Sex

Lucifer’s Women (1974)

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Let’s just get this out of the way: The most memorable thing about Lucifer’s Women is that four years later, Al Adamson hacked it into Doctor Dracula. The runner-up: It’s edited by David Webb Peoples, future screenwriter of Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys.

Now we return to Lucifer’s Women, already in progress: Professor Wainwright (Larry Hankin, Billy Madison) not only has written about a book about the second coming of Svengali, but believes he is just that, down to claiming psychic powers of control and having the appropriately ratty, assured-to-reek beard — so pointed it looks pilfered from the Pistachio Disguisey disguise kit.

The narcissism is catching. Also believing himself to be a reincarnation is his publisher, Phillips (single-hitter Norman Pierce), who needs “a pure soul” for an upcoming black mass so he can ensure an all-new possession. He convinces Wainwright to procure that meat for him, complete with awfully specific instructions: She must be killed at the point of orgasm, precisely at midnight, on her 21st birthday.

Seriously? I can’t even get my own wife to slip on a pair of going-out shoes with 45 minutes’ advance notice. But Svengali 2.0 accepts all these conditions, like “No problemo!” His target is the naive Trilby (Jane Brunel-Cohen, whose only other role is in Freebie and the Bean), who somehow fits the “pure soul” portion of the bill despite being a stripper and freein’ her bean while reading underground sex comix at night.

As the fated, er, stroke of midnight approaches, both men cough and wheeze, making the movie all the more disgusting than its drab, gauzy brownness already does a bang-up job of doing. It all, um, climaxes with horned-goat-head rape at that satanic crucifixion as scheduled. Weird, right?

Even before that, Lucifer’s Women is overloaded with weird as director and co-writer Paul Aratow — later the producer of outdated comic-strip pics Sheena and The Spirit (the good, made-for-TV one) — dishes out a mute magician named Bobo, a butterfly girl, lines and lines of cocaine, the professor leaping spectral planes and a menage a trois a single thrust from becoming porno — especially since the tripod of that triumvirate is played by XXX star Paul Thomas (Ready, Willing and Anal).

And it’s all really, really boring. What can I say? The devil made me do it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Siege (1983)

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Down Nova Scotia way, the po-po are on strike due to a labor dispute, so crime runs rampant, primarily under the grip of the New Order — not the band, although that would be something. Of blue collars and unfettered ignorance, the loose collection of garden-variety fascists take advantage of the lawless land — at least as far as the night on which Siege is set — by terrorizing a friendly neighborhood gay bar known as The Crypt. (Oh, it’s right next to Thrifty’s Just Pants; you can’t miss it.)

When the bartender is accidentally killed, the New Order homophobes call in their fixer, Cabe (Doug Lennox, Police Academy), a strong, mostly silent type in black leather and silencer to match. To dissuade the bar patrons from reporting what they’ve seen, Cabe executes them one by one. Except for the one who gets away: Daniel (Terry-David Després).

Pronounced “Danielle,” Daniel runs and runs like Lola to the relative safety of an ugly, three-story apartment building, where he’s saved by the couple Horatio and Barbara (Winter a-Go-Go’s Tom Nardini and Echoes in the Darkness’ Brenda Bazinet, respectively). The remainder of the film entails the despicable New Order’s efforts to penetrate the couple’s threshold to nab the “fruit pie,” even if it means positioning a sniper across the street.

Siege so deftly plays with simple a “what if?” scenario that it quickly doesn’t matter we know nothing about Horatio and Barbara, such as why they have two blind students (Meatballs campers Keith Knight and Jack Blum, aka Fink and Spaz) just hanging out in their shithole of a pad. And why does their medicine cabinet lead into the unit of their next-door neighbor, Chester (Daryl Haney, Lords of the Deep)? I’ll answer that: Because it gives our heroes a unique home advantage, as does Chester’s proficiency at making dirty bombs and other tools of the terrorism trade.

Also known under the yawner title Self Defense, the Canadian production from co-directors Paul Donovan (Def-Con 4) and Maura O’Connell is taut and ingenious — the kind of thriller that works best then seen with an audience, but you’ll love all the same if watched alone. It’s as if Roberta Findlay’s Tenement had a moral code; Mr. Wizard harbored a Death Wish; and the Westboro Baptist Church participated in The Purge. Siege is all that and more. See it! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Mondo Hollywoodland (2019)

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Janek Ambros’ Mondo Hollywoodland is as hard to describe as it is to fully engage with. Even going into it knowing the experience will prove as nonlinear as a thousand Hula-Hoops makes the sit no easier. With a spark-quick attention span forever at odds with the pacing of individual scenes, it’s not everyone’s cup of mescaline.

To those of us familiar with that most peculiar style of cult film — the “mondo” movie — it’s obvious this experimental comedy name-checks the 1967 documentary Mondo Hollywood, which merited a memorable passage in David Kerekes and David Slater’s exhaustive tome, Killing for Culture: “The subjects for the most part are dull. People of local character (hippies) with over inflated egos, freely expound on the loveliness of Hollywood and their important place in it. One young man is something of a recurring motif, running around the film doing a madcap impression of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Elsewhere, a woman recounts how she loves colors and once ate a piece of crayon in a sandwich while on acid.”

In spirit if not always specifics, those four sentences apply here. Mondo Hollywoodland’s audience surrogate is an omniscient visitor from the fifth dimension with one mission on the mind: “But what is today’s Hollywood really like? Indeed, we shall seek the answer.” The visitor (Ted Evans) pledges to find that resolve via “the titans, the weirdos and the dreamers.” In and out we flit about from one character to another, through freakout transitions like an art-school editing exercise (and I mean that as a compliment). The survey reveals overlapping lives and scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in Slacker, Richard Linklater’s microbudget ode to Austin, half a country away.

As with the latter, Hollywoodland appears to be heavily improvised, to a point that tests viewers’ patience and endurance. We get performance artists and dumpster divers, magic mushrooms and cocaine lines, a lost cat and a threat of rats, asshole agents and pompous teen stars. Although Ambros’ visuals often smack of the trippiest years of psychedelic ’60s, there’s contemporary talk of Antifa and Twilight, and one harsh — but funny — 9/11 joke.

Ambros and friends never appear incompetent on either side of the camera, but the film is frivolous without truly being fun. Perhaps — and this is possible — the movie works like gangbusters to the L.A. crowd it lampoons; either way, I felt excluded from the punchline. One thing’s for sure: Mondo Hollywoodland is produced — and assumedly funded — by James Cromwell, whom we know from the likes of L.A. Confidential and Babe. The actor did the same for Ambros’ previous film, the documentary Imminent Threat, but why this? I dunno, but that’ll do, pig. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

America’s Runniest Home Videos (2021)

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WTFWhat do you get when you cross schizophrenic singer Wesley Willis with an attack Schnauzer with an overflowing toilet with a white-trash pool party with a Jim Varney mask with dinner-roll shenanigans with a portly Boy Scout with a deep hole with a female ventriloquist with egg tricks with a remote-control biplane with a Pride parade with a baby-shower smoke break with a confident squirrel with a Pee-wee Herman doll with gratuitous carrot-eating with golfers in drag with a disembodied deer’s head with a testicle festival with low-calorie horseradish with 50-year-old tits with Howard Frum with a baby who totally sucks at swimming?

You get America’s Runniest Home Videos, a 20-minute mixtape of rapid-fire camcorder found footage from VHS tapes several dozen families will soon regret accidentally donating to Goodwill — all from the fine folks at the finer Strange Tapes zine. —Rod Lott

Get it at Strange Tapes.

Action

Camino (2015)

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The Spanish word camino translates to “road” in English, which is a very apt title for this primo action flick, as it travels down many bloody South American streets, all of them barely lit by a flickering streetlight as stuntwoman extraordinaire Zoë Bell tries to make it out of a green inferno with her life.

Bell is prizewinning photojournalist Taggert, who is sent on assignment to follow a group of heavily armed missionaries through the dense jungle. At first glance, the team seems as nice as a group of guerillas possibly can be, with leader Guillermo (Oscar-nominated director Nacho Vigalondo) providing much of the group’s capable bluster as their likably annoying leader.

However, in a drug deal that is witnessed by Taggert — and photographed, no less — Guillermo slits the fucking neck of a small child for fun. Spotted, she goes on the run as the charismatic leader and his soldiers are after her, wherein she unleashes her masterfully choreographed martial arts capability on much of the offending party.

With Camino mixing important social critiques with blistering ass-kicking potential — the best way to get any kid to learn, if you ask me — Bell is at the top of her B-movie game, with a surprising turn from Vigalondo, helmer of films like Timecrimes and Colossal, portraying a truly despicable general who, at times, is kind of likable.

Camino is a road I’d definitely like to travel again, even if it means pulling over to get kicked a couple of times. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

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