Documentary

Beyond the Mat (1999)

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I’m no fan of professional wrestling as sport, entertainment or otherwise — I’ve always had an aversion to it, and always will — but I was intrigued by Saturday Night Live scribe Barry Blaustein’s documentary Beyond the Mat, which tells the stories of the wrestlers outside of the ring, from the perspective of a fan who nonetheless doesn’t shy away from showing the pitfalls of the game.

While pro wrestling is all staged and all show, the violence can be real. But the ring footage is boring compared to the remarkably candid peeks in the thick-necked personalities’ lives. See “living legend” Terry Funk put off retirement, although he needs new knees. See Jake “The Snake” Roberts go on a crack-induced rant-’n’-rave. See WWF head honcho Vince McMahon come off as more repellent and slimy than ever before. See the audition of the new recruit Puke — so named because of his ability to barf on cue (and, as the end credits reveal, now paralyzed following a fight).

Best of all, see family man Mick “Mankind” Foley’s young kids watch in tears and sheer terror as their father gets beaten up by The Rock. It happens.

The doc is alternately interesting, funny, uncomfortable and touching. It has more spandex and mullets than should be allowed in a feature film, but that goes with the territory, right? —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Horror

Hangman’s Curse (2003)

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Hangman’s Curse is perhaps the world’s first Christian paranormal teen mystery spooker, and as expected, it’s so bad, it’s good — a crazy combo of The Omega Code, The X-Files and Spy Kids, with elements of Heathers and Arachnophobia thrown in just to muddy up an already messy mix.

David Keith and Mel Harris star as the parental units of the Springfield family, a gypsy-like clan roving the country in an RV with their twin teenage children, Elisha and Elijah, and Max, the drug-sniffing dog, all working together as The Veritas Project, a crack freelance undercover investigations team. They’re hired by a public high school to uncover the truth behind a series of mysterious deaths that has so far claimed the lives of three football players. The bullied Goth kids — depicted as Satanists, of course — explain that the soul of a kid who hung himself in the school years ago is getting revenge on all classroom tormentors.

Donning baseball cap and spectacles, Keith unconvincingly goes incognito as the school janitor, while Harris looks at evidence under microscopes and calls for the assistance of a nutty professor, played by Frank Peretti, author of the book on which the film is based. I can understand cutting him a little slack since these characters are his and all, but Peretti is no actor and seems to think the dramatic narrative is sturdy enough to support his decision to channel Bruce Dern, Jerry Lewis and Prof. Irwin Corey, inadvertently providing many funny moments. (The honor for the funniest, however, goes to the scene in which virginal Elisha wraps a snake around her neck and comments, “It reminds me of a boyfriend I once dated.”)

The kids are the real stars of the ham-fisted, underlit, amateurishly acted film, especially Elisha (Leighton Meester, TV’s Gossip Girl), who exclaims “Oh, snaps!” whenever something doesn’t go her way — like plunging down an air duct and landing in the nest of hybrid killer spiders. The tumble and resulting bites nearly kill her, but she’s saved by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. (Oh, and a fresh dose of anti-venom, but that doesn’t get near as much credit.)

Whom did the Christian backers hire to helm their cinematic testament of God’s love? Rafal Zielinski, director of such noted church faves as all three Screwballs titty flicks, of course. They also couldn’t have picked a better example for the sanctity of marriage than Harris, who’s such a firm believer, she’s been hitched five times. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Psychic Killer (1975)

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Although he’s second-billed, Jim Hutton (TV’s Ellery Queen) plays Arnold Masters, the Psychic Killer in question. Wearing red-rimmed glasses that likely make him the least popular man behind bars, he’s institutionalized for a murder he swears he did not commit. And he didn’t. But give the man some time.

After a fellow mental patient commits suicide, Arnold learns the man willed him some sort of voodoo necklace, which enables him to astral-project into others’ bodies and do some crimes. Once the murder charges are dropped and Arnold his free, he uses his new jewelry as often as a teenage boy does erections.

Anyone responsible for the death of his mother and his wrongful imprisonment are at the top of Arnold’s shit list. A rapey doctor goes kablooey; a hot nurse is scalded to death in the shower, as its head cranes to follow her around the tight space; a cop drives his car off a cliff; a contractor is smashed by a cement block; a butcher is chased by slabs of meat until he gets caught in a machine that turns him into ground round. It’s tough not to think of the Final Destination series since the culprit is nowhere present at these grisly deaths.

Because Hutton was such a likable actor — or perhaps I’m just a sick bastard — I was rooting for Arnold, and not for the gruff detective (Paul Burke, Valley of the Dolls) eager to get his goat. Directed and co-written by Ray Danton (Deathmaster), the film alternates between police procedural and speculative fiction, with some surprising gore sprinkled about, and topped with one of the screen’s oddest stripteases (courtesy of Love Me Deadly’s Mary Wilcox). Yet for some reason, it doesn’t feel like a mess; it feels like an undiscovered gem of weirdo ’70s cinema. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Plot of Fear (1976)

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In Italy, a serial killer leaves a calling card alongside his victim’s corpses: vintage illustrations from a book of fairy tales. What a plot! A Plot of Fear, one might say. Our intrepid investigator is the horny Lomenzo (Michele Placido, The Divine Nymph), who learns that the dead have something in common: being founders of a wildlife organization called the Fauna Club, which collects endangered species and smokes a lot of hash, although not necessarily simultaneously.

The fur flies big-time after a cop discussing the case on live TV is shot in the head. Lomenzo gains an ally and a bed partner in Jeanne (Corinne Cléry, The Story of O), a pro whore who tells him of a Fauna Club shindig she recently attended, where rich men, Phyllis Diller-esque hookers and one chimpanzee got drunk, watched a pornographic cartoon, played an X-rated party game at the dinner table, then nearly fed a call girl to a tiger. But she died of fright first, the party pooper.

Directed by Mondo Cane creator Paolo Cavara, Plot of Fear is so narratively muddled, I didn’t initially realize the above flashback was a flashback, but I also didn’t care. I was too distracted by the plentiful nudity, pig carcasses, hammer attacks, Tom Skerritt’s haircut, and racist dialogue like, “You’re worse than a black man!”

Questionable lines prove to be a theme, with a cuckolded hubby reacting to pics of his cheating wife thusly: “Look at that ass! And her tits, they’re so slutty!” Better is this exchange between Lomenzo and a fellow cop while rifling through LPs at a late-night record shop:

Lomenzo: “Do you like classical music or not?”
Fellow Cop: “No.”
Lomenzo: “Just fuck off.”

Speaking of, Lomenzo and Jeanne engage in a sex scene with so much aggressive, wide-open French kissing, one wonders if their taste buds were forever wonky afterward. —Rod Lott

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