Comedy

Smosh: The Movie (2015)

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smoshmovieIf you have the short attention span of the average millennial, here’s a three-word review: Shit: The Movie.

If you have more patience: Smosh: The Movie is an extension of Smosh, the YouTube channel of comedy duo Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. My 10-year-old son tells me — and the Internet confirms — that the two’s videos are among the site’s most popular. I haven’t seen any of their clips, so I can judge the Smosh brand only by this maiden feature. And in doing so, I can say three things with certainty:
1. I fail to see the appeal.
2. The bar on YouTube fame is set periously low.
3. I weep for the future of comedy.

smoshmovie1Assumedly playing themselves since they’ve retained their real names, Ian and Anthony are roomies in Ian’s parents’ home. Ian’s a total slacker; Anthony at least has a job, albeit delivering piping-hot pizza pies. With their five-year high school reunion looming, Anthony hopes to reconnect with his unrequited crush, Anna (Jillian Nelson, 1313 Giant Killer Bees!), but he wishes he could remove a embarrassing senior-year video of him that someone posted to YouTube.

Toward that most noble of pursuits, they appeal to YouTube prez Steve YouTube (Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Ian Black, exerting more craft than the material requires), who sends them into the Internet — literally, via magic portal — to retrieve the offending file. This setup is all a silly, disposable comedy should need in order to take off running, poking fun at and deflating dozens of the web’s most infamous viral videos. It all but places the ball at the one-yard line on first down. A wealth of targets awaits the skewering … and stays that way, because the potential for Smosh: The Movie is roundly, soundly squandered.

Actor-turned-director Alex Winter (Freaked) is at a disadvantage from frame one, because the script by Steve Marmel and Eric Falconer (respective TV producers of Family Guy and Blue Mountain State) demonstrates an unwillingness to exercise imagination. Instead, the duo opts for least-common-denominator humor, with much of it depending on Ian’s recurring lust for the well-kneaded rear of Butt Massage Girl (Brittany Ross, TV’s The Middle) in his favorite vid, as well as your familiarity with the Smosh boys’ fellow YouTube celebrities (like Grace Helbig) who make cameo appearances. Let’s not even get into the atrocious opening animation, other to say it looks to have been the losing entry in a crowdsourced contest.

I only laughed once during Smosh: The Movie, and it arrived at the movie’s last line. I’m still amazed I was able to last that long. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Steel and Lace (1991)

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steellaceThrow a rock in any direction in the B-movie pool and you’re bound to hit a rape-revenge thriller. Chances it will involve a hot lady robot with a master’s degree in disguise, however? Infinitesimal. That one-in-a-million shot is Steel and Lace. Praise be it is not one of a million.

On the night of her concert debut, on-the-rise pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren, Season of Fear) is raped in an alleyway by real-estate mogul Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant) while his four “musketeer” buddies watch and egg him on. At the trial, however, the balding, yet ponytailed Emerson is found not guilty. Crushed, Gaily ascends the courthouse stairwell to the roof and purposely plunges to her death. Crushed five years after the fact, her scientist brother, Albert (Bruce Davison, 1971’s Willard), uses his room of blip-de-bloop wall computers to recreate her as a sexy cyborg with instruments of death hiding in her killer bod.

steellace1Donning enough full face masks to outfit the next two Mission: Impossible installments, Gaily seduces her way through the quintet of womanizers, offing each in an unexpectedly gory manner. From drilling straight through one guy to decapitating another, her chintzy methods of disposal give Steel and Lace what little juice sits in its tank; she’s like Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct murderess rebuilt as a Swiss Army Knife model of the Six Million Dollar Man.

Wren is appropriately cold and emotionless, devoting herself to the role with admirable commitment not shown by her fellow cast members — among them, An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton as the cop who investigates the killings because he has to, Luther the Geek’s Stacy Haiduk as a chain-smoking courtroom sketch artist who investigates the killings because she’s nosy, and David L. Lander — once and forever Squiggy of TV’s Laverne & Shirley — as our comic relief (although he doesn’t come close to actually providing it).

For such an impressive CV as an FX artist and animator who’s worked for James Cameron and John Carpenter, debuting director Ernest D. Farino appears to have left his considerable day-job skills back at the office. Steel and Lace is cheap-looking trash that feels so creatively ill-invested, it’s amazing Farino went on to helm bigger and better things … psych! His only other features were parts one and five of Charles Band’s insufferable Josh Kirby … Time Warrior kidventures. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Guest List

Guest List: Anders Runestad’s Top 5 Movies Tangentially Tied to Robot Monster

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icannotyetimustAll hu-mans, rejoice! Perhaps due to an error in calculation, someone has acquired the temerity to write an entire book about 1953’s Robot Monster, one of cinema’s legendary creative calamities. That someone is Anders Runestad, and that book is I Cannot, Yet I Must: The True Story of the Best Bad Monster Movie of All Time, Robot Monster. At nearly 700 pages, it tells all there is to be told of the film’s production and legacy, and here, in his Guest List for Flick Attack, Runestad tells us about his favorite films that — believe it or not — have ties to his book’s Golden Turkey classic.

Robot Monster in my view is the greatest bad monster movie of all time, and thereby an essential cult film of any kind, but why should this be the case when there are so many other contenders? Well, the contenders sadly lack a gorilla wearing a diving helmet who speaks to himself about his conflicted emotions.

Continue reading Guest List: Anders Runestad’s Top 5 Movies Tangentially Tied to Robot Monster →

Mystery

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

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lizardwomanskinAlthough an insomniac, Carol (Florinda Bolkan, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) suffers from recurring, claustrophobic nightmares that conclude with her rolling around nude with her sexy, hard-partying neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail). One night, the dream’s bedroom romp even progresses to Carol stabbing Julia thrice in the chest with a letter opener.

So when, in the waking world, police find Julia bloodied and dead, having been stabbed thrice in the chest with a letter opener, guess upon whom suspicion falls? Certainly you answered “Carol,” but as we all know with mysteries, the solution is rarely so cut-and-dry. That goes double — perhaps triple — with the Italian giallo, which A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin most assuredly is. If the nonsensical, zoological title didn’t relay as much, the name of its director and co-writer would: Lucio Fulci.

lizardwomanskin1Although known best for his string — barbed wire? — of horror bloodbaths in the late 1970s and early ’80s (Zombie, The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, et al.), the prolific filmmaker earlier plied his trade with a few stylish, if sometimes incomprehensible whodunits. Lizard lounges about on its own groovy beat, immediately distinguishable by the opulent and erotic surrealism of Carol’s dangerous dreams — scored by Ennio Morricone, no less!

Fulci’s direction of these sequences is tops, outdone perhaps only by an extended set piece in which Carol is pursued through an abandoned church by an armed and helmeted assailant. So Hitchcockian is this near-silent chase — recalling everything from Vertigo to The Birds — that the suspense can’t help but grow mighty intense. That’s what will stick with you, rather than the tidy, unsatisfying denouement.

Okay, so the dog vivisection scene might stick with you, too; just do your best not to dwell. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Mexico Barbaro (2014)

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mexicobarbaroTranslating to “barbarous Mexico,” the anthology film Mexico Barbaro is built upon ocho segments from as many directors, who largely draw upon the country’s urban legends and folklore to deliver its south-of-the-border scares. No one tell Donald Trump that a fraction of them are frightening, lest the dude propose something crazy like building a wall to keep this stuff out of our country!

Right in the middle of these hateful eight tales perch Barbaro’s two strongest, coincidentally presented consecutively: “Drain” and “That Precious Thing.” In the former, a young woman is commanded by a demon to “drain the blood from your sister’s vagina” within a 12-hour deadline or “I’ll suck your soul through your anus!” (In my country, we call that “motivation.”) Although it sounds silly, the story elicits a serious case of the creeps.

mexicobarbaro1Conversely, the latter of the two sounds scary, yet reveals itself as funny instead, as two lovestruck teens renting a remote cabin in the woods for the express purpose of ditching virginity find their cherry-poppin’ efforts thwarted by a pustule-ridden creature. (In my country, we call that “blue balls.”)

With Jorge Michel Grau (2010’s cannibal family saga, We Are What We Are) as the lone “name” among the otherwise unknown filmmakers, the remaining six pieces involve such elements as scar-faced prostitutes, boiled doll heads, a morgue and a haunted mansion. Half of them qualify as clunkers, yet the movie — more of a shorts showcase than a binding whole — ends with just enough good to recommend taking the trip. Besides, it won’t take as long as you’d anticipate; although tagged with a running time just shy of two hours, the final 15 minutes are consumed by the end credits — practically a segment in itself. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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