Action

Foxy Brown (1974)

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In a lily-white era where female matinee idols were Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn, Pam Grier became a groundbreaking alternative, in part due to her landmark role of Foxy Brown. While the film is also a blaxploitation classic, make no mistake: Grier’s too confident onscreen to be exploited herself, bare breasts and all. Regardless of the race element, it’s just a damn enjoyable AIP actioner.

In the not-a-Coffy-sequel to Coffy, Grier is the no-nonsense, clean-living voice of reason in a world of danger. She pleads for her brother, Link (Antonio Fargas, Huggy Bear of TV’s Starsky & Hutch), to get straight by leaving the blow-dealing biz behind. When he gets into trouble with a loan shark, Link rats out sis’ undercover-cop beau (Terry Carter, Abby) for the payoff.

When Foxy’s boyfriend is gunned down, she skips the grieving process and goes undercover herself, as a high-class hooker for the organization responsible. That way, she can exact revenge from the inside out.

Writer/director Jack Hill fought to get Grier in the title role, and it’s easy to see why: She commands the screen. She is the movie. She can play sexy and sweet, tender and threatening, and exude credibility no matter what mode she’s in — and that includes the finale, where she bestows the gift in the pickle jar. Only the embarrassing opening-credits sequence gives Grier anything to be ashamed of. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Shock Corridor (1963)

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Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor is an unconventional mystery unlike any other, and not just because it opens with a quote from that ancient playwright Euripides. Newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck, The Crawling Hand) narrates the whacked-out, envelope-pushing drama, about his feigning a sexual fetish to enter mental hospital to solve a murder. It’s easier to do behind the door rather than peeking through the keyhole.

Johnny’s girlfriend, Cathy (a knockout and excellent Constance Towers, who reteamed with Fuller for 1964’s The Naked Kiss) is against the idea, but he sees infiltrating Ward B’s hall as the “magic highway to the Pulitzer Prize.” She’s also pretending in a way, spending her nights as a singing stripper, playing upon her audience’s lurid desires.

Inside the snake pit, Johnny has no shortage of suspects, because every patient is seriously unhinged, from the man who believes he’s a Confederate general (James Best, TV’s Dukes of Hazzard) to Trent (Hari Rhodes, Detroit 9000), who steals pillowcases and, despite being black, espouses white-supremacist rhetoric.

Predictable is one of the last adjectives anyone could affix to Shock Corridor — one moment, Johnny’s being attacked by women at dance therapy; another, Cathy taunts him sexually while appearing as a slumberland specter. This black-and-white exercise in abnormality about the abnormal is a fever-dream masterpiece, and its sterling reputation as a before-its-time classic more than deserved. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Fuzz (1972)

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I distinctly recall an early-’80s Tonight Show episode where host Johnny Carson brought the house down by creating a fictional, raunchy tagline at the expense of his guest and his upcoming film: “Burt Reynolds is in Heat.” Alas, I’m too young to know if Carson made a similar gag about a dozen years earlier for Reynolds’ 1972 procedural, Fuzz. Perhaps the late-night king saved it for the more appropriate Raquel Welch?

That sultry sex bomb plays Detective McHenry, the newcomer to the 87th Precinct, as created in Ed McBain’s series of crime novels. On her first day, the police station gets a call that the commissioner will be killed unless $5,000 is turned over. That’s the first step of a crime spree undertaken by this hard-of-hearing man who quickly proves himself to be a mad bomber.

In other plot threads, the men (and woman) of the 87th try to crack the cases of a serial rapist in the park, and two young men who douse hobos in alcohol then set them aflame. McBain’s books in the long-running series always juggled stories this way, ranging from the seriocomic to the serious. While not the first adaptation (that’d be 1958’s sober Cop Hater) Fuzz comes closest to matching the author’s indelible tone.

Credit goes to McBain’s own screenplay (under his real name of Evan Hunter) and his game cast. Burt Reynolds and Jack Weston go undercover as nuns, while lucky bastard Tom Skerritt goes undercover with Welch in a tight sleeping bag. Yul Brynner shows up only in the final third as “The Deaf Man,” and no one delivers a line like “Marvelous, empty-headed bitch” better than he. Even Russ Meyer fave Uschi Digard shows up, albeit on a big-bust loop in a porno shop. Like such shorts, Fuzz is slight and fleeting, but enjoyable while it lasts, so it’s a shame this didn’t become a franchise. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966)

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While rare, Hollywood on occasion births a sequel greater than the original: The Godfather: Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Hillbillys in a Haunted House. The latter is the 1967 follow-up to the prior year’s Las Vegas Hillbillys. Arguably, Vegas boasts more star power, but lacks Haunted‘s — how you say? — je ne sais quois. Ah, yes: gorillas and Joi Lansing’s garguantas.

Vegas does have Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren. As the appropriately named Tawny, Mansfield pops in and out of the movie, with each appearance accompanied by that percussive “bong” sound that signifies cups-poureth-over pulchritude. So there’s that. Director Arthur C. Pierce (Women of the Prehistoric Planet), I salute you.

After nearly 15 minutes of country music performances, a story takes root: Tennessee good ol’ boy Woody Wetherby (Ferlin Husky, a real-life singer probably more or less playing himself) is called to settle the estate of his newly croaked uncle, so he and near-illiterate pal Jeepers (Don Bowman) hop in a jalopy with an umbrella for a roof and head for Sin City. Woody has inherited the strip’s near-empty Golden Circle casino and bar … and an accompanying $40,000 in debts. If only he could get some quality singers to attract paying customers.

One comes built-in — and built — with waitress Boots Malone (Van Doren), who likes to sing and dance atop the bar, and attracts the eye of Woody: “She reminds me of a 2-year-old filly that’s ready to be tamed.” Woody dreams many more live music numbers; 007’s dentally challenged nemesis Richard Kiel appears as muscle; and everyone in the movie has so much fun, it ends in a pie fight. Glad to see someone had that much of a ball. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Phantoms (1998)

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If there’s one giant monster I’ve ever truly felt sorry for, it’s The Ancient Enemy. Most cinematic behemoths don’t get much in the way of inner conflict or psychological depth. Phantoms, however, provides the audience with a study of the God complex, in the guise of an intelligent oil slick with visions of deification and serous inferiority issues who just wants to be remembered. I feel rather bad for the poor ol’ goop.

And it tries so hard to be one of the greats. It replicates humans like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It haunts the sewers like The Blob. It manifests the creepiest dog this side of The Thing. It uses giant moths to sucks out brains; it wipes out an entire town in an afternoon; and it even gives birth to a Lovecraftian cross of Liev Schreiber and a land squid.

But it just can’t seal the deal. All it takes to defeat it is a few vials of virus and Peter O’Toole (in an endearing performance of the sort only older English actors can pull off: equal parts gravitas and ham, replete with droll line readings that completely obliterate everyone else onscreen, including Sheriff Ben Affleck and Rose McGowan).

Phantoms is hardly perfect, often barely more than good, which is par for the course for anything author Dean Koontz has ever touched (the man positively reeks of adequacy). But director Joe Chappelle (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) understands how to create atmosphere, even if he doesn’t always succeed. He plays with silence and long takes, yet knows when to go for the gusto, makes the most of a low budget, keeps the cheap CGI to a bare minimum, and succeeds with a few of the creepiest moments I’ve seen in film. (That dog. That dog!)

All told, Phantoms is an effective creature feature that has quickly become a personal late-night staple, a cinematic snack to gobble down with cheap liquor and chips. Bonus points for the genius second act; the military and scientists arrive to survey the situation — a scenario which would normally result in an epic end battle of guns, mortars and tanks à la Godzilla — and The Ancient Enemy wipes them out in five minutes. Five! —Corey Redekop

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