Comedy

Sausage Party (2016)

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sausagepartyAn open challenge to Seth Rogen: Try to write a feature-length comedy that contains none of your three crutches. To reiterate the obvious, those are:
• the word “fuck” and all its variations/conjugations;
• references to the male member, especially being sucked and/or jerked;
• and pot-smoking.

He cannot do it. That trusty troika of fallbacks comprises his entire arsenal. Movie to movie, each and every one is trotted out incessantly for jokes — not to set up jokes, not to pay off jokes, but to be the jokes. More on that in one hot minute.

Sausage Party represents the worst offender of Rogen and co-scribe Evan Goldberg’s stoned bag of tricks. And because the film is animated, they’ve doubled down on their juvenile instincts in order to appear more subversive than the cartoon would be in sheer concept alone. That concept, in a nutshell (or a jar of Butt Nutter peanut butter, to borrow a Party-going character) is that, unbeknownst to us (unless you’re trippin’ on bath salts), all the food items in your local grocery store are sentient sexual beings.

sausageparty1The hot dog Frank (Rogen, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising) is particularly eager to wrangle free of his vacuum-packed packaging so he can slip inside a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig, this year’s Ghostbusters remake). Certainly you’re able to see through the subtlety (because it’s completely transparent) and know that means intercourse. Keeping them from doing that are two primary obstacles:
• the revelatory admission that being purchased by a customer leads to being eaten
• and a douchebag — literally, a douchebag (Nick Kroll, TV’s The League) seeking revenge for his bent nozzle, which he’s itching to jam into a vagina … but he’ll settle for a dude’s asshole.

Co-directed by Conrad Vernon (Monsters vs. Aliens) and Greg Tiernan (approximately 100 episodes and videos in the Thomas & Friends kiddie franchise!), the movie truly has a lot going for it technically, from ace character design to seamless computer animation. Spirited voice work gets delivered from the likes of Michael Cera, Craig Robinson, Salma Hayek and Edward Norton as, respectively, a malformed wiener, a gangsta box of grits, a lesbian taco and a bagel that may as well be named Woody Allen.

Too bad they’re ill-served by an elementary premise and a junior-high script that assumes the acts of copulation and bong-hitting are hee-larious, in and of themselves and entirely lacking context. It’s like that kid in the back of the class who would say things like “cunt” and “flappy fuck” in a bid for attention. The difference is that his remarks cost nothing; Rogen and company’s, about $30 million. Sausage Party is not clever enough to merit the markup. In fact, it’s rotten. —Rod Lott

Horror

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973)

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boycriedwerewolfHere is why parents should never get divorced: Wounds cut deep. Resentment boils and festers. Kids are hurt the most. Dad sprouts fangs.

Okay, so I skipped a few steps.

This happens first: Dad, aka Robert Bridgestone (Kerwin Mathews, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), takes his only child, Richie (Scott Sealey, in his first and last movie), to his mountain cabin for the weekend. With trusty walking stick in hand, he and the boy saunter outside toward a juicy steak dinner they never get to order, because Robert is bum-rushed by a wolf man (Action Jackson stuntman Paul Baxley). They tussle until Robert is able to toss his attacker off the cliffside, fatally impaling the toothy stranger on a highway road sign.

Later, having been bitten in the scuffle, Robert sprouts fangs, as well as a black nose like my Shih Tzu has, gnarly fingernails, hair frickin’ everywhere — the works! Since The Boy Who Cried Werewolf is in the directorial paws of Nathan H. Juran (1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) and not of John Landis, the transformation plays out as a series of still photographs, with Robert increasingly appearing like The Shaggy D.A. stuck in an O-face.

boycriedwerewolf1To the authorities, Robert denies he was assaulted by anything other than fellow man, despite their face-to-snout encounter taking place in broad daylight. “Stop this monster nonsense!” he yells at Richie, who won’t shut up about the pee-your-pants awesomeness he witnessed. Robert’s occult-friendly shrink (George Gaynes, all seven Police Academy outings) tells him not to rush to judgment, because children can see monsters. (Or something like that. What other advice could Robert possibly expect from a man whose office shelves are stocked with tribal tchotchkes and a thick book whose spine is imprinted with the word “ALOE”?)

Turns out, turning into a lycanthrope isn’t just a one-off. With every “full moon” — I surround that in quotes because Juran has to hold the record for most scenes depicting darkness in the rays of the sun — the elder Bridgestone’s wild side emerges. In these sequences, a lot occurs: Fleeing from his werefather, Richie cock-blocks a young couple. A makeshift commune of hippies (led by screenwriter Bob Homel) prays for Jesus to keep them safe. The curmudgeonly sheriff (Stripes’ Robert J. Wilke) blames the carnage on a puma. And, as Richie’s MILF of a mother, Elaine Devry (A Guide for the Married Man) makes parental concern appear downright sexy.

Looking every bit like a Universal TV series of its era, The Boy Who Cried Werewolf is executed quickly and cheaply, yet also competently. When he’s running around wearing the monster mask, Mathews is an inadvertent hoot; the juvenile Sealey, then around 12, gives the more believable performance — and trust me: He’s no Haley Joel Osment or Jacob Tremblay. But his presence and POV help make the movie equally fun for adults and their offspring, harmlessness and all. It’s cornball horror at its log cabin-comfiest. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979)

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guyanaWTFStuart Whitman is the Rev. Jim Jones in Guya … wait, what? Okay, if you say so.

Take two.

Stuart Whitman is the Rev. Jim Johnson in Guyana: Cult of the Damned!

Yes, the inch-high-eyebrowed Treasure of the Amazon star plays the real-life deranged and delusional cult leader who convinced nearly 1,000 of his followers to commit mass suicide by drinking poisoned Flavor Aid in 1978. Dubbed “the Jonestown Massacre,” the tragedy quickly beget two screen adaptations. Hollywood went prestigious with the 1980 telefilm Guyana Tragedy, for which Powers Boothe won the Emmy; Mexico, however, struck sooner with 1979’s Cult of the Damned (aka Guyana: Crime of the Century), for which Whitman won … well, nothing, but maybe he got to keep his character’s omnipresent, They Live-style sunglasses? One can dream!

guyana1Hey, at least Whitman’s film, with Tintorera: Killer Shark’s René Cardona Jr. at the helm, played theaters. It aimed for pure exploitation, which might be why its subject is named Johnson instead of Jones. (Make no mistake: He’s totally playing Jim Jones.) Whatever the reason, Cult of the Damned opens in San Francisco as Jones Johnson preaches fire and brimstone from the pulpit. Clad in all-white, cape included, he hammers and yammers for six minutes before unveiling visual aids: a map of South America, with which his parishioners kinda need to familiarize themselves, since he’s just all but ordered them to ditch their possessions and move there to live and work at the Jonestown Johnsontown compound, as God supposedly has instructed. (Disclaimer: The Lord does not appear in this motion picture. But The Munsters’ Yvonne De Carlo does.)

Ostensibly, Johnsontown is established as a farming community, yet the only crops his highness seems interested in yielding are human slavery and total submission. Disobey and there’s hell to pay … and shock value for viewers. For instance, a man who attempts to leave finds his back whipped to bloody shreds. A little boy who swipes food from the kitchen is tied to the ground and tortured with live snakes, while an accomplice is strapped to a wooden contraption and dunked underwater. A young man caught fornicating with his girlfriend must endure rape by a big, scary black man Johnson hand-picks from his congregation.

guyana2That last bit proves Cardona’s trip to Guyana was charted solely for ruthless purposes. The reverend’s teachable moments might carry more dramatic weight if they happened to people we cared about, much less knew who they were, but every Johnsontown resident who isn’t Johnson is poorly delineated; Cardona and co-scripter Carlos Valdemar (1978’s The Bermuda Triangle) have sketched them so lightly, it’s as if they were created from a dot-to-dot puzzle with four points at best.

Guyana: Cult of the Damned may “just” be a classic case of headlines-torn exploitation, yet the movie is disturbing all the same, particularly in the section focused on the ill-fated exploratory visit/rescue attempt by a congressman (Gene Barry, 1953’s The War of the Worlds). Lucky for us, either no one told Whitman this flick was a cash-grab or he just didn’t care that it was, because the man delivers a performance that goes for broke … and, yes, a plate of ham. There’s kitsch in its grip. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Mars Needs Women (1967)

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marsneedswomenPopular culture owes Larry Buchanan a mountain of debt, because if not for the Texas-based filmmaker’s Mars Needs Women, what other dialogue could MARRS possibly have sampled for its smash hit, “Pump Up the Volume”? (And then, by extension, that Christian Slater movie would have been titled something generic like Teen Rebel DJ.) But Buchanan’s film itself? It’s no damn good.

At the United States Decoding Service — NASA Wing, mind you — decoders have been busy for three days decoding coded messages from outer space. These “mysterious signals” all say the same thing: “Mars needs women.” Further explanation is delivered via Dop (Tommy Kirk, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), one of a crew of five clean-cut Martian men who have come to Houston to enact Operation Sleep Freeze, in which they will recruit (read: abduct) five unmarried, but way-beautiful women for a mission of repopulation. Exclaims Dop to those aforementioned decoders, “We are in earnest! The life of our planet depends upon this!”

marsneedswomen1When Buchanan (The Naked Witch) isn’t busy padding his 83-minute picture with so much stock footage of military aircraft taking off and landing (not to mention a loudspeaker that shows up so much, it deserves a supporting credit), he shows us the Martians collecting their prey like so many Pokémon: a stewardess, a homecoming queen, a stripper (Hip Hot and 21’s “Bubbles” Cash, per the credits) undulating like a Bill Ward cartoon in the ever-livin’ flesh.

But in the midst of their rapey plan, what would happen should Dop — gasp! — fall in love? Enter Yvonne Craig (the same year she debuted as Batgirl to TV’s Batman) as a prim-and-proper scientist. That their date takes them to a planetarium is a foregone conclusion since it allows Buchanan to make it to feature length by working in what amounts to a slideshow on the red planet. Strangely, it is more compelling than the movie’s actual story. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Blood (2009)

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bloodFor 14 years, the murder of a maid in the home of a woman named Miyako (Aya Sugimoto, Flower & Snake II) has been a cold case. With the statue of limitations about to kick in, the young and not-yet-disillusioned Detective Hoshino (Kanji Tsuda, Ju-on: The Grudge) makes one last-ditch investigation effort for the sake of the victim’s still-grieving family.

Hoshino finds himself captivated by Miyako, and hell, no wonder: Asian actresses rarely arrive as sultry and curvy. (The Naked Killer herself, Chingmy Yau, is another of this rare breed.) Unbeknownst to Hoshino, a portion of his attraction is not under his control, because she’s not merely a vamp, but a genuine vampire. Practically deflecting questions about her maid’s death, the cunning Miyako points blame on a hedge fund manager (Jun Kaname, Casshern). Jealousy between the two men quickly breaks out, as do the eventual swords.

blood1Immediately, Shinobi: Heart Under Blade director Ten Shimoyama establishes a look for Blood that is dark and seductive. Peppered with bursts that action that incorporate a proper amount of martial arts without going full chopsocky, the story moves slower than it should. When the Japanese film starts to drag — and it does, inevitably — Shimoyama injects passion through several sex scenes, which are actually erotic. Certainly uninhibited in her dead-sexy performance, the gorgeous Sugimoto gets — how you say? — kneaded like bread dough. Call it gratuitous if you must, but the vampire, as it was created in literature centuries ago, was intended as a sexual creature. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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