Thriller

Madness (1980)

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No sooner has thieving murderer Joe Breezi (Andy Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro) escaped from prison to sweet freedom than he kills a couple of farmers, stabbing one with the elderly guy’s own pitchfork. At least he has good reason: Joe needs their car to drive to the two-room countryside cottage in which he buried 300 million liras five years prior, underneath the fireplace.

Arriving at the cottage for the weekend are cad Sergio (Gianni Macchia, Inferno), his wife (Patrizia Behn) and her sister (Lorraine De Selle, Cannibal Ferox). Sergio’s cheating on the former with the much-hotter latter, Paola. When he goes out hunting and his wife heads into town to shop, that leaves Paola to sunbathe … and Joe to knock her out so he can start chipping away at the bricks.

Had he just waited a couple of days, Joe could have the place to himself — but then, we wouldn’t have a movie. And it’s an enjoyably sleazy movie. Clad in a wife-beater, blue jeans and white Keds, Joe rapes Paola when she comes to … and then professes to like it. De Selle spends a good half of the movie with nary a stitch; getting nearly as much screen time is John Travolta, via a poster above the couch.

Madness contains three additional sex scenes, with the first being the most explicit — surprisingly not involving gay icon Dallesandro. Let’s just say writer/director Fernando Di Leo (The Italian Connection) familiarizes the audience with Macchia and Behn’s taints. Don’t worry: Di Leo delivers his trademark violence, yet the weird thing is, you may find yourself rooting for Dallesandro and against his captives — not just because the actor has a palpable presence, but because the Italian-language film is written that way. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

In the Devil’s Garden (1971)

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My dad always told me that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. What he failed to mention is that a rapist may be hanging out somewhere around the middle. That’s the case for the pink-skirted schoolgirls who, while on their way home, take a shortcut In the Devil’s Garden.

A young Lesley-Anne Down (The Great Train Robbery) is the first girl to be attacked; she survives, but is rendered virtually catatonic from the shock. After a second girl goes missing, hot art teacher Julie West (Suzy Kendall, Torso) goes hunting for her student. Julie finds the girl — dead, unfortunately, but also gets a glimpse of the likely killer, who she testifies looks “exactly like the devil.”

Well, except he had no horns. Admittedly, that’s a pretty stupid thing to say in such a public forum. Way to go, Teach.

Ms. West makes up for it by hatching a plan to draw out the killer. It involves convincing a journalist to run her drawings of Satan on his newspaper’s front page. Don’t question it — just know it’s crazy. In fact, we’re told, “It’s so crazy, it might work.” Really!

Alternately known under many titles that include Assault, Tower of Terror and Satan’s Playthings, the movie sprouts a big, brassy score that grows so loud, it suggests “THRILLS!” in places where there aren’t any. That’s not to say the film is bad — just very, very British, in that it exudes a different sensibility than an American film would. In our hands, it’d be a pulse-pounding thriller; in those of director Sidney Havers (Circus of Horrors), it’s more a standard, mild-mannered whodunit, painted with just a streak of the perverse. Casting someone as lovely and lively as Kendall makes following the trail more pleasurable than otherwise. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Sect (1991)

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I hadn’t heard anything about La Setta — aka The Sect, The Devil’s Daughter and Demons 4 — before watching it, but I did so simply because it’s an Italian horror film directed by Michele Soavi (Cemetery Man) and written with the legendary Dario Argento. Looking at the cover, I couldn’t tell what it was about. Looking at the back cover didn’t help, either, because it’s in Italian. Yep, this is one of those movies that could be about anything — funny, because I felt the exact same way after watching it.

It’s supposedly about a woman and her relationship to a sect of Satanists. Lots of things happen. There are lots of squirm-inducing set pieces like bugs up your nose, a scary … well, you know, scary things! Aren’t you scared yet? Context? Sorry. It’s all just ingredients — a plot that isn’t for following, but for yanking you from one contrivance to the next.

The acting isn’t any worse than Soavi’s others, but if your lead actress is going to act like an Italian who’s supposedly an American (or whatever the hell’s going on), you’d better surround that person with a plot that will distract me. As for star Kelly Curtis (Trading Places), her name certainly seems American (and she is, being the sister of Jamie Lee Curtis), but she acts and sounds as if she doesn’t quite have a grasp of the English language or has never observed rational human behavior.

None of her reactions to all the strange goings-on seem very realistic. After having an old man die in your house, then your friend is murdered and then comes briefly back to life to try and kill you, there’s no time to relax, Kelly. It’s time to start figuring shit out. —Richard York

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Action

Twisted Justice (1990)

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If you see only one David Heavener film in your life … well, it’s clearly one too many. Heavener’s one of those guys who does practically everything in his low-budget action movies; in addition to starring and producing, he provides the witless writing, the lifeless direction and the atrocious music. (It’s a wonder he wasn’t credited with doing his own mullet-sculpting.) Despite all his involvement to the contrary, he can’t be an action hero, because he looks like the guy who last serviced my car.

In Twisted Justice, he plays Tucker, a quirky, renegade Los Angeles cop in the year 2020. How quirky and renegade, you ask? How’s sleeping in the bathtub in dirty longjohns with his jelly-donut-eating hamster for you? Tucker’s on the trail of a serial killer who murders hot, rich women connected to a chemical company.

Or, as his boss (Erik Estrada, TV’s CHiPs) puts it, “We’ve got a turbo-charged fruit loop here.” Congress has outlawed guns, however, so the cops have to make do with stun darts. Good thing our boy Tucker — who drives a beat-up car with the license plate “TUCK U” — still carries his illegal weapon, with bullets hidden inside a donut kept in a box next to his toilet.

Estrada is just one part of an all-star washed-up supporting cast that includes Jim Brown, Karen Black, James Van Patten, Shannon Tweed and a “special appearance by Gerald Milton.” (Wait, who? The executive producer.) It’s with Tweed that Heavener proves his true ineptness as a filmmaker: Who in the fuck casts Tweed and doesn’t write himself a five-minute sex scene with her? Heavener, that’s who. In fact, he doesn’t even have her take off her clothes. That’s just Twisted, dude. Now will you please rotate my tires while you’re at it?

Fun fact: This was the last movie I watched before nervously hopping on a plane for the first time after 9/11, mere weeks. If it had turned out to be the last movie of my life, I would’ve been pissed. —Rod Lott

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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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