The Naked Kiss (1964)

Certainly it’s no accident that Sam Fuller set the powerhouse opening of The Naked Kiss on the Fourth of July, because it’s full of fireworks. Prostitute Kelly (Constance Towers) swings punches toward the camera, and that’s even before her pimp rips off her wig to reveal a bald scalp beneath. The visual manliness suits the whoop-ass she delivers. Once he’s knocked out cold, she takes the $75 she’s owed, reassembles herself and leaves.

Two years later, Kelly steps off the bus into the idyllic town of Grantville, and right into bed with an eager customer, asshole Capt. Griff (Anthony Eisley, The Wasp Woman). Immediately, she swears to go straight. Instead of enlisting at the whorehouse across the river, she lands a job she loves, working with handicapped children at an orthopedics hospital. She also falls in love with the town playboy philanthropist Grant (Michael Dante, Willard), who’s Griff’s best bud; equally smitten, Grant proposes marriage.

Can life be happily ever after for Kelly? Are you kidding? This is Sam Fuller we’re talking about here, and The Naked Kiss is not only his follow-up to the previous year’s Shock Corridor, but thematically, its first cousin. They share an overall strange vibe, as if a regular noir film got slipped a mickey, and a shocking-for-their-time subplot of deviant sexuality.

Only several jarring edits make Kiss the technically inferior work, but Towers being put front and center elevates this into the superior territory for me. Giving one hell of a performance that should have earned her an Oscar nomination, she supplies just the right amount of honor and histrionics. Kelly is not a “hooker with a heart of gold” character, either, but one who leaves Grantville with far more baggage than she brought. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Extreme Prejudice (1987)

If you’re like me, Chuck Norris has forever debased the image of the Texas Ranger into a caricature of bearded empty-headed goofiness. How strange is it, then, to watch Extreme Prejudice and see Nick Nolte portray a Ranger with even less emotional range, and hit it out of the park.

Walter Hill, director of such manly classics as 48 HRS., The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, is not known for subtlety of characterization. He deals in black-and-white archetypes of mandom, shades of gray rarely necessary. So it’s no surprise that Nolte’s Ranger is good, Powers Boothe is evil (he crushes scorpions between his fingers, for Christ’s sake), and we’re never in doubt that Nolte will get the girl (The Running Man‘s Maria Conchita Alonso, doing her best to convey some sort of character in a translucently thin role).

Luckily, there’s a subplot involving rogue mercenaries led by Michael Ironside to complicate things. Throw in the invaluable Clancy Brown, William Forsythe and Rip Torn; coat everyone in record amounts of perspiration; and climax with a straight-up bullet-ridden homage to The Wild Bunch (if you must steal, steal from the best), and you’ve got a testosterone-fueled, underrated ’80s actioner that The Expendables could only dream of replicating.

Leading it all, the oak tree that is Nolte in his glorious physical prime, running on one emotion and one facial expression and overpowering everything in his path. There may be another fist beneath Norris’ beard, but beneath Nolte’s mustache? Chuck Norris, weeping like the little girl he really is. —Corey Redekop

Buy it at Amazon.

Tarkan Versus the Vikings (1971)

Sword-and-sorcery flicks differ country to country. For example, here in America, our barbarians punch camels; in Turkey, they weep over a dead dog. Pussies. At least that’s the case with Tarkan, an adventurer created for Turkish comics and adapted to several live-action films, including Tarkan Versus the Vikings.

Tarkan (Kartal Tibet) looks like Charles Bronson (it’s the ‘stache) if he wore a long, blond wig, which we know Bronson would never do. In the comics, Tarkan’s companion is a badass wolf; here, it’s a German shepherd. Named Kurt. I don’t care how many tables Tarkans throws at his enemies, either — if you aren’t pushing the Wheel of Pain and balling Sandahl Bergman, you ain’t shit.

Good thing everyone else in the movie is more vicious than he. Its violence comes brutal and bloody — especially for its age — complete with more than one stabbed infant! What do you expect from those durn Vikings, who tie up their detractors to a dock so they may be sacrificed to a giant octopus?

Better Turkish fantasy actioners may have existed — maybe even from the Tarkan franchise — but how many contain such translated dialogue as “The game is up, you Asian rat” and, best of all, “Kurt, guard this bitch here.” —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

The Girl Can’t Help It (1956)

Frank Tashlin’s background directing Looney Tunes paid off big — in more ways than two — in the rock ‘n’ roll comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, giving him the opportunity to work with the live-action cartoon that was Jayne Mansfield. At 40-21-35, her curves are so improbable, they make for the kind of exaggerated fantasy that existed only via pen and ink, not flesh and blood.

And yet, here she is, filling the frames of this vibrant, buoyant rom-com as Jerri Jordan, the shapely kept woman of gregarious gangster “Fats” Murdoch (Edmond O’Brien, D.O.A.) who wants to make her a singing star. To do so, he hires agent Tom Miller (Tom Ewell, The Seven-Year Itch) because he knows Miller is desperately in debt and has a reputation for keeping his hands off clients; Jerri’s chassis invites nothing if not eager mitts.

Tashlin obviously knew this, and thus, created a scene of Mansfield making a scene simply by strutting down a sidewalk. The resulting reactions — physical, chemical, what-have-you — comprise some of the funniest visual gags committed to film. Half of the movie’s point is how seriously people refuse to take a woman with a body like that; unlike much of her career afterward, Mansfield’s actually allowed to act, and does a wonderful job. Both she and her character are smarter than they’re given credit for, no matter how many thrifty erections they so inadvertently inspire.

Girl is equally known for showcasing a wealth of acts from the sock-hop era of pop music, and the flick’s jukebox is as well-stuffed as Mansfield’s sequined gowns. Those seen (and heard) in action include Little Richard, Gene Vincent (“Be-Bop-a-Lula”), Eddie Cochran and Fats Domino. Best of all is Julie London, who croons “Cry Me in River” in full while appearing as a ghost in Miller’s apartment. It’s as sexy as anything Mansfield does, without the torch singer even trying. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Anguish (1987)

The eyes have it in Anguish, a perfectly oddball horror film from Spain that’s obsessed with all things ocular.

Oh, and snails. It also really digs snails.

Future Oscar nominee Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) is John, an optometrist’s assistant and all-around schlub who lives with his kooky, bird-loving, pint-sized mother (Zelda Rubenstein, Poltergeist). John’s losing his eyesight, so with the help of Mom, who specializes in psychic hypnosis or something, he collects the peepers of other people. It’s good to have a hobby.

Nearly a third in, writer/director Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) pulls quite the fast one on us, revealing that all the action we’ve been watching is taking place on a movie screen. Within the rapt audience, one teen girl is particularly freaked the fuck out.

She has good reason to be, as her fellow moviegoers begin to be killed, just as John is offing innocents onscreen. If Luna’s trying to make an “art imitates life or vice versa” statement, it gets a little lost in the mess of the meta, but Anguish is really kind of ingenious and definitely ahead of its time. It would make a good double feature with Lamberto Bava’s Demons from two years earlier, which also plays with the trapped-in-a-theater concept.

When I was in high school, a local mom-and-pop video store was having a huge sale on posters, and I bought dozens, plus a weird countertop box advertising the VHS release of Anguish. It directed you to peep through a cut-out hole at its top, and any curious customers who did were greeted with a still of the film’s graphic scene of eye surgery. Just thought you’d like to know. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Random Genre & Cult Movie Reviews