Steel and Lace (1991)

January 22, 2016 Rod Lott Leave a comment

Throw 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.

Donning 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

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Guest List

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

January 21, 2016 Guest Leave a comment

All 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)

January 20, 2016 Rod Lott Leave a comment

Although 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.

Although 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

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Horror

Mexico Barbaro (2014)

January 19, 2016 Rod Lott Leave a comment

Translating 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.

Conversely, 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

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Thriller

The Centerfold Girls (1974)

January 18, 2016 Rod Lott Leave a comment

From Four Rode Out director John Peyser, The Centerfold Girls depicts what happens when a holier-than-thou man with a dubious grasp on reality gets a hold of a straight razor and the special, year-end issue of the fictitious Bachelor skin mag. Played by Andrew Prine (Simon, King of the Witches), Clement Dunne fancies himself a moral guardian who rings up these nude fantasy ladies, threatens to make them pay for their sins of the flesh, works toward and achieves that lofty goal, and then moves on to the next one. Making that premise unique is its three-in-one structure that hoists each story to stand on its own. If not for the running thread/threat of Dunne, it could be an anthology film; with each segment running roughly half an hour, it plays like Sex Pervert Stalker: The Series. That’s a compliment.

After disposing the corpse of Miss January in the opening credits, Dunne puts away his trademark souvenir (one of the victim’s shoes) from the felonious act and begins targeting Miss March (Jaime Lyn Bauer, Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women). She’s a nurse en route to a job interview when an act of Good Samaritanism backfires in the form of rape-happy hippies who may beat Dunne to the punch (so to speak).

Next up is Miss May (Jennifer Ashley, The Pom Pom Girls), a model on an overnight shoot on a private island, not unlike the setting for Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None — especially since Dunne has to slay a few extra bodies to get to his intended one.

Finally, Miss July (Tiffany Bolling, Kingdom of the Spiders) is a flight attendant whose grounded exploits accidentally answer the immortal question of what to do with a drunken sailor — two of ’em, in fact. When she eventually crosses paths with Dunne, she’s been through so much that our killer just might find the proverbial table turned.

The law of diminishing returns applies to The Centerfold Girls’ troika of tales, but its one-of-a-kind architecture makes it unlike any suspense slasher you’ve seen. Peyser throws as much female nudity at the camera as he does buckets of bright-red blood, thus satisfying the baseline requirements of 1970s sleaze. Even though he didn’t have to, Prine raises that bar with an actual performance as the omnipotent (and possibly impotent) murderer who has the ability to appear at the perfect place at the perfect time; after a short while, you’ll stop wondering of whom he reminds you. (The answer is Ben Folds.) —Rod Lott

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