Zombeavers (2014)

zombeaversAren’t you sick of those half-assed, would-be creature features in which the entire experience is the title? You know the ones: Pick one animal from Column A, then another from Column B, and pat ourselves on the back for our “best thing ever” hipsterism, i.e. Sharknado, Sharktopus, Dinoshark, Dinocroc, Pteracuda, Piranhaconda, Sharknado 2, et al.

Me, too. Well, Zombeavers is nothing like that. Zombeavers is a tool of goodness. For 85 minutes, I felt pure joy. And upon a second viewing, I felt that all over again. It’s a real-deal motion picture — not a time-slot filler that aims no higher than to be a Twitter trending topic. I loved it.

zombeavers1Three sorority sisters (headed by Dumb and Dumber To standout Rachel Melvin) head to a cabin in the woods for a weekend escape. Their respective boyfriends crash the party. And so does a colony of beavers, rendered radiated and mutated by an errant barrel of toxic waste. Leave it to the beavers to spoil the collegians’ trip of tanning bods and guzzling booze and swappin’ spit.

Several aspects keep Zombeavers blissfully afloat, including scene-stealing supporting turns from Rex Linn (TV’s CSI: Miami) and — believe it — white-bread pop singer John Mayer.

But the main reason is that the horror comedy is like a PB&J: It sells both sides. It earns its “Ewww”s for every lost limb and spewed fluid, and yet it never loses sight of being a joke-delivery vehicle — a screamingly funny one at that. No winking at the camera, no has-been cameos, no self-referential BS; following in the muddy, bloody footsteps of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, director/co-scripter Jordan Rubin (a writing vet of several years’ worth of MTV Movie Awards) strikes that delicate balance of tone that allows the film to be deliberately campy without becoming a joke itself. —Rod Lott

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House on Bare Mountain (1962)

baremtnVery little story exists in House on Bare Mountain. Very little needs to; it’s not meant for telling a story. The debut of The Defilers director Lee Frost, the flick is a nudie cutie, period.

The House in question is the site of Granny Good’s School for Good Girls, with Granny Good being played by Frost’s regular producer, Love Camp 7 commandant Bob Cresse, in drag. While ostensibly “about” a mysterious new enrollee and/or the wolfman in the basement, it’s really about the student body and its bodies, almost always nude from the waist up, even while reading the dictionary front to back. The ladies exercise, then draw, then shower. A masked ball is held in mixed company, at which Dracula and Frankenstein spike the punch, but it’s not until Granny douses it with her illegal home-brewed hooch that tops are doffed. The end.

baremtn1Like so many entries in the pioneering genre, Bare Mountain is all “look, but don’t touch.” One can sense the humor at work without succumbing to actual laughs; pay particular attention to the opening titles, crediting “Hoover Vacuum” for hairstyles and “Everybody!” for body makeup. Speaking of, Frost heats up the screen as best as censors would allow, making for an hour-long movie as saturated in skin as it is in rather appealing vibrant colors. —Ed Donovan

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The Pact II (2014)

pactIIPart of what made Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact so effective was its twist — one not of plot, but overall structure. Without spoiling its secret, the 2012 indie chiller cleverly led viewers to believe it belonged to one horror subgenre, only to reveal itself as another. Without spoiling the sequel, either, it is disappointing to see The Pact II undo that trick. It’s tough to tell for certain, but if it hasn’t fully embraced its predecessor’s initial path, it has blurred the line.

Although Caity Lotz (The Canary of TV’s Arrow) returns for what amounts to an extended cameo, the central character this time around is June (Camilla Luddington, TV’s True Blood), a crime-scene cleaner by day and aspiring graphic novelist by night. One of her freelance scrub-downs of gray matter is, believes no-nonsense FBI Agent Ballard (Patrick Fischler, 2 Guns), the work of a serial killer. To say more would ruin everything I warned against in the previous paragraph.

pactII1I can say that co-directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath (Entrance) do their best to stay true to the tone established by McCarthy in the original Pact — and carried through to his similarly eerie follow-up, 2014’s At the Devil’s Door — but their screenplay ultimately keeps this reverent-in-intention sequel from being nearly as good. Luddington and Fischler deliver big nonetheless. While the film is spooky in places, The Pact II cannot replicate its big brother’s feat of eliciting real scares. At least it tried. —Rod Lott

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Kiss Me Quick! (1964)

kissmequickDeep in the Buttless Galaxy, on the unisex planet of Droopita, lives Sterilox (Frank A. Coe, The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill). The pudgy, 612-year-old dimwit with a spaghetti colander atop his head is given a peach of an assignment: Teleport to Earth to find the “perfect specimen” of woman to perpetuate a slave class, because, according to his leader, “these women make ideal servants if you train them properly.”

Apparently, the ones in Kiss Me Quick! have been trained to stay silent, except to utter the title of this monster-themed nudie cutie, the first flick for legendary exploitation producer Harry Novak, whose prodigious output represents a huge chunk of the Something Weird Video catalog. Residing in the castle of the Dr. Strangelove-esque mad scientist Dr. Breedlove (Max Gardens, My Tale Is Hot) and his Sex Machine, the abducted ladies exercise within Catacombs 69, but mostly they just strip individually for the camera and then undulate in a go-go style that does not-always-flattering things to their bosoms.

kissmequick1During all the undressing and the bouncing, the childlike Sterilox is supposed to be selecting a busty babe to bag (yet in the end, he chooses a vending machine). Taking turns, the girls unpeel the same kind of strapless black bra, garters and partially peekaboo panties, which makes me think Novak purchased only one set of undies and had director Peter Perry Jr. (Mondo Mod) pass it from starlet to starlet. Incidentally, their underdeveloped (in everything but cup size) characters have names like Boobra, Hotty Totty and Gina Catchafanni.

Why, yes, puns are as prevalent as bare breasts! A female mummy under Breedlove’s employ is named Selfish, says the doc, “because she’s all wrapped up in herself!” Ba-dum-bum. Dracula also stops by for the length of a groaner, as does a transgender Frankenstein’s monster (also Coe). The final scene has Breedlove — who looks like a mix of Claude Rains’ Invisible Man and a purchaser of My First Halloween Makeup Kit from TG&Y — judging the quality of the newly arrived nudes by slapping stickers on them, e.g. “CHOICE,” “PRIME,” “KOSHER” and, finally, affixed to one body’s butt crack, “THE END.”

Is Kiss Me Quick! loaded with misogyny or just naiveté? As a product of its time — one in which onscreen nudity still was from-the-dryer fresh — the latter could be argued. Today, the nudie-cutie genre is more likely to bore than titillate, to register as celebratory vs. predatory. This one is among the most enjoyable; even with its castle wall-to-wall toplessness, it exudes an all-American innocence, not to mention a generous spritz of Aqua Net. —Ed Donovan

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American Neo-Noir: The Movie Never Ends

americanneonoirAuthors of more books on film noir than you have pairs of underwear, Alain Silver and James Ursini now turn their attention to American Neo-Noir in their latest trade-paperback collaboration for Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.

Following the close of the “classic noir” period with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, neo-noir is loosely defined as the next step of the genre — one that embraces the motions of and comments upon its preceding movement. Silver and Ursini weave their way through its history, right up to today, nimbly moving from one title to the next with sheer unpredictability.

They tackle their subject here not chronologically, but thematically, with chapters devoted to fugitive couples, director duos, the femme fatale and so on. Along the way, they codify such sub-subgenres as “rap noir,” “kid noir” and “Native American noir,” somehow without sounding silly.

Their style always has been a delicate balance between the academic and the accessible, and here, that means Fyodor Dostoyevsky is as likely to pop up as a reference as Alfred Hitchcock, that Stakeout and Stripped to Kill merit as much consideration as Taxi Driver and Thief. As you wonder what something like Spring Breakers or, God forbid, Cyborg 2 is doing here, the authors will tell you and make it seem perfectly natural. While Silver and Ursini are not about to turn in their scholar-credibility cards by placing ’80s action-movie he-man Chuck Norris on a pedestal as a paragon of neo-noir, they will tell you the film in which he gets closest to it.

Roughly the final fourth of the book is an exhaustive filmography of some 500 titles — a helpful feature carried over from their previous (and also recommended) Applause genre surveys, including The Zombie Film and The Vampire Film. Design of this volume is also similar, in that the text (in a sans serif typeface I find too primitive) is supplemented by a wealth of still photos.

Incidentally, captions for those pics contain many innocent typos and outright factual errors, from misidentifying 1997’s forgotten David Duchovny vehicle Playing God as Playing Code to confusing Robert Mitchum with the comparatively towering Jack O’Halloran (and dropping the “O’” from the latter’s surname). Although the main text itself doesn’t sport as many boo-boos, the book overall could have used another eagle-eye to ensure the fifth Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, didn’t appear as The Drowning Pool (being the true title of a Paul Newman film also covered within).

Since American Neo-Noir discusses a few titles as recent as January’s Jennifer Lopez thriller The Boy Next Door, I wonder if perhaps the book’s production cycle were rushed, which could account for such flubs. Ultimately, it matters not, because once more, Silver and Ursini have delivered yet another wholly readable, instantly addictive long-form essay on a genre beloved by moviegoers who may not know it’s a genre at all. They can now, emerging with a greater understanding … and an overbrimming Netflix queue. —Rod Lott

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