Killer Elite (2011)

In Killer Elite, Danny Bryce (Jason Statham) is reluctantly pulled back into the assassination game when his former partner, Hunter (Robert De Niro), is held captive in Dubai by a six-months-to-live sheik with a pubic beard and a score to settle. One of the sheik’s sons was killed by three British Special Air Service agents in the Oman war, so he enlists Danny to exact revenge for him, whereupon he’ll let Hunter free.

Not onboard with this arrangement? Spike (Clive Owen), an ex-SAS agent with a glass eye and runty mustache. He wants to protect his boys, so he’s all about tracking down Danny Boy. During their first of several tussles, Spike bites Danny, who responds with one considerable ball punch.

Directed by first-timer Gary McKendry and based on a true story, the 1980s-set Killer Elite represents brainier fare for Statham than his bread-and-butter style of Transporter-tainment. But the script is a bit too muddled, making it tough to follow at times. The end result is the Stath’s least-satisfying action vehicle since 2007’s War.

But watch him use a loaf of bread for a silencer! Leap from rooftop to rooftop as if he were the bald Jackie Chan! Jump out a second-story window while tied to a fucking chair! Take part in car chases! Put the moves on Yvonne Strahotski Strahovski! Again, plant that fist into Clive’s dangling nads! Yes, it’s not without its moments, and even may improve upon a second viewing. —Rod Lott

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The Orphan Killer (2011)

Relax, The Orphan Killer is an orphan who’s a killer, not a killer of orphans. That said, yeah, he’s still the kind of guy who’ll stab a machete in your face, or choke you with barbed wire, even ax a nun if he has to. On the playful side, he likes to steal bras for sniffing purposes.

Masked murderer Marcus (David Backus, Priest) can’t get over the fact that after their parents were killed some 20 rough-odd years prior, his 5-year-old sister, Audrey, was adopted and he wasn’t. While she got to play with Barbies, he had to be molested by a priest and made a mockery of by other kids. So he tracks down Aud (Diane Foster, who also co-produced), strings her up, rips open her blouse and tortures her. Sibs!

This relationship isn’t much different than the one between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode of the exalted Halloween franchise, except that Marcus speaks (mostly about Jesus and pain and suffering — y’know, the usual) and, quite thoughtfully, wears a tie while on his rampage of rivalry. There’s not much more to it than that, with writer/director Matt Farnsworth filtering in pieces of the backstory on a need-to-know basis between instances of bloodletting. That savagery, however, is executed (pun intended) quite well.

In fact, the overpowering aggro-metal music notwithstanding, The Orphan Killer is one of the most impressive pure DIY horror films I’ve seen, if not the most. Marcus isn’t likely to be the next horror icon — neither are Victor Crowley, ChromeSkull, Babyface and the other touted wanna-be Vorheeses — but Backus certainly succeeds in making him repugnant. Foster, exuding a Scarlett Johansson/Elizabeth Olsen quality, plays her wounded heroine role to the hilt. Her efforts are worth it, given Farnsworth’s slick, yet brutal direction and top-notch effects that make this squarely not for the squeamish. —Rod Lott

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Cop in Drag (1984)

Been to The Blue Gay? You know, “that weird club,” where the drag queens put on big production numbers, like a skeleton act performed in total darkness, a breakdancing extravaganza … and also murder! When a transvestite named Nadia is found dead in his/her dressing room, Inspector Giraldi (Tomas Milian) is assigned to the case, because, as his supervisor says, “Sissies like your type!”

Welcome to Cop in Drag, an Italian crime comedy so broad, you could study its cartography. With the prime suspect being The Blue Gay’s prima donna, the cocaine-eyed Giraldi goes undercover in the club. Rather than don drag himself, he forces that indignity on his rotund sidekick, Venticello (uni-monikered Bombolo), the subject of many a slap.

About the height of the humor is Venticello being forced to eat cat food. (Hey, just because it’s the height doesn’t mean it’s funny.) As you’d expect, the majority of jokes fall into the category of “potential to offend,” with “fairy,” “fruit,” “fag” and other derogatory terms that don’t start with F batted about
by the people for whom we’re supposed to root. A subplot has Mrs. Giraldi mistaking her husband for a homosexual, and you kinda wish the bickering spouses would go back to shaking their newborn baby.

Apparently, the Giraldi series was a big hit among Italians, with the franchise numbering 11 entries. While Cop in Drag certainly is watchable and capable of generating a few smiles (mostly at its own expense), Bruno Corbucci’s effort made me long for the comparative smarts and subtlety of his brother Sergio’s Super Fuzz. Italy’s Tootsie, this ain’t. —Rod Lott

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Panic Beats (1983)

That damned Alaric de Marnac! He’s the 16th-century knight who caught his wife in flagrante delicto, so he beat her to death with a mace. Not content with that act of revenge, he rises from the tomb every 100 years to kill any Marnac woman. Or at least that’s the legend told to Geneviève (Julia Saly, Night of the Werewolf), a wealthy woman with a dire heart problem. She’s been brought by her husband, Paul (writer/director Paul Naschy), to his childhood “holiday home” to rest comfortably, away from the hustle and bustle of civilization.

After all these years, the swanky spread is still taken care of by Maville (Lola Gaos, Blood Castle), the elderly maid, who now has (reluctant) help from her orphaned niece, Julie (Pat Ondiviela), a former drug-doin’ prostitute. From the start, Geneviève witnesses what others brush off as hallucinations: a snake in her bed, a hobo in her bathtub — why, it’s almost as if someone is trying to scare her to death!

Spoiler alert: As John Cougar Mellencamp once sang, “I need a lover who won’t drive me crazy.” If I got as much action as Naschy gives himself in Panic Beats, my unit would be worn to a nub. As befitting of such a sex-fueled, greed-driven set-up, it’s as if everyone has an evil-off in a race to be the last asshole standing.

The whole bloody affair ends with a predictable comeuppance, but a perfectly gory one. Bright and colorful, the Spanish splatter is amped up in an effort to keep pace with the era’s slasher films of the other hemisphere. Although no stupid teenager, Naschy makes for a strong-willed presence in front of the camera, and clearly has a ball behind it, orchestrating one gruesome scene after another, at a pace faster than his more famous efforts. If you’re into the man at all, just Beat it. —Rod Lott

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Dune (1984)

Here is why I love Dune: It doesn’t work. Not as a drama. Not as a space opera. Not as a war movie. By the basic tenets of comprehensible storytelling, it’s ridiculous. Its overall failure is legendary. But taken as a whole, it’s a twisted dream, rife with spectacularly unique imagery and a baroque, Flash Gordon-like design that never fails to draw me in, even while I’m picking it apart.

But this is what happens when you hire David Lynch, that most idiosyncratic and nonlinear of directors, to adapt Frank Herbert’s dense, sci-fi classic. Lynch pares the plot of a space messiah on a desert planet past the bare essentials to a series of stunning images, tying them together with the most convoluted of narratives, goofy dialogue and aggressively uneven special effects — the first appearance of a sand worm is a classic, but the poor use of green screen would make modern Asylum mockbusters blush with shame.

Yet within Dune lie the seeds of something much greater. Watch as the Guild Space Navigator (an effects wonder) speaks through a grotesque vaginal slit. Gaze upon Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan), his face swollen with boils, hovering beneath a shower of oil. Listen to the absurd rock score by Toto, which under no circumstance should work, yet does so gloriously. View the premature birth of a mutated reverend mother from the inside of the womb.

Dune, again, is ridiculous, with a game cast vastly more talented than necessary. However, by watching it, you glimpse the nightmarish vision of a director who just needed a chance to express himself outside the narrative demands of others. If nothing else, it makes you wonder what Lynch (who was approached) would have made of Return of the Jedi. I bet the Ewoks would have been far more feral, festooned with gaping wounds. —Corey Redekop

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