Babysitter Wanted (2009)

As Elisabeth Shue so famously warned in Adventures in Babysitting, “Don’t fuck with the babysitter!” It’s a quote that Angie Albright (Sarah Thompson, Cruel Intentions 2) neither utters nor paraphrases in Babysitter Wanted (which should not be confused with the ’80s Touchstone teen comedy), but certainly embodies, if a little too late.

Angie’s a good, Christian girl-next-door type who moves away from her devout mom to study art history at college in a small town where young women have been disappearing. Smooth move! Needing money to buy a bed, she takes a job babysitting one night for Sam (Kai Caster), a cute but shy only child who always wears cowboy gear and drinks buttermilk. He lives with his parents in a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse.

Everything goes well until the some big, bald man with scars all over his face tries to bust his way inside, recalling — how could it not? — John Carpenter’s Halloween. But debuting co-directors Jonas Barnes (who also wrote) and Michael Manasseri have a trick up their collective sleeve, and odds are that you won’t be able to guess at least the most twisted part of it.

Unfortunately, from there, this otherwise better-than-expected Babysitter loses all its juice. Its greatest asset, Thompson, spends most of the remaining time tied up and gagged, listening to one character go into exposition overdrive for a situation that could be explained in just a couple of lines. It’s not the great Bill Moseley, incidentally, who plays a cop sympathetic to Angie’s plight. She’s so darned cute, who wouldn’t? —Rod Lott

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Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana (1971)

Is marijuana an aphrodisiac? While I know some women who would easily fellate you for a dime-sack of high-quality, hydroponic sticky-icky with no hesitation, I have a feeling that has more to do with low self-esteem and the lack of a positive male role model than it does any type of magically seductive ingredient laced within those tenderly pungent pot buds.

Sadly, I personally have never been privy to such THC-leazy doings — although it hasn’t been for a lack of trying — nor have I ever been to a swanky cocktail party wherein a joint is casually passed around and eventual inhalation of the demon weed leads to a spontaneously nude encounter group session wherein pock-faced, fully-bushed cuties are told to stare at your bathing-suit area and gently caress your mons pubis, as I am repeatedly promised in this 1971 sexploitation relic.

Sorry, Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana, but while you dubiously proclaim that cannabis is an ancient sexual enticer that will lead even the most frigid broad to drop trou and let you plow, in my experience, it’s typically just two or three dudes chafing it up on a Goodwill couch, barely watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force and, almost ritualistically, going to sleep, alone, with a belly full of Salsa Verde Doritos, depressed they can’t even maintain the most pathetic of erections for some tearful self-stimulation before passing out to side one of Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus.

Your visual dissertation just doesn’t hold (bong) water, Aphrodisiac! It does, however, hold other, thicker fluids. While I’m sure in their heart-of-hearts, the filmmakers thought they were presenting a strong case for the use of marijuana as a sexual aid, all that hard work and scientific research is pretty much lost entirely the first moment onscreen penetration occurs between two of the saddest, most unphotogenic, low-rent porn actors the Bowery-based modeling agency could rustle up.

And, you know, I kinda liked that, actually. The idea of a director trotting out to the nearest homeless shelter, paying a belligerent morphine addict $10 to mime the most reptilian of sexual encounters with an equally uninterested, possibly dead hooker, using every diseased thrust as an opportunity to feel something other than the lifetime of mind-numbing regret and stomach-growling hunger … well, that’s some sexy shit. It makes me feel like a shadowy Italian businessman who just paid $5,000 to sit in a hotel room with other equally shadowy businessman — mostly Japanese — to watch a Bolivian snuff flick. I’m sure we can all relate. —Louis Fowler

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Karate: The Hand of Death (1961)

Quick! What was the first martial-arts movie to unspool across American cinemas? Five Fingers of Death? Fists of Fury? Nope! ‘Twas the no-budget, black-and-white oddity Karate: The Hand of Death.

In it, a Yank named Matthew (Joel Holt) is vacationing in Japan when he mysteriously comes into possession of a coin owned by a former Nazi who was murdered via karate chop the previous night. Because said coin contains hidden secrets surrounding the dead man’s fortune, bad guys come out of the woodwork to prey on Matthew; the one pestering him the most is Ivan Mayberry, a near-7-feet tall homosexual who talks like Mr. Belvedere and smokes all of Matthew’s cigarettes.

Luckily, Matt is skilled in the fine art of karate — black-belt style! Or so says the script. He’s got scars on his knuckles and we see him break a couple of boards, but he doesn’t hit much beyond a teapot, which he assaults in a rage in his hotel room, hilariously. He also stops a taxi cab in its tracks and kills a man simply with a bale of hay, but I don’t think you need a black belt to do that. When Matt fully busts out his kung fu in the to-the-death finale, it’s still so stilted and awkward, it’s like watching Ward Cleaver.

The film’s middle is an extended lesson in the sport of karate, during which Ivan won’t stop asking annoying questions (“Why do those chappies have their fingers extended like this?”). Karate sure doesn’t work as a straightforward action film, because it’s largely in a state of inertia, but it works well as a comedy. —Rod Lott

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Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007)

If you’re ever boarding a commercial airline and the pilot happens to mention it’s his last flight before retirement and a long vacation with the grandkids, turn around and get off! Because there’s a middle-aged housewife zombie locked up in the cargo bay and she. Wants. Out.

The proof is in Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, which is like Snakes on a Plane, minus the snakes, adding the undead, but keeping same the ratio of “fuck” and its variations to all other words spoken. I’m fairly certain the subtitle only exists to hammer this point home, and even potentially confuse/trick viewers too clueless to know the difference.

Soap actor David Chisum is no Samuel L. Jackson, but his FBI agent has a gun. So does Richard Tyson as a federal marshal with a beret that, at certain angles, make his hair look like Princess Leia. There are three super-hot flight attendants (that’s how you know it’s fiction) on the Paris-bound plane, one pro golfer whose carry-on is a golden putter, Kevin J. O’Connor in the John Malkovich role of kooky criminal, several douchebags and, eventually, a jumbo jet full of zombies that just seem to come out of nowhere, despite the confined setting.

Once it gets going, Flight is awfully fun, but it could’ve been more fun, had the whole of it played things as over-the-top as the last chunk of scenes. One moment even veers into the purposely slapstick deaths of the great Final Destination 2. It gives you a lot of simple-minded entertainment for your ticket, but no free bag of peanuts. —Rod Lott

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Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (1979)

One thing I truly love about watching forgotten exploitation films are coming across moments where the filmmakers manage to transcend their obvious limitations (be it budget, talent or a combination of both) and create a sequence that truly stands out as something far more memorable than it has any right to be.

For the majority of its running time, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (aka The Great American Girl Robbery) is little more than a blatant excuse to connive scenarios in which its titular characters are compelled to expose their breasts, but hidden at the end is a genuinely engaging heist sequence as breathlessly enjoyable as anything you could expect to see in a major studio film of the era.

So what I’m saying is that to get to the good part of this movie, you’ll have to sit through a lot of nudity featuring a bunch of attractive young women dressed in short skirts and very tight T-shirts. There are clearly worse ways to spend your time.

As the kidnapper/mastermind/former pro football player, co-writer Jason Williams (of Flesh Gordon fame) manages to walk the hero/villain line surprisingly well — at least enough to earn the final moment of connection he shares with the film’s nominal heroine (Kristine DeBell, a Playboy cover girl who went hardcore in the X-rated Alice in Wonderland before moving on to mainstream fare like Meatballs and The Big Brawl).

The rest of the performances are mostly abysmal, but in that amusingly porno way, that actually adds charm to a production rather than detracts from it. —Allan Mott

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