Comedy

Father’s Day (2011)

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A decade after a string of serial rapes and murders of men who are dads comes to a close, it appears to star back up again, in the film Father’s Day. The perpetrator is obese cannibal Chris Fuchman (Mackenzie Murdock), and as if that weren’t gruesome enough, themes of incest, suicide and genital mutilation also come into play.

Did I fail to mention it’s a comedy?

This delightfully demented flick comes from Astron-6, a five-member group of VHS-obsessed filmmakers from Canada responsible for heaps of genre-skewering shorts, almost every one a gem of ingenuity. Because the same year’s Manborg is only an hour, Father’s Day marks the troupe’s first full-fledged feature. Not abandoning its ’80s-movie sensibilities, Astron-6 has structured it as a late-night movie airing on ASTR-TV 6, complete with tracking troubles and a commercial break advertising the film to follow it, Star Raiders.

The latest victim of Father’s Day Killer Fuchman (pronounced “fuck man,” of course) is the dad of teenage trick-turner Twink (Conor Sweeney), who vows vengeance. Joining him on his mission of madness is Ahab (Adam Brooks), the one-eyed hunter who thought he defeated Fuchman all those years ago, and Father Sullivan (Matthew Kennedy), a priest who’s about to be corrupted to the nth power. There are also strippers.

While a revenge homage/parody on its surface, Father’s Day also dips its infected foot into cesspools of horror, action and fantasy. And yet, above all, it’s very, very funny … if you possess an open mind and a strong stomach. One of Astron-6’s calling cards is going over-the-top, and often with buckets of gore, but doing so with crack comic timing unholstered. As always, the guy use their microbudget to their advantage, and the end result is so creative, it looks like several million bucks’ worth. My one and only complaint: I wish it had more than one fake trailer sandwiched within. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Jeepers Creepers II (2003)

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Jeepers Creepers II is a hair better than its predecessor, but a hair better than shit is still shit.

As the film’s opening crawl informs us, the flying, winged Creeper feasts for 23 days every 23rd spring. We begin on day 22 of such a season, when the youngest son of farmer Ray Wise (TV’s Twin Peaks) is snatched up out of the cornfield and carried away. On the next day, a school bus toting a high school state champion basketball team and assorted cheerleaders blows a tire on the near-deserted highway, thanks to the Creeper’s well-aimed special brand of homemade ninja stars.

With nowhere to go, the bus serves as a Hometown Buffet for the hungry Creeper, at first picking off (or up) all the adults, until Wise shows up for some heavy-duty harpoonin’ with his truck-mounted, jerry-rigged Post Puncher 500.

JCII has its moments, but only a precious few, and fleeting at that. This installment gives the monster far more screen time, but it’s simply the same thing over and over: Creeper attacks; Creeper flies away; Creeper attacks again. If we were supposed to empathize with the characters, writer/director/convicted pedophile Victor Salva could’ve picked another group besides cocky athletes. For my money, the Creeper can’t kill them fast enough.

But then, Salva’s camera wouldn’t be able to linger on their shirtless, hairless upper bodies. It’s hard to believe the film’s overt homoeroticism isn’t at least semi-intentional, what with all the bare chests, the multiple scenes of guys peeing together and dialogue like “You want to poke it with sticks?” and “Can’t they just whip out the jack and pump this mutha up?”

I liked Wise, but then again, I like him in just about anything. I also liked Nicki Aycox (Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead) as the Girl Who Somehow Has It All Explained to Her in Dreams, but then again, that’s probably because she’s the only hot one. But any horror film that delivers such an illogical ending (so chop it up already, whydon’tcha!) and christens its characters with names like “Double D” and “Big K” deserves a flat-out F. —Rod Lott

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Action

The Hire (2003)

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Technically, the eight films collected as The Hire are BMW commercials, but really, they’re rather exemplary models of short-form filmmaking. For the project, David Fincher and BMW rounded up A-list directors, with each assigned to bring their vision of The Driver (Clive Owen, Children of Men), a suave BMW wheelman-for-hire, to cinematic life. It’s like the Jason Statham franchise The Transporter reconfigured into an unofficial anthology film.

Unsurprisingly, the Asians fare very well, with John Woo’s “Hostage” being among the best of the lot. It has more thrills and twists in its 10 minutes than most feature-length action films (his especially). On the opposite end of the pulse meter — but every bit its equal in quality — is “The Follow,” from Chungking Express director Wong Kar Wai, about The Driver being hired to follow a wife suspected of infidelity. Ang Lee contributes a chase-as-operatic-ballet in “Chosen,” and manages to reference his much-hated Hulk in a clever ending.

Smokin’ Aces‘ Joe Carnahan delivers “Ticker,” a gritty tale with The Driver transporting Don Cheadle and his mysterious briefcase while they’re tailed by helicopters and machine-gun fire. “Ambush” was helmed by the late John Frankenheimer, who clearly knew a thing or two about car chases. The story from Amores Perros helmer Alejandro González Iñárritu — about getting a wounded combat photographer out of Central America — is a bit of a downer, but true to the filmmaker’s style.

Guy Ritchie’s “Star” lets then-wife Madonna poke fun at her image as a bitchy singer who gets roughed up by The Driver’s insane street driving. It attempts comedy with success, which cannot be said about Tony Scott’s entry, so embarrassingly over-the-top in its own pretentiousness that you can understand why critics hounded him his entire career. But one stinker out of eight cannot spoil the overall package. Even with so many unique touches at work, The Hire works as an overall whole, thanks to Owen’s cucumber-cool persona and pinwheel-precision skills behind the wheel. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Drive-In (1976)

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Like a redneck version of American Graffiti, the relatively obscure comedy Drive-In chronicles one crazy day and night in the humdrum life of several residents, mostly high schoolers, of an unnamed rural Texas town. Beyond a ramshackle skating rink, the main source of entertainment appears to be the local Alamo Drive-In, where the movie takes place after roughly half an hour of setting up its characters.

Usually terrible director Rod Amateau (The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) constantly jumps between their stories. They include two lunkhead car-strippers (one of whom is Trey Wilson, Raising Arizona‘s unpainted furniture king) plotting to rob the drive-in manager, a senior planning to propose to his girlfriend, and a rivalry between the town’s “gangs.” The focus, however, is on cute Glowie (Lisa Lemole), who’s so tired of being treated like dirt that she dumps her abusive boyfriend to make moves on nice boy Orville (Glenn Morshower, TV’s 24), who thought she didn’t even know he existed.

If there’s a real star to Drive-In, it’s the nostalgic experience of going to the drive-in, most of which is captured in the opening montage, then lovingly spoofed for the remainder. Debuting on the Alamo’s single screen is Disaster ’76, an Irwin Allen-esque epic that allows Amateau to directly parody Airport, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and Jaws in one fell swoop.

Quite the time capsule, Drive-In isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but loaded with such goodhearted charm that I didn’t want it to end after 96 minutes. I suspect what kept it from clicking with the public at large is its flyover setting. So wall-to-wall are the country radio tunes and thick hick dialects, it may strike coastal viewers as intruding on an alien land where everyone speaks in similes, from “trickier’n diaperin’ Siamese twins” to “busier’n a belly dancer with a case of the crabs.”

Trust me: No matter where you live on the map, it’s a movie for people who love the movies. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Primal Rage (1988)

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Primal Rage is a rare example of a horror movie that manages to create some degree of tension due entirely to a pre-production fuck-up. When the filmmakers decided not to cast the highly appealing soap star Sarah Buxton as their female lead, but instead as the female lead’s doomed roommate, they made it impossible for viewers not to agonize over the likelihood of her eventual fate — if only because she’s the only remotely sympathetic person in the entire picture. That her painful descent into madness and violent death is suggested to be an indirect punishment for a previous abortion only makes Rage that much more infuriating.

An Italian production shot in the States, the movie is about what happens when university professor Bo Svenson (sporting the most pathetic ponytail in the entire history of mad science) experiments on a monkey, which then goes on to bite a muckracking student journalist who contracts a contagious disease that turns all of its victims (all five of them) into zombie-like homicidal maniacs.

Written by Umberto Lenzi, the auteur responsible for the infamous Cannibal Ferox, and directed by Vittorio Rambaldi, the son of Oscar-winning E.T. FX artist Carlo Rambaldi, Primal Rage is — with the exception of one decapitation near the end — virtually gore-free and filled with cheap-looking effects.

Despite the film being ineffective even as unintentional camp, horror completists might want to watch it as a double feature with Slumber Party Massacre II, if only to make their way through star Patrick Lowe’s entire filmography in just one sitting. —Allan Mott

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