Horror

Lake Nowhere (2014)

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As staged by the New York-based Ravacon Collective, Lake Nowhere replicates the all-but-lost experience of watching horror movies on VHS — in particular, slashers whose three-digit rental counts show in an image quality so degraded, your VCR’s tracking buttons were of little use. It was a magical time; you had to be there.

Like a lo-fi Grindhouse, the film begins with a pair of fake trailers for the giallo Quando Il Fiume Scorra Rosso! (When the River Runs Red!) and the eco-terror/SF hybrid Harvest Man; sandwiched in between is a beer commercial so very ’80s, it’s more convincing than the short on either side.

From there, it’s on to the feature presentation, Welcome to Lake Nowhere. Shot in six days in the tiny town of Edinburg, its setup is practically pulled from a studio template: A group of young men and women go to a cabin for the weekend; regret follows. The only difference is this isn’t made by studio suits for financial gain, but artists for the shared love of being creative; therefore, we get an original take on well-trodden territory.

What that means is in addition to tits, there’s penis.

The “kids,” so to speak, aren’t your standard lineup of brand-name jocks and cheerleaders; they’re the thrift-store hipsters who avoided jocks and cheerleaders. One of them even looks like Doug Kenney’s Stork from Animal House. Together they chop wood, play games, smoke pot, fuck and die, so some things never change.

The death portion comes at the hands and blade of whom the credits call the Masked Maniac. Being fashioned from tree bark, his mask is folk horror-friendly, but his actions may not be as by-the-numbers as your everyday slasher villain, and same goes for your “final girl.” Co-directors Christopher Phelps and Maxim Van Scoy cannily upend expectations in a compact 50 minutes. Within such a short amount a time, Lake Nowhere may be one turn too clever, effectively getting high on its own supply, but at least our host is gracious enough to share a hit. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Calendar Girl Murders (1984)

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Remember when you could sexually harass female co-workers and openly read porno mags in the workplace without fear of punishment? Apparently it was the same time the Big Three networks churned out some decent genre movies made for prime-time household consumption — specifically, 1984, when Calendar Girl Murders debuted on ABC.

This telepic’s Hugh Hefner, Paradise magazine owner Richard Trainor (Robert Culp, then on the back half of The Greatest American Hero’s run), has a special way to spotlight the dozen lovely ladies posing nude for the coming year: a television special … hosted in part by that icon of testosterone, comedian Rip Taylor. Unfortunately for Trainor, someone else has a different special way to spotlight them: homicide! Miss January is shoved off a hotel balcony; Miss February (Claudia Christian, Half Past Dead) is stabbed while raiding the fridge.

Assigned to the case is midlife-crisis cop Lt. Stoner (Tom Skerritt, Alien), much to the chagrin of his “meh” wife (Barbara Bosson, The Last Starfighter) and the delight of his masturbating teen son (Jonathan Aluzas, Monster in the Closet).

A tip on a photographer who gives the girls the heebie-jeebies leads Stoner to interview former Paradise Angel of the Year Cassie Bascomb (Sharon Stone), and somehow, that creepy shutterbug is not the one played here by Alan Thicke. In a preview of the beautiful Stone’s Basic Instinct breakthrough to come in eight years’ time, Bascomb and Stoner embark in a YMCA-shower-steamy affair while bodies keep turning up. Somehow, one girl manages to be drowned in a busy pool at one of Trainor’s legendary parties. (Then again, with the night containing both an impromptu breakdance and Culp in a Speedo, that’s a shitload of diversion.)

So whodunit? Exactly whom you’ll expect. As predictable as that ending may be, the culprit’s motive is a truly histrionic howler of mid-’80s pop psychology. In the hypothetic hands of, say, Dario Argento, something titled Calendar Girl Murders could be something really special by being really sleazy; in the actual hands of TVM vet William A. Graham (Shark Kill), however, it’s hardly titillating. With Calendar Girl Murders being a Sunday-night movie, its centerfolds — er, calendar girls — sport the most demure one-piece swimsuits and leotards a Sunday-night movie could get away with immediately following an ep of Hardcastle and McCormick. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

12 Monkeys (1995)

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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Terry Gilliam has always been a true visionary who has never received the full credit he truly deserves, and I’m not talking about Monty Python.

While he has done some truly great movies like Time Bandits, Brazil and The Fisher King, I feel that he reached his absolute mainstream height with 1995’s 12 Monkeys, a truly original take on time travel inspired by the absorbing French short film La Jetée, told mostly in photographs.

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a prisoner chosen for a dangerous experiment to travel from 2035 to 1996 to stop a deadly disease that was supposedly started by a group known as the 12 Monkeys. However, during his first attempt, he ends up in 1990 in a mental institution, with Jeffery Goines (Brad Pitt) as a bunkmate, giving him — who happens to be the leader of the 12 Monkeys, natch — the idea for starting the simian insurrection.

Mistake (somewhat) fixed, Cole is sent to 1996, for real, kidnapping one of his former doctors from the asylum, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). He attempts to stop the 12 Monkeys — and the virus in general — but through a series of continually turning and twisting spheres, we soon learn that Cole can’t change the future, no matter how hard he tries. But he doesn’t know that.

Filmed with Gilliam’s masterful hand, 12 Monkeys presents a claustrophobic underground future, yet somehow makes the then-present feel even grimmer and grimier. That’s one of his specialties, with everything he’s ever done coming together, almost knowing that the end of the world — and the end of his career due to money-hungry studio heads — was coming. —Louis Fowler

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Documentary

On the Trail of UFOs: Dark Sky (2021)

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With his Small Town Monsters label, Seth Breedlove has, well, bred a cottage industry of documentaries on all things cryptozoological and/or mythological. After features on Bigfoot and Momo: The Missouri Monster, he again watches the skies for On the Trail of UFOs: Dark Sky.

In this one, he and paranormal investigator Shannon LeGro visit the Appalachians and “hills of hollows” of West Virginia, as the Mountain State plays home to several “quintessential cases” in the lore of unidentified flying objects. Mixing clips from 1956’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and stock footage with actual interviews, Dark Sky presents firsthand accounts, hearsay accounts, “anonymous witness” accounts and even the occasional kids’ crayon drawings to present the locals’ stories of encounters both close and close enough. Among them are a diamond-shaped craft sucking energy from power lines, a sighting while playing hoops with the old man, spinning lights, flashing lights and more — all professionally recreated with first-class motion graphics. Without them, Dark Sky would feel feather-light on content.

You can practically watch the doc with a bingo card at hand with squares for all the usual-suspect terms one might hear involving UFO conspiracies and conversations: military ops, psy-ops, Mothman, men in black, Project Blue Book, Dow Chemical, WMD, FBI, CIA, NSA, mobile homes …

Not a follower of UFOs, I’m not qualified to state if On the Trail unearths anything new, but Breedlove brings a theory regarding mineshafts to the table, while an interviewee raises the question of whether aliens target families. Typical of his work, this film impresses with top-notch production value. The only drawback is in LeGro’s narration, which is halting and hesitant, as if she’s not only reading from cue cards, but reading from cue cards written in a foreign language she’s translating on the fly. Her interest and knowledge, however, are not in question.

Whether the movie plays as mere entertainment or belief reinforcement is left for you to decide. —Rod Lott

Action

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

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I had the ultimate pleasure to meet director Jack Hill in the early 2000s, when he was a at a local college campus showing a double feature that included Switchblade Sisters, a film that gained new prominence once Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures reissued it to theaters.

One of my favorite films since a rental in the early ’90s from a now long-gone video store in Oklahoma City, it was thrilling to see it on the (somewhat) big screen and even more thrilling to meet the soft-spoken man who made it, a film that he described as a modern (as modern as the ’70s can be, I suppose) take on Othello.

Switchblade Sisters tells the story of blonde Maggie (Joanne Nail, in short shorts and high-heeled boots), a streetwise teenager who, after a scuffle in a local burger bar, ends up in a girl gang called the Dagger Debs, led by Lace (Robbie Lee, who has always reminded me of a Depression-era youth). When her boyfriend, the leader of the Silver Daggers, dies, they become the Jezebels, the meanest bunch of teen troublemakers in town.

However, when high school sleaze Crabs (Chase Newhart, channeling his evil Eaglebauer) tries to take full control, the Jezebels team up with a Black militant squad led by Muff (Marlene Clark, who really should have had a spin-off flick) and take the dirty motherfucker and his boys down, by any means necessary, which, thankfully, includes plenty of machine guns.

A box-office dud upon release, Switchblade Sisters effectively killed Hill’s career, but, even watching it now, the amount of guts on display here proves that he was far ahead of his time, delivering a movie that would probably make at least good money at Redbox, capitalizing on all the things that have made movies in general great over the years: rowdy girl gangs, dark violence, black humor, Black nationalism and, I guess, Shakespeare.

Well, at least all the things I love in a movie. —Louis Fowler

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