Horror

Dog Soldiers (2002)

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Set in the Scottish highlands, the inexpressibly splendid Dog Soldiers proves three things:
1. Despite recent Hollywood attempts to bury the genre, the werewolf movie ain’t dead.
2. A talented filmmaker can do true wonders with very little.
3. There is no movie that Sean Pertwee doesn’t automatically make better. (See also: Ian Holm and Liam Cunningham, who is also in Dog Soldiers — doubleplusgood!)

Sgt. Wells (Pertwee), alongside the resourceful Cooper (Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd, also fantastic), leads a regiment of ragtag soldiers on a routine training exercise (“I expect nothing less than gratuitous violence from the lot of you!”). Before long, they find themselves to be pawns in a Special Ops scheme to capture an actual werewolf, and have to hole up in a farmhouse to fend off a very hungry, very determined, well-nigh unstoppable family of lycanthropes.

In his directorial debut, Neil Marshall (The Descent) makes the most of a negligible budget to deliver a breathless horror movie along the lines of Aliens meets The Howling. It is very likely the best thing to ever appear on the then-called Sci-Fi Channel, including the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series. The casting is top-notch, Marshall keeps the tension high, and the monsters (beautiful practical effects, no CGI American Werewolf in Paris garbage here) are kept dimly lit, disguising their limitations and becoming genuinely eerie.

Combined with a tight script chock full of offbeat allusions to Star Trek II and The Matrix (among others), the end result is an endlessly entertaining slam-bang horror actioneer, and the best werewolf movie in a dog’s age. Bonus marks: During a scene of meatball surgery, Pertwee screams “Sausages!” at the sight of his own entrails. Just. Freaking. Perfect. —Corey Redekop

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Comedy

Do Not Disturb (2010)

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Do Not Disturb is a microbudgeted, all-hands-on-deck affair in which some actors dabble as directors and whatnot for an anthology film. Furthermore, the structure is experimental and even improvisational. They should not have bothered. Despite a fine concept — five stories set in Room 316 at a hotel — it’s one of the worst-executed films I’ve ever seen, making Four Rooms look like The Four Feathers by comparison.

First, a sad sack of a man (Harris Goldberg) hires an escort (Maureen Flannigan, Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde) to read his eulogy while he lay in bed. Hysterical, no? No. Next, skeevy, flight-suited Eric Balfour (Skyline) meets his love, Lindsay Pulsipher (the girl in True Blood who looks like she’s 12), and it turns into nonsensical sci-fi with lizard tongues and marked impatience for the viewer.

During a student trip, a white gay guy has to room with a black straight guy. Nothing happens. I don’t mean sexually — I mean nothing happens. (At least the movie is consistent.) Finally, there’s a two-parter (seemingly to stretch the film to its big, bad feature length of 69 minutes) in which a guy thinks he’s going to get his rocks off, but instead gets his kidney stolen.

Wrapping this ball of bullshit from start to finish are interludes with Diva Zappa as a new maid. The actors really aren’t the problem — it’s all in the writing. Not a single joke is funny. Not a single story is interesting. Not a minute went by that I wished I were doing anything else but suffering through this. Do Not Disturb? Do not watch. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Amer (2009)

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If you have a hard-on for the works of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, you’ll love Amer, a quasi-anthology French film that pays tribute to those Italian masters. While the giallo celebration’s title translates to “bitter,” Amer is oh-so-sweet, a thrilling debut from filmmakers Hélenè Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Does it hurt that it contains the best visual representation of an orgasm I’ve ever seen? Aucun.

The movie is comprised of three chapters in the life of Ana, first as an only child (Cassandra Forêt) who lives in a lakeside mansion with her parents and an elderly housekeeper they suspect of being a witch. Told with an array of eyeballs and keyholes in extreme close-ups, it’s the most overtly horror portion, imparting a strong, unsettling vibe reminiscent of the “Drop of Water” segment from Bava’s Black Sabbath.

The middle (and shortest) part of Amer finds Ana as an adolescent (Charlotte Eugène Guibbaud) with bee-stung lips and a budding sexuality that threatens to turn into danger, as she accompanies her mother (Bianca Maria D’Amato) on a walk into the dizzying, labyrinthian cobblestone streets of the nearby village. By the final tale, Ana is a full-blown gorgeous woman (Marie Bos) returning to her childhood home now abandoned and in disrepair … and complete with one of those black-gloved, razor-wielding psychos on the grounds.

If the music score sounds spot-on, it should, sporting ’70s cuts from Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai and Stelvio Cipriani, putting it squarely at the head of the class of giallo grad school. Amer may baffle those whose viewing habits don’t cross oceans, but I found it absolutely absorbing and fascinating — the art film at its most accessible. Take a stab at it. —Rod Lott

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Action

Never Too Young to Die (1986)

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Today, Steven Paul is best known (if at all) as the guy who keeps Jon Voight working in such modern crapsterpieces as Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Karate Dog and Bratz, but back in 1986, he was busy trying to live down the failure of his infamous 1982 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation, Slapstick (of Another Kind), which likely will go down in history as the worst movie ever made based on a book by a modern literary master.

Apparently, Hollywood decided four years was long enough to leave him dangling before allowing him to co-write and produce Never Too Young to Die, a strange attempt to create a new action franchise that tried to fuse the retro campiness of ’60s secret agent movies with the gender-bending campiness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Future Full House icon John Stamos plays Lance Stargrove the (teenage?) son of American secret agent Drew Stargrove (George Lazenby, who presumably got the part because Roger Moore read it and told Paul and company to go fuck themselves), who’s killed attempting to stop an evil scheme to turn the nation’s drinking water into radioactive sludge by a hermaphroditic maniac named Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, summoning the collective spirits of John LaZar and Tim Curry). Lance is aided in his mission to avenge his father’s death by his glamorous partner Danja Deering (ex-Prince associate and Tanya’s Island star Vanity, who isn’t quite hot enough to make up for the fact that she’s one of the worst actresses of all time) and his (boarding school/college?) roommate Cliff (Peter Kwong), an Asian gadget genius.

Directed by TV vet Gil Bettman, Never Too Young to Die clearly was meant to stand out from the ’80s action crowd, but its overt attempts at over-the-top campiness only serve to highlight how boring and generally crappy the rest of the film is. Simmons obviously had a fun time playing his version of an Adam West Batman villain, but his giddiness only serves to prove how bland Stamos and Vanity are in comparison. Because of this, the implied sequels never happened and the chances of Stamos ever appearing in an Expendables entry turned to naught. Somehow, however, Paul managed to keep on working, if only to give his friend, Voight — who gets a songwriting credit (!) in this flick — a much-needed paycheck every now and then. —Allan Mott

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Sex

Space Thing (1968)

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Call this softcore entry Star Whores or Fuck Rogers. Described by its very own producer, David F. Friedman, as “the worst science-fiction movie ever made,” Space Thing is so no-budget, its opening credits are painted on naked breasts (including the ever-dubious “written by Cosmo Politan”). Not that you’ll be complaining.

Our hairy-backed hero, James, is an avid sci-fi reader, much to the dismay of his horny wife. After she convinces him to make love, he drifts off to sleep and dreams he’s an alien, disguised as a human, in the year 2069 (natch) aboard a spaceship filled with intergalactic honeys and ruled by the lesbian Capt. Mother, who looks an awful lot like Rose McGowan.

The plot — James wants to stop them from reaching a California desert, oops, I mean far-off planet — is simply an excuse to allow the various and numerous sexual couplings. Strangely, the women (one of whom is named Portia — a Shakespearean reference, perhaps? Nah!) are allowed to fully disrobe, but the guys keep their pants on and simply do a lot of rolling around. Capt. Mother even gets her groove on with another girl and wields a stinging whip to another.

Something Weird Video’s special edition includes the original trailer — which tastefully references one sequence as “planet of the rapes” — as well as a gallery of Friedman advertising art and two future-themed short subjects, one involving a giant robot butler. —Rod Lott

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