All posts by Louis Fowler

Comedy

Blame It on Rio (1984)

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Blame It on Rio is the Celebrity Skin-ready tale of the woefully middle-aged Matthew (Michael Caine, The Island) and his painfully farce-ready love affair with his best friend’s teenage daughter, Jennifer (Michelle Johnson, Beaks: The Movie). His excuse? Blame it on Rio!

Rio is one of the lustiest cities on this side of the planet, a brown-skinned Bacchanalia filled with an infinite amount of bare breasts bringing to life all your damnable desires, flaunted about in the streets 365 days a year. It’s seemingly the perfect setting for Stanley Donen’s directorial swan song, if it wasn’t such a bleak, horrific view into the mindset of a dying man wishing for one last view of pert teen bosoms. The easiest way to get them? Blame it on Rio!

Matthew and his wife (Valerie Harper, TV’s Rhoda) are seemingly in a loving relationship, but, in this film, love is a selfish emotion that gets more grotesque as the movie goes on. When the spirit of a crazy night in Rio gets into him, he gets even deeper into Jennifer, giving fully into the sudden sexual aplomb of the city. He expects to have one torrid night to forget with her, as most middle-aged men would, but, of course, she obsessively falls in love with him. He totally blames it on Rio.

After their initial sexual encounter, Matthew gets tries admirably to cut things off with Jennifer, not out of the dark shame of bedding a willing teenage girl, but completely out of fear of getting caught by her equally sleazy dad (Joseph Bologna, Transylvania 6-5000). When he tries to gently let her down, she goes a tad overboard and tries to off herself. We’ve all been there, but we probably weren’t able to blame it on Rio.

Donen, who directed films such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Singin’ in the Rain, sadly, seems to forgotten all he knew about being a filmmaker, his master’s touch now a pervert’s sticky glove, with his leering view coating the film in a gooey veneer of manmade despicableness. He made an ugly film of people doing rather ugly things, but it was the ’80s, and anything went, usually with the help of cocaine and an Animotion album. Especially if you going to blame it on Rio.

But no one really comes off worse than Caine; now considered a great actor because, well, he’s old and British, here he’s a combination of visibly embarrassed and audibly horny as Jennifer writhes and grinds on him every chance she gets. But, if the authorities asked him what he was doing with a 17-year-old-girl in his bed, he could always wink at the camera and blame it on Rio. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

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An alcohol-bloated Richard Burton (The Medusa Touch) is Father Lamont, who leaves his father’s junk empire in Watts to perform meandering exorcisms in Latin America. When his latest dispossession goes up in smoke, quite literally, he’s summoned to the Vatican not for a swift punishment — probably a transfer to a boys’ home in Wisconsin — but instead to find out the truth about a disgraced Father Merrin (Max von Sydow, Never Say Never Again) from the first film.

Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair, Airport 1975), who’s bloated as well — possibly from cocaine — is back also, of course. We learn that since her exorcism she now loves to tap-dance in a shirt that showcases the underside of her breasts, usually before her sessions at Dr. Gene Tuskin’s (Louise Fletcher, 1987’s Flowers in the Attic) very John Boorman-esque — i.e., lots of sharp glass and curved mirrors — research clinic. There, even though she’s buried the events of her brutal exorcism deep in the past, the damn scientific curiosity of Tuskin brings ol’ Pazuzu back to the forefront once again.

While all that is going on, Lamont goes to Africa to hang out with James Earl Jones (Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold), who sits lonesomely in a throne, fully clad in a hilarious life-sized locust costume, complete with a big bug-eyed mask.

Director John Boorman’s clunker of a continuation — hot on the well-booted Exterminator heels of 1974’s Zardoz — is something people mostly watch either out of sick curiosity or general masochism. There are a few Exorcist II: The Heretic apologists out there, and every single one I’ve met is a chunky dude in a fake Tommy Bahama shirt who’ll corner you at a party, explaining with frothing reasoning why you — and most of cinematic academia in general — are morally wrong in your tepid dislike of the sequel.

But, for once, most people are right: With the exception of Ennio Morricone’s typically gorgeous score, there’s not much to recommend here. Each progressive scene sillier than the last, Exorcist II manages to turn Satan from a monstrous representation that is Legion to a confusing swarm of African locusts with a taste for yummy psychic powers and tasty fields of grain. Obviously, whatever “good film” that was supposedly here got lost in a parade of big egos and bad ideas.

In the special features, even Linda Blair vehemently admits that this isn’t the film she signed up to do, but, then again, she starred in Roller Boogie. That ought to tell you something right there.  —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Brainscan (1994)

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While minding his own business, peeping on the mostly willing girl across the street, young Mike (Edward Furlong) gets a call from his generic horndog buddy — probably named Doozer or something equally dumb — telling him about this great new video game he’s reading about in the latest issue of Fangoria, because every little bit helps, right guys?

The video game is called Brainscan and it promises to be the most immersive experience in horror gaming on your 16 32 64-bit system and, at the very least, it’ll let Frank Langella enter your subconscious, as he is wont to do. Mike plays the game and finds himself in a first-person world of murder and madness as whomever he kills in the game, is found dead in real life. Bummer, dude.

Beyond the silliness of the game itself, the movie Brainscan goes one better by introducing the wholly grating boogeyman known as the Trickster, a horrific sprite from the video game world (?) here to convince Mike to kill himself while eating all of his well-stocked stash of junk food. With a stretched-out face and a shocking-red faux-hawk, it’s very easy to see why T. Ryder Smith isn’t at very many horror conventions signing copies of the movie poster handed to him by pudgy Trickster clones.

Although many of you younglings might not remember it, Brainscan comes from a time long ago and far away when Furlong was the affable-enough boy-king of the first-run genre picture, riding somewhat high after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But, sadly, too many silly scripts like Pet Sematary Two and this techno-trash caused his star to extinguish faster than a cigarette under Furlong’s well-worn Doc Martens boot heel.

Even worse, by the time this picture was out in theaters, the technology was already practically outdated, no matter how many cool-ish gadgets and Aerosmith posters director John Flynn (Rolling Thunder) threw on the screen. And even though the CGI was getting technically better, the actualized concept of virtual reality and cyberspace were still the thing of badly rendered William Gibson novels and horribly cartoonish Thomas Dolby screensavers.

Despite those winning attributes, realistically Brainscan isn’t even nostalgically good for the time, leading most viewers to check their futuristic Apple Watches and Fitbits to see how much time is left on the thing. To be fair, however, this flick does make a rather unwatchable double feature with Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War if you truly hate yourself.

Or you can just take a nap. Whatever.   —Louis Fowler

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Martial Arts

Lionheart (1990)

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Based on a story and screenplay by action star, martial artist and Tostitos spokesperson Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lionheart casts Bloodsport’s Belgian bruiser as Leo, a serviceman in the multinational Foreign Legion and stationed in the fun-to-say Djibouti; he’s one lone, stone-cold warrior surrounded by a bunch of comical Col. Klink-style Germans always riding his ass for something or another.

When his brother is gruesomely immolated by drug dealers, Leo uses his high-kickin’ feet to say goodbye to his superiors (and his superiors’ faces), hitchin’ a ride on a 1930s steamship to New York City where, as soon as he gets off the boat, in a moment of prescient critique, he harshly compares and contrasts the drug-abusing homeless dudes on the ground with the wholly porcine moneymen in their glass towers — to which he shakes his head and dismissively says, “America!”

Good burn, JCVD.

Leo soon hooks up with Joshua (Harrison Page, Carnosaur), a jive-talking fight manager whose profanity-rich dialogue would be moderately offensive if the guy wasn’t putting his heart and soul into this mildly racist character. Together, after beating up the cast of Beat Street, they make it to Los Angeles and, in between helping his sister-in-law and her adorable 5-year-old, he manages to get into one high-paying blood brawl after another, knocking out the best Frank Dux-choreographed stuntmen in parking lots, racquetball courts and the near-empty pools of the rich and famous.

Lionheart does a good job in casting Van Damme as the ultimate good guy: a nice, caring man doing everything through excessive violence to help his friends and family, all the while eschewing the continuous advances of a rich benefactor who is unsubtly letting him know she’s looking for a good-ish time, and I do mean sexually.

But he’s having none of it, instead choosing healthy alternatives such as constantly jogging around his neighborhood, eating bean burritos and outrunning the bulky Foreign Legion goons looking for him. (Although, to be fair, he does gratuitously preview his well-buffed buttocks for the ladies, although I’d really like to meet the woman who fell in love with this flick, Jean-Claude Van Damme and action films in general simply because of three seconds of tightly toned foreign ass.)

I’m not giving away any well-guarded secret by saying there’s a final fight with a ’roided-out Paul Stanley look-alike, but make sure to stay for the final scene, as JCVD and his friends and family enthusiastically hug and laugh maniacally as the camera pulls back and the credits roll. You’ll instantly feel pretty bad about yourself and your life if you’ve never had one of those tender moments in your non-Lionhearted existence.  —Louis Fowler

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Kitchen Sink

Pastor Paul (2015)

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WTFThe cinema of Ghana and Nigeria — referred to colloquially and collectively as Nollywood — is best known for its low-budget goofy actioners and laughable melodramas, but there is very much a frightening side to their filmmaking: the ominous atmosphere and existential dread of their many demon-possession films. Forget The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, whatever … Ghana and Nigerian filmmakers have them beaten and beaten brutally.

Maybe it’s because they still fear Satan in a way that Westerners (lamentably) don’t anymore, but regardless, their horror epics featuring demonic witch doctors, torso-shaking, eye-rolling vessels and sweaty preachers calling on Jesus to get rid of that vile creature tend to leave audiences praying for their own soul by the time the credits roll.

But then you’ve got to deal with a sequel … or two … or three …

It’s a trend that I’m surprised took American filmmakers so long to latch onto, but auteur Jules David Bartkowski, armed with a camera, a white suit and about 100 bucks or so traveled to this foreign land, gathering the biggest names in (regional) African cinema — Wanlov the Kubolor, Funsho Ogundipe and Lady Nancy Jay, to name a few — and actually made a pretty good first attempt at introductory cinematic diplomacy.

Bartkowski is Benjamin, a mathematician working on African drum rhythms and their supposed equations. When sitting in a bar one afternoon, he’s talked into starring as a white ghost in a film called Pastor Paul. During the filming, however, he goes into a strange trance and when the eccentric director yells cut, Ben can’t remember anything. People tell him he’s possessed, so he travels to a nearby town to hook up with the area witch doctor, and then it gets truly bizarre — but in a financially responsible way, making it even more scary.

While many fish-out-of-water films use a certain sense of xenophobia to get their paranoid feelings of danger and despondency across, this film mostly avoids that; surprisingly, mostly everyone in Pastor Paul, from the little kids following the characters around to the long stretch of Christian preaching, is just doing their thing and Benjamin is caught in the middle of it, walking along, letting them tell their stories, letting the audience experience what he does.

Sure, he’s shaking and convulsing around them, stricken by evil creepy crawlies, to bring it all back to the main story, but it’s the moments in between that are infinitely more interesting, to explore the souls of the friends (and enemies) he’s just made, sitting around talking and enjoying bowl after bowl of fufu with his grimy fingers.

But even more interesting is instead of bringing American techniques to Ghana and Nigeria, the filmmakers used theirs, the Africans, as a way to tell a compelling enough story, filled with plenty of strange tangents and obscure jokes to keep both Hollywood and Nollywood viewers both intrigued and waiting for parts two, three and four, which we’re promised is coming, to great terror and foreboding.  —Louis Fowler

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