Comedy

Mortuary Academy (1988)

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Police Academy’s success was so huge, it predictably led to a glut of slob-comedy imitators that could be pitched — and likely were — with the sentence “It’s Police Academy, but [insert training scenario here].” The best of these was arguably the screenwriters’ own Moving Violations (“at a traffic school”); the worst is a distinction among many contenders, including the leaden Mortuary Academy, appropriately late to the game.

Brothers Max and Sam Grimm are due to inherit their deceased uncle’s Grimm Mortuary & Academy (“You kill ’em, we chill ’em”) on one only-in-the-movies condition: They first must graduate from it. Having no motivation, Sam (Jocks’ Perry Lang) has nothing to lose, but Max (The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins) dreams of becoming a doctor, not an embalmer. However, once he’s rejected in short order by med schools and his pretty-but-petty girlfriend (Megan Blake, Eyeborgs), Max suddenly has no other prospects. After all, a premise is a premise!

The hallowed institution is, per the film’s not-aged-well poster, “where the dearly departed meet the clearly retarded.” Per the demands of the subgenre, it’s chock full of misfits! They include Tracey Walter (Repo Man), who “revives” dead dogs with robot technology; Stoney Jackson (Angel 4: Undercover) as the token black character — rapping, no less; and Lynn Danielson (from director Michael Schroeder’s other 1988 movie, Out of the Dark) as a good-girl love interest for Max and superfan of Radio Werewolf, a band I didn’t realize was genuine until afterward. The group’s inclusion is tied to the movie’s “Special Appearance by Wolfman Jack” — the adjective is up for debate.

In charge of the academy are Eating Raoul power couple Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel as, respectively, the nymphomaniac professor and the necrophiliac owner with eyes on keeping the brothers Grimm from taking over. Bartel also co-wrote the script with William Kelman (Beach Babes from Beyond), but the satirically dark touch Bartel is known for (baby caskets, anyone?) isn’t employed nearly enough, drowned out by the easy-lay, low-hanging fruit of sophomoric and scatological jokes. The dialogue can be so clunky, it sounds like the work of an ESL student who hasn’t stuck to the lesson plan: “Your head’s swollen with baby vomit! You listen to me, you toxic vagina!”

At least Bartel presumably penned himself into Mortuary Academy’s one good bit, in which he falls hard for — and gets “engaged” to — a deceased cheerleader (Cheryl Starbuck, Pathology). After taking her corpse to a drive-in restaurant, they have a romantic encounter on the beach à la From Here to Eternity … if Deborah Kerr were dragged out to sea while Burt Lancaster zonked out in a post-coital snooze. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Batwoman (1968)

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Na-na-na-na-na-na-Bat … woman?

On the not-so-sullen streets of Acapulco, a lone vigilante of the daylight stalks her chubby prey using a sporty convertible, a few police pals and, best of all, a lucha libre alter ego with the exact same name: the Batwoman.

When fellow wrestlers are found dead on the beach, she’s called in to help solve these crafty crimes in her very sleek and hyper-sexy costume, which is basically a black bikini with a Batman cowl; if I saw her in real life, my knees would shake, too, but probably not out of fear.

The murderers are (somewhat) evil scientists and their middle-aged henchmen, lounging in lab coats on a luxury yacht near the beach. So powerful is their supposed reign of terror, that at one point the Batwoman shows up on a much smaller speedboat, only to be told to go home … and it works!

In between chasing down leads, of course the Batwoman tears up the mat, practicing wrestling moves and lucha throws, oddly enough in an even bulkier Bat-costume — think her superhero outfit, but as a sweatsuit instead. Still, the various bouts are a great way to stretch out this already thin superhero soup.

Maura Monti, as the Batwoman, is a defiantly sensual presence who does a good job of talking down baddies and clothespinning opponents alike. It’s a strong message The Batwoman should have really gone out on, but instead, it ends with her utterly afraid of a mouse while her police pals laugh at her expense. —Louis Fowler

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Kitchen Sink

Spidora (2014)

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WTFMultiple reasons may exist for a carnival sideshow’s use of garish paintings and a curtain to curtail peeks from the ticketless, but I’m only interested in the most obvious: Because you don’t get what you pay for.

Legendary B-movie director Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) knows this; in fact, he literally wrote the book on it. Amplified by the barker’s ballyhoo, the sideshow posters outside the tent promised one thing and delivered another on the other side of the admission booth: something always lesser, often phony. For example, what was depicted as a giant spider with a human woman’s head actually would be — zut alors! — an illusion achieved by the lady sticking her head through a prop atop of a web of rope, with everything below her neck concealed.

Which brings us to Ray’s carnival-set Spidora. Its key art and tagline — hell, its very title — prime the viewer for a fanciful, “eight-legged love story” of this so-called spider woman. This is not that.

As much of a con as the shows it emulates, this is about Princess Marina, the Lobster Girl (the Amy Adams-esque Megan Sheehan), she of the claws for hands. Now, she does don a mask to moonlight as Spidora, which we get in one all-too-brief scene. But the rest? The rest is Marina and the smitten, Shakespeare-quoting suitor (Bobby Quinn Rice from Ray’s Super Shark) who’s a regular to the Museum of the Weird, Strange and the Unexpected. (Try fitting that on a ticket.)

Ray’s affection for the state-fair “freak show” is evident and reverent, given the sheer amount of coverage allotted to Marina’s act, the introductions of the top-hatted host (Jerry Lacey, TV’s Dark Shadows), the coat hanger swallower (Grindsploitation’s Krystal Pohaku) and the fire dancer (Crystal Marie) who twirls nary a tassel, but lighted wicks dangling from her pasties.

Less-exotic-sounding subject switcheroo notwithstanding, more to interested parties’ detriment is Spidora’s running time, misleadingly labeled at “Approx 90 Minutes.” That number is accurate if you include — and the Retromedia Entertainment DVD does — 1952’s notorious Chained for Life among the bonus features. Separated from that vehicle for conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, Spidora runs a pat 15 minutes, which is not enough time to achieve anything but a start. Ray may not have had the funding to expand the short into a full film, but he definitely had the story, however unexplored. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

The El Duce Tapes (2019)

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Sometimes, a great project falls into your lap. Less often, it falls into your bushes.

Yet such was the case for struggling actor Ryan Sexton (The Toxic Avenger) when, outside his apartment, he found one Eldon Wayne Hoke blackout-drunk. As Sexton soon discovered, Hoke was not only better known as El Duce, leader of shock-rock band The Mentors, but also quite a character whose wayward, doomed-for-brevity life was worthy of chronicling with a camcorder. Some two dozen VHS cassettes later, shot between 1990 and ’91, the resulting shenanigans and conversations live on as the documentary The El Duce Tapes.

Whipped into fine narrative shape by directors Rodney Ascher (Room 237) and David Lawrence, who also edits the film, The El Duce Tapes begins with a crash course in the executioner-hooded Mentors and the bald, bearded, bulky frontman who proudly salutes Hitler and more proudly brands their music as “rape rock.” His lyrics are simple yet juvenile rhymes one would expect from drunken high schoolers — to wit, “My woman from Sodom / Lets me fuck her in the bottom.”

His zeal for misogyny and white supremacy is matched by perpetual homelessness and full-blown alcoholism, resulting in not just a warts-and-all doc, but an all-warts look at the raucous L.A. club scene and the sad reality awaiting Hoke between gigs, from which he tried his best to numb. A product of abuse, Hoke admittedly spits back the kind of hatred he received growing up. While not exactly smart, he was certainly shrewd, knowing how to push PC buttons and slam them into disrepair.

Judged from a standpoint of “any publicity is good publicity,” his antics worked, landing him on the hostile stage of The Jerry Springer Show and, his lyrics, decried in U.S. Senate hearings of Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center. A decade later, with major-label backing, the likes of Marilyn Manson rode a similar strategy all the way to the bank; El Duce got no further than the welfare line. (That’s not a metaphor, either; visits to pick up his government handout are in the film.)

Although The El Duce Tapes isn’t the only documentary on this ever-colorful character and his awfully patient bandmates, Sexton strikes something akin to gold with the unfiltered rawness of his subject. It’s as if a particularly vile segment of Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization trilogy were spun off into a full, free-standing case study of the anthropologic and anarchic. On its own, Sexton’s footage would be captivating, but Ascher and Lawrence amplify it with clips of Hoke’s influences — everything from Walking Tall to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (!) — and his cultural environment, informing or reminding viewers of what was in the water — or cesspool — at the time. In the closing moments, the line they draw from Hoke to, well, today is staggering. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

A Stranger Is Watching (1982)

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To borrow a phrase from Oprah Winfrey, what I know for sure about director Sean S. Cunningham is how lucky he was to strike gold with Friday the 13th. Because having watched three of his other films recently — The New Kids, DeepStar Six and his Friday follow-up, A Stranger Is Watching — a throughline bubbled to the surface: Directing just isn’t his thing. His gift — one arguably more valuable — is commercial instincts; the creative execution is best left in the hands of others, like Wes Craven with The Last House on the Left and Steve Miner with House.

A Stranger Is Watching seals my thesis with a pat of the cement trowel. Based on a huge bestseller by Mary Higgins Clark, queen of the PTA-mom-approved thriller, the movie opens with a little girl named Julie Petersen (Shawn von Schreiber) watching from the stairs as her mother is murdered by an unknown male assistant with a hammer and point-and-shoot camera. A couple years later, Julie is living a normal life with Dad (James Naughton, The Birds II: Land’s End); Dad is getting serious with a TV anchor (Kate Mulgrew, Star Trek: Nemesis); and Mom’s supposed killer (James Russo, 1988’s Freeway), who proclaims his innocence, is about to be put to death. Then the real killer (Rip Torn, Dodgeball) shows back up to terrorize the Petersens once more.

So much of Stranger seems like it’s been grafted from Friday the 13th’s still-fresh corpse. With Friday creator Victor Miller co-writing this script, perhaps that’s to be expected. But one also can imagine the MGM executives asking Cunningham to do what he did with that smash-hit slasher, but this time for grown-ups, so you can still ventilate a throat, but don’t make it look real — just have the actor push his chin as hard as he can to his neck to hold the fake weapon in place.

And instead of a summer camp, set it at a homeless camp. And instead of the bad guy in a hockey mask, put him in Eric Von Zipper’s get-up from Beach Blanket Bingo. And instead of someone going to the restroom and being met with an ax to the face, have someone be confronted by a thug who bops in time like he’s going to burst into song. And instead of depicting people having sex, can you just have William Hickey play a bum who asks to see Rip Torn’s “pecker”? (You can have him yell “Pussy!” with each hammer blow he takes to the head; it’s okay.)

Oh, one last thing: Instead of sending chills up the spines of audience members, can you make it really, really boring?

He could and he did. Stranger’s true legacy is a move it made from page to screen: flipping the kid’s gender so the world may be introduced to von Schreiber. The girl had an empty filmography before this big debut, anchoring a feature from a major studio, and never added another. Why? It’s as if she were so good, everyone told her afterward, “Shawn, you did it! This performance can never be topped — not by you, not by anyone. You should stop acting now.” Because you can’t tell a kid like that the truth, which would be “Your acting style is completely unnatural. I ask for tears of sadness and you give me an impression of a losing struggle with a painful grumpy.”

A Stranger Is that awful. —Rod Lott

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