Sci-Fi & Fantasy

7 Guardians of the Tomb (2018)

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When her estranged brother vanishes while looking for life-extending pharmaceuticals in an abandoned mine in the Chinese desert, venomous animal expert Dr. Jia Le (Li Bingbing, The Meg) joins a team to find him. Leading the charge is the brother’s boss (Kelsey Grammer, The Expendables 3), co-founder of the biotech firm for which the siblings’ father was CEO. As if Grammer’s presence weren’t off-putting enough, Kellan Lutz (The Legend of Hercules) is on hand as the search-and-rescue expert.

After the team members encounter dried-out livestock at ground level and manage to outrun a lightning storm, they descend into the mine — actually a series of secret tunnels from an ancient emperor’s underground palace. There they find the movie’s raison d’être: spiders genetically engineered to breed and kill — and, per the closed captioning, “chitter.”

7 Guardians of the Tomb is a Chinese-funded production helmed by Australia’s Kimble Rendall, the former founding Hoodoo Guru whose 3D sharksploitation effort, 2012’s Bait, is not dissimilar in spirit, but boasts less convincing effects. That the CGI spiders don’t look as “added in post” as expected is one of 7 Guardians’ two strongest points; the other is that Rendall doesn’t skimp on them, with spiders small, medium and big-ass crawling all over his film’s frames and cast members.

But one cannot depend on all that arachnageddon alone, which is why a heavy dullness soon sets in. Overwhelming crudity drags the proceedings down to such a level of Syfy silliness that not even Grammer’s hammy God-complex speechifying can distract from it, no matter how loudly he yells. —Rod Lott

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Sex

Shining Sex (1977)

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Within the first few minutes of Shining Sex, we find Jess Franco’s muse Lina Romay (Revenge in the House of Usher) plumping up her breasts and vagina to a tune that sounds like Procol Harum’s Matthew Fisher jamming on the Hammond. As her bare pubis humps the heck out of some shag carpeting, an emotionless couple admires her with dead eyes, inviting her over for the night.

Once there, Lina and the couple spend long periods of time mostly tongue kissing and rubbing nipples, all shown in extremely long and lugubrious detail. As she shakily orgasms after being penetrated by a small porcelain hand, Franco himself shows up miles away as a handicapped scientist babbling on about “hearing things.”

Between travelogues of Spanish castles and other beautiful scenes of the European countryside, after getting mystical lotion rubbed on her nude body, Lina is apparently possessed by some sort of “superior force” from another dimension which, of course, leads to even more loose and languid sex, the only true excitement coming from a constantly moaning Franco.

It’s a somewhat intriguing screenplay that probably could have been fleshed out — no pun intended — a bit more, but then I remembered this was Franco and we’re lucky we got this much of a story. Essentially a vehicle to show off Lina’s constantly spread genitalia, it’s films like this that make it hard — so to speak — to truly dislike a filmmaker like Franco. —Louis Fowler

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Mystery

City in Panic (1986)

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I’m old enough to remember the fear of AIDS that gripped America — so irrationally hysterical that when Rock Hudson’s HIV-positive status became public, headlines worried whether Linda Evans was next, given the two shared a kiss on an episode of Dynasty. It was a different time — one in which your parents and teachers told you not to utilize public fountains or toilet seats, lest you catch “the gay cancer,” too.

From this frenzied climate a year later emerged City in Panic, a bargain-basement Canadian whodunit originally titled The AIDS Murders until someone realized naming a mystery after its solution maybe wasn’t the wisest of choices.

Also not a great idea: Having your protagonist be a preening cad. FM101 talk-show host Dave Miller (David Adamson, Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman) pretentiously yammers on and on with callers about the string of serial murders plaguing Toronto. Curiously, freshman director Robert Bouvier (Avenging Warriors) moves the camera moves around Dave just as Oliver Stone’s would do to Eric Bogosian two years later in Talk Radio. Whereas Talk Radio crackled with electricity, City in Panic is a weak joy buzzer.

As Dave spouts his tired rants on air (“Bullshit has no conscience!”), he smokes, plays darts, reads comics and toys around with RC cars and robots — each endearing him even less to us, the viewers. We’re stuck with him, just as he’s stuck with his journalistic nemesis, a Truman Capote-esque gossip columnist (one-timer Peter Roberts). You’ll wish Bouvier would spend more time with the murderer, dubbed by the press as “M” for leaving that letter carved into victims’ skin. With dark sunglasses and a buttoned-up trenchcoat, “M” looks not unlike the darker half of Spy vs. Spy and definitely has a type; see if you can figure it out from these dead people:
• a male bodybuilder
• a banana-hammock stripper
• a guy who patronizes public steam baths
• a security guard who sticks his dick through a bathroom-stall glory hole

Yes, you’re on the right track. In offensiveness, City in Panic doesn’t even approach William Friedkin’s Cruising, but its easily guessed twist and shot-for-shot recreation of Psycho’s legendary shower scene help ensure it’s not going to be crowned Mr. Congeniality, either. Cheaper-looking than the similarly plotted Massage Parlor Murders!, the movie sounds even worse, with music overpowering dialogue as if everything were recorded on one track, which is likely the case. That flatness fits the single dimension exhibited by the actors.

FM101’s chipper receptionist may put it best: “Weird show, Dave.” —Rod Lott

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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

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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

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