Horror

Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

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One of the better entries in the Bigfootsploitation cycle — granted, that feat is not at all difficult — Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot takes the docudrama approach in following seven men on an Oregonian expedition to the Peckatoe River to hunt for the fabled monster.

Lead researcher Chuck Evans (George Lauris, director of Buffalo Rider) narrates the film and introduces his fellow travelers, including:
• shirtless Native American Techka Blackhawk (Joel Morello, clearly wearing a wig);
• a skeptical, big-city journalist (Lou Salerni), of whom Chuck tells us, “His negative attitude disturbs me”;
• Barney Snipe (Jim Bradford, From Nashville with Music), the curly-headed cook who looks like a truck-stop Ronald McDonald and executes a fine pratfall (“He’s a little clumsy. But his coffee isn’t bad.”);
• and an old coot (Ken Kenzle) and “his faithful mule, Ted.” The former, Chuck relays, is the only one who knows the way to Peckatoe … despite a scene mere moments before that shows Chuck and an anthropologist reviewing a wall-sized map with a point clearly marked as Peckatoe River.

As the gents mount horses and gallop through the forest, one-and-done director Ed Ragozzino throws in nature footage — Wolf vs. badger! Bear vs. raccoon! Bear vs. bear! — and, I presume, literally throws a mountain lion from an overpass to land on the horses below. (That shot is pretty funny; I watched it five times.) More famous are the Bigfoot-sighting stories the men tell one another at the campfire and on the trail, which Ragozzino cuts away to recreate; the most memorable finds a log cabin of miners under fire by rocks hurled by a family of Sasquatch.

After being a near feature-length tease, the film climaxes with a tree trunk-tossin’ finale that gives way to a tender Bigfoot ballad playing over the end credits. What an odd, chunky stew this Sasquatch is: a Sunn Classics fauxmentary mated with Disney nature shorts. For that reason, I can’t help but recommend it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Sugar Boxx (2009)

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If only Sugar Boxx were a faux trailer and nothing more, it might be something. Extended to a full-length feature, however, it loses a lot of spark … much like Robert Rodriguez’s own Grindhouse spin-off, Machete. Still, any purebred fan of the women-in-prison (WIP) film won’t hate himself for digging in, as this Boxx offers all of the much-reviled subgenre’s mainstays, sapphic ones included.

Cody Jarrett’s low-budgeter centers on Valerie March (The Hillside Strangler’s Geneviere Anderson, who’s prettier than the transvestite Christina Applegate the poster depicts her to be), a go-get-’em news reporter for WPNS (get it?). Wishing to expose the Sugar State Women’s Prison as the sex-and-slavery hovel it really is, Valerie longs to go undercover as a prisoner. Shortly after donning hooker getup, she gets her wish and lands herself behind its bars.

The hot-flashed hoosegow is the kind of place that houses the worst of the worst, where … well, let’s let the sexy Warden Beverly Buckner (Linda Dona, Future Kick) fill us in: “Life in this compound can be pretty damn hard unless you have friends. I’m talking about beatings, gang rape, dysentery.”

Check, check and check! Writer/director Cody Jarrett (Frog-g-g!) gleefully submits leading lady Anderson and her fellow actresses to much mayhem and misery before allowing them to achieve that much-desired revenge. As a result, Sugar Boxx is marginally violent, occasionally funny and aggressively stupid, while not fully being able to embrace its drive-in roots. Having little money certainly works to the movie’s advantage, as does Jarrett’s decision to fill supporting parts with Russ Meyer starlets Kitten Natividad and Tura Satana, not to mention veteran WIP director Jack Hill (The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage). That said, a little more creativity is required to pull off the pastiche/homage to the point where it looks as authentic as Jarrett no doubt would like.

I admired it more than enjoyed it, getting in step with its funky groove as it shimmied its way forth. In terms of silly-minded throwbacks of fightin’ foxy females, it’s not up to the titillating heights of, say, Bitch Slap, but for a mere 86 minutes, it will do. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

The Stitcher (2007)

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stitcherTulsa, Oklahoma: birthplace of The Gap Band, porn star Stacy Valentine, 1921’s most incendiary race riot and, depending upon who you believe, the shot-on-video horror movie made expressly for home video. Following that trail blazed by Blood Cult were such Tulsa-lensed terrors as Revenge and The Ripper. As recently as the late aughts, T-Town was still at it, with the slasher known as The Stitcher. It’ll have you in stitches, whether you want it to or not.

Thanks to a freshly dead aunt, hot girl Brittany (Carmen Garrison) has inherited a luxurious lake house. Although she is not pleased the place is located in “hillbilly hell,” Brittany invites seven pals to make the trip for a par-tay weekend of bikinis and brewskis. Unfortunately, most of them show up! I say that because several of The Stitcher’s characters are exceedingly annoying, none more so than the obnoxious Digger (Justin Boyd), an obnoxious writer for the fictional (yet likely obnoxious) Blast Zone music magazine. He is the worst, because he is an obnoxious misogynist, because he is an obnoxious stoner with a bong seemingly glued to one hand, and because his name is Digger. Among all of Brit’s friends, he’s the one you cannot wait to see killed off, by that mysterious masked man for whom the movie is named.

stitcher1The Stitcher is to this Blackstone Cove what Jason Voorhees is to Crystal Lake, the difference being that across the dozen or so Friday the 13th chapters in existence, not once to my knowledge does Jason leave behind a handful of buttons as a calling card. Limbs, heads and entrails, yes; sewing materials, nay. As the backstory explains, back when the textile-mill biz was boomin’ and The Stitcher was just a wee lad, he was abused in a rather unique manner: Ma would sew a button to his bare skin every time she felt he was a bad boy.

And if you think that’s outlandish, wait until you see how at least four local yokels are presented: with missing teeth! (While the whale-like feed store employee escapes this indignity, he is saddled with an arguably worse social ill: uncontrollable flatulence.) Writer/director Darla Enlow (Toe Tags) also fills a role among these Okie rurals, but you won’t catch her with blacked-out chompers or an overactive anus; instead, the blonde is running and bouncing in just tight shorts and a tighter bra while fleeing The Stitcher in the flick’s prologue. I’m willing to cut her some slack, because she has made a deliriously entertaining movie. It’s amateurishly acted (although there are exceptions, like Garrison and Laurel Williamson), but what do you expect for $70,000? As much as I desired to punch Digger, I wanted even more for The Stitcher to keep going past the point at which Enlow decided to stop. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Best of Enemies (2015)

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bestenemiesThe day before the 1968 Republican National Convention, the ceiling of the ABC News studio stationed at the Miami Beach Convention Center collapsed, temporarily shambling the struggling network’s control room and set. Nobody knew it at the time — especially not ABC — but the resulting disarray proved to be a prophetic metaphor for the fractured fate of broadcast journalism. For better or worse, political punditry and slanted cable news commentary are 2015 America’s de facto information resources. And it all started with ABC’s televised debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal, portrayed with appropriately crafty and captivating fashion in Best of Enemies.

The documentary depicts Buckley and Vidal’s contentiously off-the-cuff (and wildly entertaining) discourse through rare archival footage and interviews, many of which articulate the broader, far-reaching effects they had on today’s political climate. At the time, ABC was playing third fiddle to NBC and CBS, networks that had established their network news dominance through fact-based, down-the-center reporting — the standard in 1968. But by pitting Buckley and Vidal — who already detested one another prior to the debates — ABC subsequently surged in the ratings, with millions tuning in each night of the convention to watch the two pummel each other with personal jabs and snidely delivered one-liners. It was shockingly candid television unlike anything the American people had ever seen, and they couldn’t stop watching.

bestenemies1But Best of Enemies is most absorbing in its examination of the individuals themselves: their worldviews, motivations, weaknesses, differences, and ultimately their similarities. Buckley — a self-described conservative, Republican, Christian libertarian — founded the highly influential National Review, a publication renowned for its unabashedly conservative, Republican, Christian libertarian news. Vidal — a liberal, radical, forward-thinking sexual deviant — was a highbrow writer known for his uncommonly edgy novels and plays (including the notorious Myra Breckenridge), many of which were adapted for the silver screen. Despite their existence on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, Buckley and Vidal had one very important thing in common: a relentless affinity for their own pride and intellect.

As often happens in a battle of egos, their conviction turned to hate, with both even going so far as to believe, in their heart of hearts, that the other threatened not only the advancement of their ascribed political doctrine, but the fate of humanity as a whole. Naturally, their debates became less about issues or party platforms and more about pummeling their opponent, about winning, and eventually devolving into a battle of who can dig deepest under the other’s skin. This manifested in a television meltdown for the ages after Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” to which Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face.”

Moments like these carry consequences that need no explanation. And outside of their subtle use of editing to inject a leisurely buoyant tone, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville know good and well to let the images and sound bites tell the story — until the end credits, when they needlessly tack on what the preceding 85 minutes had already explicitly implied. It’s an unfortunate “allow me to explain what you just watched” moment, overly simplistic in its insinuation that Buckley and Vidal, conservatives and liberals, Fox News and MSNBC are merely two sides of the same coin.

The prevailing theory that the truth always lies in the center should satisfy those who already ascribe to it, much like it would if it implied that the truth lies on the right or left. What is indisputable, however, is that the story of Buckley and Vidal is as historically relevant as it is fascinating. And for 85 minutes, Best of Enemies is the most compelling glimpse into one of history’s great rivalries that you’re likely to ever watch. That we can all agree on. —Zach Hale

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

15 Great Books About Bad Movies

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After reading Michael Adams’ yearlong diary of bad-movie-watching, titled Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, I found that I enjoyed it, but not quite enough to keep it for posterity’s sake. My home office has an entire shelf devoted to books on less-than-stellar films that often are more entertaining than watching the flicks they discuss. Although mostly all out-of-print, the volumes below — in order indicative of nothing, once you get past the first one — are well worth owning for the connoisseur of cinema’s cheesiest. Happy hunting!

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael J. Weldon — As anyone who has this already knows, this 1983 volume is the Holy Grail of this genre. I first stumbled upon it college while visiting a friend of a friend’s apartment, where the book lie dog-eared atop the TV. Having just gotten into Mystery Science Theater 3000, I was immediately captivated and knew I had to have my own copy. Unfortunately — and this was pre-Internet 1991 — it wasn’t all that easy to find. Waldenbooks — remember them? — had to special-order it for me. It took months, but it was worth the wait. I read it cover to cover a couple of times, and still consult it to this day. Soon, I also discovered the magazine from which it came, and a couple years later, even had an article published in its issue #22, when I interviewed Don “The Dragon” Wilson. (My payment? More free copies than I had friends.)

The Psychotronic Video Guide To Film by Michael J. Weldon — Since the first Psychotronic book happened before the VHS explosion, a sequel was a sure thing. It took seemingly forever for Weldon to get around to it, but again, delayed gratification proved most satisfying when it finally hit in 1996, and I spent many a weekend night thereafter reading this alphabetically, probably much to the chagrin of my then-wife (yeah, I’m boring). My release-date enthusiasm for acquiring it during a lunch hour from work on its was only slightly dampened when I returned to my car, to find it wouldn’t start, and it wasn’t the battery. At least I had something to read while I waited for a ride.

The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide by The Phantom of the Movies — At the end of my first semester in college in 1989, I took my history final, then drove home, went to the dentist, caught a matinee of The War of the Roses, and then wandered into Waldenbooks, to see if they had this book, which I had read about that morning in USA Today while waiting for said history final to begin. They did, and while The Phantom didn’t quite dig as deep as Weldon, but his approach is indispensable, full of some great sidebars and with reviews organized by genre instead of the ABCs. Better yet, I aced that final.

The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope: The Ultimate Guide to the Latest, Greatest, and Weirdest Genre Videos by Joe Kane — By the time The Phantom got around to delivering a sequel of his own in 2000, he no longer was hiding behind a pseudonym. Also by then, Kane was taking a page from Weldon by independently publishing his own zine, Videoscope, from which probably all these reviews first appeared. This one’s not nearly as much fun as its big brother, probably because the Internet was starting to render these guides irrelevant. There was much less to “discover” in the decade-plus that had passed. It’s still never leaving my shelf, however.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide — I do not hide that MST3K is my all-time favorite television series. It got me — and many of my friends — into watching bad and B-level movies on purpose, with or without robot hosts, and that extends into today. But I know purists who think MST3K ruined the films. Lighten up! If you have many a fond memory of an afternoon spent watching the crew of the Satellite of Love, odds are you already have this 1996 guide, show by show, season by season. Every page is hilarious; the only drawback is that it only goes through the sixth season. I’d kill a hobo for an update.

Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese by Michael J. Nelson — After MST3K called it quits in 1999, host/head writer Mike Nelson was the first to jump into publishing, with this 2000 collection of essays. Basically, he does in here what he did on TV: ripping bottom-of-the-barrel cinema a new one, just all by himself. It made me so laugh so hard and so often, I kind of got tired of laughing. That make any sense?

Videohound’s Cult Flicks & Trash Pics by Carol A. Schwartz with Jim Olenski — The VideoHound brand issued a ton of terrific, wonderfully designed genre guides, from horror and sci-fi to more niche subjects like martial arts and vampires. But only this 2001 title focused specifically on the bad (updated from a lesser 1996 edition). Like all its other siblings, the thick-as-a-phone-book effort rates movies on a scale of bones, rather than stars, and numerous spotlights on infamous actors, directors and producers fill out page after page of lively reviews. Man, I miss these.

Bad Movies We Love by Edward Marguiles and Stephen Rebello — Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Movieline was one hell of a magazine. One of its regular features was the “Bad Movies We Love” column. In the periodical, if I recall, it barely merited half a page, but in this 1993 collection, the skewerings seem expanded, with exponentially more acidic wit. I read much of it when it came out in August 1993 as I took a road trip to the Grand Canyon with my girlfriend, and I still have it … the book and the girl.

Bad TV by Craig Nelson — Yeah, this 1994 book is about television, but since part of casts its lasso to round up some truly terrible made-for-TV movies, I’m including it. (My website, my rules.) As wretched as some films are, the boob tube is an even bigger wasteland of dreck, and Nelson eviscerates much of its poisoned landscape with glee. That’s what I got when I read it while out of town for a wedding I had no interest in attending, but for which my (now ex-)wife served as maid of honor; while everyone else was rehearsing and fretting over details like flowers, I was in the parking lot, sweating in the car, but laughing my ass off.

Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In and Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In by Joe Bob Briggs — A roundup of this kind wouldn’t be complete without the king of the drive-in movies, Joe Bob Briggs. I bet many of you didn’t even know this 1986 book and its 1990 sequel even existed. They weren’t exactly the easiest to find even then; I had to special-order them from my local Waldenbooks at the time, and I’ve never seen them on a shelf anywhere since. Too bad, because they’re absolutely awesome. If you’re familiar with his legendary syndicated columns, then you’re familiar with the contents here — why mess with perfection? You should also check out Joe Bob’s Profoundly Disturbing and Profoundly Erotic essay collections from 2003 and 2005; they’d merit their own entry, if not for focusing on mostly good movies.

Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square by Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford — Like the Psychotronic testaments books, this 2002 book was born from a zine. Unlike most everything else here, it’s not really a movie guide, but a spare-no-gory-detail history of New York City’s grimy grindhouse-theater experience, right down to the sperm puddles on the floor. On one hand, I’d be afraid to visit such a filthy, dangerous venue; on the other hand, Landis (who passed away recently) and Clifford cover their territory with such nostalgia, it’s hard not to get caught up in their fervor.

RE/Search #10: Incredibly Strange Films by V. Vale and Andrea Juno — When I first stumbled upon this 1986 book in a secondhand record store in Dallas in 1989, I remember thinking, “Holy crap, not only have I never heard of this, but there are nine more volumes! I’ll go broke getting them all!” Untrue; this was the only RE/Search-branded book dealing with the subject. But it did so wonderfully, with exhaustive interviews with trash cinema’s finest (?) purveyors, and loaded with titillating photos and vintage ads as illustrations.

Video Trash & Treasures and Video Trash & Treasures II by L.A. Morse — Probably the rarest books on this list, 1989’s Video Trash and its 1990 sequel stand out for being issued as mass-market paperbacks, instead of the usual trade editions like everything else above. Don’t assume they’re disposable; Morse is funny, and every page comes with a quote from one awful film or another. The first book focuses on monsters and serial killers; the second, titty flicks and action extravaganzas. Get both, if you can find them. Me? I located them in some mail-order joke/prank/novelty catalog in 1993. Never saw them anywhere else again.

Yep, I know there are more, and someday I’ll compile a “Son of 15 Great Books About Bad Movies” follow-up. In the meantime, discuss your favorites in the comments. —Rod Lott

Buy them at Amazon.

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