Kitchen Sink

Big Leaguer (1953)

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WTFSpring is here, and with the sights and sounds of rebirth — flowers blooming, birds chirping, anxious masses clamoring for vaccinations — come thoughts of baseball … well, at least if you happen to be a baseball fan. Any buff of the once-upon-a-time national pastime can rattle off their favorite baseball pictures, but how many know 1953’s Big Leaguer?

As light as a Wiffle ball and as pleasantly bland as a box of Cracker Jack, Big Leaguer marks a curious debut for director Robert Aldrich, who would go on to make some of the cruelest pictures of the 1950s and ’60s, including Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen. But constrained by a modest budget and cliché-riddled screenplay, Aldrich let his decidedly less misanthropic side out to play.

To play ball, specifically. The setting is a Florida training camp for the New York Giants, where former third baseman John “Hans” Lobert, played by Edward G. Robinson, has the task of shepherding through a crop of 17- to 22-year-olds – none of whom, by the way, look younger than 28 — harboring big-league dreams.

But it feels petty to quibble about a dearth of age-appropriate actors — or a notable lack of Black baseballers, for that matter — when there is a bounty of stock characters. The prospects include wisecracking Julie (William Campbell), cocky pitcher Bobby (Richard Jaeckel) and gangly nice guy Tippy (Bill Crandall), who is living in the shadow of his ex-first baseman father. Vaguely patronizing comic relief is provided by Chuy (Lalo Rios), a friendly Cuban forever consulting his trusty book of English translation.

The most promising athlete of all is handsome Adam Polachuk (minor leaguer-turned-actor Jeff Richards), but the West Virginian’s near-constant brooding hints at deeper secrets. “From the moment he hit camp with the other kids,” says our sports reporter narrator (Paul Langton), “he was what the folks in baseball call a loner.” As coincidence would have it, even us laypeople know what a loner is. Hans’ pretty niece, Christy (Vera-Ellen), strikes up a romance with Adam and offers tough love to her beau.

Will Hans find that talented rookie who will have them cheering at the Polo Grounds? Will Tippy step out from the shadow of his dad? Will Adam cheer the eff up? Big Leaguer breaks no new ground, but its breezy disposition and hokey-but-agreeable tropes feel as warm and snug as a favorite catcher’s mitt. Robinson gets a chance to swing a bat and wax philosophically, stopping a card game to muse on what it means to be 18. “When you’re 18, you’re tomorrow morning,” Hans muses, gazing off into the distance. “You’re the world giving yourself another chance.”

Even Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell pops up for a cameo. Keep your expectations at double-A level and Big Leaguer is a ground rule double. —Phil Bacharach

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Cosmoball (2020)

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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

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Aquaslash (2019)

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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

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

Come Play With Me (1977)

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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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Action

Russian Raid (2020)

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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

Get it at Amazon.

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