Cosmoball (2020)

By title alone, Cosmoball sounds like you’re in for dull science fiction or novelty porn. For the record, the movie in question is sci-fi, but either way, it’s not something you’ll want to admit to watching.

As depicted in the Russian film Cosmoball, the future plays home to one of those sci-fi dichotomies where one environment is all super-high-tech and tricked-out, while the other dresses the populace in pieces of scavenged Tupperware. In the former, elite athletes play Cosmoball; in the latter, our unemployed teen scamp of a protagonist, Anton (Evgeniy Romantsov, free of charisma), waits in line for rationed water amid fellow commoners who appear to be doing Hook cosplay in the lobby of Rainforest Cafe — the one in Gurney Mills, Illinois, at that.

But back to the spectator sport of Cosmoball: Played in an indoor arena, the game is like soccer, except the players must have the power of teleportation. Also, only after five consecutive kicks does the opponent’s goal materialize. Also, it’s broadcast in the sky. Also, exploding balls of fire delight an all-alien audience only a Lucas could love. Also, a Rip Taylor-esque announcer pies himself in the face like a self-loathing clown whenever a goal is scored.

But other than that, just like soccer. Hell, even one player is named Pelé!

Because Anton needs money for his ailing mom’s Rx, because Anton crushes hard on Cosmoball star player Natasha (Viktoriya Agalakova) and because the team has an opening on the roster, it should surprise no one that Anton:
• can kick good!
• can teleport!
• will be recruited to join the team!
• will win Natasha’s heart!
• will be assigned a pet that looks like a tentacled ViewMaster!
• involuntarily teleports whenever he gets an unexpected boner!
• possesses a microscopic particle that the villain Cherno — who looks like a fist mated with Thanos — needs to complete a “protogene” that, once fully assembled, will grant Cherno power over the universe!
• will have his DNA attempt to be, um, “extracted” by a sexy waif (a WILF?) actually working for Cherno!

Okay, so maybe those last four fall under “Wait, wha-huh?” And for good reason: Director Dzhanik Fayziev and his writers’ room — repeat: writers’ room — pile one suffocating element atop another atop another, as if they’re world-building as they go … because they are, continuing the process until enough punishing minutes have passed that they risk using up the world’s entire supply of pixels if they don’t get to the climax. Folks, this isn’t storytelling; it’s rule-sharing.

With a cloying English dub and each frame green-screened into a cartoon artifice, it comes off possibly the most imbecilic family-friendly fantasy since that space-kangaroo movie a quarter-century ago. Somewhere, Soviet SF king Andrei Tarkovsky cries, “The fuck you say?” (Or, per Google Translate, “Какого хрена вы говорите?”) —Rod Lott

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Aquaslash (2019)

If I were a betting man, I’d place all my chips on the theory that Renaud Gauthier’s Aquaslash came into existence because of one scene. Admittedly (not to mention literally), it’s a killer: the one where most unfortunate watersliding teens meet a big, bladed “X” on their trip down the tube, and the bratty popular girl at the front immediately gets quartered into nice, neat (but bloody) pieces shaped like pie slices, as if the gods were playing Trivial Pursuit with dismembered humans.

Placed there on purpose by a gloved person unknown, the blades are inserted many, many minutes before Aquaslash gets around to paying them off. Gauthier even periodically cuts (no pun intended) to show them in wait amid rushing chlorinated water in an otherwise empty flume; no shot has been teased so mercilessly in cinema since Catherine Tramell’s Great Leg Uncrossing of 1992.

When the carnage arrives, it’s easily the movie’s highlight — but almost by default, because Gauthier (Discopath) has no other comparable bit to offer. Everything in this waterpark-set story appears to have been written around that novel death — and forced if necessary, as if Piranha 3DD already claimed every other possible waterslide gag. (Come to think of it, yeah, it did.)

Of course, originality is not on Aquaslash’s to-do list. Being an exercise in 1980s nostalgia, the movie takes place at Wet Valley Water Park, where the class of 2018 continue its high school’s decades-old tradition of a weekend-long party at the site, seedy motel rooms included. Several characters are introduced at once with little delineation beyond who hates whom, who gets high with whom, who’s fucking whom and who’s playing in the cover band (TRIGGER WARNING: Corey Hart). Key affiliations among them aren’t made clear until well into the last 20 of its rather expeditious 71 minutes, but really, when everyone is this unlikable and you know they’re mere pawns awaiting execution, does it matter?

French-Canadian to the point of seeming alien, Aquaslash attempts some comedy, only one line of which truly succeeds: “You’re built like a Swiffer.” —Rod Lott

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Come Play With Me (1977)

Though their teeth stereotypically may not be in all that great of condition, the sturdy women of the British sex comedy Come Play With Me are people who deserve our respect and admiration, mostly due to the fact they very rarely, if ever, wear clothes. I really admire that, guv’nor!

Although these ladies don’t show up until about 30 minutes in — a charming Mary Millington among them — as soon as they appear on-screen (and their clothes, of course, disappear!), it quickly becomes the sex comedy we’ve paid good money for, as they dance and sing in the nude while two old perverts dressed like Laurel and Hardy try to hide their blood-infused members.

At legendary 10 Downing Street, the prime minister (played by Benny Hill cast member Henry McGee!) and his cohorts argue about some stolen money. Across town, in a burlesque house, some guy argues about women while one dancing spreads fluffernutter on her nether regions. And then, down at a café, two guys argue about the price of coffee and pies.

None of that really matters, because when a rock ’n’ roll band stops at a local hotel, the horny women turn the place into a health club that seems to run, primarily, on juice and nudity; honestly, though, it’s a business I can get behind — and in front of — and would like a pamphlet, and not just for the fact Millington gives a horny gentleman a wholly painful yet fully erotic colonic.

Double-breasted with cameos from performers from the best British sex comedies of the era — movies and television shows, mind you — Come Play With Me is, honestly, mostly dumb, but filled with so many titillating moments of Her Majesty’s softcore sexuality that it’s easy to see why it played in London theaters to forlorn perverts for four royally arousing years. —Louis Fowler

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Russian Raid (2020)

Among the events crammed into the needlessly distended Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen is a fun moment in which Charlie Hunnam’s drug-trade enforcer runs afoul of — and trades blows with — a group of street thugs. Russian Raid feels like an extension of that scene into nearly two hours of its own, turning a standout bit into mere status quo. Do you want to settle for that? Nyet.

This Russian actioner’s story is somewhat less thin than its setting’s doors, which look to be made of packing material: Former military sniper Nikita (Ivan Kotik, Chinese Zodiac) takes a freelancing assignment to rob a missile factory of its riches. Reluctantly assisting him on this nighttime heist is a rowdy, ragtag pack of tracksuited hooligans with authority issues. While they target a massive safe — and even attempt its penetration via medieval battle ax — Nikita has personal reasons for retribution as well.

Justifying the assumed titular nod to Gareth Evans’ The Raid, but hardly as vertical, reaching the well-fortified bounty requires moving from room to room and level to level through the factory. Wearing a blue-striped tank top that registers as ridiculous to this side of the world, Nikita and his hired charges go to hand-to-hand combat in one skirmish after another.

While I have no doubt of the guys’ real-life fighting abilities, the choreography isn’t as supportive; in fact, it’s pretty clunky. In his first feature, writer/director/producer Denis Kryuchkov not only errs by hitting “play” on a distractingly obnoxious soundtrack when shit hits the fan, but speeds up the footage to a telling degree. Worse, he gives the camera a slight bump to punctuate the points he wants viewers to react to with a sympathetic “Oof!”

It’s so obvious, it’s Pavlovian. The overall effect is punishing, as the sequences near-instantly wear out their welcome, with a respite of flat humor or preening villainy before returning to more of the same song, different room. In a fight film, the fights are everything. And sometimes, as in Russian Raid, nothing. —Rod Lott

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Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968)

I’ve never been a shogun and, sadly, probably never will. Mostly because while I may enjoy tacos and dogs and movies, if this flick truly leads me to believe one thing, it’s that shoguns only really enjoy the cruelest of tortures, primarily through inflicting it on other people’s bare bodies. There goes another dream!

One of director Teruo Ishii’s infamous flicks of sex, violence and torture, often at the same time, this Toei production is a supposed anthology of the heinous practices documented on scrolls during the height of Tokugawa shogun. It features a catalog of barbarism that deftly mixes penile titillation with painful humiliation, seemingly a specialty of Ishii.

Focusing on three stories, Shogun’s Joy of Torture begins with a young woman and an illicit romance with her recently hurt brother and the scummy lawmen who jealously take their sexual issues out on her, with, of course, violent retribution.

The same goes for the second story, featuring the unbridled passions and unheralded smacks at a Buddhist nunnery. And the final story, which honestly wouldn’t seem out of place in an otherworldly Amicus production, depicts a tattoo artist who wants to get as close to death as utterly possible and achieves it with the help of a sadistic shogun.

Each tale is, as you’d probably imagine, beautifully — but brutally! — told, with excesses of ropes, whips, chains and other instruments of haughty pain throughout, used primarily on women hanging from the ceiling. While I’m sure a trigger warning is necessary for most viewers — I know I could’ve used two or three — this depiction of sex and sadism is a well-made movie that, I’m sure, will make someone’s penis suitably hard. —Louis Fowler

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