Comedy

Just One of the Guys (1985)

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If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have firsthand experience dealing with the misery that comes from being a smoking-hot, 18-year-old girl (but if you do, please feel free to email us — with an attached photo). Luckily for us, though, we have Just One of the Guys to share with us the insight our own lives thus far have failed to provide.

Terri (Sandra Bullock lookalike Joyce Hyser) is a high school reporter who believes she isn’t taken seriously because of her impressive rack. In order to test her theory, she decides to transfer to a nearby school and pose as a male student (where she is accurately described by female admirer Sherilyn Fenn as looking, “like the Karate Kid”).

Speaking of a certain Ralph Macchio movie, professional ’80s asshole William Zabka shows up to play the school bully who picks on “Terrance” and her new friend, Rick (April Fool’s Day’s Clayton Rohner), whom she inevitably falls in love with and has to flash in order to prove she’s a lady-girl and not a really cute gay dude.

While lacking the verisimilitude that made the concurrent John Hughes films so special, Just One of the Guys has a fun, timeless quality that keeps it from being another dated ’80s teen comedy (and as a bonus, it has a much happier ending than Boys Don’t Cry). Hyser is a genuinely charming lead, and it’s a shame her work here didn’t allow her to go on to bigger and better things. —Allan Mott

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Horror

Burnt Offerings (1976)

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Dan Curtis’ Burnt Offerings comes from that era in horror when the genre was a chic gig for Oscar winners and A-list talent, rather than any given season’s crop of young, cheap TV supporting players. This one has Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith and even the grand bitch herself, Bette Davis.

Reed and Black portray the Rolfs, who — with son Davey (Lee Montgomery) and Aunt Elizabeth (Davis) in tow — rent a sprawling Gothic manse for the summer for $900. Seems too good to be true? It is, because there’s a catch: Thrice a day, they are to set out a plate for the unseen 85-year-old woman who never comes out of her room. RUN!!!

Not only do they not run, but Mrs. Rolf does what she’s warned not to do: entering the coot’s room. After doing so, she starts acting all weird. Her hubby also starts exhibiting strange behavior — well, if attempting to drown your own kid counts. (Is it? I can’t keep track of things like “laws.”)

You get the idea Reed was just doing this slow stepper for beer money, because he tends not to invest much in it beyond teeth clinching. No one told Davis, however, who overacts the hell out of things, to the point where you can feel her arrogance seething through your TV. At least the ending is kinda cool, if expected. Was that scripted or was Reed so tanked he slipped? —Rod Lott

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Horror

Babysitter Wanted (2009)

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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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Sex

Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana (1971)

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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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Martial Arts

Karate: The Hand of Death (1961)

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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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