Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The McPherson Tape (1989)

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One of the earliest found-footage movies, if not the earliest, Dean Alioto’s no-budget The McPherson Tape purports to document one family’s encounter with extraterrestrials on an evening in the fall of 1983. Despite the title, this clan’s surname isn’t McPherson, but Van Heese. The night that changes their life happens to coincide with their celebration of a girl’s fifth birthday, thereby accounting for the constant use of the video camera.

The Tape’s strongest suit is that the cast members interact like a real family would at a paper-plate supper — gentle ribbing, overlapping conversations and all. Other than the two brothers — our ostensible leads — we witness more normal human behavior than we do acting. But — and this is rhetorical — how exciting is watching normal human behavior?

After that interminable dinner, unusual lights through the windows prompt the brothers to wander through the woods to see what’s what. From a distance, they spot a couple of alien life forms stepping off a landed spacecraft, or, in the words of one of the Van Heese boys, “a Martian or shit or somethin’!” Rightly fearing for their lives, they hightail it back to the house … until they decide to go back outside again. Among a power failure and the siblings hauling a dead alien inside (without affording us a glimpse), the family plays Go Fish and the matriarch voices her desire to watch Johnny Carson.

And so it goes (and goes and goes and …) until the literal last shot, when something interesting finally happens, giving us our first good look at the space invaders. It’s a letdown, however, because it’s nothing you can’t see answering the door every Oct. 31. An anal probe would elicit more emotion. In 1998, for Dick Clark Productions and the late, not-so-great UPN network, Alioto remade The McPherson Tape as Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County with less believability, but more tension and action, not to mention actual characters named McPherson. —Rod Lott

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Action

The Great Escape (1963)

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There once was a time when Hollywood made moving pictures for our two-fisted fathers and four-fisted grandfathers, solid men who slugged it out with Nazi beasts overseas like they were on the cover of a damn paperback novel. And perhaps the best movie to come from this lost era is the nail-spittin’ POW flick The Great Escape.

Based on the rousing true story, a daring team of Allied soldiers — mainly British — are stuck behind the walls of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III. Built especially for those captured servicemen who had been wasting Germany’s precious time and valuable resources with their constant escape attempts, it was supposed to be inescapable.

But with a camp full of hardened men who have only one thing on their minds — freedom — this crew comes up with an ingenious plan to get out at least 250 soldiers by digging three tunnels, right under the noses of the Germans. But you can make sure those kraut bastards are going to make them work for it every step of the way.

With Steve McQueen in a star-making role as Hilts, a captain with a bad attitude and good motorcycle skills, The Great Escape is well over three hours, but doesn’t feel like it, thanks to director John Sturges’ ability to make James Clavell and W.R. Burnett’s script constantly filled with chest hair-riddled action from start to finish.

Co-starring James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Donald Pleasence — to name a few — this is, for me at least, one of the best films ever made, the kind that couldn’t be made today … but thank God they made it yesterday. —Louis Fowler

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Mystery

The Killer Is One of Thirteen (1973)

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Two years after her spouse’s suspicious death, Lisa Mandel (Patty Shepard, My Dear Killer) invites a dozen friends and family members to spend the weekend at her spacious country estate. As only happens in the movies, no one’s calendar holds a conflict, so everybody shows up. Why has she gathered them? To find out which one of them murdered her husband! What’s on the menu? Exposition!

In classic Agatha Christie fashion, every guest has a motive; Lisa simply needs time on her dime to suss out the culprit among the parlor of suspects. Also in classic Agatha Christie fashion, that task becomes markedly easier as they begin dying — but not until after the one-hour mark, oddly enough. You could call this Spanish-language film And Then There Were Ninguna. Croquet is played; “elegant gigolos” are discussed; affairs are consummated; allegations are hurled. Eventually, one of them sticks.

Featuring Paul Naschy in a small role as part of Mrs. Mandel’s help, The Killer Is One of Thirteen comes from Javier Aguirre in the same productive year he and Naschy collaborated on Count Dracula’s Great Love and Hunchback of the Morgue. Although by no means a bust, this project is the least of the three, with Aguirre unable to crack the code of how to handle such an expansive cast; we get to know only a few characters — and barely at that, with the possible exception of Shepard’s widow — while others don’t even register from scene to scene. The film is no great mystery, but we’ll call it good enough. —Rod Lott

Horror

Dance Macabre (1992)

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Behind the camera of Dance Macabre stands a trifecta of 20th-century cinematic cheese in director Greydon Clark and producers Menahem Golan and Harry Alan Towers, so it’s a shame this Russia-lensed terror tale is more Limburger than Parmesan.

In what originally was intended as a sequel to his 1989 turn as The Phantom of the Opera, Robert Englund stars as Anthony Wager, famed choreographer of the fabled Madame Gordenko’s ballet academy. For the school’s inaugural class of students from outside the Iron Curtain, rebellious American teen Jessica (Michelle Zeitlin) is enrolled, to whom Anthony takes a great liking because she resembles his late, beloved Svetlana. As for Madame Gordenko, well, she’s bound to a wheelchair and (apparently) sunglasses, and speaks using a throat harmonica.

To the surprise of no one, Anthony’s rising interest in Jessica is inversely proportional to the school’s student population — why, it’s almost as if someone is trying to eliminate the competition so she can cop the top spot by default! Also to the surprise of no one, those kills come rather rote and unimaginative — something one can’t say about the dialogue, which is so bewildering it sounds like Clark had his script translated into Russian, then translated back into English and shot that version; to wit, “Do you want to get wet with me? Do you like bubbles?”

Do you like Dario Argento’s Suspiria? Because in setting and premise, but nothing else, Dance Macabre is indebted to that horror classic — and I mean a lot, as in the-mob-will-come-to-break-your-legs a lot. In something of a cosmic interest payment, Clark presages an element of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake by — spoiler alert, although it should be evident from the trailer — having Englund bend gender to also play Gordenko. While the makeup is unconvincing, it adds a touch of the perverse to a dull film lacking originality and energy. —Rod Lott

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Action

Bad Boys for Life (2020)

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It’s May and the only film released in 2020 I’ve seen in an actual theater has been Bad Boys for Life; at this rate, I’m thinking it could take Best Picture at next year’s Academy Awards.

And, even if it did happen, I really wouldn’t be mad because, for all intents and purposes, this third film in the Bad Boys series — set some 15 or so years later — is the buddy-cop film I’ve been patiently waiting for since, at the very least, Bad Boys 2.

Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) are the two titular bad boys of the Miami PD, wrecking cars and blowing up shit, throwing out comedic bon mots with every act of public destruction. The fun comes to an end, however, when, during a fun footrace, Lowery is shot at point-blank range by an enterprising cartel heir on a black motorcycle.

It turns out that, before he was a bad boy, Lowery was an undercover boy, working with a government agency to go deep undercover as a Mexican drug lord’s lover. That mujer (Kate del Castillo, pigeonholing herself) is mad as hell, having spent decades in jail; now she’s a bruja out for bloody revenge that takes the duo — as well as a squad of younger bad people — to Mexico where life is, apparently, cheap.

Taking the high-speed reins from Michael Bay — who cameos as a wooden wedding guest — directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah have got his patented blueprint down for this type of over-the-top film which, really, is pretty basic by now; thankfully, they’ve added plenty of their own stolen touches, obviously inspired by the Fast & Furious flicks.

With a fourth film in the works, my only complaint is they really should have saved this title for the next one, the “for” a stylized number 4: Bad Boys 4 Life … I think it works, right? —Louis Fowler

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