Kitchen Sink

The Assistant (2019)

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WTFFresh from a well-deserved Emmy win for the Netflix crime series Ozark, Julia Garner faces arguably more dangerous territory in — and as — The Assistant, set entirely within one workday. As the lowest rung of a Miramax-esque film company in New York City, her Mary stays busy making copies, fielding phone calls, washing dishes, balancing checks and fetching water — glass-bottled, of course. Across the movie’s 87 minutes, we watch her perform so many menial tasks, you may feel like you deserve three hours’ internship credit.

Most of The Assistant is as dull as Mary’s day, until signs of her boss – who’s heard but never seen — become more common. He’s the film’s ersatz Harvey Weinstein, a blustery, berating bully apparently more interested in chasing tail rather than talent. As Mary navigates this toxic environment, culminating in a futile meeting with an HR representative (Matthew Macfadyen, 2010’s Robin Hood), her soul slowly deflates like a balloon days after the party, air seeping from Garner’s perpetually sour pucker. Yet nothing really happens, in terms of story.

Unconventional documentarian Kitty Green makes her narrative debut with The Assistant, yet the pulse of her previous project, Casting JonBenet, cannot be located. Her film may have nailed the #MeToo timing, but is itself something of a quiet slog. In keeping the audience from hearing (except in select occasions) the other end of the movie’s many phone conversations, which constitute a good chunk of dialogue, Green keeps the viewer from engaging with her material. It’s an odd directorial choice — one I respect, although don’t necessarily like.

Make no mistake: The Assistant is not the finely tuned workplace thriller it’s expertly sold to be. Its themes of sexual harassment will attract the curious, only to yield wildly mixed results: cathartic for a few, a horror show to a few more, and baffling to most everyone else. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Hot Dog … the Movie (1984)

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In many sports, a “hot dog” is typically a nickname for a skillful show-off, but, in context of the ski-slope sex comedy Hot Dog … the Movie, I’m pretty sure it means penis … the movie!

It’s the loose story of Harkin (Patrick Houser), a farm boy with high hopes to win an international skiing competition, coached by an American horndog in Tahoe, Dan (An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton). While learning the ins and outs of the slopes, Harkin also takes time for some ins and outs with the female clientele, most namely Shannon Tweed (Possessed by the Night) in a scene that really should have been included as one of the AFI’s 100 Masturbatory Moments.

In between the skillfully shot sequences of downhill racing and snowbound ballet, there’s also less-skillfully shot wet T-shirt contests, sexual spa antics and a ski-lift blowie or two — I guess for the nonsporty dudes who can’t get off on every twisting helicopter or spread eagle attempted on that fresh powder.

Speaking of powder, I really hope everyone involved was on some primo cocaine during the filming of this, most notably writer Mike Marvin and director Peter Markle. By the grace of God, they took about 15 minutes of actual film and stretched it into an overlong 99 minutes, just by adding plenty of softcore sex, slalom six-packs and a few somewhat rocking songs about love being at the top of a mountain — something I’m sure we all can identify with. —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

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I vaguely remember, as a child, watching a creepy French movie about a child who undergoes immediate baldness and somehow ends up in a slavery ring. In the pre-internet age, however, I was not able to find it and eventually chocked it up to being some sort of a spooky fever dream.

So imagine my surprise when, right there in my mailbox, the French-Canadian film The Peanut Butter Solution shows up, bringing back all of those disturbing memories and, upon actually viewing it, giving me even stranger new ones.

Living in a bizarre, French-influenced town with a depressed-artist father and an Electra-complexed sister, young Billy (Michael Hogan) wakes up one morning to find his hair has completely fallen out. After numerous taunts and barbs from his soccer teammates on the field, as he sleeps, an immolated homeless couple shows up and gives him a nasty recipe for a hair tonic.

As Billy mixes and drinks the titular solution, he begins to grow long luxurious locks. His Asian friend, Connie (Siluck Saysanasy), also uses the formula, but on his pubic area, which is slightly uncomfortable.

The fact, however, that it causes his hair to grow to ridiculous lengths isn’t the weird part; it’s that his art teacher is actually a psychotic brushmaker who has kidnapped most of the neighborhood kids and put them to work in an underground sweatshop manufacturing said brushes.

As I viewed the Solution, I could feel that sense of nocturnal uneasiness come back and disturb me — perhaps even worse this time, as it’s now viewed with adult eyes — but maybe it’s that slight terror that makes some of the best kiddie fare to revisit, especially as a young Celine Dion belts out tunes about the power of being young over the end credits. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

The Lodge (2019)

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One otherwise sunny afternoon, Richard (Ocean’s Eight’s Richard Armitage) deserves a World’s Worst Estranged Husband award for telling his wife he wants to finalize their divorce and marry his new girlfriend — a one-two punch of info that drives the spouse to suicide. Six months later, over Christmas vacation, he earns a World’s Worst Dad trophy to add to that hypothetical mantle by forcing his two kids to spend time in their snow-covered mountain cabin with said girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough, Logan Lucky), and then leaving them with her for a few days.

Not only is Grace a stranger, but they blame her for their mom’s death. Furthermore, they know she’s literally a psychopath, being the daughter of a Christian cult leader (played by her real-life dad, Danny) whose members killed themselves in a mass suicide à la Heaven’s Gate. Only Grace, befitting of her name, survived, yet bears heavy emotional scars, all of which Keough rightly and consistently plays in the key of dour.

What begins to happen in The Lodge once Richard temporarily vacates is best left to audiences to discover on their own. More eerie than scary, the picture marks just the second narrative feature for the Austrian duo of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, following up the acclaimed twin terrors of Goodnight Mommy. This one is even better; call it Goodnight Stepmommy-to-Be. Just when you think Franz and Fiala are pulling pages from their 2014 film for recycling, the course of events changes wildly, and viewers might not be willing to follow if the actors weren’t so good.

Keough is, in particular, excellent, but let’s not diminish the two other equally tricky roles of Richard’s children, played by Jaeden Martell (Knives Out) and Lia McHugh (Along Came the Devil). They interact like real siblings, with McHugh believably conveying grief for which Martell, in turn, provides the big-brother support she needs. And far from Clueless, Alicia Silverstone is terrific in a brief appearance that neither requires nor allows her to lean on her trademark charm.

As was the case with Goodnight Mommy, one important character goes unbilled: architecture. Franz and Fiala build so many shots starting from that foundation, giving The Lodge a touch of delicate elegance even in its darkest corners. Their compositions are crisp and symmetrical, much like the microscopic snowflake of this arthouse horror’s poster. —Rod Lott

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Action

Jake Speed (1986)

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Remo Williams and Mack Bolan are the two biggest names in men’s paperback fiction and have been for decades. We’re politely asked, however, to add another adventurer to this roster: Jake Speed.

Sure, I guess.

When her sister is kidnapped by some dirty white slavers, Margaret (Karen Kopkins), on the advice of her senile grandfather, seeks out the help of pulp hero Speed (Wayne Crawford, God’s Bloody Acre). With the help of his typist, Desmond (Dennis Christopher), they head to a stereotypical African country beseeched by civil war and, even worse, unclean showers.

After stopping for a drink in a bar where an African band plays a delicious cover of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac,” they find her sister in a fortified jungle villa, kept prisoner by the vicious Sid (John Hurt); it’s at this point when the film truly becomes pulp fiction instead of pop parody, with Hurt squeezing every bit of scum out of his detestable villain.

I remember when this flick came out in the summer of ’86. I confused the hero for many months with the also-recently released Big Trouble in Little China’s Jack Burton, both with similar ad campaigns in the Dallas papers that focused on the macho swagger of these characters. And while Burton has the advantage of being portrayed by Kurt Russell, Wayne Crawford as Speed ain’t no slouch, either.

Still, Jake Speed, though not entirely great, much like a $2.99 drugstore paperback, does its job and does it admirably, providing the world with one of its last true heroes of dime-store fiction and all the derring-do that entails. But forget the movies—I’m just more surprised that it didn’t inspire a series of cheap novels on the spinning rack. —Louis Fowler

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