Just as Hellhole is not your average women-in-prison picture, the Ashland Sanitarium for Women is not your average nuthouse. It’s where Susan (Judy Landers, Stewardess School) is sent after her mother is murdered before her eyes and she suffers a head injury while escaping the killer’s nicotine-stained clutches. Susan awakens in the asylum with a classic case of amnesia, which is convenient for Landers, who always seems absent-minded in her roles. Bless her buxom heart, but she’s all puffy hair and vacant stare.

The reasons for her mom’s death? Purely unimportant, other than to keep Susan in peril even within the institution’s walls, because the killer (Ray Sharkey, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) disguises himself as an orderly in hopes of finding her alone so he can finish the job; if he happens to bangs a nurse and/or resident along the way, so be it. Ironically, all the Ashland patients are endangered, because within the bowels of the place, the evil Dr. Fletcher (Mary Woronov, Eating Raoul) and Dr. Dane (Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) conduct their experimental research toward creating the world’s first chemical lobotomy. Any patient who misbehaves unwittingly serves as a guinea pig.

To paraphrase Spinal Tap’s “Hell Hole,” the window’s dirty, the mattress stinks, the floor is filthy, the walls are thin, the nudity is plentiful. Per the WIP template, toplessness is a must of its caged coquettes, yet Savannah Smiles (!) director Pierre De Moro throws bottomlessness in there, too, to give his flick a bonus layer of ’80s sleaze. More than eager to please in the bared-breast department is Edy Williams (Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), delivering her lines in a breathy, cue-cardy voice that makes everything sound suggestive, down to an offer of sharing soap: “Use mine. It’s hypoallergenic.” Despite her efforts to steal the show, that honor is taken by Sharkey as Silk, the chain-smoking heavy in black leather who looks like he arrived from a failed audition for Can’t Stop the Music. To continue that analogy, Nancy Walker’s loss is De Moro’s gain. —Rod Lott

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Terror in the Jungle equals hilarity in your living room. (Or in your bedroom or from your toilet or wherever you choose to stream content for which you did not pay. Just admit it.)

The brainchild of producer Enrique Torres Tudela (1976’s House of Shadows), the adventure film is so misbegotten, it took three directors to shape the dough into a presentable ball, with each man duly credited for his respective sequence: plane (Tom DeSimone, Reform School Girls), jungle (Andrew Janczak, cinematographer of The Undertaker and His Pals) and temple (Alex Graton, whose record is otherwise clean).

A plane bound for Rio carries some rather interesting passengers, including a wealthy woman acquitted (but most likely guilty) of killing her husband, a busty actress with a Joker-esque mouth, three wig-wearing members of a teen-sensation band (although each guy easily is double the age of the average screaming fan), two nuns (not counting the corpse in the carry-on coffin) and one poor preschooler named Henry Junior, forever clutching a stuffed tiger. Don’t you get attached to any of them, because when the aircraft leaks fuel and plummets into the Amazon jungle, all of them either:
• perish in the force of the wreck,
• get torn to pulled-pork shreds by alligators after leaping into the water,
• are burned to smithereens by not leaping into the water fast enough when the wrecked plane explodes
• or, in the case of one of God’s holy sisters (sorry, Sister Inferior!), get sucked out of the plane well before the treacherous nosedive.

It’s remarkable the movie spends so much time setting these characters up when it had designs from square one on doing away with them in one fell swoop — all except little Henry, who was traveling alone, plopped aboard against his wishes by his square-jawed single father to go see that hussy the boy calls Mommy. The kid makes it out with nary a scrape (severe emotional trauma excepted, of course) and floats the Amazon in the aforementioned coffin until he crosses paths with a local tribe whose members treat the boy not like the whiny brat he is, but The Chosen One. Because his golden locks literally radiate a halo in a hue reminiscent of their sun god, Inti, the tribesmen and tribeswomen wash his feet and put on shows for him and that damned stuffed tiger … which, in Terror’s peril-strewn climax, somehow temporarily comes to life to rip apart the jealous native trying to kill the kid.

Like a jungle film should, Terror ticks off some tried-and-true elements of the subgenre: snakes, piranha, quicksand, shrunken heads, an exotic score (by lounge king Les Baxter!), spear-carrying men dressed in diapers and sporting the kind of silly headwear made in Sunday school classes with construction paper and Elmer’s glue.

However, its most entertaining asset is what no other jungle pic has, but should: Henry Junior, played by Jimmy Angle. Although he never earned another credit, Angle gives the most committed, realistic performance of the film … because he does not appear to be acting. Scene to scene, Angle gives off the vibe that he is on camera against his will, as if he didn’t quite comprehend a movie was being made. His laconic delivery suggests he was slipped a Dramamine lollipop, and his constant tears — the kid cries more times than not — look real, not to mention enough to end a Third World drought.  

Not so real: the brief gore scenes rendered in a crude stop-motion process dubbed Magicmation. The technique also was glimpsed in Legend of Horror, another Tudela production, but with origins and intentions far less dubious. —Rod Lott

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For one of his myriad adaptations of Edgar Wallace works, brand-name producer Harry Alan Towers takes us to Hong Kong to meet Five Golden Dragons.

Our inadvertent tour guide is Bob Cummings (Beach Party) as American bachelor Bob Mitchell, whose sole purpose for hanging at the Hilton seems to be to charm the bikinis off the lovely women he meets. Through a roundabout way — one that the iconic Hitchcockian characters played by Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart knew all too well (and, in the latter case, too much) — Bob finds himself inexplicably implicated in the death of a man, soon followed by several more for heightened intrigue. He’s innocent, of course, but the local police inspector assigned to investigate (Roy Chiao, Bloodsport) isn’t easy to convince.

Who’s to blame? The members of the titular international syndicate that controls the illicit gold market. This society of “the most evil men the world has ever known” is so secretive, even its quintet of members don’t know one another. When they do meet, they lumber around in ill-fitting, parade-ready dragon heads that look utterly ridiculous instead of threatening.

The film’s marketing raised much ballyhoo over who was underneath those disguises, each “a great international star”: Christopher Lee (1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles), Brian Donlevy (The Curse of the Fly), Dan Duryea (The Burglar) and George Raft (that year’s Casino Royale). Unhidden is the film’s most terrifying villain: Klaus Kinski (Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu) as Gert, chain-smoking his way through daily duties of assassination and intimidation.

A bumbling everyman, the affable Cummings was a big TV sitcom star at the time, and plays his lead role less like an action hero with global smarts and more like Bob Hope with a bubble gum habit. He cracks wise at every opportunity, even though said cracks elicit no laughs and the movie by Towers’ four-time collaborator Jeremy Summers (The Vengeance of Fu Manchu) is assuredly not a comedy, despite evidence to the contrary in one life-or-death chase sequence scored with slide whistles and bass drums.

I have no clue if Wallace’s source material was set in Hong Kong, but I do know Towers sure got his money’s worth shooting there, as the picture doubles as a big, bright travelogue that captures the flavor of the Chinese city’s exotic locales, indoors and out. Illuminating the foreground are three criminally beautiful women in Margaret Lee (Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs) and, playing sisters, the drop-dead gorgeous Maria Perschy (1972’s Murders in the Rue Morgue) and Towers’ wife, Maria Rohm (1974’s Ten Little Indians). Each had me mentally booking a one-way ticket. —Rod Lott

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Nick Jonas kisses his purity-ring days of the Jonas Brothers bye-bye with Careful What You Wish For, an erotic thriller so by-the-numbers and yet diluted, it may as well be titled Basic Instinct for Beginners.

Acting through a series of drooping bottom lips, the youngest Jo Bro headlines as Doug, a teenaged virgin home for summer vacation. He’s hired by investment banker Elliot Harper (Insidious: Chapter 3’s Dermot Mulroney, nailing the Rich Asshole part) to keep the man’s sailboat in tiptop shape for the insultingly low hourly wage of 12 bucks. An unmentioned fringe benefit: close proximity to Mr. Harper’s much younger trophy wife, Lena (Isabel Lucas, 2014’s The Loft), an overly lithe, living Barbie who thinks nothing of bathing in the nude in broad daylight in peekaboo showers on the public dock — a lot of prepositional phrases for such a simplistic setup.

Yes, of course they’re totally gonna do it. And of course Lena talks smack of her husband to Doug, saying, “You have no idea what he’s capable of.” And of course their affair will lead to mortal danger. Too faithfully, director Elizabeth Allen (Ramona and Beezus) follows the modern template of sex-infused noir throwbacks established by Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, so that little of significance is new and plot turns can be spotted far in advance. What Allen does do differently is render the proceedings oddly sexless, meaning that while the movie is filled with couplings between Lena and Doug, nudity is limited to bare backsides and (if this even counts) rain turning Lena’s shirt see-through.

First-time feature screenwriter Chris Frisina juices the dialogue so that every line of Elliot’s is laced with elbow-jutting innuendo, from “Anything worth doing is worth doing all the way” to “This hasn’t been thoroughly caulked,” and the joke calls too much attention to itself to work. Frisina also appears to draw inspiration from Armageddon’s infamous animal-crackers seduction scene, with Doug rolling an Oreo cookie down Lena’s bare hips and legs. Restraint is shown by not allowing Doug to pull them open and lick the cream; somewhere, Michael Douglas volunteers to show this young pup how it’s done. —Rod Lott

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Someday, I’m convinced, a book — not just a chapter, but an entire book — will chronicle the amazing, without-precedent story of Snakes on a Plane. How the Internet convinced New Line Cinema to forgo the original title of Flight 121. How the Internet then convinced the studio to chase an R rating, specifically by adding a ready-to-bake catchphrase for star Samuel L. Jackson in the instantly immortal “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” How the Internet went meme-bonkers with anticipation for months leading up to the movie’s release. And then, after all that, how the Internet didn’t even bother to show up to see it.

And maybe that book will address the actual quality of the film, which is the one thing surrounding Snakes that often goes unmentioned. Instead, people talk of the “fan” videos, the “fan” T-shirts, the promotional trick where you could have (a recording of) Jackson place a phone call to whomever you wanted, the puzzle book tie-ins, the soundtrack album with the supremely silly theme by emo “supergroup” Cobra Starship. It’s almost as if everyone was so caught up in and/or beholden to the hype, they forgot a movie existed in its creamy center.

Yet one did! It’s fine, but nothing to write memes about.

Leaving Honolulu for Los Angeles, South Pacific flight 121 is carrying a Jennings Lang-worthy set of passengers and crew members, including an attendant on her final shift (Julianna Marguiles, Ghost Ship). Because FBI Agent Flynn (Jackson, The Hateful Eight) is court-chaperoning a dude-bro (Nathan Phillips, Chernobyl Diaries) who witnessed a mob hit, said mob has checked some killer baggage: deadly snakes hidden in boxes of pheromone-spiked flowers to get them all horny and hot-to-bite everybody, everywhere.

A kitty cat is first to go, which I’m totally onboard with, because that means it can’t leap from the shadows for a clichéd jump scare. Then they slither their way toward actual humans, from a couple angling for mile-high club membership to a poor guy who just needs to drain his bladder. (Takeaway: When your next flight is invaded by snakes, stay out of the restroom.)

What keeps the eventual chaos from being the fun it should be — especially with Final Destination 2’s David R. Ellis at the helm — is twofold: repetition as maddening as being grounded on the tarmac and the fact that the title creatures look so fake, they may as well be cartoons. Once Jackson has had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane, so have we … with yet another third or more on the horizon. —Rod Lott

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