats involved when they find out that, in a recreation of Romeo and Juliet’s famed balcony scene, the movement’s Montague will be played by John Henry (Joseph Runningfox), a full-blooded Seminole. One night, these white supremacists beat him bad, as well as fire up a cross to add insult to injury.

While they’re dealing with the religious zealots — oh, yeah, and a scheming politico who attempts to make it with a 16-year-old girl — the lascivious lot manage to capture the Klan and, with the help of the entire Seminole tribe, strip the xenophobes and shave their heads before parading them nude in front of the preacher’s anti-Shakespeare rally in front of the school.

What’s so remarkable about all this is how respectful the Seminole people are depicted onscreen in a lesser-known sequel to a notorious sex comedy, more realistically than possibly any social-justice film of the era. While the strip-and-shave scenario is, of course, thought up by the young masturbators, the way the Indigenous community stands behind Henry is remarkable, as well as the fact Clark cast real Natives for the numerous background roles.

But if you’re a racist and like dated wanking material, don’t worry; this sex-filled sequel is still packed with pervy pranks like a hot-to-trot graveyard girl, a snake directed straight toward Ms. Balbricker’s vagina and a randy sexpot who inexplicably vomits from her bouncy boobs in a fancy nightclub. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)

Over the past couple of decades, I think we can all agree two of the best cinematic examples of total mind-fucks have been The Matrix and Inception, right? At least that’s what Entertainment Weekly told me recently.

That being said, I’m pretty sure the Ethiopian flick Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway has them both beat and beaten badly with intense imagination and general weirdness that puts those multimillion tentpoles to increasing shame with each subsequent viewing.

In the far future of a retro world, Special Agent Gagano (deformed actor Daniel Tadesse) is assigned to virtually enter the Psychobook — this universe’s version of the Internet — and try to stop the destructive computer virus called the Soviet Union. After a double-cross or two, Gagano finds himself trapped in the dusty mainframe.

Traveling through the virtual world of New Ethiopia, the pizza-loving Gagano continually tries to wake up and find his way back to his wife, a blonde giantess, to keep his promise of helping her open a kickboxing academy. As an Irish-accented Stalin and corrupt hero Batfro try at every turn to stop him, once he realizes the power of the world he’s in, he becomes unstoppable, with the help of the titular Jesus.

I think.

Expat director Miguel Llanso, cherry-picking from the best (worst?) of 1970s pop culture, from Filipino kung-fu to dystopic Philip K. Dick novels, has crafted a beautifully tacky world for his cast to play in, with the enigmatic Tadesse doing most of the surreal heavy lifting. Jesus is Afro-futurism sci-fi at its best, a future awash in the flotsam of the past and the jetsam of an unpredictable psyche. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

The Untold Story (1993)

There was a time in Hong Kong cinema when Category III flicks about insanely graphic serial killers were all the rage, with The Untold Story one of the best remembered and most award-winning, which is completely surprising to me because — and let’s be honest — it’s kind of terrible.

Directed by Herman Yau with all the skill and dexterity of a low-budget TV-movie journeyman, Story stars a skin-crawling Anthony Wong as the untold storyteller, a glasses-wearing creeper with a boiling-over penchant for ultraviolent outbursts, one of which luckily takes him to exotic vacation destination Macau.

But, as you can guess, that’s really only half of the untold story.

Once there, he opens a restaurant that specializes in the best steamed pork buns in town, absolutely filled with the perfectly cooked meat of the previous night’s kill. City on Fire’s Danny Lee, who seems to always have a hooker on each arm, leads an investigative squad of buffoonish cops only interested in ogling Lee’s women while simultaneously eating free pork buns and harassing the only woman on their team, mostly for not having heaving breasts.

After years of destructive desensitization, the grue and gore aren’t really all that shocking, with the exception of the brutal scene where Wong uses a handful of chopsticks in a way they were hopefully never intended for. While the last half of the movie mostly features Wong constantly beaten while in police custody, in scenes that might give a few fascist viewers untold boners, I’m really not sure what was the point.

With a little urine drinking — according to Wong, it helps heal your busted-out, broken-down innards — the film’s abrupt ending, complete with a Dragnet-styled voiceover, only adds to the back-alley greasiness of the cleaver-heavy proceedings, a dirty job that won Wong the Best Actor trophy at the Hong Kong Film Awards. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.