All posts by Louis Fowler

Sex

Private Lessons (1981)

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You never realize just how sleazy most Rod Stewart tunes are until they’re used as the backdrop for the seduction of a teenage boy; I know this not from personal experience, mind you, but from the fact that the filmic wet dream Private Lessons uses at least three different Rod songs for this erotic purpose.

The summer’s here and all Albuquerque rich-kid Philly (Eric Brown) and his requisite chubby bud want is to see a girl naked. That perverted wish comes true — and a whole lot more than that — when sexy maid Ms. Mallow (Sylvia Kristel) moves into his mansion, sexually teasing and sensually taunting him until, in the middle of surprisingly graphic intercourse, she dies of apparent heart failure.

By the way: In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Philly is only about 15 years old when all this is going on.

Panicked, he enlists his chauffeur, Dr. Johnny Fever Lester (Howard Hesseman), to help him get rid of that fine body; little does Philly know, however, that it is all part of an extortion plan that, sadly, takes the movie’s view off of the adolescent sexual experimentation and, instead, on a lame crime subplot that wraps up neatly with a minorly madcap chase scene.

Private Lessons has, embarrassingly, been a longtime favorite film of mine since secretly viewing cable airings of it, repeatedly, as a kid in the early ’80s. Star Eric Brown was pretty much the luckiest kid on TV at the time — besides this film, he also got it on with statuesque Sybil Danning in They’re Playing with Fire, as well as being cast as Buzz on the first season of Mama’s Family. What a resume!

Not to be outdone, French delight Kristel — high on both her marriage to Ian McShane and mounds of cocaine, possibly at the same time — is a tempestuous delight, even if for half the nude scenes she’s using a body double, for reasons I don’t understand and, honestly, don’t care to explore unless “Tonight’s the Night” is blaring in the background. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

Charlie Says (2018)

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WTFI think that, if I was born a couple of decades earlier, I would have been a pretty good hippie cult leader, you know, minus all the murder; just me and a bunch of groovy runaways, kicking back on a deserted movie set and eating out of dumpsters while trying to reach universal oneness … sounds like far-out time to me.

That’s probably why I never fully understood Charles Manson or the notorious 1969 murders he was behind; sure, you can go with the de facto notion that he’s a fucking lunatic, but he probably would have had it so much better, possibly for the rest of his life, if he hadn’t ordered his followers to go out and kill due to a record producer not wanting to record his mostly lousy tunes.

It’s a line of thought that the mediocre flick Charlie Says could get behind, I’m sure. Starring Merritt Wever as Karlene Faith, a fully invested prison teacher who comes to know Manson’s so-called girls — Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins — and their undying devotion to Charlie, who took the classic pimp-game strategy and added a skewed version of Christianity to it to give his lost followers something to believe in.

Director Mary Harron (American Psycho) does a good job of keeping the usual histrionics of the girls to a bare minimum — something many other Manson filmmakers seem to go absolutely crazy themselves with. The real sore spot of the movie is with ol’ Charlie himself, played by the flaccid Matt Smith, complete with a laughable beard and wig, but maybe that was the point.

Sadly, while the ’60s are long over and so is my chance to be a cult leader, Charlie Says is thankfully the wishful-thinking flick that tells me I would probably screw it all up just as bad — if not worse, yikes — as Manson did. Believe me: Even the most minor of power corrupts, especially in me, absolutely. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Western

Django the Bastard (1969)

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In all the dusty annals of the mythical Western genre, if there was ever a true bastard to tame the Wild West, it was apparently Django or, even better, Django the Bastard, this illicit Italian rip-off of his blood-spattering name.

People are strange when you’re the Stranger, a gunslinger dressed in black (the decided un-Franco Nero Anthony Steffen) who walks into town one day carrying a convenient wooden cross; he plants it dead in the middle of the town square and quickly doles out his six-shooter justice, the only way a black-hearted demon from hell — as we’re told he might be — can.

Meanwhile, the just-as-terrible townsfolk are placing wagers on a game where two poor boys toss a stick of dynamite back and forth, betting dollars on who is going to get a hand blown off first. Welcome to Desert City, population … well, I guess it doesn’t matter, because Django’s got a handmade wooden cross for all of them, which he hands out one by one.

Turns out that this low-rent incarnation of Django isn’t an avenging angel, but rather a former soldier who is seeking revenge on the perpetrators of a brutal Confederate massacre, one that apparently he can’t seem to get over; he crafted this death-bringer persona as way to not only strike fear in the hearts of fellow evildoers, but also to help him through the apparent post-traumatic stress that he is surely going through.

Whatever works, I suppose.

Filmed at a tumultuous time in spaghetti cinema when the men looked like glam-rock refugees and the women like young Melania Trumps, Django the Bastard was originally released under the more family-friendly title of The Strangers Gundown — and it’s gundowns a-plenty that Django delivers in this mostly watchable tale of brutal revenge and copyright infringement. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Weird Science (1985)

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Of all the movies from the 1980s loosely based on an Oingo Boingo tune, Weird Science still remains the breast — uh, I mean best – of the lot.

Coming off his back-to-back directorial triumphs of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, even John Hughes was seemingly tired of all the laid-thick teen pathos; for his next film, he opted for a raunchy teen sex comedy where, instead of having what I feel would have been a full weekend of absolutely incredible lovemaking with Kelly LeBrock, the youngsters learn about themselves and each other. Good for them, I guess.

Gary and Wyatt (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith, respectively) are two teen-movie approved geeks repeatedly picked on by their horrible mulleted classmates. Instead of making a Terminator-like killing machine to wreak cold-blooded revenge on them, using their highly advanced (even for 1985) computer, they break into the Pentagon’s data files and invariably create The Woman in Red, seemingly just to stare at from afar.

Lisa (LeBrock) is not only a gorgeous mature sexpot, but also has cyber-enhanced powers, warping time and space to fit whatever mood she’s in; great for us (but sadly for the impoverished children of the world), those powers mostly go into throwing the wildest party this side of the ’80s, complete with nuclear missiles, a piano getting sucked through the chimney and an appearance by The Road Warrior’s Vernon Wells as a post-apocalyptic biker.

LeBrock was perfectly cast in an icon-making role, but that’s not to say Hall or Mitchell-Smith are by any means shabby in their archetypical nerd roles that defined a generation of dorks for HBO-obsessed youths; that being said, a special lifetime achievement award of some sort should have gone to Bill Paxton for the role of the meathead older bro Chet, mostly for introducing the phrase “You’re stewed, buttwad!” to the lexicon.

The gorgeous Arrow Video release of Weird Science not only delivers a 4K restoration, but both the theatrical and television versions of the flick are present, the latter of which is twice as funny for its barely legible curse-word redubs, which is especially great for the story where the girl of Gary’s dreams kicks him in the “guts” and calls him a “braggart” in front of everyone. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Machete (2006)

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From the opening scenes featuring a middle-aged man with a machete cutting the throats of a few vatos playing a crooked game of dice, this Machete looks very much like a homegrown copy of that Machete, even if this was strangely filmed a few years earlier.

However, as soon as this Machete finds an adorable, Walter Keane-styled lad in need of a family getting beaten up by locals, it’s here where the film veers off into a somewhat violent tale of spiritual love as the possibly Heavenly Kid and a group of irreligious area thugs battle for the soul of Machete.

With a healthy appetite for tequila — Antigua Cruz, straight from the obtuse bottle — Machete, also known as Lukas, an ex-bodyguard for the president, wanders the desert, stopping by the small town of Purgatory — to hell with subtlety, I suppose — for reasons that are unclear and remain unclear. Either way, he causes trouble with the same three locals throughout the movie, swinging a flimsy machete around like a 5-year-old who’s just seen Conan the Barbarian.

Meanwhile, as a young girl and her “gypsy” mother are harassed by those same three locals, a gringo from Machete’s past — back in Vietnam, apparently — is looking for him, ready to take him back to Arizona, “dead or alive.” While they all impatiently come together for the climax, as the film tries to tie all the loose ends together at once, complete with Machete being shot to death.

Only he’s not. I think.

With guardian angels, familial intrigue and a white dude machete training montage in the desert, writer and star Pablo Esparza — who I do hope that I’m related to on my maternal side — does what he can on this zero-budget actioner, even if very little of it makes any sense which, of course, makes it incredibly entertaining.

At the very least, I hope they got a few bucks from the Antigua Cruz sponsorship. It’s in this flick so much, I’m surprised that bottle didn’t get a producer’s credit. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.