Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
Demon Lover Diary (1980)
What happens when a speedometer-cable factory worker mortgages his house, car and furniture, and takes two weeks of “sick leave” to make what he’s certain will be “a masterpiece” of horror cinema? Something far short of that, as demonstrated by that eventual film, 1977’s The Demon Lover, and this warts-and-all documentary on its making, with apologies to the word “making.”
Never officially released commercially and not likely to, Demon Lover Diary was captured by the camera of Joel DeMott as her boyfriend, Jeff Kreines, volunteers to shoot the debut film of his friend, the aforementioned toiler Donald G. Jackson, who co-directed with Jerry Younkins, an arrogant hothead who cut off his own finger to get $8,000 of insurance money to fund their dream. They should have dreamed harder.
Don and Jerry are revealed less as creative geniuses and more as temper-prone diva babies. For some reason, they don’t want the donated efforts of a sound man, Jeff’s buddy Mark Rance; Don deceives his kindly mother, at whose house they’re crashing; and one of their recruited female stars is missing one of her front teeth. Plus, she’s 14 — a year for every scheduled day of principal photography.
While Don and Jerry claim to have worked their asses off, Jeff, Joel and Mark instead find an extremely disorganized set. Don won’t help move any equipment: “A director really shouldn’t be carrying anything. I’m carrying the weight of the whole film.” The only continuity among their scenes, Jeff notes, is stupidity. Don and Jerry are all talk and no action: “We think we’re going to come up with the best low-budget horror movie ever made,” says Jerry.
They didn’t. All this and a cameo by a belching Ted Nugent! —Rod Lott
Knowing (2009)
Fifty years after an elementary school buries a time capsule, the modern-day student body unearths it. Everyone gets crappy Crayola drawings they’re all excited about, but lil’ Caleb (Chandler Canterbury, After.Life) receives a page of seemingly random numbers. His dad, John (Nicolas Cage), a “cool” science professor who says “Shit just happens” in class, gives it the ol’ look-see.
John determines the numbers aren’t random at all: Down to the date, casualty count and flippin’ GPS coordinates, they’ve predicted five decades’ worth of tragedies. Like what, you ask? Oh, everything from a hotel fire to something called lil’ ol’ 9/11 — perhaps you’ve heard of it? While Caleb gets a buzzing in his ears and is pursued by mysterious men who can shoot light out their mouths, his dad tries to prevent the remaining three tragedies.
Those “will they or won’t they happen?” sequences allow for some nifty effects sequences, from a passenger jet crash to a subway crash, but CGI visuals hardly can be the backbone of a sci-fi thriller. Director Alex Proyas — who’s worked on both sides of the genre spectrum with Dark City and I, Robot — should know better, but casting Cage was perhaps more damaging than anything in (or not in) the script. The once-great actor no longer can so much as yell convincingly, so of course, it’s now his go-to emotion.
With Rose Byrne (Insidious) on hand as a useless female lead, the movie all leads to a laugh-out-loud ending that combines Close Encounters with plodding stupidity. By then, any intrigue generated by the setup has eroded roughly 90 minutes prior. To paraphrase an old adage, sometimes not Knowing is better than Knowing. This is one of those times: a disaster flick that’s a disaster in itself. —Rod Lott
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
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