• Number of albums by The Dandy Warhols I have owned: 3
• Number of albums by The Brian Jonestown Massacre I have owned: 0
And in part, the reason can be found in the scrappy rockumentary Dig!, a funny, sad, warts-and-all, good-cop/bad-cop portrait of two bands on the rise — and one’s fall — over seven years’ time and captured by the camera of Ondi Timoner (We Live in Public).
In the mid-’90s, our nation had not heard of The Dandy Warhols or The Brian Jonestown Massacre, no matter how hard those puns tried. But that was soon to change. What begins as a friendly rivalry between the bands’ respective leaders (Courtney Taylor and Anton Newcombe) devolves into outright jealousy on the Massacre’s part when the Warhols taste some major-label success — and, to their credit, apparently with relative levelheadedness.
Newcombe, meanwhile — due to either mental illness, drug addiction or just plain stupidity — sabotages each and every chance of his band achieving the same. By the film’s midpoint, he seems to expend more energy trying to badmouth or crash the Warhols than he does working on his own music. And perhaps that’s because he keeps beating them — and the occasional audience member — up during shows, some of which become riots.
Personally, The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s music never has done anything to perk my ears, while several of The Dandy Warhols’ power-pop cuts stuck in my brain like spilled soda — and this was before knowing the backstory of either. But as one watches Dig!, which is entertaining even when your heart aches for Newcombe’s ravaged soul, it becomes clear that Newcombe has talent. It’s just buried under a lifetime of painful memories, self-destructive behavior and a general unwillingness to do something about it, making this tale all the more tragic. —Rod Lott
Ready Player One is the $175 million embodiment of the adage about wishing to possess cake and consume it. Like a cruel parent with bipolar issues, the film spends two hours sparing no expense to tout its virtual-reality construct as something BuzzFeed might headline “You Guys! This Game Gives Me So Many Feels, I Can’t Even,” only to turn around and abruptly scold its audience for snapping at the cheese, let alone even sniffing it.
And that’s if you buy into the showroom model Ready Player One presents. If you don’t, which is my case, the experience is even worse: an empty vessel of sensory overload.
In the vast wasteland that is America 2045 (just you wait!), the populace has become what Pixar’s WALL-E prophesied in 2008: lazy asses. Instead of participating in real-world activities, people strap on goggles and hide behind chosen avatars to spend their days and nights roaming around in OASIS, an immersive, anything-goes environment of VR fantasyland games and high jinks. Drive the Batmobile or the Back to the Future DeLorean! Wage war against Freddy Krueger and the Iron Giant! It’s like Second Life with a thumbed nose at copyright law and intellectual property.
When OASIS’ dippy-hippie founder, Halliday (Bridge of Spies’ Mark Rylance, Oscar-winning porn star), passes away, he does not go gently into that good night. Rather, he makes his death and legacy a game, proactively bequeathing ownership of OASIS to one lucky player, Willy Wonka-style. Whomever can obtain the three keys hidden throughout his pixel-perfect world, wins.
Poverty-stricken teen orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) vies to grab that bounty. His most formidable challenger: the ruthless, bullying corporate CEO/control freak Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, Knowing). The innocence of youth and plucky know-how vs. unchecked power and vast resources: We all know how this one will end — fictionally, of course.
The first key goes to the victor of an improbably speedy road race. Coming essentially right out of the movie’s gate, it kick-starts Ready Player One on a propulsive, well-boding note. Then the movie downshifts into narrative banality until the set piece for the second key — without question, the film’s most enjoyable sequence, as Wade and friends (including a love interest played by Ouija’s Olivia Cooke) enter The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Jack Nicholson not included).
From that point on, with roughly half an elongated running time still to come, Ready Player One is a punishing sit. The quest for the third and final key occupies all of Act 3, culminating in an all-out CGI war among indiscernible sides and blink-and-gone pop-culture cameos (Robocop! Chucky! And, um, that guy!) Maybe this Trivial Pursuit: The 1980’s style works on the page — I have not read Ernest Cline’s 2011 best-seller on which this blockbuster is based — but given how the battle is entirely artificial, the effect is pummeling to a point of numbness. Your mileage may vary, dependent on how much you enjoy watching others play video games.
Ironically, the USP of Ready Player One becomes utterly meaningless well before the picture’s end: the four-word phrase “directed by Steven Spielberg.” America’s longest-reigning household-name filmmaker helped define the decade to which this film pays homage, if not worships. In the 1980s, a movie stamped with Spielberg’s name felt like a Spielberg movie, from the ones he directed (E.T., the first two Indiana Jones adventures, one-fourth of Twilight Zone: The Movie) to the ones he did not (Gremlins, The Goonies, Poltergeist,* Young Sherlock Holmes); whatever his capacity, each production bore That Spielberg Touch.
No more. If Ready Player One has a heart, it does not beat. Arguably half-animated, the film could have been directed by anyone, since it sparks no wonder, appears to confuse nostalgia with drama, and wastes the gifts of its actors. It is a chunk of digital plastic — tomorrow’s ColecoVision, today! —Rod Lott
Not even three minutes of Poor White Trash Part II tick by before an unseen ax murderer kills one of our two presumed main characters — newlyweds on a log-cabin honeymoon, no less! With her new hubby freshly dead, insta-widow Helen (Norman Moore, Problem Child) runs for her life into the woods — and all to the tune of an inappropriately upbeat score, complete with rubber-band instruments.
Helen soon finds safety — relatively speaking — when she bumps into possum-hunting redneck Odis Pickett (Gene Ross, The Legend of Boggy Creek), who lives nearby with his son (Charlie Dell, 1986’s Invaders from Mars), daughter (Camilla Carr, A Bullet for Pretty Boy) and pregnant wife (Ann Stafford, Keep My Grave Open). “Lookie here what I done brung home for supper,” Odis tells them, and he doesn’t mean possum.
If you read Odis’ quote as a leering threat of nonconsensual sexual congress, pat yourself on the back. When it comes to Helen, who shore is purty, every overstrained syllable that manages to escape the uneducated man’s mouth crackles with electricity. Unfortunately for her, it’s like the kind of electricity generated by the exposed ends of frayed cords used for misogynist methods of torture as depicted on the covers of pulp detective mags: unwanted.
Or, as his daughter says best, “I know what kind of privates you got in mind: same ones you been pokin’ in me since I’s goin’ on 12!”
Welcome to Deliverance as a family sitcom. Yessiree, this here Trash comes scooped and dumped by the Arkansas-born/Texas-dead director of the public-domain fright favorite Don’t Look in the Basement, S.F. Brownrigg.
Poor White Trash Part II has jack-squat to do with the original-recipe Poor White Trash, except the nekkid pursuit of a quick-and-easy buck. Seeing how the plain ol’ Poor White Trash was a shrewd and profitable retitling of 1957’s Bayou for the drive-in market, why not see if White lightning could strike twice? Trash Part II first entered the world with the none-too-subtle title of Scum of the Earth … but should not be confused with the 1963 Scum of the Earth, a sexploitation serving dished out by Herschell Gordon Lewis.
However, you are forgiven for any confuzzlement, because Brownrigg’s picture owes quite the debt to Lewis’ pioneering gore films (as well as his hicks-in-the-sticks flicks, e.g., Moonshine Mountain). With its shock scenes — tame by today’s standards, natch — of killbilly kapers, it also prefigures the slasher subgenre that would propagate like inbred offspring across drive-in screens by decade’s end.
Call it what you wish. Brownrigg’s blood-strewn streak of soap-opera camp makes Poor White Trash Part II tough to take seriously, but easy to take in. —Rod Lott
Ray Dennis Steckler, the backyard multihyphenate whose psychotronic efforts have dealt famously with two-bit superheroes (Rat Pfink a Boo Boo) and mixed-up zombies (The Incredibly Strange Creatures), turns his lens to the world of crime in the private-eye procedural Body Fever. Aside from writing, directing and producing, Steckler takes the starring role — no surprise there — as Charlie Smith, an always napping detective for hire.
He’s hired by beefy crime boss Big Mack (Bernard Fein, Robin and the 7 Hoods) to locate one Carrie Erskine (Carolyn Brandt, then Mrs. Steckler), a sexy cat burglar — check out that snakeskin suit and Catwoman mask! — for snatching $150,000 of pure, uncut heroin from his safe. (Unbeknownst to Big Mack, the drugs immediately were stolen from her as well.) Charlie puts his feet to the Hollywood pavement and frequents local sleazy hangouts to determine Ms. Erskine’s whereabouts. When he finally does find her — dancing in his room, no less — she makes him an offer he can’t refuse: She’ll give Charlie half of the cut if he helps her get the smack back. They fall in love.
Wishfully titled Super Cool on some prints, Body Fever is neither exciting nor even suspenseful; nonetheless, there’s something enjoyable about watching Steckler — who looks like a dopier Kevin Spacey in a Gilligan cap — traipse around town in a connect-the-dots gumshoe plot of his own doing. He’s no actor — no one in his films ever is — but he does have more directorial talent than he’s given credit for; of course, he is to blame for much of that reputation, given that he could be his own worst enemy (see: The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher).
At the very least, his movies look interesting, and here, he gives himself a few arty sex scenes to direct the fuck out of. Clearly, he enjoyed it — hey, I’d give myself four sex scenes, too — so it’s hard not to be slightly charmed by this B-level potboiler. —Rod Lott
Prophetically titled, Half Past Dead was Steven Seagal’s last theatrical hurrah as an action hero. Either as a sign of desperation or as a self-deluded desire of demonstrating range, the former tuffie agreed to wear a ’do rag and play a Russian, yet eschewed any attempt at an accent. Leave that shit to Meryl, right?
Seagal’s Sasha Petrosevitch works undercover for the FBI. As the film opens, Sasha is introduced to a crime syndicate boss named Eckvall (but it sounded like “Eggfart”), helps take down an arrogant criminal (arrogant rapper Ja Rule, 2001’s The Fast and the Furious), almost dies for it (hence the title) and dons prison garb at New Alcatraz.
While Sasha is in the clinker, a bald bad guy (Bruce Weitz, Deep Impact) is scheduled to be executed for stealing $200 million in government gold bars, and the Supreme Court justice (Linda Thorson, Curtains) who helped put him away is there to witness. So naturally, a gang of would-be thieves drops in via helicopter and takes the justice hostage until the death-row inmate reveals where he’s hidden that loot.
The treasure hunters’ leaders are played by Morris Chestnut (2015’s Heist) and Nia Peeples (Werewolf: The Beast Among Us), who looks like she’s wearing the prototype for Sears’ Underworld collection and moves as if she were Michael Myers from Halloween.
This all results in an action free-for-all. Martial arts! Pornographic gunplay! Acrobatic swinging from chains! Guards thrown through glass! Story be damned! Written and directed by former actor Don Michael Paul (Rolling Vengeance), Half Past Dead seems interested only in being so slick that one could cook pancakes on it and not have them stick. Such an approach is admittedly entertaining, even when it’s absolutely absurd. —Rod Lott
• Number of albums by The Dandy Warhols I have owned: 3
Newcombe, meanwhile — due to either mental illness, drug addiction or just plain stupidity — sabotages each and every chance of his band achieving the same. By the film’s midpoint, he seems to expend more energy trying to badmouth or crash the Warhols than he does working on his own music. And perhaps that’s because he keeps beating them — and the occasional audience member — up during shows, some of which become riots. 
Not even three minutes of 
Ray Dennis Steckler, the backyard multihyphenate whose psychotronic efforts have dealt famously with two-bit superheroes (
Prophetically titled, 