Nancy Drew … Reporter (1939)

As the title so blatantly gives away, Nancy Drew … Reporter finds America’s sweetheart sleuth giving journalism a try. Not for altruistic reasons, but for the local newspaper’s prize of “$50 and a gold medal.” Leave it to Nancy (Bonita Granville) to pull a switcheroo so she can cover a front-page murder investigation.

Ignoring all journalism ethics, Nancy throws the concept of being unbiased out the window so she can work to free the woman she’s just sure is wrongly imprisoned: “Isn’t it a whopper?” In doing so, Nancy gets in a fender-bender, drives dangerously, meets a boxer named Soxie, and even eats breakfast cereal annoyingly. You know, come to think of it, Nancy’s kind of a manipulative nag, but boy, she sure can solve a mystery!

The second of the four-film series proves as frothy and accessible as the first, if you can get past the Asian stereotype who pops up at a Chinese restaurant where Nancy and friends are short by 65 cents. Thus, she, Ted (Frankie Thomas, whose character is suddenly no longer named Ned), Ted’s little sister and her pal Killer literally sing for their supper, and the crowd digs Killer’s killer Donald Duck impression.

The sequence serves no other purpose than to wedge in a musical number, which audiences of the era apparently ate up. Crack open the Flick Attack fortune cookie for my verdict: “I’ll allow it.” (Also, your lucky numbers are 07, 16, 33 and 84.) —Rod Lott

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The Convent (2000)

The Convent is made with such obvious affection, I’m able to forgive that it literally plunges a knife into the heart of its least hateful character 30 minutes into its running time, and then makes us wait another 20 before Adrienne Barbeau shows up to kick some serious demon nun ass. It begins memorably in 1960, with a hot, young brunette in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform walking into a church and batting away at the assembled sisters (and father) with a Louisville slugger before setting them ablaze and blasting them with a shotgun, all to the sweet sound of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.”

Forty years later, the location of this massacre is the destination of choice for a trio of truly obnoxious fraternity assholes, their virgin pledge, two girlfriends and the super-cute, sarcastic Goth girl who’s just like the woman I imagined I’d end up marrying back when I was 14. (It didn’t happen.)

The trouble starts when super-cute Goth girl is sacrificed by a quartet of pathetic Satanists, which causes the demons that necessitated the previous massacre to rise up from wherever they went the last time this all went down. In the end, the only person who can stop the demons from raising the Antichrist is the hot, 50-something version of the hot schoolgirl who took care of the problem the first time.

Needless to say, Barbeau is truly awesome as the foul-mouthed, liquored-up, tight-jeans-wearing demon slayer and is — along with The Convent’s sly sense of humor — the main reason to ignore the its obvious deficits and give it a chance. Clearly inspired by Night of the Demons and Evil Dead 2, The Convent is better than the former and nowhere close to the latter, which is exactly how it should be in a fair and just world such as our own. —Allan Mott

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Angst (2003)

While being date-raped, heretofore virgin Helen (Fiona Horsey) notices suddenly that the pain has suddenly stopped. That’s because her date has been eaten in full by her very hungry genitalia. Such is Angst.

“He vanished, into thin air,” a baffled Helen relates to her doctor, who answers, “Inside your vagina?” Then he, too, tries to molest her, and is, er, snatched up as well. Same goes for her stepfather when he tries to put the moves on her. Once Helen’s private parts start talking to her (“Feed me!”), she tries to silence it by spraying bleach all up in there.

And when that doesn’t work, she simply gives in and becomes a ho-bag to keep her vagina satisfied. About the most graphic it gets is when a john can’t get his now-ridiculously elongated tongue loose from that which exists between her legs. The image is like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon … well, if not for the vagina dentata plot, the rampant nudity, the exploitation of women, the rough language, and all that other stuff.

Originally titled Penetration Angst, this shit- shot-on-video snorer is hardly the first talking-vag flick (Chatterbox, anyone?), but it’s definitely the worst. “What a fucking mess!” screams one woman with about eight agonizing minutes left to go. My sentiments exactly. —Rod Lott

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