The Invincible Space Streaker (1977)

spacestreakerSo nonlinear that calling it nonlinear doesn’t cut it, the Hong Kong oddity The Invincible Space Streaker has nothing to do with space, and there’s no streaker. But here’s what goes down, or as much I was able to decipher from its truncated-English subtitles (“I order you kill him!”): After a hard day at grade school, about two dozen little boys go to a local watering hole and remove their little-boy pants to go skinny-dipping. This odd group activity is halted by the appearance of a mystical guy with a stereotypical bad haircut. He’s dressed in a robe that makes him look like Dr. Strange, except that I don’t recall the Marvel Comics character having ever enjoyed an eyeful of undescended testicles during an afternoon romp.

Anyhow, this creepy doctor convinces roughly half the kids to follow him to this lab by using a poster of a superhero as bait, presumably because candy — the favored tool of kidnappers the world over — sucks ass in Asian countries. Doc promises to turn them all into “superman” (lowercase), but once the first kid is wired into a crazy contraption in the evil lair, it’s clear there will be no kid-to-superman transformations.

spacestreaker1Instead, Doc changes the first boy into a cute capuchin monkey. The other children react via frightened subtitles: “It’s the monkey! Not superman!” Another kid becomes a pot-bellied pig. A third boy is on the road to mutation when his full-bladdered friend yanks down his shorts and pees all over Doc’s face and the machine. (And it’s no special effect, either, as the camera horrifyingly details.) These two tots manage to escape, but the one whose transformation was interrupted by the ol’ stream-of-urine-as-means-of-distraction trick finds himself turned into a masked superhero. His costume is an unsettling blend of Boba Fett, Evel Knievel, The Fly and Liberace. He kicks bad guys and then there’s an elaborate (at least by the standards set forth thus far) motorcycle chase.

Then there’s more fighting as the hero fights a walking bug, several guys on choppers and, for a split second, what appears to be a man in a wolf costume. Pee-Pee Boy helps out by discovering the joys of explosives, and then promptly dies in a slow-motion scene highly reminiscent of Willem Dafoe’s death in Platoon. This makes the hero angry enough to zap the crap out of the bad guys to emerge victorious. Why he didn’t do that in the first place and thus spare his best friend’s life is beyond me. But all the little boys celebrate this triumph by taking another nude group swim, as the title card screams, “THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMING!” —Rod Lott

Insidious (2010)

UnknownHaving watched James Wan “evolve” as a filmmaker — the gruesome Saw, the dull Dead Silence, the better-than-it-should-be Death Sentence — I assumed he’d hit a career stride of making moderately entertaining, derivative genre flicks. Unsurprising, in other words. So color me eight shades of surprised when Insidious, a haunted-house movie that absolutely does not try anything new, grabbed me with old-timey spookhouse values like craftsmanship, sound design and frights instead of gore. It’s so old-school it’s new again.

Insidious joins movies such as The Woman in Black and The Orphanage in the current renaissance of horror films that forgo the genre’s modern cynicism and instead stress atmosphere over blood. Working with a tiny budget, Wan recreates the plot of Poltergeist (child kidnapped into ghost realm; family must retrieve him) without the grandiose effects that made Tobe Hooper’s movie a rollicking funhouse and an exception to the rule that big budgets are death for horror films (looking at you, The Haunting remake). Wan keeps the effects to a minimum, plays with silence (always a good bet for tension), and succeeds in generating actual terror. The most nerve-rattling scene has absolutely no scares at all — just a whispering psychic describing a demon only she can see.

insidious1Populating his plot with appealing actors such as Patrick Wilson (Watchmen) and Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Wan keeps the movie on a slow boil, amping up the dread, sprinkling a supply of boo! moments about, and artfully toying with the audience. For two-thirds of its running time, Insidious is one of the scariest movies in recent memory, only stumbling into the realm of rote when it fully reveals “the further,” the netherworld that is pretty much just a lot of fog.

Yet even here, the budgetary restraints lend the goings-on a charm lacking in bigger-budgeted fright flicks (i.e. the abysmally silly ending to Poltergeist II: The Other Side). It’s a forceful reminder that genre filmmakers often do their best work in the low-budget sphere. Let’s pray Sam Raimi doesn’t forget. —Corey Redekop

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Naked Violence (1969)

nakedviolenceChaos in the classroom used to mean something different than the school shootings of today. In Fernando Di Leo’s Naked Violence, it’s the rape and subsequent murder of a female teacher by her teen students — all boys, all juvenile delinquents. Di Leo shrewdly shoots them in unflattering close-up so viewers automatically responds to their greasy faces with disgust.

Police detective Lamberti (Pier Paolo Capponi, The Cat o’ Nine Tails) investigates. He has unusual interrogation methods, one of which is dousing the suspects’ chair with absinthe to upset them; the 85-percent-proof alcohol was downed by the boys at the time of the crime.

nakedviolence1Under duress, one particularly troubled student lets slip the personal pronoun “she,” leading Lamberti to believe a woman masterminded the whole brutal act, from its inception to their stories of denial afterward. The truth is something else — in more ways than one, although the film’s “twist” is easily guessed, partially because of the director’s awkward blocking.

Known for brutal Eurocrime efforts like The Italian Connection, Di Leo comparatively presents a softer side with this procedural; it’s simply not as hard-hitting. Even the brutality of the act is shielded by the opening credits; when the sequence is repeated at the conclusion, it carries more weight — probably due to being soundtracked by obnoxious, off-putting metallic screeches.

“What’s wrong?” asks Lamberti’s boss in the final scene. “Aren’t you satisfied?” Eh, almost. —Rod Lott

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The Films of Mamie Van Doren

mamievandorenIn the introduction of The Films of Mamie Van Doren, author Joseph Fusco connects the dots to draw a line from Hollywood’s old-school vamps (such as Jean Harlow and Mae West) to the 1950s starlets Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. With the latter two, Mamie Van Doren often is thought to form the third point of that era’s sex-bomb triangle.

As the title has it, this BearManor Media paperback pays tribute to the cinematic oeuvre of the lovely lady, who survived when her pulchritudinous peers did not, because, Fusco argues, of her powerful roles and sheer versatility. He may be overstating the case — after all, we’re talking about the likes of The Navy vs. the Night Monsters — but Van Doren, today a lively 82, is no doubt worth such fun, book-length honors.

Fusco devotes the book’s first 50 of 272 pages to a breezy overview of her entire career — not just the movies, but everything from dinner theater to disco albums. The rest goes film by film, a chapter apiece, full of photos and poster art.

Signed by Universal in 1953 as a purposeful rival to Monroe, Van Doren first was cast in a number of uncredited parts two years prior. Soon, the starlet found no shortage of work, arguably reaching an apex — by exploitation standards, at least — in her eight collaborations with producer Albert Zugsmith. While he stands dozens of rungs below D.W. Griffith or Josef von Sternberg on the filmmaker ladder, far more people remember the likes of High School Confidential today than the Griffith or von Sternberg films in which Van Doren briefly appeared.

Because of the brevity, we are unable to get a sense of what she did in her first few movies; how much of that fault is the author, I cannot tell. I can blame him for the irksome multiple spaces appearing at the end of each sentence, but that’s negligible. His book obviously does its job, as my Amazon orders of the sex comedy 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt and the crime drama Vice Raid now attest. (Sadly, Sex Kittens Go to College and Girls, Guns and Gangsters are unavailable for purchase.) —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon or BearManor Media.

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