Thriller

Stripped to Kill (1987)

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strippedtokillWho is killing the skanky strippers of the miserably dank Rock Bottom strip club? Middle-aged hottie cop Cody Sheehan (Kay Lenz, 1986’s House) goes undercover to find out. During her investigation and to her surprise, she realizes she likes removing her clothes before the lustful gaze of strangers. (Not to my surprise, I liked her removing her clothes, too.)

When she first performs, it’s both demeaning and laughable, yet Sheehan is egged on by her earring-wearing detective partner (a barely emoting Greg Evigan, DeepStar Six). And kicking off the final decade of his long career, Norman Fell (Mr. Roper of TV’s Three’s Company) is the cigar-chewing club owner who demands his dancers stay topless for a full 30 seconds — a stand-in for executive producer Roger Corman, perhaps?

strippedtokill1Coming from Corman, the movie should be more fun. Despite an intriguing (if purely exploitative) premise, Stripped to Kill begins with several strikes against it, not the least of which is being visually hampered. As with virtually all of Corman’s Concorde output, Stripped is shot flat and murky — not the finest choice for a film taking place mostly at night, especially one built upon copious nudity.

Under actress-turned-director Katt Shea Ruben (for example, going from Hollywood Hot Tubs to Poison Ivy), Kill slows to a near-crawl, partially because every character but Sheehan is repellent. Even the film holds contempt for them; the strippers’ dressing room is marked “SLUTS.” Lenz, long a terrific actress, deserved a better showcase; to her credit, she acts as if it were all the same. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)

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1000eyesmabuseFritz Lang’s final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, marked his return to the pulp series he kicked off with 1922’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. Like his 1933 entry, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, this one is not without some great sequences, but suffers from an overly convoluted plot and slow pacing. It’s well-directed, although not all that well-plotted.

Beginning with an assassination at a stoplight — utilizing a secret weapon that sends thin steel needles through human skulls — Thousand Eyes centers around the Hotel Luxor, where several recent visitors ended up murdered, baffling the local police (including Goldfinger himself, Gert Frobe, who can barely keep his pants up). The hotel rooms are bugged with cameras and have two-way mirrors, setting the course for an intriguing angle of voyeurism that never comes to be.

1000eyesmabuse1As with other Mabuse sequels, the good doctor is deceased, so it’s merely his “spirit” doing all the dirty work through other humans. While it sounds really cool, the movie isn’t even a quarter as exciting as its poster. As good as Lang was at what he did (see: Metropolis for the man at the height of his visual powers — and honestly, you must), the Lang-less, low-rent Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard so far remains my favorite in the German crime-cinema mainstay. The goofier, the better. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Girlhouse (2014)

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girlhouseLook, it’s very simple: Liken a fat kid’s sexual organ to an acorn, and he’ll grow up to be a cross-dressing serial killer. Moonlight as a porn model for college tuition, and that serial killer will target you. The digital-age slasher Girlhouse says so.

With a freshly deceased dad and a hilt-mortgaged mom, coed Kylie (Ali Cobrin, The Hole) puts her Topeka-born, apple-pie good looks to use to pay the bills by stripping online to the delight of masturbators the world over — people like, per the screen names we glimpse, WoodWizard, Tugboat and Cream_Slinger. (Was regular ol’ “CreamSlinger” taken, thus forcing the underscore?)

girlhouse1And then there’s Loverboy (unimonikered Slaine, The Town), the aforementioned overweight murderer. When Kylie understandably gets creeped out by the hulking sociopath and spurns him during a private webcam session, Loverboy snaps, dons a costume that makes him look like the drag Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, grabs a crowbar, walks to the website’s headquarters house and, despite supposed Fort Knox-level security, starts whacking away at the naked ladies! Er, by that, I mean with the tool in his hand — um, yes, of course, the crowbar!

Minus the biggest cliché of the slasher subgenre, everything you’d expect to happen in Girlhouse happens. First-time director Trevor Matthews (star of the 2007 horror comedy Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) must have recognized this, and plastered the movie with scoops of female flesh to compensate for the lack of originality; the finale even rips off The Silence of the Lambs’ then-novel use of the night-vision POV.

Ironically, the fine Cobrin, so very nude in her breakthrough role in 2012’s American Reunion, is the one woman who doesn’t appear in the altogether. In a way, adhering to the rules of the subgenre, this makes sense; the Final Girl must be virginal, and compared to her housemates, she is. And compared to other stalk-and-stab exercises, Girlhouse is mighty slicker and easier on the eyes. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

VHS: Video Cover Art

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vhsvideocoverThomas Hodge’s VHS: Video Cover Art is hardly the only book to lovingly collect outré boxes from the dominant home-video format of the 1980s and ’90s, but it’s the first to feature this eyebrow-raiser from the back cover of the 1986 sex comedy Free Ride:

“HEALTH WARNING
Superglue is not a penis enlarging cream
See inside for details”

Woe be to the horny renter who couldn’t read, I guess.

That’s merely one small delight in Schiffer Publishing’s horizontal hardcover, full of colorful, kitschy boxes handpicked by Hodge, aka The Dude Designs, the moniker under which he creates wonderfully evocative key art of his own to cult flicks of today, from Hobo with a Shotgun to WolfCop. His style clearly kneels at altar of the cassette-rental heyday. It was a time when we were drawn to tapes we knew Mom never would allow us to bring home. With fondness, Hodge remembers the “rows upon rows of fantastically fun, crazed art depicting moustached muscle men, buxom beauties, big explosions, phallic guns, and nightmare-inducing monsters,” he writes in his introduction. “How can the Mona Lisa inspire after you’ve gazed upon the likes of Lust for Freedom and Silk as a kid.”

How indeed? (Although I’m more of a Silk 2 man, myself, being unable to resist photography of Monique Gabrielle wearing nothing but a shiny white bra.)

Hodge also wishes readers will discover many gems, and you will. That’s not because similar books — Jacques Boyreau’s Portable Grindhouse, Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher’s VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics from the Videotape Era — have zero overlap, but because Hodge is British. Therefore, the 250-ish tapes featured — obscurities like Blood & Guts: Heavy Thunder, Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain and The Chinese Typewriter — come from companies different from those stateside, meaning the covers are largely alien to Yankee eyes.

Being low-rent, such commissioned illustrations for the UK tapes manage to look really porny. Those companies got away with showing a lot of tits, and we’re not even talking X-rated titles. At least they retain the American practice of seemingly every tagline including dramatic ellipses, e.g. “ONLY ONE MAN WOULD DARE … CHALLENGE THE NINJA” and “THE INNOCENTS HAVE TASTED BLOOD … AND THEY LIKED IT!”

Choice as those lines are, they have nothing on the lost art of back-cover box copy, judging from these examples:
• What a Way to Go: “Kidnapped by a household of women to make love to a sex-starved fat woman”
• Spectreman: “Live actors attempt to outdo Superman through a new power to right wrongs, Spectreman. DEFINITELY FOR THE KIDS”
• Banzai Runner: “Cocaine trafficking is emerging. As one U.S. Drug Enforcement agent puts it: ‘Who’s going to catch you when you’re doing 200 mph.’ The answer could be Dean Stockwell.”

Could be! And yet VHS: Video Cover Art is a must-have. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)

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lostsoulIf Hardware auteur Richard Stanley had his way, his adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel he loved as a child would have featured such shocking scenes as a human man engaged and engorged in foreplay, sucking the many nipples of a panther woman.

But, as we know, he didn’t; New Line Cinema replaced the in-over-his-head Stanley with veteran John Frankenheimer (1962’s The Manchurian Candidate), and the tortured result, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, tanked. Today, the colossal boondoggle is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made. Personally, I think that’s a bit harsh, but whatever it is, at least it finally yielded some good, nearly two decades after the fact, with Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, a documentary of What Went Wrong.

lostsoul1A whole helluva lot! That’s why, even with so many of its players dead or absent, Lost Soul can clock in at feature-length. Admittedly an outsider, Stanley is forthright about the mistakes he made before his dismissal; chief among them, he recalls, “I then made another strategic error: I met Val Kilmer.”

While Stanley is pegged as passionate and paranoid from both his supporters and detractors, no one has nice things to say about Kilmer. Then at the height of his Hollywood powers, the Batman Forever star was, by all accounts, an asshole forever. Further poisoning the well was the legendary Marlon Brando, bringing with him an ego larger than his don’t-give-a-shit girth.

Those stories of bad behavior are well-documented. What justifies Lost Soul’s existence is director David Gregory, co-founder of the Severin cult-video label and contributor to The Theatre Bizarre, allowing more time for anecdotes that didn’t make Variety’s front page. For example, before a single frame was shot, New Line toyed with taking the reins from Stanley and giving them to Roman Polanski; understandably frustrated, Stanley did what he had to do: Enlist a genuine warlock on the other side of the world to cast a spell exactly as the filmmakers met in Tinseltown.

Giving lip service to both sides of the fray, Lost Soul may be executed as a glorified DVD extra, but it’s no puff piece. Between this and 2013’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, the case could be made that any high-profile picture that ends up unmade — or not as intended by its original shepherd — deserves a documentary in lieu of a severance package. —Rod Lott

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