Hollywood Babylon (1972)

Why isn’t more softcore porn as educational (or gossipy) as this? Hollywood Babylon, pseudo-based on the best-selling Tinseltown scorcher by psychedelic Church of Satan co-founder Kenneth Anger, is the ultimate precursor to The E! True Hollywood Story, with a much-needed emphasis on the nastier side of fame. Granted, we’re never really told who most of the stars (repeatedly referred to as “the golden people”) are, but it doesn’t matter — you came for some ‘70s bush-filled debauchery, and that’s exactly what you get.

Here are a few highlights among its star-studded and stud-starred recreations:
• Corpulent comedian Fatty Arbuckle bangs a girl to death with a champagne bottle after saying things like, “Later, Toots, I’m in a lovin’ mood.” The narrator laments, “If only his fans could see their jolly, fat star now!”
• One nameless star falls in love with a 7-year-old girl, gets her pregnant at 15 and marries her in a Mexican village that “smells of human urine and donkey dung.” Now mortally afraid of normal penis-to-vagina sex, he vows never to have to do it that way again. So what does he do? He obsessively forces her to go down on him all the time, even bringing in other girls to teach her how to do it properly (i.e. no teeth — you fellas know what I mean).
• Hilariously German director Erich von Stroheim, when not filming orgies, masturbates and cackles maniacally (monocle and all) as he watches a “professional sadist” whip the shit out of a chained naked girl. Is it just me, or did Stroheim look like Dr. Hugo Strange?
• Notorious lover Rudolf Valentino liked highly masculine, domineering women, was married to two “renowned dykes,” was worshipped by “swishing sissies” and his final words were, “Now, do they still think me a pink powder puff?”
• Swedish sexpot Uschi Digard — the hottest, most buxom star of ‘70s adult cinema — gets into a face-slapping catfight that leads to one of the most erection-inducing sex scenes you’ll ever see. She then models lingerie for her director.
• Lastly, America’s first sweetheart Clara Bow invites the whole football team into her boudoir, with sexy results. In the best end credits sequence since Don’t Go in the Basement, they run over the final scene of the exhausted football team, exposed wangs and all, sprawled out in Bow’s room. —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.

Townies (1999)

Townies is a sleazy flick about a group of strange characters in a town called Schlarb, Ohio. (Imagine a black-and-white Hal Hartley film cast with recently discharged mental patients.) Scharb is a nice enough little town, but is suddenly being overrun by weirdos, freaks and goons. In true B-movie tradition, it is these freaks and goons that are the heroes of the piece. It’s the “normals” that you have to watch out for.

Director Wayne Alan Harold (Killer Nerd) introduces his ensemble, then moves briskly into the story, which includes necrophilia, martial arts, kidnapping and squirrel-eating. Townies definitely evokes early, rough-around-the-edges John Waters works, but retains its own sensibility.

While the movie is filled with bizarre characters and disgusting situations, Harold somehow manages to inject quite a bit of actual drama and emotion into the film. Clocking in at a mere 71 minutes, it moves at a brisk pace and never has a chance to get boring.

Townies was shot on a budget of $300, and serves as a great example of overcoming all kinds of limitations, especially budgetary. It has a completely stripped-down, grainy look. But the characters are interesting, the locations look like they’ve been carefully chosen, the movie is very well directed and it’s actually funny! Most of the time, I can’t even watch low-budget DV movies. I’m never “caught up” in them, like a viewer should be. I didn’t have that problem with Townies at all. It’s gross, humorous and even a little touching at times. —Ed Donovan

Buy it at Amazon.

The Rats (2002)

Made for TV, the New York-set The Rats originally was slated to air the week of Sept. 11, 2001, until suddenly, broadcasting a Big-Apple-in-peril flick didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. But aside from a prologue in which the titular creatures short out the electricity in Lady Liberty, there’s nothing all that NYC-centric about it. If it can be set there, it can be set anywhere.

Thousands of aggressive lab rats have decided to fight back against humans, beginning in a posh downtown department store overseen by Twin Peaks’ Mädchen Amick, who is aging well. She calls in exterminator Vincent Spano (Rumble Fish), who is not.

Although it does throw in some rat gore and an attack on kids in a public swimming pool, The Rats runs through the numbers: Disbelieving city officials? Check. Opposite leads who eventually find love through a time of crisis? Check. Minor black supporting character dies? Check. Come up with a cliché, and sooner or later, The Rats gets to it, right down to the ever-predictable it-ain’t-really-over final shot. Child’s Play 2 and Man’s Best Friend director John Lafia does a decent job, having experience with all sorts of beasts, like killer dolls, robot dogs and Ally Sheedy. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters (2011)

I spend very little time with video games, but when I do, it’s Tetris. The play gets so ferocious that I later have stressful dreams about maneuvering its falling pieces. Turns out, this is perfectly natural — a problem shared by many of the Tetris-obsessed gamers profiled in the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters.

As a narrator informs us, two out of three Americans have played the game. This causes Portland resident Robin Mihara to wonder why the world’s arguably most-played game doesn’t have a world champion? Director Adam Cornelius’ camera follows Mihara as he locates and assembles the best blockers for a proper Tetris championship event.

The contestants include a woman who wears a Mercedes hood ornament around her neck, a guy whose strategy entails making his eyes veer in separate directions and, most notably, the enigmatic Thor Aackerlund, who won a national Nintendo championship at the age of 14 and since claims to have cracked the game’s fabled level 30, yet has offered no photographic proof. Watching them square off against one another raised my pulse.

The obvious comparison to Ecstasy of Order is 2007’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the documentary about dueling Donkey Kong champs — so obvious, in fact, that it’s name-dropped by one of the players. But Ecstasy lacks that work’s Billy Mitchell, an arrogant bully to keep conflict and drama at a breathless high. In this doc, there are no villains; everyone’s a Steve Wiebe. That keeps Ecstasy from being as delirious entertaining as King of Kong, but makes it a natural for a second half of a double feature … because if you run it first, you’re just going to want to play Tetris, guaranteed. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

A View to a Kill (1985)

Roger Moore’s seventh go-round as James Bond doubled as his last, and proof that it was time for him to go occurs almost immediately in A View to a Kill. During the otherwise fine ski-and-snowmobile-chase prologue, Agent 007 knocks out a couple of Russian goons by snowboarding into their faces, at which point the soundtrack blasts a soundalike version of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” Never mind this scene takes place half a world away from the Golden State — it’s that anyone thought that joke was a good idea is what we should be worried about.

One Duran Duran title sequence later, the real story begins, with blimp-loving French industrialist Max Zorin (Christopher Walken, awesome as ever) plotting a microchip monopoly by striking Silicon Valley. 007 poses as a reporter to get close to Zorin and his mannish henchwoman, May Day (pop singer Grace Kelly, frightening as ever) — one of Bond’s four sexual conquests within a tedious two hours and 11 minutes, including a hot-tubbing Alison Doody (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and Virginia Slims-voiced blank slate Tanya Roberts (The Beastmaster).

Every time Bond is called upon to do more than throw a punch, workmanlike director John Glen (Octopussy) uses an obvious stunt double for Moore, then nearly 60, and the hair color doesn’t even match. Still, this does not keep the action set pieces from impressing — from a foot pursuit up the Eiffel Tower that becomes a car chase on the ground, to 007 swinging from an errant fire engine ladder through heavy traffic. The climactic Golden Gate Bridge finale is less notable, due to dated effects.

And speaking of dated, that Communism and the KGB loom over the film as big baddies is almost charming in a post-Cold War era. Moore’s inability to even try, however, is not. Look for Maud Adams and Dolph Lundgren in blink-and-miss-’em cameos; I missed ’em. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Random Genre & Cult Movie Reviews