Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Monolith (2022)

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A disgraced journalist (Lily Sullivan, Evil Dead Rise) attempts to rebuild her career — if not her credibility — by starting Beyond Believable, an investigative podcast on unexplained events. One night, the subject for a potential first episode falls in her lap via an anonymous email. Bearing the subject line “The Truth Will Out,” it contains only a name, a phone number and a cryptic reference to a brick.

As the saying goes, curiosity killed the podcaster, so she takes the bait. A couple of calls later, she’s nose-deep in the mystery — or conspiracy? —regarding these black bricks of unknown origin and composition, and containing odd symbols inside.

One unsolicited tip is all it takes to lead her down a rabbit hole. For a good while, the same holds true for Monolith viewers as well, thanks to Sullivan’s engaging performance — all but required when you’re the lone actor onscreen. Unlike the recent, similarly themed First Time Caller, the Australian Monolith benefits from its always-on lead character not being abhorrent.

As first-time filmmakers, directory Matt Vesely and Lucy Campbell take a lot of correct steps upfront. Ultimately, their conclusion’s dogged ambiguity could work against the film’s potential life span. Sci-fi viewers don’t demand complete, lock-and-key explanations — witness The X-Files — but for Monolith to pivot so hard to the abstract after an hour of Sullivan’s methodical info-gathering feels indolent. Nevertheless, I look forward to whatever they direct their energy toward next. After all, the truth will out. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Immaculate (2024)

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As a religious-horror film, Immaculate earned my respect simply for leaning into internet commenters’ clutched-pearls cries of “evil” and “blasphemous” by using those nobodies’ quotes in its ad campaign, then doubling down with a one-day promotion for $6.66 admission. Members of the Neon marketing department, I proclaim you unholy geniuses.

Then, unlike most of the offended, I actually saw Immaculate. It retains my respect, so much so that I grant it a vow of obedience. (Poverty and celibacy, however? Let’s not go overboard.)

In Italy’s Our Lady of Sorrows, the newest nun is Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney, Madame Web), a young American woman. As Cecilia gets a tour of the 17th-century grounds and introduced to her fellow 21st-century sisters in Christ, the flick is so transparent in foreshadowing, it’s naked, e.g., “Be careful of this one. She bites.”

It’s not like things at the convent aren’t already, well, off; Cecilia’s spider-sense tingles from the outset. Then she gets pregnant, despite her iron-clad virginity. Holy calamity, scream insanity.

Some of Immaculate’s horrible happenings come as shocks, while others are so telegraphed, they’re practically stamped with the Western Union logo. And yet, even some of those shock, despite being expected. In the aforementioned tour, Cecilia’s ears perk up at a passing mention of “catacombs.” Ours do, too, knowing full well the story will near its end at this location. Sure enough, it does, but director Michael Mohan presents it like he’s leading viewers through a haunted house. It’s effective as, um, hell.  

Sweeney, a shrewd businesswoman who also produced the film, seems uneasy in the first act. How much of that is her character’s nervousness, her performance limitations or my own inability to divorce my mind from her sexualized persona in past roles and public, I cannot determine. But once the shit hits the fan — or the God seed hits her womb, so to speak — Sweeney sizzles. Particularly excellent in the birthing scene, with the lens scrunched tight on her bloodied face for what seems like unbroken minutes, she’s a raw nerve.

Arguably the movies’ highest-profile example of the nunsploitation subgenre since Ken Russell danced with The Devils in 1971, Immaculate could have wussed out. It doesn’t. I admire its commitment to middle-brow nastiness and trashiness — and more so its refusal to back down, as Mohan (reuniting with Sweeney after their erotic thriller, The Voyeurs) and first-feature scribe Andrew Lobel carry their button-pushing transgression all the way through what its literally Immaculate’s final shot.

Be careful of this one. She bites. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

The Coffee Table (2022)

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When we meet spouses Jesús (David Pareja) and Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), they’ve got a brand-new baby and are arguing over a brand-new table in a furniture store. Under the protest of his much older wife, Jesús picks one made of bronze, ivory and an “unbreakable” slab of glass. And thus begins The Coffee Table.

It sounds like a joke — the IKEA instructions-inspired opening credits sequence suggests as much — but I assure you, the poster’s phrasing of “a cruel Caye Casas film” is not a marketing conceit.

No spoilers here: A moment at the 20-minute mark will divide audiences — and not necessarily into nice, clean halves. Just as something really, really bad feels like it will happen, it does. We don’t see the horrific act; worse, we feel it.

At this point, The Coffee Table holds immense potential at becoming the darkest of dark comedies; Casas (Killing God) and his co-screenwriter, Cristina Borobia, need only go one way: all in.

But they don’t. Instead, almost apologetic at having gone so far so soon, they shift the tone into the realm of familial/relationship drama, as Jesús spends the rest of the movie trying to keeping the lid on What Transpired from Maria. Your nerves remain jangled, jarred and wracked, yes — and performances strong — but the Spanish film simply isn’t the same.

Until the ending, when Casas leaps out of the corner he’s backed himself into as everything — and I do mean everything — comes to a head. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

Black Lizard (1968)

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Although Rampo Edogawa, Japan’s answer to Edgar Allan Poe, had seen his material adapted for the screen dozens of times in his life, he died just a few years before the Golden Age kicked off. We’re talking Blind Beast, Horrors of Malformed Men and, coming first, Black Lizard, all within a year and a half. Talk about a trifecta!

One of the legendary Seven Samurai, Isao Kimura headlines this crazy crime tale as Akechi, a private detective with a lot going on. While investigating the disappearance of a corpse from a med school lab, he’s hired by the jeweler Iwasa (Jun Usami, The Vampire Doll) to protect his daughter, Sanae (Kikko Matsuoka, The Living Skeleton), at the secret go-go club where she works.

As Akechi is told, Iwasa’s been warned Sanae will be kidnapped by the mysterious Black Lizard, perhaps to get at his invaluable Star of Egypt diamond. A chloroformed rag or two later, Akechi fails his duties. Unknown to our dick, but not to our minds, is the Black Lizard’s true identity: the woman who runs the club.

Given the Black Lizard’s hunchbacked henchman, a snake-throwing henchwoman and a Sax Rohmer-ready hideout, it’s not like the movie lacks in audience appeal. But here’s where things get really interesting, because she was really a he — Akihiro Miwa, arguably Japan’s most celebrated drag queen.

For today’s viewers (who may recognize Miwa’s voice as Princess Mononoke’s Wolf Goddess), the actor’s true gender is no secret; it’s obvious as soon as his female character appears. Yet the more the Black Lizard is set up not only as Akechi’s foil, but as his potential paramour, the more I kept anticipating a proto-Crying Game reveal. To the progressive credit of director Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale), it never arrives!

Equal parts cigarette smoke and champagne effervescence, and buoyed by a score by Isao Tomita — yes, that Tomita! — Black Lizard is a real Pop Art blast from the Far East. Both informed by and showing up American pulp fiction, Fukasaku’s confection has style to burn and then some. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

Comedy

Sasquatch Sunset (2024)

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Even if you’re a such a cryptid-cinema completist that you’ve subjected yourself to the likes of Bigfoot Goes to Hell or Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper, I guarantee you’ve never encountered a Bigfoot movie quite like Sasquatch Sunset. I say this already having seen the one in which he goes hog-wild at a nudist camp, the one where his nipple inflates from excitement and the one where he tears off a urinating man’s penis.

From indie-pic iconoclasts David and Nathan Zeller (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), the film depicts a year in the life of a four-member family of skunk apes. No dialogue is spoken beyond grunts and howls as they go about their way, foraging for food and shelter, and stumbling into one strange, dangerous situation after another.

Only two bits stretched too far into sketch comedy, like mimicking humans’ cellphone usage with a turtle standing in for the tech. Otherwise, ignoring the laws of nature dictate the shenanigans. It’s as if the “Dawn of Man” prologue in 2001: A Space Odyssey were remade as a ribald comedy. Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I took first crack by opening with Kubrick’s apes masturbating; the Zellners expand that into feature-length, covering all the bases of bodily functions.

It’s filthy, funny and — not referring to bowels here — oddly, oddly moving. To say such a style will polarize audiences is an understatement. Decidedly unconventional rather than experimental, Sasquatch Sunset is likely to prompt a flood of early walkouts. Whenever I witness such a hasty response — e.g., at every Paul Thomas Anderson or David Lynch screening — I consider it a badge of honor for the film. Congrats, Zellners! You’re in excellent company.

Expertly selling the inhuman illusion, the actors disappear behind first-rate makeup and prosthetics, to such a degree that I couldn’t determine whether Jesse Eisenberg (Now You See Me) or Nathan Zellner played the patriarch. No ID issue exists with Riley Keough (2019’s The Lodge) or Christophe Zajac-Denek (Tales of Halloween), respectively being the only woman and little person among the quartet. Each is excellent, gelling as a true ensemble.

Technically, the landscape shots are stunning, thanks to Oscar-worthy cinematography from Michael Gioulakis (2019’s Us). In its sixth screen collaboration with the Zellners, The Octopus Project delivers a beautiful score that, while different from the Texas trio’s alt-electronic albums, is no less melodic.

Detest Sasquatch Sunset all you wish — and many will — but its enigmatic energy clicked with me right away. The best moment arrives in a final shot that conveys irony, craft and an otherworldly power that registers that deadpan frame as an all-time great. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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