Horror

Blood Rage (1987)

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For the ideal Thanksgiving-themed horror film, watch Blood Freak. Then, if you have room for seconds, go for Blood Rage. It tops your relatives’ at-the-table political bickering with the lead character dropping this bon mot: “Looks like you’re gonna get a chance to meet the rest of the family. My psychotic brother just escaped. Could you pass the green beans, please?”

That plot-establisher comes from the mouth of Terry (Mark Soper, The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II), who, 10 years prior, hacked a guy to death at a drive-in movie and blamed it on his twin brother, Todd, who was instantly rendered catatonic upon witnessing the murder. Now grown up and living in mental institution, Todd (also Soper, but with messier hair) remembers the details, throws a fistful of pumpkin pie in frustration and flies the coop to make things right.

Todd’s unannounced homecoming coincides with Thanksgiving dinner, where the boys’ mom (Louise Lasser, Frankenhooker) announces her engagement at dinner. It’s enough to make a jealous son lash out — but which one? Knowing a killer is on the loose (if not his true identity) at the apartment complex, what do Terry and his teen pals do? Oh, just hang out, go here and there, play video games, fuck on diving boards — that sort of thing.

Not always the case for slasher movies, Blood Rage makes good on its title, as director John Grissmer graduates from Scalpel to machete, cooking up a cornucopia of dismemberment and decapitation from which his camera never shies. As the crazed sibling puts it, “That isn’t cranberry sauce, Artie. That is not cranberry sauce.”

Meanwhile, Lasser, collecting a day’s pay in Shirley Temple curls, mostly sits on a couch or the kitchen floor. As she utters early in the film, “Well, I say this big bird is ready for carving.” Couldn’t agree more, Louise! Happy Thanksgiving! —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Bad CGI Sharks (2019)

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With just $6,257.34, Bad CGI Sharks does what the underwhelming fin-fronted film The Meg couldn’t do with $130 million: Be incredibly entertaining.

Matt (Matthew Ellsworth) loses his office job when he loses his cool, thanks to receiving after-the-fact news that Mom and Dad have shipped his no-good older brother to California to live with him. Embodying oil to Matt’s water, Jason (Jason Ellsworth) is a perpetually unemployed, possibly lobotomized man-child with a phallic man bun and a lofty dream on which, unlike his buttoned-up bro, he never gave up: to “make it” in Hollywood by finishing Sharks Outta Water, the 15-year-old screenplay they started writing — in longhand, of course — as kids.

Enter our Ricardo Montalban-sounding narrator, the mischievous Bernardo (a scene-stealing Matteo Molinari, The Silence of the Hams), whose magical director’s clapboard makes people’s movie ideas come to life. (Yeah, yeah — don’t ask. Just enjoy.) Suddenly, cheap-looking sharks are floating through Matt’s neighborhood and seeking human-sized snacks. So what if the creatures sometimes suffer rendering glitches while on the hunt?

Effectively writing, directing, producing and editing Bad CGI Sharks as a musketeer-thick trio, Molinari and the Ellsworth siblings turn many a shark flick’s deficiency into their primary selling point, and I’ve got to hand it to them: It’s kinda genius. The guys go so meta, they not only break the fourth wall, but ruin the soil around it so a fifth cannot be constructed. If you find the propulsive drum-and-bass score of the chase scenes self-aware, wait for the chat-show intermission at the one-hour mark.

Although not every actor in their unpaid cast is quite in lockstep, Ellsworth/Molinari/Ellsworth demonstrate a firm grasp on the rhythms of film comedy, both in camera and on the page, resulting in a knowing parody that earns each of its many laughs. Sharksploitation has never looked this good looking this bad. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Häxan (1922)

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Certain films feel more like a devilish fever dream than an actual movie made by human hands; the silent film Häxan is definitely one of those wholly unholy flicks.

Filled with the most satanic of imagery this side of heaven, this Swedish silent film — purported to be a historical study of witchcraft — opens with at least two full acts of drawings and woodcuts as the title cards tell the malicious tale of fiendish covens that gather in the middle of the darkest night to give Beelzebub a gentle kiss on his pert bottom, as well as other diabolically sexy goings-on.

And, as interesting as all of that is, Häxan earns its demonic name from the spooky reenactments that feature, of course, ol’ Nick Scratch and his dirty little pranks on poor humans, such as dumping gold coins all over an impoverished woman’s bed. What a dick!

But really, it’s the story of the Inquisition and the holy men who led it that is perhaps the most frightening part of this film. Like a malevolent game of telephone, the trail of witches and their accusers is as long as the Prince of Darkness’ curled tail; the various medieval torture techniques are also displayed here to cringeworthy effect, many looking far too real.

With the Dark Lord essayed by director Benjamin Christensen himself, he seems to have cast the most destitute and elderly of Sweden as the tortured fools of the tumultuous time, bleary-eyed, scab-covered and missing most of their teeth. It’s a haunting recitation of evil — or what they, at that moment, thought was evil, including the woefully disturbed and sadly handicapped.

If you are averse to silent films, however, in 1968 Häxan was re-released as Witchcraft Through the Ages, an edited version which manages to be even creepier, thanks to William S. Burroughs’ cronish narration and an absolutely unsettling score by Jean-Luc Ponty. Now you can’t tell me that the archfiend didn’t have a hand in that … —Louis Fowler

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Thriller

The New Kids (1985)

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With their parents perishing in a car wreck, military-base teens Loren (Shannon Presby, Trackdown: Finding the Goodbar Killer) and Abby MacWilliams (Lori Loughlin, Back to the Beach) move to Florida to live with their slovenly Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones, Invasion U.S.A.). They earn their keep by helping get his decrepit, two-bit amusement park, Santa Funland, off the ground.

They earn something else, too: the ire of the local gang of high school hick thugs, led by the drug-dealing Dutra (James Spader, Avengers: Age of Ultron), all for one unreasonable reason: Abby won’t go out with them. Outraged at this affront to their rapey overtures, Dutra and his fellow detritus pledge to make the MacWilliams siblings pay — quite literally with their lives, after a couple rounds of garden-variety vandalism fail to convince Abby to put out. It all culminates as the viewer would hope: on the after-hours grounds of Santa Funland, with the villains using shotguns and our heroes using jerry-rigged carnival rides.

This late left turn into terror shouldn’t surprise anyone, seeing how The New Kids is directed by Sean S. Cunningham, he of the landmark slasher Friday the 13th. Now, James Spader is no Jason Voorhees, which is to say that while the former’s villainous turn failed to achieve the latter’s icon status, the actor is absolutely slimy to the point of serpentine — a petulant, entitled alpha male whose assholiness resonates even more today with a realism the supernatural slayer Jason can’t even hope to match (not that he would).

As intense as Spader is, treating the B movie as A material (as was his wont), Presby is nearly as magnetic – a surprise since The New Kids marks his film debut, and doubly a surprise since he never did another. In fact, his acting career — all four years of it — ended with the ’85 calendar. Slow-motion shots of his athleticism aside, presumably to showcase his package, Presby has more presence than his ultimately famous screen sister. Among the supporting cast in too-small parts are Eric Stoltz (Anaconda) as a super-dweeb and Tom Atkins (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) as the ill-fated MacWilliams patriarch.

Cunningham’s instincts have always been stronger as producer than director, so he seems mostly disinterested in Stephen Gyllenhaal’s script until the finale places him back within his comfort zone. Viewers will not only sense it, but may think likewise. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979)

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Cinema of the ’70s gave us a whole litany of cool characters to cheer for, from John Shaft to Han Solo; for me, however, one of the coolest characters has always been a smart-mouthed teen who not only blew up her high school in the name of rock and roll, but got the Ramones to play while doing it.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to top Riff Randall in Rock ’n’ Roll High School …

Riff Randall (P.J. Soles) is a punk-rocking teen — at least as punk rock as Roger Corman was probably willing to go in 1979 — who hates her school and loves the Ramones, regularly staging lunchtime rock riots as the jocks and the stoners and the nerds all groove together in a true rainbow coalition of high school unity, minus the freshmen, of course.

It’s a tenuous bond that only solidifies once totalitarian principal Ms. Togar (Mary Woronov) is put in charge of Vince Lombardi High, cracking down on any and all of the school’s mostly rebellious trouble-starters, including the music of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky. This extends to the big Ramones concert where Riff publicly gives the “Hey-ho, let’s go!” to Togar’s fascistic rule of order.

Originally called Disco High — an idea that, truth be told, I would have loved to have seen as well — this Allan Arkush-directed production, while maybe not the best film of the time, it definitely is the coolest in a long time; the combo of Soles and the Ramones have a lot to do with that, but co-stars Woronov, Dey Young and, of course, Clint Howard, are the pepperoni on the pizza that makes it so damn tasty.

The soundtrack is tops as well, filled with plenty of blitzkrieging Ramones boppers — all the hits are here, kids — as well as tunes by artists as (somewhat) diverse as the Brownsville Station, Devo, Nick Lowe and Brian Eno, making appearances; Chuck Berry, the true king of rock and roll, is somewhere in their, too, as he really should be. Hail, hail, rock and roll!  —Louis Fowler

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