Mystery

D-Tox (2002)

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Until the Rocky Balboa and Rambo reboots saved his career, the aughts were not a good time to be Sylvester Stallone. Arguably, his nadir would come with D-Tox, aka Eye See You, a $55 million film deemed so toxic, it opened on one screen in the United States: at a discount theater on the fringes of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. I live there, and I have no idea why OKC was deigned the appropriate dumping ground. Hadn’t we suffered enough?

Detective Jake Malloy (Stallone) can’t seem to crack the case of the Saw-voiced serial killer who’s on quite the cop-slaying streak and whose M.O. is a power drill to the eyeball through your front door’s peephole. While Malloy is at the murder scene of the mystery man’s latest badged victim, the killer is making it personal by going after Malloy’s fiancée (Dina Meyer, Johnny Mnemonic). The ensuing grief sends our Italian Stallion toward the bottle, then over the frickin’ edge: He slits his left wrist in a suicide attempt. (In subsequent scenes, however, his right wrist is bandaged — perhaps a sign how little the filmmakers cared.)

To kick the shakes and get his life back on track, Malloy is sent to a Very Special Rehab Facility; run by a grizzled ex-cop (Kris Kristofferson, Big Top Pee-wee), the former military complex caters only to cops and is located in what seems to be a perpetual blizzard. But no matter how remote the facility, Malloy is unable to escape his demons, because when his fellow residents start showing up murdered, it’s clear the killer has followed him there.

Okay, so maybe it’s only clear once our hero spots “ICU” written on the underside of a corpse’s eyelids.

The closest Stallone has gotten to making a horror film (at least intentionally), D-Tox marked the sophomore feature for Jim Gillespie, who lucked out and broke big when his debut, I Know What You Did Last Summer, rode the immediate wave of the pop-culture tsunami that was Wes Craven’s Scream. Slasher elements are in place, right atop the machinations of an old-fashioned whodunit in Agatha Christie’s patented one-by-one mode, but the work simply does not work. (Two years later, Renny Harlin’s Mindhunters would fare far better utilizing a similar setup.) It’s a shame, too, because Gillespie was gifted with a ridiculously strong supporting cast for this type of film, including Tom Berenger (Major League), Jeffrey Wright (Source Code), Stephen Lang (Don’t Breathe), Charles S. Dutton (Alien 3), Courtney B. Vance (Office Christmas Party), Polly Walker (John Carter) and Robert Patrick (The Marine). Curiously absent among that list: suspense. —Rod Lott

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Action

Sweet Sugar (1972)

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Elation turns to frustration when a prostitute named Sugar is sentenced to the plantation, in the Cain-raising Sweet Sugar. In a role similar to her star(let) turn in the following year’s Terminal Island, the lovely Phyllis Davis pours every bit of her seductive curves and salacious charm into the role, making the women-in-prison picture a superior example of the exploitation-staple subgenre.

Set up for a marijuana bust in Costa Rica, Sugar is thrown into jail. Rather than face a year or more behind bars while waiting for her sure-to-be-unfair trial, she opts for the alternative punishment of a two-year stint cutting sugar cane under the unforgiving sun. She and her fellow conscripted cuties (including Detroit 9000’s Ella Edwards as the film’s good-enough simulation of Pam Grier) use their rented machetes and feminine wiles in numerous attempts to overpower the men and make a run for the border.

Virtually every character with testicles — the literal kind, mind you — is a villain, none more so than the wackadoodle scientist Dr. John (Angus Duncan, How to Seduce a Woman), whose twisted experiments include some sort of orgasm machine that Sugar short-circuits and a drug he injects into cats to turn them ferociously feral, upon which they are hurled by the guards toward the caged women.

From Werewolves on Wheels steerer Michel Levesque and The Big Doll House scripter Don Spencer, Sweet Sugar has far more going for it than the average WIP entry, most notably a subplot involving voodoo rituals conducted by the Afro-sporting male prisoner Mojo (Timothy Brown, The Dynamite Brothers). But make no mistake: All it really needed to work was the underappreciated Davis, who balances playing delectable and devious by practically erasing the line that separates the two. The camera loves her even more than the hormone-raging guards trying to win her favor. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Mummy (2017)

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Seeing green (with envy) at the massive success Marvel Studios has had with its shared cinematic universe, Universal Pictures announced that audiences can look forward to seeing its classic movie monsters intersect across a “Dark Universe” of reboots, starting not with 2014’s Dracula Untold, which would have been logical (and, at $70 million, relatively cheap), but this summer’s creaky, extra-pricey, been-there-done-that The Mummy. It smacks of a high concept on a low boil.

Well, you gotta start somewhere.

And for screenwriter-turned-director Alex Kurtzman, “somewhere” is more or less 1999’s The Mummy, whose flashback prologue this film apes, but gender-flips, making the bandaged bandit a woman (Sofia Boutella, Kingsman: The Secret Service) with double the necessary retinas, hieroglyphs for facial tattoos and a wicked kiss of death. She and her curse are awakened — or rather, unleashed — when asshole adventurer Nick Morton (Tom Cruise, Jack Reacher) dares muck with Ahmanet’s tomb, accidentally discovered buried beneath the Persian desert. Lucky for Nick, doing so saves his life when he perishes in a plane crash, only to reanimate himself while nude in a body bag on the morgue slab.

Don’t ask questions; the movie makes only a minimal effort at grasping coherence. It does what little it can get away with just enough to set up the bulk of the pic, which is Nick and his fetching one-night-stand of a foil (Annabelle Wallis, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) literally running from Ahmanet, her zombie posse and an array of spiders, rats and exploding glass. Midway through, they meet Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe, The Nice Guys), for no other reason than to introduce a character for future Dark Universe installments; Jekyll is this franchise’s Nick Fury, but with zero employee-engagement skills.

While not quite the total train wreck so many have expected for months, this Mummy is no better than the worst among the Brendan Fraser-led trilogy or its Dwayne Johnson spin-off, The Scorpion King. Those pics’ feel-good, Indiana Jones-inspired flair has been jettisoned for an approach that leans in toward horror without fully committing. Whatever usual care Cruise takes to pick his projects was asleep at the E-meter the day he signed on the dotted line for this flat phantasmagoria; among supernatural elements, he clearly is out of his comfort zone, and it shows in a performance sapped of charm. Not being able to rely on him as an anchor, the film falters (even when the effects impress), most glaringly with an ending that is so laughably wretched, it does the cringing for you. Haste indeed made waste. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s

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Entire books have been written about the revolutionary wave of American cinema in the 1970s — most notably Peter Biskind’s seminal Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — but New York-based journalist Charles Taylor isn’t interested in rehashing those stories of the walloping impact and lasting legacy of The Godfather, Jaws, et al. Instead, he casts his critical eye to the pictures that fell through the decade’s cracks, curating for delicate dissection 15 choice B movies — some forgotten, others still admired, all sharing “an air of disreputability.”

The slim, comfy volume that results, Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s, is the year’s most rewarding film read thus far.

Transcending mere reviews, Taylor provides full-fledged essays that cut right to the heart of the film in question, whether the freewheeling disillusionment of Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, the superior talent of Pam Grier in comparatively inferior works like Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown, or the sad “death poem” of Sam Peckinpah’s tragically maligned Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In prose that shimmers and brims with intelligence, Taylor forces the reader to examine these films with new eyes and due respect, even if you’ve never seen them before now (and if that is the case, his discussions will make you want to remedy that immediately).

A couple of essays find the author easing his way into the film by way of wrestling with something else entirely, yet making it work like the final two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For example, the chapter on actor Robert Culp’s lone feature as director, Hickey & Boggs, which found him reteaming with I Spy co-star Bill Cosby, is focused as much on the pleasures of that groundbreaking television series as it is the movie, the tone of which was so whiplash-different as to disappoint audience expectations and taint the picture’s immediate reputation. For another example, the response to the Rolling Stones’ disco-inflected album Some Girls deftly — almost imperceptibly — segues into all that’s right with Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars.

There’s not a single page within Opening Wednesday that fails to remind you of cinema’s power. The directors of these films harnessed it, and Taylor matches it with mere words. As critics of the art form go, he’s up there with David Thomson and James Wolcott as our Western world’s brightest. His only fault is that we don’t hear from him enough. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Escape (1971)

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Cameron Steele (Christopher George, Mortuary) is a famous escape artist who can get outta anything … but couldn’t get into a weekly time slot, unfortunately. From director John Llewellyn Moxey (Horror Hotel), the made-for-TV movie Escape may be a “failed” pilot for what should have been a series, but it is a damn fine hour and a half of, um, escapism.

Now a private dick who lives above a bar catering to magicians, Steele takes a $25K gig to find Dr. Henry Walding (William Windom, She’s Having a Baby), a scientist who has gone missing — and whose lab has been torched — after cracking the code toward creation of a game-changing virus. As feared by Walding’s estranged daughter in the fashion industry (Marlyn Mason, Fifteen and Pregnant), the doc indeed has been kidnapped. As feared by no one, however, the culprit is Walding’s own brother, Charles (John Vernon, Killer Klowns from Outer Space), which is totally weird since he’s supposed to be deceased!

Charles is holding Henry captive, wishing to use his brother’s breakthrough for nefarious purposes. But the “why” is less important than the “where”: the Happyland amusement park! Yes, in order to spring Henry from captivity, Steele must navigate a funhouse laden with tricks and traps, which is where the telefilm lives up to the wonder promised by its way-out opening credits, scored by Mission: Impossible maestro Lalo Schifrin. In fact, Escape plays like an episode of M:I unfolding within a maze of mirrors — never a bad thing.

Serving up bonus kicks are members of the kitchen-sink supporting cast, including former Bowery Boy Huntz Hall, prime-past Oscar winner Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful) and, as Steele’s associate, comedian Avery Schreiber (Loose Shoes) in a rare straight role — well, straight if we’re using his Doritos ads as the benchmark. —Rod Lott

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