Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
10 to Midnight (1983)
Dressing down a pesky journalist in the first scene of 10 to Midnight, Charles Bronson’s Lt. Leo Kessler proclaims, “I’m a mean, selfish son of a bitch. And I know you want a story, but I want a killer, and what I want comes first!” I felt like cheering right then and there, and the title hadn’t yet appeared onscreen. The serial-killer police thriller comes from Bronson’s underrated ’80s run with Cannon Films and his fourth of nine collaborations with Conquest of the Planet of the Apes director J. Lee Thompson.
In this film’s case, the murderer is Warren (Gene Davis, The Hitcher), a young, creepy guy in a Members Only jacket who fixes typewriters for the office secretarial pool. He fancies himself quite the martial artist and ladies’ man. He’s definitely not the latter, because he gets rejected all the time, but gets his revenge by stabbing his busty jilters to death.
Examining the corpse of Warren’s latest victim, Kessler theorizes, “Well, if anybody does something like this, his knife has gotta be his penis.” Indeed, Warren’s M.O. is stripping nude before each and every kill, holding a sharp blade at genital height, all rapey-like. As Kessler inches closer to nabbing the scumball, said scumball targets the copper’s daughter (Lisa Eilbacher, Beverly Hills Cop), a student nurse — convenient for a cinematic massacre’s sake.
What makes 10 to Midnight great is not just Bronson being Bronson, but that his Kessler is deeply flawed. He’s not a supercop, but an imperfect man more interested in doing what’s right vs. what’s legal, which irks his idealistic, by-the-book partner Andrew Stevens (The Seduction). It’s also as if a slasher movie focused not on the Final Girl, but the investigating police detective, and Davis is absolutely hateful in his robotic-perv role.
Look for short bits by Kelly Preston in her movie debut and an artificial vagina. —Rod Lott
YellowBrickRoad (2010)
In 1940, the entire population of Friar, N.H., scaled a mountain trail. Only one person survived, and he went crazy; the others 571 were found frozen, slaughtered or not found at all. Nearly 70 years later, a small group of obsessives follows the same path to unravel the mystery. Interesting premise you have there, YellowBrickRoad, and one you botched completely. Its crime is not being purposefully vague, but utterly boring.
Led by Teddy Barnes (Michael Laurino) and his wife, Melissa (Anessa Ramsey, The Signal), who plan on co-authoring a book on their subject, the group of eight take a hike — literally! — and unfortunately, it feels like one shot in real-time. After a long stretch, weird things start to happen to them — the kind a $500,000 budget can afford: Teddy having nightmares, a compass going willy-nilly, and all hearing music of the old-timey, juke-joint variety that used to score Betty Boop cartoon shorts.
One by one, step by step, the campers sloooooowly go bonkers, and periodic video interviews captured by a psych professor (Alex Draper, Mimic 2) demonstrate their increasing loss of memory and deteriorating spatial orientation. But that doesn’t count as anything “happening.” Little does until the final hour, when — spoiler alert — the mapmaker (Clark Freeman) rips off the leg of his sister (Cassidy Freeman, TV’s Smallville) after she runs off with a stinky hat he found along the trail while urinating. Swiper, no swiping!
Written and directed by feature first-timers Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton, YellowBrickRoad is like having a piping-hot slice of pizza placed in front of you, but being told not to eat it for a while: It looks good and smells good, yet when you finally take a bite, its lukewarm blandness has even your taste buds questioning whether it was worth the effort. The difference is that the movie is interminable, right up to the pointless, pretentious end. At least it’s not a found-footage film, but you’ll still want to click your heels.
Lordy, it’s the worst. As one of its taglines reads right on the DVD cover, “DO NOT FOLLOW.” You’ve been warned. —Rod Lott
Savage Sisters (1974)
One of many jungle bungles shot in the Philippines, Savage Sisters is a women-in-prison picture with a difference. And that difference is a pinch of Ginger: the star of the sleazy Ginger saga, Cheri Caffaro.
Sorry to disappoint potential viewers, but the Savage Sisters? Not real sisters. (Insert snare drum riff here.) They are subversive liberator and Navy daughter Jo Turner (Caffaro), political fanatic and commando Mei Ling (Filipino starlet Rosanna Ortiz), and their initial enemy, testicle-torture expert Col. Lynn Jackson (Gloria Hendry, Live and Let Die).
Believe it or not, but the story is too political for an AIP exploitation film. It has something to do with a hustler trying to smuggle a million bucks out of a banana republic — the country, not the clothing store — and naturally, everyone wants their hands on it. Everyone also wants their hands on these lithesome ladies, but that’s beside the point.
Jackson is assigned to find the two “hardcore insurrectionists” — revolutionaries Turner and Ling — and find out who they’re working for, or something like that; it doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, the scattered story is all about good vs. evil, with the latter being Capt. Juan Morales (Eddie Garcia). You know he’s bad, because who else wears those orange-tinted sunglasses?
Hidden in a poncho, WIP vet Sid Haig (The Big Bird Cage) is in this confused mess, and he plays his part as if he we were in a screwball comedy. He may be on to something. That would explain Caffaro’s ‘tude with the lines she so unconvincingly growls at her he-man opponents, from “No comment, pork chop,” to “You’re pissin’ in the wind, little man.”
And so does director Eddie Romero (the Blood Island trilogy), who helmed this disappointing flick. He not only forgot to deliver a coherent plot, but also — and most importantly — the nudity. —Rod Lott
The Invisible Boy (1957)
The Invisible Boy refers to Timmie (Richard Eyer, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), the 10-year-old son of a cold, emotionless workaholic. (But really, aren’t we all?) The kid hangs out at his dad’s top-secret intelligence office, which houses a talking supercomputer containing the sum of all human knowledge.
Left to his own devices while his father works, the kid reassembles Robby the Robot (from Forbidden Planet), who becomes his new friend. At first, they do things together like flying kites, but after the supercomputer downloads a big batch o’ evil into Robby’s electrobosom, the robot is getting the kid to drink a potion that turns him invisible.
It’s every kid’s dream to have a robot and be undetectable to the human eye (or maybe just to have a robot; the invisibility part is ideal for teenage boys who wake up with sticky sheets), which is what makes The Invisible Boy an enjoyable, old-school science-fantasy film, particularly when the kid starts pulling pranks on his parents.
But in the final half-hour, this squeaky-clean exercise ceases to be fun when it no longer focuses on the boy, but his dad and his co-workers. Thus, what was playful and mischievous turns into something political and menacing — in other words, just like real life. —Rod Lott