After the super-hot, high-fashion model Celine (Elsa Pataky of Fast Five) disappears one night in Italy, her almost-as-hot sister, Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner, Mrs. Roman Polanski), persuades goateed FBI inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody) to help find her. In a voice that apes Columbo, he agrees, but only because he suspects she’s been abducted by a serial killer he’s there to track.

Said slayer is known as Yellow, so dubbed for his jaundiced skin that’s a shade or two away from full-on Oompa-Loompa. He’s a cabbie who dresses in a hoodie and an Axl Rose bandana. He sucks on a pacifier, reads pornographic comics and talks like Gollum. He only kills young, beautiful, young foreigners, making them ugly in various ways, like planting a hammer to a forehead. You know, the
get-shit-done stuff.

Giallo was greeted with critical scorn, but I believe if it had any other director’s name affixed but Dario Argento, response may have been better. Not that it’s great, but it’s more serviceable than your average Hollywood killer thriller. Plus, all of the horror maestro’s signature touches are intact: vivid colors, uncomfortable close-ups, unflinching gore.

Okay, so the ending is anticlimactic, and Yellow a real goofball of a villain, but nothing so awful that Brody need bad-mouth it to the press and attempt to have his name removed from it. Of all the misbegotten projects he could have disowned after winning an Oscar — The Village, The Jacket, King Kong — and this is the one he sticks his nose up at? And that’s one prodigious beak! —Rod Lott

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After The Beverly Hillbillies went off the air, Max Baer Jr. couldn’t find work, so we wrote and produced his own vehicle in the Southern-fried scare tale Macon County Line. The Hail Mary pass worked and, by gum, Jethro, you done made yourself a fine picture show!

Supposedly based on a true story from the early 1950s, the AIP hit follows the bad-boy Dixon brothers (real-life siblings Jesse and Alan Vint) as they drive oft-shirtless through the Deep South, up to no good. We first meet them as one is screwing someone’s old lady for six bucks, then watch as they ditch a diner check, pick up a free-spirited girl (Cheryl Waters) headed for Dallas, and have to spend some downtime in the titular Georgia site when their car suffers some mechanical failures. They’ll be lucky to leave alive.

For the first two-thirds, the film plays like a redneck quasi-comedy that might be titled The Felonious Misadventures of Cooter and Banjo. Then it takes a sharp right turn into thriller-ville as the town’s racist sheriff (Baer) gets mighty pissed when his wife is raped and murdered, and goes after the Dixons, even though they had nothing to do with it.

As the unapologetically flawed man of the law, Baer gives a great performance, as does lil’ Leif Garrett as his son, not to mention the brothers Vint. Enjoy that acting while the plot seemingly meanders, because admittedly, it takes a while before anything of significance happens. Once it does, however, it makes for some memorable, tension-filled moments that are hard to shake. —Rod Lott

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Had star Erika Christensen actually gone all the way and bared her considerable assets, Swimfan might have something to recommend. (Am I being too vague here? Apologies. I totally mean her very large boobs.) Instead, it’s a laughable, teenage take on Fatal Attraction. Its dumb title is hardly the worst thing about it.

Bring It On’s Jesse Bradford stars as Ben, a high school stud with a swimming scholarship practically sticking out the side of his Speedo and a girlfriend in the other (Roswell beanpole Shiri Appleby). One day a new girl named Madison Bell (ol’ chipmunk-cheeked Christensen) comes to school, asks him to help with her locker, fucks him in the pool to say “thanks” and then won’t leave him alone, despite Ben’s increasing protests.

Wait, so what’s the problem here? I’m thinking back to when I was in high school. And if someone as cute and curvy as Christensen wanted to have sex with me and it meant she would show up at my house to look at old pictures with my mom or instant-message me while I was doing homework, so be it. ’Tis a very small price to pay for hot, chlorinated sex.

As Madison’s behavior grows more psychotic, Ben starts to fear for his life. Yeah, and? I’m supposed to root for this jock asshole? He takes advantage of an impressionable young girl and then throws her away because he’d rather stick it to a rail-thin waitress with raccoon eyes? Sorry, folks, but I just can’t sympathize. —Rod Lott

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Despite loads of young-French-blonde nudity courtesy of then-newcomer nymph Ludivine Sagnier, François Ozon’s Swimming Pool is merely a decent movie. It’s a virtually thrill-less thriller (purposely methodical, one assumes) about a lonely mystery writer with writer’s block (Charlotte Rampling) who goes to her publisher’s summer home in France to get her creative juices flowing.

It works until his highly promiscuous daughter (Sagnier) shows up and keeps the woman up all night with her loud orgasms. Then the girl kills someone and the writer doesn’t seem to mind because it’s good plot fodder. Then, in an effort to keep the crime covered up for the sake of the book, she beds an old sweaty gardener just after he’s mowed the yard. Eeewww!

The film is nicely shot, and I didn’t dislike it, but the ending left me with a “that’s it?” feeling. If you rent the unrated version, you get to see the girl blowing a French guy while Rampling throws rocks at them.

WARNING: But if you rent the unrated version, you also get full-frontal scraggly Rampling. WARNING: No matter which version you rent, you have to see a sleazy, dumpy French guy hanging out of his black cotton underwear. —Rod Lott

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Las Vegas Lady begins, appropriately enough, in a theme park and wax museum. But it’s not as much fun as either. I’m going to dish out blame to a mood-setting (read: mood-destroying) country-rock theme song that’s worse than any turd ever dumped onto drive-in screens by Crown International Pictures.

Said song is about Lucky, played by government-certified MILF Stella Stevens. As the tune goes, “She’s a winner and a sinner,” and the plot is only slightly more complex. In the opening moments, a shadowy figure in a cowboy hat ropes her into a job of robbing a Vegas casino of — pinky toward mouth, Dr. Evil — half a million dollars! The place deserves to lose it, because the unsmiling owner (George DiCenzo, Helter Skelter) is a real douche.

It’s a not-so-ritzy joint where the entertainment isn’t Goth magicians, killer tigers or stick-up-the-ass Billboard divas, but a chintzy circus act starring three busty trapeze artists, one of whom is sick of all the flying around. Lucky corrals her (Linda Scruggs) and a token black woman (Lynne Moody, Scream Blacula Scream) to aid her in the gig, along with Lucky’s fuck buddy (Stuart Whitman), who works security there and won’t stop asking her hand in marriage, even though she’s hot and he’s … well, like a beer gut in unkempt human form.

Ocean’s Eleven this is not, as the heist is as low-tech as the casino, which may as well have wood paneling. It’s so bottom-barrel by today’s standards that you can smell the Pall Mall through the screen. The biggest element into pulling the job off are Stevens’ pendulous breasts, which distract WKRP‘s Frank Bonner, forever endanger the PG rating, and mitigate that the big twist is obvious from the first scene. —Rod Lott

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