Western

True History of the Kelly Gang (2019)

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If America had a wild west, then Australia had a fuckin’ wild west, mate, one that seems to continue in the barren outback to this very day. And like our own outlaws such as Billy the Kid or Jesse James, they have their own bloody versions as well, most notably the legendary Ned Kelly.

Having seen various on-screen incarnations of Kelly by both Mick Jagger and Yahoo Serious over the years, I’m gonna say both were heavily fabricated, while director Justin Kurzel’s apocalyptic interpretation in True History of the Kelly Gang seems closer to the real story, Oedipal subtexts and all.

In the film, Ned’s parents were a drunk and a prostitute — always a perfect recipe for a Down Under ne’er-do-well, if you ask me. His father’s inability to find the family food leads Ned to slaughter a random cow for beef, but Dad is taken away to the notorious Aussie prisons and ultimately killed there for his crime.

In need of money, Ned’s mom sells him to rotund Russell Crowe (Unhinged) — almost resembling Denver Pyle here — who promises to turn him into an outlaw and, true to form, lands him in jail within a few minutes. Growing up in the hud, Ned (George MacKay, 1917) becomes a two-fisted rabble-rouser prone to psychotic delusions of grandeur, all of which he writes in his diary, apparently the basis for this film.

Clad in women’s frocks and calling themselves the “Sons of Sieve,” this gang of proto-punks takes on the damned English one bullet at a time, leading to a final showdown with the colonial bastards where Ned dons his famous “iron man” suit, fighting the oppressors like a true hero of the people.

Gritty and grimy, dirty and dank, this anarchist retelling of the Kelly story is a steel-toed kick to a koala’s groin, giving the man’s mythology the revolutionary style it probably needed. It’s an Aussie tale of revolt and rebellion that even the Americans — on film and in real life — couldn’t compete with, and thank God for that. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Space Dogs (2019)

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Two films bear the cute and cuddly title Space Dogs. Incidentally, both are Russian; their similarities end there. One is an 2010 animated movie your preschoolers are likely to love.

The other is a documentary that will traumatize them for life. And perhaps you, too.

I chose to be enchanted. Co-directors Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter posit that the dilapidated streets of Moscow are haunted by the ghost of Laika, the stray dog that became the superstar of the Soviet Union’s space program when launched into an ill-fated orbit in 1957. To that end, their camera follows current-day strays going about their business, which entails a lot of sitting (and results in some beautifully composed shots) and scavenging for food. In one of the film’s more memorable and disturbing scenes, hungry canines murder a cat for a daytime snack.

Interspersed with this you-are-there “story” is historical footage of Laika’s mission — not just her launch, either, but the preparation the poor mongrel had to endure. Let’s just say it’s surgical and leave it at that.

With the sparsest of narration, Space Dogs is not your “normal” documentary. Lyrical and meditative, it sits snugly alongside experimental docs as 2012’s Leviathan or Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 masterwork, Koyaanisqatsi. While I remain unsure of Kremser and Peter’s ultimate point, the richness of their visuals is too striking to ignore, especially those frames shot at that time of year when the night sky takes on a purplish haze as the city lights dilute the darkness. Never has ugliness looked so beautiful. —Rod Lott

Horror

Aenigma (1987)

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If there’s one thing I love about the grotty films of Lucio Fulci, it’s no matter how terrible a flick of his might be, there are always one or two vomit-worthy scenes that tend to hellishly elevate the thing above most other horror movies. In Aenigma, there’s plenty to choose from, but I’m going to go with a schoolgirl waking up covered in slimy snails.

I know here, in digital print, it doesn’t sound like much, but visually, it’s truly a waking nightmare of slithering special effects.

One of Fulci’s later films, he dutifully takes the worst elements of movies like Patrick, Carrie and Phenomena to make a film that, while not better, is definitely a lot more fun than any of those. Over the strains of a terrible attempt at a pop song, a young girl has a date with the hot gym teacher. Before anybody questions the morals, it turns out to be a bloody joke and she ends up in a coma.

Around that same time, horny new girl Eva (Lara Naszinski) show up at a Boston school for girls and she might be possessed by the bullied student who likes to manifest herself over a famed poster of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. From a head decapitated by a window to a Renaissance statue coming to life and choking a girl, the grotesque deaths keep piling up and how.

But, now that I think about it, even more disturbing than the traumatic snail death is the constant rotation of prepubescent strange the older men hanging around campus seem to be getting all up in — most notably, the gym teacher and the hospital doctor who, when at the school, wears a sweater that reads “University.”

The illicit intercourse, along with the splatter-filled set pieces Fulci (Demonia) was best known for, the only thing that truly remains an enigma to me is how to pronounce the fleetingly pretentious title. Eh-nigma? Augh-nigma? Augh-eh-nigma? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Rent-a-Pal (2020)

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One of the more memorable sketches in 1987’s Amazon Women on the Moon comes right before the end credits: A lonely guy named Ray comes home from the video store with an unusual rental: a personalized, POV tape of a super-foxy sex bomb who speaks directly to the camera, dropping his name as she drops her clothes and writhes in bed. Now, expand those five minutes by about 2,000%, don’t play them for laughs, swap the intercourse for conversation — well, most of it — and you have Rent-a-Pal.

Set in the dawn of the 1990s, Rent-a-Pal gives us a grim look at David (Brian Landis Folkins, The Creep Behind the Camera), a middle-aged beta male in dire need of a companion. Living as a stereotype in the basement of his elderly, invalid mother’s home, he tries video dating, but finds no interested parties. In a moment of despair, he purchases a VHS tape titled Rent-a-Pal from the bargain bin. Its tagline reads, “Meet your new best friend, ‘Andy.’ He talks to you, he listens to you, he understands you.”

They forgot “He manipulates you.”

As played against type by Stand by Me’s Wil Wheaton, Andy asks questions to the watcher, followed by pauses of silence as if listening. For the socially deprived David, it’s enough. He plays the tape until he wears out the heads — and wears on our nerves — because he craves the attachment, however artificial.

Or is it? Because when David finally meets a woman (Amy Rutledge, Neighbor) who appreciates his company, and vice versa, Andy doesn’t like becoming the proverbial third wheel and makes his opinion known. What writer and first-time director Jon Stevenson does best is not revealing how much of what Andy says comes from the tape or David’s head, leaving it to us to discern. Their friendship is warped and increasingly disturbing, qualifying David for membership in the same cinematic losers’ league as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle or Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom — initially sympathetic characters who test our loyalty as they slide down the spray-butter-slippery slope of deteriorating mental health.

From the start, Folkins earns viewers’ pity, then disdain as he starts screwing up his clear chance at the happiness eluding him for so long. Rutledge is terrific in what is essentially the Rosemarie DeWitt role of the voice of reason, and Wheaton terrifying as either the puppet master behind David’s actions or David’s imagined scapegoat for such. You be the judge. With humor as dark as its tension, Rent-a-Pal isn’t trying to win friends or influence people; the right people will click with its message and see how eerily it holds true today, subbing one technological advance for another. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Split Second (1992)

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Of all the sci-fi flicks to rip-off, filled with a lone alien, multiple guttings, large explosions and little to no story, one of the best is Predator. But, thinking outside that pine box, Split Second decided to go a different route and do Predator 2. Well, okay.

Sometime in the near future — and now far past! — Great Britain of 2008, prescient global warming has turned the isles into one big, dirty swimming pool. Puffy Rutger Hauer is burnt-out cop Harley Stone, a foreign-exchange officer who lives on chocolates, coffee and the long-lasting regret of his partner dying at the hands of a 10-foot-tall beast with a taste for human hearts. But can you blame him?

Armed with psychic powers left unexplored, he’s partnered with pencil-pushing nerd Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan). This mismatched duo slogs through a soggy England with generous hand cannons and shotguns, trying to protect the vapid Kim Cattrall from what turns out to be a rat-loving, tide-drenched version of Satan, here an ineffectual representation of absolute evil, but a great clone of a Xenomorph.

Also, at one point, Stone refers to a dog as a “dickhead” and then questions it as the witness to a murder in a nightclub that rock legend Ian Dury runs. Maybe that should have been the movie …

For years, I mistook this flick for the Dolph Lundgren favorite I Come in Peace (“You go in pieces …”), like a cinematic idiot. And while I was sure I would be disappointed by this, I happy to report that Split Second is unapologetic in its constant writhing in wet trash, an art form that only Tony Maylam, director of the equally trashy The Burning, could ever achieve. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

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