Thriller

Don’t Answer the Phone! (1980)

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Tubby, beer-swilling Vietnam vet Kirk Smith (Nicholas Worth, Swamp Thing) eeks out a meager living shooting photos for two-bit wank rags. His real hobby, however, is breaking into the homes of L.A.’s bustiest single ladies. With pantyhose pulled tight over his melony noggin, he rips off their clothes, strangles them to death and laughs maniacally. Somewhere in between, he sexually assaults them — as one cop puts it, in “every orifice she’s got.”

Welcome to Don’t Answer the Phone! Now hang up.

It’s a Crown International cheapie whose misogyny is as strong as the men’s ties are wide. While the title suggests something along the telephonic lines of When a Stranger Calls or Black Christmas, the only film of director Robert Hammer — blunt, to say the least — is nothing like those taut works and then taunting of victims made possible by Alexander Graham Bell. Kirk’s phone use is limited to affecting a comically over-the-top Mexican accent and the pseudonym of Ramon to call into a live radio show hosted by abnormal psychology expert Dr. Gale (Flo Gerrish, Schizoid).

Like the notorious The Toolbox Murders, the focus shifts about halfway through from instigator to investigator. Sniffing out Kirk’s sweat- and sperm-strewn trail are Lt. McCabe (James Westmoreland, The Undertaker and His Pals) and Sgt. Hatcher (Ben Frank, Death Wish II), whose unannounced visit to a massage parlor results in an out-of-place sequence of “wacky” comedy.

Although Worth makes Kirk more interesting in person than he is on the page, no sequence is worth watching, despite how many breasts it bares. Sleazy and repugnant, Don’t Answer the Phone! revels in its own dreariness, growing to a point where it practically dares you to stay seated. It’s an ugly movie on several levels. Don’t. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Calamity of Snakes (1983)

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Keep your expectations low to the ground when slithering your way into Calamity of Snakes. This is, after all, a Hong Kong film whose opening credits include such crew positions as “lighiting” and “propesman.” However, Bruceploitation-vet director and co-writer Chi Chang makes up for any spelling errors with serpents, and lots of ’em.

Our hero is an architect who’s designed a 17-floor luxury apartment building, yet refuses to cut corners in interest of time, thereby vexing his greedy boss. At the construction site, a bed of snakes is unearthed, and rather than let professionals deal with it, the boss orders them killed, doing much damage himself with a bulldozer. Chang used real, live snakes throughout the movie, including their grisly, goopy murders here by shovels; soon after, we see a street vendor strip a live cobra to squeeze “juice” out of its bladder to concoct a refreshing beverage of sexual vitality.

Once the building is complete, the snakes — Survivors? Children? It’s never explained, nor needs to be — exact their revenge, first attacking a couple mid-coitus. After infiltrating the workers’ barracks, mongooses (again, real) are unleashed to clean house, in a long sequence that’s like Rudyard Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” come to life. When a big ol’ boa constrictor is suspected, a snake expert is hired, resulting in an amazing fight sequence in an empty cardboard box factory between the old man and the huge boa, which can fling itself across the room.

By the time of the grand-opening shindig, Calamity of Snakes plays like an Irwin Allen disaster epic … if that Towering Inferno producer had the forethought to include slow-motion footage of a guy slinging a sword at all the herps being flung his way. They burst into the parking garage, drop in on a mahjong game, and slink into a child’s bed and a woman’s bath. Some of the slithering beasts growl when in attack mode; others come equipped with kung-fu stock sound effects; all contribute to one mad Mother Nature flick. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

If You Like Quentin Tarantino … Here Are Over 200 Films, TV Shows, and Other Oddities That You Will Love

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Limelight Editions has put out half a dozen If You Like … pop-culture guidebooks over the last year, using everything from The Beatles to The Sopranos as jumping-off points for recommended media, but Katherine Rife’s If You Like Quentin Tarantino … is the most logical of them yet.

Why? Because Tarantino is the perfect subject for such as series, for what are his movies but built-in recommendation lists? They wear their influences on their sleeves, right out in the open. Thus, Rife can feel safe in recommending, say, an Ennio Morricone album, because QT has drawn from that well many a time already.

A filmmaker herself, the Chicago-based Rife has structured the paperback into eight chapters, one for each of his directed features, from Reservoir Dogs 20 years ago (feel old yet?) to next month’s hotly anticipated Django Unchained. Moving chronologically through them, she delivers mini-essays and reviews on flicks and other media that directly match each; thus, she covers crime, noir, blaxploitation, martial arts, Italian horror, biker pics, war epics and spaghetti Westerns at large, with many subgenres peppered about.

She doesn’t always pick the obvious, too; although those are there — say, Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter trilogy, the first part of which is practically a plot point of True Romance — she also digs down to the obscure, or obscure enough that you’ll curse her when you can’t find the film in print. The lady knows her stuff; depending on what her feet look like, she could be QT’s idea of a perfect woman.

Personally, I love her ain’t-screwin’-’round writing voice, as witnessed by such lines as “Dicks don’t get more dickish than Mike Hammer” or for pegging Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha as “hobosploitation.” That’s new.

Generously but not overly illustrated, the book swims in sidebars, too, in order to suggest some pulp fiction (as in novels, mind you), count down the seminal blaxploitation soundtrack albums, or sludge through the high (low?) points of rape-revenge movies. These shortened bits also serve as quick-fix 101s as such important topics as Wu-Tang Clan, Brian De Palma or Goblin. We all should be as schooled. —Rod Lott

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Martial Arts

Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story (1974)

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This poorly dubbed (and, therefore, highly entertaining) slice of Bruceploitation tells the true story of Bruce Lee straight up, with no BS — except that the character is never called Bruce, he looks like nothing like Bruce (who didn’t wear a beard) and skirts all the details. In true Hong Kong fashion, the film remains reverent to the legend via distorted facts and wacky-ass sound effects!

As soon as the “biopic” begins, meager paperboy Bruce Lee But Not Bruce Lee (played by Bruce Li) is persuaded by pals to enter a karate tournament. He does, wins and is immediately approached by some American schmoe who simply says, “Hello. I am producing The Green Hornet program this fall on NBC and I’d like you to have a part. Are you interested?” and then walks out. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is storytelling.

A Dragon Story then chronicles Bruce’s quick rise to fame as the star of Fists of Fury and The Chinese Connection, although both go unnamed. He also forgets about his wife and kids back in the States in favor of a boozy, slutty actress named Betty Ting Pei, with whom he shares a tender coitus scene to the tune of a disco-funk instrumental of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

The whole thing is just an excuse to get to some kicking, and what little martial arts they show is pretty unspectacular. But at least one fight scene is set by a swimming pool so all four of Bruce’s enemies can conveniently fall in! Dat shit funny! During another fight scene, a bug slowly moves across the lens.

Before he dies in Betty’s home from a bangeroo headache, we are treated to the film’s defining moment: a syrupy, Cantopop love ballad with the lyrics, “I trimmed my long hair for you / And I keep them short also for you / The style never change / Be ever faithful, my darling / To our love they tangled together / Leaving scents on the pillow / My heart now belongs to you / Never let me despaired.” For this alone, A Dragon Story kicks the crap out of Hollywood’s big-budget Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. —Rod Lott

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Action

Bail Out (1989)

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The plot of Bail Out is too convoluted for its own good, but all you really know is this: It stars and was produced by one Mr. David Hasselhoff.

Davey plays “White Bread,” a tennis instructor and bounty hunter hired by an annoying Jewish bail bondsman to make sure spoiled heiress Nettie Ridgeway (The Exorcist‘s Linda Blair) shows up in court. Then he turns into Rambo when she’s kidnapped by swarthy foreign types with Uzis. With the help of his skip-tracin’ pals Blue (the black guy) and Bean (the Hispanic guy), he vows to rescue her.

At first, Nettie doesn’t even like White Bread (who can blame her?), leaving him stranded without clothes at a cheap sex motel. Earlier, he plays air tennis with a stripper while she dances onstage! The strangest moment, however, comes courtesy the bail bondsman, who refuses to pay Bean in cash because his family will “use it to buy marijuana and wine!”

Despite all the dead bodies, the movie wants to be funny, too. Unfortunately, its attempts at humor are reminiscent of the lame ’80s NBC TV-movies loaded with sitcom stars like Night Court’s Richard Moll, Family Ties’ Tina Yothers, a lesser Cosby kid or two and of course Jackée from 227. You know the ones: They were either set in Europe or at a summer camp.

Hasselhoff’s in way over his head in this one on all fronts. He even says to himself, “I can’t believe he called me ‘fuckface!’” Really, David? —Rod Lott

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