All posts by Louis Fowler

Action

Beckman (2020)

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In the realm of Christploitation flicks, David A.R. White is, arguably, the cinematic king of kings in this straight-to-video subgenre. From racial comedies to post-apocalyptic road movies — and let’s not forget the immortal God’s Not Dead trilogy — White manages to take a popular film of the day, give it a Christian message and, believe it or not, make it incredibly entertaining.

And now, with John Wick being so well-liked among the secular tribes of America, in Beckman, he crafts quite possibly the world’s first Christian action flick two-fisting audiences with well-choreographed martial arts, downright bloody head shots and a whole lot of the Word of God.

A hitman is looking for a way out of his murderous life after an explosive opening. The contract killer is the titular Beckman (White), who wanders into a church run by former Vietnam doc Phillip (Jeff Fahey). Given grace by the embittered preacher, Beckman apparently earns a pastoral degree in a year’s time and becomes the rightful heir to the house of worship when Phillip dies.

As Beckman faces a crisis of conscience and a failing of faith, in comes Phillip’s teenage niece, Tabitha (Brighton Sharbino), looking for a port in the storm herself. Almost immediately, he starts calling her his “daughter” and asks nothing about her shady past until a gang of thugs bust into the church and kidnaps her, taking her to be sacrificed by cult leader William Baldwin.

Rightfully so, Beckman goes on a rage-fueled rampage across L.A. to find her, with some of the city’s hottest killers going on a tear to find him.

Beckman is, praise be, loaded with biblical messages and other righteous truths, but a devilish amount of it is gunplay and blood spray that, I’m presuming, might have some sort of spiritual credence to it as well. While your grandmother may not approve of it, it’s an inventive way to spread the message, with White never turning Beckman in a religious parody to be nailed to any cross.

Baldwin, on the other hand, is written as such a devious tool of Satan — mostly in a NXIVM mode, mind you — that, it might be somewhat unholy to say, you just can’t wait to see him get his in the end and, boy, does he. No cheek is left unturned and unkicked-in here, with every moment a ballistic blessing to watch. Amen. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Bloodshot (2020)

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Dumb meatheads need superheroes too, I guess, and that’s pretty much why companies like Image Comics, Boom! Studios and, in the case of Bloodshot, Valiant Comics were created. With practically every title of theirs a four-color tribal tattoo on acid-free paper, that same illustrated idiocy has moved to the movie screen with the spectacularly stupid movie of the same name.

Human circumcised penis Vin Diesel is Ray Garrison, a former special-ops soldier who not only watches his wife murdered Anton Chigurh-style, but is shot in the head for his troubles. He wakes up to find that all of his blood has been replaced by nanobots and he is virtually indestructible. As his memory comes back to him, he escapes to track the killer down.

Repeat ad infinitum.

It turns out that the guy behind Rising Spirit Technologies, the company that keeps bringing Ray back, is a petty crybaby who is using Ray to settle his own personal scores. Of course, eventually Ray finds out about this and, in his gravelly sluggish way, doles out super-powered retribution that typically involves his face getting blasted off and slowly reassembled.

He’s called Bloodshot, we learn toward the end, because his eyes go bloodshot when he uses his regeneration powers, zoomed in on closely while fighting down the side of a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur.

From this brief description, the film might sound plenty entertaining; in reality, it’s mind-numbingly slow and, worse, brain-fryingly dumb. It reminds me of those terrible ’90s-era adaptations of indie comics like Spawn, minus the badly rendered computer demons, something that might have actually helped save this no-necked junk. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

The Dead Ones (2019)

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The tagline for the existential teen horror flick The Dead Ones is “High School Is Hell,” which almost immediately should give you an idea where we’re going with this whole thing: to hell.

A quartet of thoroughly irritating teens with slight mental issues are taken in the middle of the night to clean up their high school, I’m guessing as punishment. As they barely scrub the dirt and debris that seems to have settled in, they gripe, complain and cut themselves. Meanwhile, a second group of teens heavily into Slipknot cosplay attack the sleeping school at the same time.

But as the time periods constantly shift — and more monsters and other horrific visions start to appear — it becomes heavily evident where the teens are and why. Apparently this is the devil’s detention hall. (Detention hell?)

After living through 20 or so years of some of the more nightmarish of school shootings, it’s a bit shocking to see director Jeremy Kasten — he of The Wizard of Gore remake fame — present the teens’ backstories of abuse and whatnot as a means to garner these kids a little sympathy, but it’s an attempt that falls painfully flat once they strap on masks and a few guns.

I do have to wonder though how a group of teens were able to afford masks with state-of-the-art voice changers and boss leather jackets and pants, not to mention the high-powered assault rifles. Scratch that last one — this is America, after all. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Claudine (1974)

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The blaxploitation boom of the 1970s was called many things by many people, but “sweet,” “romantic” and “heartwarming” were not the descriptors typically used. That’s one of the reasons that the socially conscious romantic comedy Claudine is held in such high regard by film enthusiasts.

I vaguely remember catching it at 3 in the morning as a preteen, forever intrigued by the titular single mother (Diahann Carroll) who starts dating the local garbageman (James Earl Jones) and encounters plenty of problems along the way, such as rats in the apartment, asshole social workers and, of course, a small-scale riot that ends with the entire family being carted away while happily waving from the back of the paddy wagon.

Still, I have to admit, my young brain probably didn’t understand the movie and I’m sure I was misremembering most of it.

Turns out I wasn’t. The groundbreaking Claudine, directed by former blacklisted filmmaker John Berry, is an anomaly in the blaxploitation cycle, with Carroll portraying a realistic mother of six kids, forever tired and not willing to put up with too much bullshit, from her teen daughter’s pregnancy, which she attempts to beat out of her, to her older son’s vasectomy, railing against him for destroying his “manhood.”

With a soundtrack by both Curtis Mayfield and Gladys Knight & the Pips, Claudine was a minor hit when originally released, yet somehow has been relegated to virtual obscurity in the ensuing years. A gritty but loving entry in the cinematic Black boom of the ’70s, it deserves to be rediscovered or, you know, just plain discovered. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Primitives (1980)

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At a time when the notorious Italian cannibal flicks were making un sacco di soldi the world over, Asian countries decided they, too, wanted some of that bloody lucre and started to churn out many man-eating titles, with one of the most popular — Primitives — hailing from Indonesia.

It’s kind of odd, however, as there is only somewhat implied cannibalism, but, to be fair, there are plenty of onscreen animal cruelties, including komodo killings, alligator atrocities and, most traumatic of all, monkey manglings. If you can look past that or, even worse, are a sociopath who actually enjoys that, Primitives is an engaging grotesquerie from the future filmmakers of Satan’s Slave.

A trio of stereotyped college students — the cool guy, the nerdy guy and the reserved love interest — are deep in the jungle trying to discover a new tribe of Indigenous peoples to write their term paper about. If I were the professor, I probably would have given them a B+ just for getting on the plane or, here, the flimsy wooden raft quickly destroyed in the basest of rapids.

Separated and captured by a wholly offensive tribe of “ooga-booga” natives, the cool guy (Barry Prima) and the love interest are chained to a rock and almost stripped down to their skivvies by people who apparently don’t understand the concept of clothing. Eventually, though, they escape and fall into troublesome quicksand.

Although this so-called “video nasty” gained a notorious reputation as a terrible film — mainly for the acting, writing or directing — it’s still mind-munchingly entertaining. Filled with plenty of stock footage — not to mention what I’m sure has to be a copyright-violating use of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” over the opening credits — Primitives is a tummy-troubling entry in the celluloid cannibal phase. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.