Anna Nicole Smith Exposed: Her Fantasies Revealed (1998)

ANSexposedFollowing her Playboy heyday, billionaire wedding and many, many Drake’s Cakes, Anna Nicole Smith showed us just how far starlets can fall and how pathetic they can really be (yet still be alive), in a softcore quasi-documentary that’s one of the least sexy things the year 1998 had to offer, along with the Nairobi Embassy bombing and the last ski trip of Sonny Bono. If there’s anyone who could make sex a turn-off at the time, it was Smith, in what could be called the Schafer’s Honey-Glazed Ham era of her career.

Interspersed with demonstrations of Anna’s uninspired fantasies are semi-interviews with Anna herself, in which she says things so stupid, you wonder why she had to read them off cue cards. (Example: “My favorite place to masturbate? Definitely the tub. I get the shivers just thinking about it.”) Serving as a framing device, Anna poses for a calendar that never hit the market.

ANSexposed1Clearly, Anna Nicole Smith Exposed: Her Fantasies Revealed does not feature the early-’90s Anna that made her a household name; here, her face is all puffy and her once-celebrated breasts look bruised from excessive beatings. (“With a body like this, who wouldn’t want to masturbate?” she asks, and I assume rhetorically. “What a great way to start the day.”)

Nevertheless, several guys were (paid to be) eager to join her for some simulated sex, including Darren, a houseboy who gets his RDA of calcium from a morning romp with his bloated employer (“Darren, wonderful Darren. I pay him a lot to do nothing but please me. … Oh, and he also has a pretty good butt.”) Also falling prey to her scripted wiles is Jason, a shirtless pastry chef who moves like an animatronic robot on the fritz. (“I see Jason pounding out some dough on that hard, cold marble counter with his bare hands. … I just get sooo excited.”)

Coming to an end, Exposed presents some of Anna’s nude scenes from her starring roles in the action films To the Limit and Skyscraper. In theory, this would save you from having to rent them, but they’re even funnier than this misbegotten project. —Rod Lott

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Second Time Lucky (1984)

secondtimeluckyDirector Michael Anderson’s career had come a long way since he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for 1956’s Around the World in Eighty Days; unfortunately, it was mostly in the wrong direction. The ’70s hadn’t been kind to him. Logan’s Run had been a hit, but it had been preceded and followed by the famous flops Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and Orca.

By the ’80s, he was reduced to working on Canadian tax shelter movies (1982’s Murder by Phone and 1986’s Separate Vacations) and the Australian sex comedy Second Time Lucky, which was produced by Roger Corman’s closest non-union Down Under equivalent, Tony Ginnane.

Originally planned as a full-length comedic look at the story of Adam and Eve, Second Time Lucky eventually morphed into an epoch-crossing episodic film detailing the battle of good and evil waged between God and the Devil as fought through one of the dudes from Porky’s and the woman you instantly will recognize as the French foreign exchange student John Cusack ended up with in Better Off Dead.

secondtimelucky1Ultimately, it is this young woman (Diane Franklin) who ends up giving the movie its only reason to exist. Indifferently directed by Anderson on an Australian sex-comedy budget, Second Time Lucky is less a cohesive narrative than a good excuse to see a very attractive lady-person in some state of undress every 10 minutes.

Such is the devotion and precision with which it unclothes Franklin that it borders on being the cinematic equivalent of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. And as a strategy to get 98 minutes to fly by, it’s not a bad plan. Franklin is almost pathologically adorable and does the naked thing very well. Enough so that it’s easy to forgive how utterly terrible everything else is around her.

And — make no mistake — everything around her is pretty goddamn terrible. British character actor Robert Morley clearly filmed his entire role as God in one day without ever leaving his chair, and although famed Aussie dancer Robert Helpmann once portrayed one of moviedom’s scariest villains as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he fails to do much besides camp it up in all the wrong ways as Satan.

As an excuse to see Franklin naked a lot and to witness the heights from which mighty directors can fall, Second Time Lucky is probably worth a view. I know I’ve personally watched worse movie for worse reasons, but those who hold themselves to much higher standards can be forgiven for giving it a miss. —Allan Mott

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

NOES2010I come not to bury Freddy, but to resurrect him.

Now, I’m not going to wholly defend the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street; it is far and away not a good film. But I am going to praise the impulse behind it.

Unlike many, I find 1984’s original Elm Street a flawed film, cursed with a weak lead and low re-watch value. It has a strong core, however, with fascinating thematic underpinnings and a great monster in Fred Krueger, that demon of the dreamscape. Yet as the series progressed (some entries more entertaining than the first, most much less so), Freddy devolved from nightmare creature to stand-up comedian (and we’re talking sub-Joe Piscopo stand-up here, not Patton Oswalt, although granted, a Piscopo dream-monster would be a terrifying thing).

NOES2010-1Therefore, an attempt to actually make Freddy scary again is a welcome thing. And anchored by a strong performance by the always-great Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen), the remake had definite potential. Horror movies always have been able to transcend poor performances and weak scripts as long as they were actually scary. But any potential here was wasted in one crucial misstep: getting a first-time newbie to direct it.

Why anyone would trust a reboot of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated horror icons to an untested music video director is beyond me. While Spike Jonze and David Fincher may be exemplary filmmakers who started in video production, they are outliers. Samuel Bayer does not look to join their ranks, with a style that places him firmly in the Platinum Dunes pantheon of low-rent directors who mistake blood for scares, gore for tension, and blue filters for… actually, I don’t know what those replace. I just know I’m sick of them. (Marks also are subtracted for criminal misuse of its luminous and undeniably talented leading lady, Rooney Mara, that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who should take this movie off her CV.)

Didn’t Freddy deserve better? I put it to you, members of the jury, that his reputation can still be rehabilitated. Let’s look to some proven talents who know how to combine frights with pulp monsters. Let’s get Stuart Gordon involved or maybe Frank Darabont, Eli Roth or Ti West. James Wan seems to have possibilities lately. In my dreams, I can see a Krueger/Cronenberg marriage striking gold, and a David Lynch reimagining would likely become the most terrifying movie in the history of everything. —Corey Redekop

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Possessed by the Night (1994)

possessednightSaddled with writer’s block, novelist Howard Hansen (Ted Prior, Sledgehammer) makes his way into a Chinese curio shop, where he plunks down big bucks on a jar containing a one-eyed brain monster floating in icky water. Naturally, this wise purchase helps him to concentrate so he can finish knocking out his latest book.

It also makes him want to have sex with his secretary, Carol, played by 1981 Playboy Playmate of the Year Shannon Tweed. (Hey, jar monster or no monster, especially after watching her exercise scene in a half-shirt.) One might conclude that Howard is … how you say? … Possessed by the Night.

possessednight1Every time the jar bubbles, somebody gets horny or murderous — sometimes both. During one particularly heated round of intercourse, Howard and Carol start slapping the crap out of each other. The boom mike makes its way into the frame once.

Who knows what mystical powers lie within this creature in the jar? The end hints at an evil Chinese curse, as if director Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) knew all you wanted out of his film wasn’t story resolution, but tits. Touché, Fred, touché.

Also starring in this watchable weirdo thriller are Sandahl Bergman, Chad McQueen and Henry Silva, because, well, “directed by Fred Olen Ray.” —Rod Lott

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Dr. Heimlich’s Home First-Aid Video (1987)

drheimlichWith his bald head and flaring nostrils, the world-renowned Dr. Henry J. Heimlich looks like Sid Caesar on a bender and sounds like Christopher Walken, eerie phrasing and all. Thus, it’s tough to take him as competent, especially when in the first scene, he straddles a woman lying on the floor, pushes on her chest and calls it “an act of love.”

I don’t care if he did create the life-saving Heimlich Maneuver; in Dr. Heimlich’s Home First-Aid Video, he is simultaneously scary and dubious. If a person’s choking, there’s Henry, talking about pressure on the diaphragm, and coming up from behind to wrap his slimy tentacles around some innocent young woman.

drheimlich1The other people in this made-for-VHS instructional video are even stranger. In the section on wood splinters, some wimp dumps his load of logs as if he’d just had a massive coronary. On animal bites, some simpleton prods the face of a German shepherd with a twig. A toddler is shown gnawing away on an electric cord.

The tape gets grislier as it goes on, with shots of severely blistered arms, as well as a prodigious flow of blood from a little girl’s knee; the latter proves quite touching, as her mother consoles her: “See the blood, dear? See how it flows?” Taking the proverbial cake, however, is the oaf who somehow manages to drop an open container of drain cleaner onto his face. Aaaiiieeeee!

Henry ends his First-Aid Video by telling the viewer not to pick his or her nose. —Rod Lott

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