Thriller

Deep Blood (1990)

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Four boys who look they slam pogs at recess are sitting on the beach, wieners in hand. Unprovoked, an old Indian shaman shambles over and starts rambling about warriors in the sky, which isn’t weird at all, and tells them to make a blood pact. Whipping out their respective pocketknives, they do. Kids, welcome to the world of pediatric AIDS!

Er, I mean Deep Blood. Welcome to the world of Joe D’Amato’s Deep Blood.

Years later, those four boys are four young men, each with their own problems. One is grieving a dead mom. One has to attend a military academy. One attends college, but just wants to golf. One is named Miki. One has a dad named Shelby. I may have mixed them all up, which is only natural, seeing how D’Amato (Emanuelle in America) rushes into things. It doesn’t help that each man acts with the verve of a pre-fairy Pinocchio, but it also doesn’t matter. Besides, one of them succumbs to a shark on the loose comparatively early in the film, which leaves us only three people to discern.

The first shark attack is the best, as a rafting woman is eaten while her little kid watches emotionless from the shore, as if Mom were doing something as benign as cutting the crusts from his PBJ. It’s not that her death is depicted realistically; quite the opposite, it looks as if D’Amato just had someone underwater open a jar of Ragu. Here, as throughout Deep Blood whenever shot from the shark’s POV, we can clearly make out the side of the swimming pool in which D’Amato filmed in broad daylight.

The actual shark content of Deep Blood is rather shallow, especially when so much of its stock footage comes pilfered from another Italian Jaws rip-off, Great White. Like that 1981 romp, this one includes a helicopter scene, too, but here the whirlybird is employed only to let the ever-perspiring Krupke-esque sheriff (Tody Bernard, Hologram Man) berate our protagonists via megaphone for going shark-hunting: “Get back to the harbor immediately. We know what you’re up to. Shelby, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Same goes for you, Joe! This is one of Italy’s shakiest sharksploitation efforts — and that’s saying something. —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

The Blue Lagoon (1980)

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WTFIf you ever needed proof that watching teenagers engaging in unmarried intercourse is actually quite boring, here’s The Blue Lagoon for you and your pervert eyes.

Because I vaguely remember watching it as a small child with my parents in the early ’80s, I have occasionally flashed back to various scenes throughout my life, most notably the ingestion of deadly berries on a boat. (I don’t know why Mom and Dad were watching it so often. I hope because it was there on HBO and they were too lazy to change the channel. I hope.)

Sometime in the 1800s, on a boat bound for America, a fire breaks out. Two kids and a salty-dog seaman escape, only to land on a barren paradise filled with plenty of coconuts and bananas, with only the ominous drumming from a nearby tribe to keep them company when the old man dies of bloated drunkenness.

Thankfully, he taught the young boy — who grows up to be Christopher Atkins — how to make shelter and fish while the young girl — who grows up to be a still very young Brooke Shields — learns how to pout when things don’t go her way. Of course, as they get older, sex is discovered — taking up just as much of the film as the waterlogged swimming scenes — and a child is had, leading to most hilarious scenes of terrible parenting.

Directed by Grease’s Randal Kleiser, The Blue Lagoon was the start of what I’m terming his filmography’s “sandy vagina” trilogy, which included the worse Summer Lovers and North Shore. He eventually executive-produced the 1991 sequel, Return to the Blue Lagoon, a movie starring Milla Jovovich that I’m sure is far worse unless, of course, some zombies show up. I seriously doubt it. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

Escape Room (2017)

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Setting a horror film inside an escape-room attraction is such a good idea, multiple movies have done it, including the 2019 theatrical hit Escape Room. Generically enough, two films from 2017 are simply titled Escape Room, too.

This is one of those — the one starring former Scream king Skeet Ulrich.

As Brice, Ulrich is the owner of the escape room Deranged, the logo of which adorns his ever-present black hoodie. With attendance having significantly cooled since the previous Halloween, Brice is desperate to get Deranged some new buzz to bring in the kids. Instead of offering free beer, booking a band, incorporating strippers or pursuing any valid idea, he goes browsing for antiques. At his first stop, he immediately gets worked up over a skull box behind the counter, but the shop owner (Sean Young, 1984’s Dune) says it’s not for sale, because it’s one of the world’s most cursed objects, what with housing a demon and all.

One stolen skull box later, Deranged welcomes new customers in Cutout Bin Brad Pitt (Randy Wayne, Hellraiser: Judgment) and Junior Varsity Danny Masterson (Matt McVay, TV’s Lovecraft Country) as a pair of total horror bros. The boys have brought their less-enthused girlfriends (Hometown Killer’s Ashley Gallegos and Animal Among Us’ Christine Donlon) who, in real life, would not only be attending Wine Wednesdays, but would be with other guys.

As they try to uncover clues to unlock the door within 60 minutes, Brice watches from the comfort of his office, pumping his fists whenever they jump in response to a chintzy scare effect, as if to say, “Crushing it, dude!” Chained to the wall of the escape room is a sack-headed employee our foursome christens with the franchise-ready name “Stitchface” (Taylor Piedmonte, Mimesis). Unbeknownst to them, Stitchface has been possessed by the demon from the skull box; this only becomes apparent when he starts stabbing them to death while they attempt to solve puzzles. As Billy Joel put it, one-two-three-four-PRESH-SHURE!

How’s that for a premise? If you answered “about two levels beyond what I’m willing to believe,” you clearly stole my notes. For his first feature, writer/director Peter Dukes demonstrates skill in keeping the disposable cast’s hourlong challenge to more or less just that. Dukes’ decision may be strategic to stretch the running time, as the ridiculously needless Middle East prologue certainly suggests. Either way, that doesn’t make the movie interesting; watching the customers think aloud in real time about shapes and colors amounts to a taxing sit. The effect is like watching someone play a video game, in that at least someone appears to be having fun — it just isn’t you. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Lapsis (2020)

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Like many indie science-fiction flicks, Lapsis has a fantastical premise, but takes a lackadaisical way to get to the rushed ending. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about and have been there before.

Quantum computing, I guess, is the best thing going in this alternate present, with scads of people signing up to run cable through state parks. This seems like an easy enough way for Ray (Dean Imperial) to earn a couple of bucks for his brother who has some sort of made-up fatigue syndrome; after obtaining shady papers, Ray’s in the forest, running wire and dealing with the passive-aggressive jerks he encounters.

There are also robots that look like the mechanical spiders from Runaway — I was almost hoping for Gene Simmons to show up, but that’s how I feel about most movies — that compete with the humans as they lay cable as well, with an underground group of cablers trapping and destroying the robots. I didn’t fully understand the ending, as it just kind of showed up.

With Lapsis in a broken-down sheen that many indie flicks have had for about 20 years, its idea of cabling for a new internet source is honestly remarkable, and Ray’s meeting of the many skewed characters, interesting enough. I don’t know why the spiders were introduced and, by the final third, you give up caring.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this movie really needed Gene Simmons. —Louis Fowler

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Action

Sharks’ Treasure (1975)

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More than one shark flick swam into theaters in 1975. Released a few months later than that other one was Sharks’ Treasure, the final film of the do-it-all director Cornel Wilde (The Naked Prey). Far from delivering an iron-hot cash-in, the aging auteur approached the oceanic adventure the only way he knew how: utter earnestness. So earnest is the film, Oscar Wilde — no relation — would look at it, nod his head and say, “Important.”

William Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death, this is not.

Crusty skipper Jim Carnahan (Wilde) is approached by a young man (John Neilson, Terror at Red Wolf Inn) about chartering his boat to a spot where a Spanish galleon’s gold is rumored to be sunk in the sands of the Caribbean floor. After an initial and impulsive turndown, Carnahan agrees and takes out a dangerously large loan to fund the mission. Among the hired crew is a Black Irish diver (Yaphet Kotto, Across 110th Street).

As the title has it, the waters between the boat and the loot are shark-infested. And as the title doesn’t have it, sharks aren’t the dominant threat. That honor belongs to a dinghy full of escaped convicts who, led by the appropriately named Lobo (Cliff Osmond, Sweet Sugar), hop aboard to hold our heroes hostage. Still, if you don’t think the threats won’t overlap, you’re chum.

Featuring sharks and otherwise, the underwater footage is real and it’s spectacular — not a surprise when you consider the man-vs.-nature themes of Wilde’s No Blade of Grass and the aforementioned Naked Prey. While the fearsome finned fish clearly were the front-and-center selling point of Sharks’ Treasure, the movie would be compelling enough without it. With a character like Wilde on hand to scowl, bark and show off his sexagenarian physique — including a pre-Palance demo of one-handed push-ups, it would be hard not to. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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