Bold admission: I’ll watch almost anything that dares to put an exclamation point in its title, including Hijack! (Exclamation theirs.) But since nothing in this Spelling-Goldberg telefilm gets hijacked, I propose that it should be called Hijack? (Question mark mine.)
TV’s original Fugitive, David Janssen, is Jake Wilkenson, a gruff, tanned, middle-aged truck driver on suspension, hired to drive a top-secret government project from Las Vegas to Houston. Sounds easy, right?
Well, unfortunately, blobby, lisping Donny McDonald (Keenan Wynn, Dr. Strangelove) is his co-driver. Ha! I kid, because the real trouble comes in the form of a bald guy in loud pants who chases and attempts to kill them, over and over (per the orders of The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart director Leonard Horn), until Jake gets the bright idea to ram their helicopter with his semi.
See? Not a damn thing hijacked, except 74 minutes of your free time. —Rod Lott
How strange that Clown began as a 78-second joke, as a fake trailer purporting to be the work of Hostel’s Eli Roth. How strange that the actual feature has Roth aboard as producer. What’s stranger than both those things is that there was enough in that concept worth expanding into a feature.
When the clown hired to enliven the birthday party for young Jack (Christian Distefano, Cut Bank) cancels during the event, it’s Dad to the rescue: Kent (Andy Powers, TV’s Taken miniseries), a real-estate agent, all too conveniently finds and dusts off a clown suit in the basement of a home he has on the market. Jack and friends are pleased, and one can tell in the eyes of Kent’s dental-hygienist wife, Meg (Laura Allen, TV’s The 4400), that her hubby is so totally getting laid tonight.
Or perhaps not. For some reason, the costume won’t come off! It resists scissors and serrated tools; the red, bulb nose is stuck to him like skin; the colorful curls of the wig have burrowed deep into his scalp; and that whiter shade of pale won’t wash off. And hell, what’s up with the rainbow-colored sputum? After medical treatment proves fruitless, Kent tracks down the former property owner (Peter Stormare, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), who offers three bits of worrisome news:
1. The clown of Nordic legend is not about twisting balloons into funny shapes.
2. It’s all about a demon bent on killing kids.
3. Kent’s turning into that.
Being presented without context — unlike, say, Roth’s Thanksgiving appetizer in Grindhouse — the fake Clown trailer of 2001 was difficult to peg as a pure put-on. At full-length, however, the intent of director Jon Watts (Cop Car) and co-writer Christopher Ford becomes Glass Plus-clear: scares above snorts. While the movie consistently works as a two-scoop cone of dark humor, its aim to disturb the viewer is primary; that it does so by putting kids in peril demonstrates that commitment, and Watts doesn’t use that lazily, like a short cut. Instead, aided by Powers and Allen’s real performances, he builds upon it, progressing with the aggression as poor Ken inversely descends from Dad jeans-wearing family man to hobo with trash bags duct-taped around his ankles to, ultimately, a face with a rictus carved in such a manner to haunt your dreams. —Rod Lott
Island of Death is one of those films with both content and characters so despicable and repugnant, we cannot help but assume its creator is anything but the same. In this case, that’s writer/director Nico Mastorakis (The Zero Boys), and here is why …
Christopher (Bob Belling, Cujo) and Celia (Jane Ryall, Land of the Minotaur) sure make a cute couple, don’t they? Vacationing on a gorgeous Greek isle in the pre-Airbnb days, the young Brits just duck into a shop to inquire about places to stay for a night or two, maybe more — hell, they’ve got time to kill!
After witnessing the two wining, dining and, um, other activities utilizing the “-ing” suffix, we wonder when the awful, terrible things will start happening to these tourists. (If you don’t want to know, skip to the next paragraph.) And therein we find the film’s first surprise: Mastorakis subverts the audience’s expectations by having our protagonists actually be the antagonists; in an about-face of the travel-horrors formula, Bob and Celia are the ones who will rape, murder and otherwise terrorize their way through the countryside.
The remainder of its unexpected twists, I’ll leave undisturbed; after all, Mastorakis disturbs plenty. Of all the movies that landed on the UK’s notorious “video nasties” list, this one would be merited if censorship were acceptable. (It is not.) Whereas many pics earned the dreaded label by uncomfortable-sounding title alone — e.g. Axe, Dead & Buried, Visiting Hours — yet in reality are rather tame, Island of Death positively reeks of sickness. In other words, Mastorakis did his job well and, it should be noted, not without some artful touches.
To see this one is to allow it to burrow under your skin and stay put for days. “Entertaining” is an adjective in no danger of being slapped upon the movie; however, I’m glad I watched it … and am certain I never need to again. As Christopher proves early on, it’s sure to get your goat. —Rod Lott
Terror in the Jungle equals hilarity in your living room. (Or in your bedroom or from your toilet or wherever you choose to stream content for which you did not pay. Just admit it.)
The brainchild of producer Enrique Torres Tudela (1976’s House of Shadows), the adventure film is so misbegotten, it took three directors to shape the dough into a presentable ball, with each man duly credited for his respective sequence: plane (Tom DeSimone, Reform School Girls), jungle (Andrew Janczak, cinematographer of The Undertaker and His Pals) and temple (Alex Graton, whose record is otherwise clean).
A plane bound for Rio carries some rather interesting passengers, including a wealthy woman acquitted (but most likely guilty) of killing her husband, a busty actress with a Joker-esque mouth, three wig-wearing members of a teen-sensation band (although each guy easily is double the age of the average screaming fan), two nuns (not counting the corpse in the carry-on coffin) and one poor preschooler named Henry Junior, forever clutching a stuffed tiger. Don’t you get attached to any of them, because when the aircraft leaks fuel and plummets into the Amazon jungle, all of them either:
• perish in the force of the wreck,
• get torn to pulled-pork shreds by alligators after leaping into the water,
• are burned to smithereens by not leaping into the water fast enough when the wrecked plane explodes
• or, in the case of one of God’s holy sisters (sorry, Sister Inferior!), get sucked out of the plane well before the treacherous nosedive.
It’s remarkable the movie spends so much time setting these characters up when it had designs from square one on doing away with them in one fell swoop — all except little Henry, who was traveling alone, plopped aboard against his wishes by his square-jawed single father to go see that hussy the boy calls Mommy. The kid makes it out with nary a scrape (severe emotional trauma excepted, of course) and floats the Amazon in the aforementioned coffin until he crosses paths with a local tribe whose members treat the boy not like the whiny brat he is, but The Chosen One. Because his golden locks literally radiate a halo in a hue reminiscent of their sun god, Inti, the tribesmen and tribeswomen wash his feet and put on shows for him and that damned stuffed tiger … which, in Terror’s peril-strewn climax, somehow temporarily comes to life to rip apart the jealous native trying to kill the kid.
Like a jungle film should, Terror ticks off some tried-and-true elements of the subgenre: snakes, piranha, quicksand, shrunken heads, an exotic score (by lounge king Les Baxter!), spear-carrying men dressed in diapers and sporting the kind of silly headwear made in Sunday school classes with construction paper and Elmer’s glue.
However, its most entertaining asset is what no other jungle pic has, but should: Henry Junior, played by Jimmy Angle. Although he never earned another credit, Angle gives the most committed, realistic performance of the film … because he does not appear to be acting. Scene to scene, Angle gives off the vibe that he is on camera against his will, as if he didn’t quite comprehend a movie was being made. His laconic delivery suggests he was slipped a Dramamine lollipop, and his constant tears — the kid cries more times than not — look real, not to mention enough to end a Third World drought.
Not so real: the brief gore scenes rendered in a crude stop-motion process dubbed Magicmation. The technique also was glimpsed in Legend of Horror, another Tudela production, but with origins and intentions far less dubious. —Rod Lott
At the tail end of the ’80s, what was in the Hollywood water supply that caused a wave of waterlogged movies? That pool included The Abyss, Leviathan, DeepStar Six and — at the bottom, floating just above the Roger Corman-funded Lords of the Deep — Juan Piquer Simón’s Endless Descent, aka The Rift.
After the Siren experimental submarine disappears with no word from those aboard, its lion-maned designer, Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia, Wes Craven’s Red Eye), is called upon by a concerned Pentagon to join the crew of the Siren 2 to seek closure. With Capt. Phillips (Tom Hanks R. Lee Ermey, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) calling the shots and Robbins (Ray Wise, Jeepers Creepers II) navigating, the Siren 2 picks up a signal from the black box of the original-recipe Siren — or Syren, depending upon the prop — located some 20,000 feet below in a rocky crevice — a rift, one might say. Between here and there grows giant seaweed, a sample of which is requested by the sub’s resident biogenetics expert (Deborah Adair, TV’s Dynasty).
Compliance proves to be a very bad idea for the Siren 2 crew, but a good one for Endless Descent, as it allows Simón to get to the face-melting, skin-bubbling and other icky results of mucking with underwater flora. Further problems befall Hayes and company when they investigate the signal’s source: a cave that may as well be an alien world, what with the giant tentacled starfish and all the creatures aggressively popping from holes in the wall like the babies of a Surinam toad; the trypophobic may want to skip this section, although it’s the film’s best.
For such a transparent purloining of Ridley Scott’s Alien, this Descent could have been much worse. Unlike Simón’spreviousworks, it appears to have a semi-healthy budget, so that the special effects actually work, rather than detract. It also, amazingly, has as much in common with Prometheus, Scott’s 2012 Alien franchise restarter, than it does his 1979 original. As always, Wise makes the most of his role, giving the B material his capital-A all; as always, Ermey and his Angry Birds-friendly eyebrows do the Ermey thing, which is to say a one-note-off rehash of his iconic performance as the nightmarish drill instructor in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Despite being the ostensible “star,” Scalia is a nonentity. —Rod Lott
Bold admission: I’ll watch almost anything that dares to put an exclamation point in its title, including Hijack! (Exclamation theirs.) But since nothing in this Spelling-Goldberg telefilm gets hijacked, I propose that it should be called Hijack? (Question mark mine.)
Well, unfortunately, blobby, lisping Donny McDonald (Keenan Wynn, Dr. Strangelove) is his co-driver. Ha! I kid, because the real trouble comes in the form of a bald guy in loud pants who chases and attempts to kill them, over and over (per the orders of The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart director Leonard Horn), until Jake gets the bright idea to ram their helicopter with his semi. 
How strange that 
At the tail end of the ’80s, what was in the Hollywood water supply that caused a wave of waterlogged movies? That pool included 