Comedy

Ghost Fever (1986)

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In contrast to the words of Ray Parker Jr., Sherman Hemsley is totally ’fraid of ghosts in Ghost Fever. And, apparently, laughs. If Hemsley was attempting to move on up to a movie career after 11 seasons of TV’s The Jeffersons, he went in the wrong direction. It’s the rare Alan Smithee film so wretched, Alan Smithee might rethink his pseudonymous credit of disownment.

Plainclothes policemen Buford (Hemsley) and Benny (Luis Avalos, TV’s The Electric Company) are ordered to evict any remaining residents of Magnolia House, a former plantation home supposedly haunted by the spirits of its slaves and their evil owner. And it is! An odd concept for a PG family comedy, but let’s go with it, because Ghost Fever gives us no other choice.

Minutes after entering the mansion, Buford’s buried his nose deep in a book about groins. Two of the place’s transparent specters, Jethro (also Hemsley), and the slaveholder’s nonbigoted son (Myron Healey, 1977’s Claws), set about shooting animated lightning from their palms to put Buford through the ringer. Thus, Hemsley engages in the lowest-order form of slapstick shenanigans, including:
• running on a treadmill to avoid a wall of spikes
• dodging swinging pendulums
• sliding up doors and twirling ’round like a pinwheel as if he were controlled by magnets
• being tickled by ghosts while scaling a bedsheet rope
• tap dancing against a breakdancing mummy
• and, in the coup de grâce, shimmying left and right to protect his testicles from being sledgehammered into flapjacks, all while nearly having his rectum perforated by a whirling metal drill

And what of Benny? He gets to play pool against a phantom he can’t see, which leads to a swordfight with cue sticks. For another fight, Smithee Lee Madden (Angel Unchained) also cuts to a boxing match where Benny spars with pro pugilist Joe Frazier.

No one in Ghost Fever contracts ghost fever, but both men risk ghost chlamydia by falling in lust with two blonde sorta-babe spirits (Diana Brookes and Just Before Dawn’s Deborah Benson) who can’t leave Magnolia or they’ll turn old and ugly. At the movie’s close, as Buford and Benny drive away sad and mutter they’re better off dead, Jethro zaps their car to crash, killing both men instantly so they can bone their way through the afterlife. Kids gotta learn sometime, right?

The film is startlingly out of touch with how comedies operate. Not even the combined might of three writers cracked that code; their script exhibits the rhythm of jokes without the reasoning to select proper words that would make a joke. For example: “If that’s a French accent, I’m speakin’ Italian!”

Funny? Fuggedaboutit. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Infirmary (2026)

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It’s the first night on the job for Edward (Paul Syre, Chop Chop). The former Marine is pulling late-shift security at Wilshire Infirmary, a former psych hospital set for demolition. And as his supervisor (Mark Anthony Williams, Phat Girlz) informs him, the docs who used to run the place were into some freaky shit.

Like what? Oh, like experimenting with transferring patients’ minds into mannequins. Yep, Edward: Orientation is gonna be quite the bitch.

With that setup, I was game for first-timer Nicholas Pineda’s Infirmary, depicted through surveillance and body cameras. It’s unable to pay off, however. A pulse barely registers.

Hey, I get it: Flickering lights, power outages, creaking doors — they’re used so much in low-budget found footage because they’re cheap, if not free. But outside of middle-school sleepover pranks, they’re just not scary or effective. Plus, when you begin with a title card informing viewers two people were found deceased, and you introduce essentially a cast of three, we don’t exactly have to play Poirot.

Worse, the acting is pretty poor. Out of inexperience rather than incompetence, Syre can’t convincingly act lost in Wilshire’s maze of lookalike hallways, and poor Williams seems to have been told to improv what Samuel L. Jackson might be like if he just wanted to nap. I hate to say it, but I nearly joined him. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Altered (2025)

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Want to see a great sci-fi movie with Tom Felton that explores themes of human evolution? That’s what Rise of the Planet of the Apes is for, because Altered sure isn’t.

In its dystopia, citizens can opt for incredible DNA enhancements from the Genesis Institute “laboratry” (as is visible in one shot), like the ability to drink through a straw that unfurls from your nostrils or to check the temp of your dinner steak via a simple gaze of your glowing peepers. These upgrades and more can be yours! Unless you’re one of the unfortunate 10% of the population immune to bio-modifications, that is; derisively dubbed “specials,” you losers are segregated from society.

Being paraplegic, Felton’s Leon is one such special. He and his 12-year-old roomie, Chloe (Liza Bugulova, Disney’s The Last Warrior), luck upon a mechanical suit of Dr. Doomy armor that allows Leon to walk again, plus fight bad guys with kitchenware from a Pampered Chef party, and save a politically minded pop star (Aggy K. Adams, Netflix’s The Witcher) from kidnapping.

As if that weren’t enough, Chloe injects the superhero suit with essence from a smuggled flower that converts nuclear energy into pure energy so Leon also can shoot vines and, ultimately, deadly thorns. Now he’s like Spawn, if created by Guerney’s Seed & Nursery. As Leon quips in the film’s climax, “That’s flower power … that’s flower power,” in case you didn’t get it the first time, I guess.

The science-fiction genre is an ideal medium to explore hot-button issues of today under the guise of a tale of a near-future tomorrow. Yet Altered is all toothless, surface-level junk, as if adapted from a tween activist’s change.org petition. Shot in the glorious nation of Kazakhstan, it sounds dubbed in post, despite an English-speaking main cast. The visuals are so inert and uninvolving, I would not be shocked to learn they were generated with a single prompt of an AI tool.

Writer/director Timo Vuorensola would have been much better off utilizing even a smidge of the satire (however mild) from his Nazi UFO breakthrough, Iron Sky. At least then, lines like Felton’s praise to a wind-up mouse, “Good work, Mr. Stinky,” could be laughed with, rather than at. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Seeds (2024)

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In films, Indigenous characters (both fictional and non-), are usually created, written and filmed to be stereotypical “redskin” primitives as generic, nonsupporting players in whitewashed plots. If you even get the part, you’re killed off in the first 15 minutes for union scale, an IMDb credit and another notch in white supremacy’s belt.

It seems Indigenous filmmakers aren’t going to take it anymore. In the past few years, when an wholly Indigenous creative team goes all-in, their projects personify simmering rage against polite society’s established systems. A Canadian film by Kaniehtiio Horn (Possessor) puts all those sharp feelings in a blender and goes hits “cultural purée.” Of course, I loved it.

That genre-bending film is Seeds, recently named Best North American Indigenous Film by the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle, of which I’m part. I felt like I triumphed; as half-Choctaw, I identified with Horn’s character, Ziggy, as she tries to reconcile the old world with the new, the traditional ways with the savage, and, naturally, the comedic side with the horrific. Seeds plays very well at balancing these sides.

Living in the city, Mohawk tribe member Ziggy is an influencer/food delivery driver with some outstanding bills she’s trying to pay off. Looking to recharge her account, her cousin (the very funny Dallas Goldtooth, TV’s Reservation Dogs) asks her to come to the Pine River rez to house-sit. Many out-of-water comic scenarios — including strapping ex-boyfriends, homemade energy drinks and clandestine internet issues — make you think Seeds is a comedy.

But soon enough, a storm builds when the town’s white-trash thief and his two accomplices try to steal Ziggy’s aunt’s most prized possession: legacy corn, bean and squash seeds. They break in and kill her cat to scare her to give up the seeds. If you know Natives, that’s easier said than done, because 500 years of Indigenous rage pours out. With total prejudice and no mercy, she strings the guys up, whips them, covers them in hot oil and “de-barks” them in an act of Indigenous revenge that’s very raw and justified.

With a true supporting cast that includes the late Graham Greene and an impossibly Goblin-esque soundtrack by Alaska B, writer and director Horn has ripped up the playbook that white people have used for a hundred years and deftly mixes humor and horror to the hilt.

I am proud to champion this film and hopefully more people will see it, from Indigenous cinephiles to all-around horror fans. However, a different movie called Seeds, a documentary about Black farmers, was released around the same time, causing confusion. As a result, both may go unrecognized. I guess when it comes to non-white films, they all look the same, right? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Obex (2025)

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In 1987, Baltimore elected its first Black mayor — not that a resident like Conor Marsh (Albert Birney, I Saw the TV Glow) cast his vote. After all, he’s a shut-in who chooses to experience life through screens; when he’s not watching TV, he’s on his computer, earning a meager living by turning people’s photos into ASCII art. Watch, type, sleep, repeat.

One day, a floppy diskette with the game Obex arrives in the mail. The objective: Defeat a soul-eating demon named Ixaroth. The game literally changes Conor’s sad, lonely life! But by kidnapping his dog. 

Conor’s mission to save his four-legged best friend takes him outside his comfort zone of dot-matrix printers and computer magazines bagged with shareware, and into the forest. It’s a fantasy world all its own, with an animated fairy, a Zelda-ready elf (Callie Hernandez, Alien: Covenant) and a walking, talking RCA television set (Frank Mosley, Don’t Look in the Basement 2).

Written and directed by Birney himself (Strawberry Mansion), Obex revels in the 8-bit aesthetic. But it’s not all about that. Its sound design, black-and-white visuals and extreme close-ups of cicada bring Pi to mind, not to mention that film’s loner protagonist. Heck, so much absurdity is planted within Obex, it could have oozed from the mind of Pi’s protagonist after his DIY trepanation.  

Birney’s film is imaginative throughout, although significantly more winsome in its first half, before Conor ever leaves the house. Not that the video game-inspired environment is a loss. Turns out, a cursor floating in the sky can be a beautiful thing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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