Horror

Scared to Death (1947)

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Scared to Death was Bela Lugosi’s only color film and it’s a crazy-ass mixture of slapstick and horror, especially for a film with a concentration-camp subplot! It opens at the city morgue, where doctors prepare to perform an autopsy on a “beautiful girl,” who then narrates her own story as it clumsily unfolds in flashback.

She’s the daughter of a physician, in whose house she lives with her husband and a maid. She’s not right in the head, which is no surprise, given the home’s open-door policy to any guest that stumbles by, including magician Lugosi and his deaf dwarf assistant, Indigo, as well as the nosy reporter, his plucky girlfriend and a brick-dumb cop. The woman lives in fear of being killed by a stranger. Every so often, a green, featureless mask floats by the window outside.

I know that filmmaking was still pretty antiquated back in 1947, but you’d think the filmmakers would have been smart enough not to begin with an autopsy if they wanted audiences to be surprised when the lead female dies at the end. You’d also think they’d have the foresight not to end with the line “She was … scared to death!” but they didn’t, and God bless them for it. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975)

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Blaxploitation by way of the backwoods, Poor Pretty Eddie’s setup is tried and true: An outsider, en route to her vacation destination, has car trouble, causing a Deliverance-esque detour into dementia via a Southern-fried Podunk town and the racist, hillbilly denizens who hold court (literally).

Here, our victimized traveler is Liz Wetherly, a national recording sensation played by Leslie Uggams, who does battered and numb so convincingly, you’ll wonder if she took lessons from Tina Turner, bringing a disturbing grindhouse gravitas to the increasingly outlandish escapades. The titular Eddie (Michael Christian) is a delusional wannabe rockabilly singer in the key of an Eddie Cochran, just waiting for his big break. He’s been leading around sloshed sugar mama Bertha (Shelley Winters), who hopes to marry her poor, pretty Eddie.

When Uggams is towed into town by Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Addams Family), Eddie recognizes the star and tries to seduce her. Baffled when his booty call is shot down, he resorts to forceful, nonconsensual boot-knockin’. It’s surely one of the most surreal rape scenes on film, as it’s spliced with an equally graphic slow-mo scene of Cassidy breeding his dog!

I guarantee there was no “test screening” for the very un-PC Poor Pretty Eddie, aka Redneck County, a shocking trip even today. It makes my heart yearn for the era of the drive-in. Where else could you see the likes of Lurch, Winters, Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor in one movie? —Joshua Jabcuga

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Comedy

Sextette (1978)

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Sextette is the cruelest motion picture I’ve seen, both to its leading lady and to its audience, neither of whom come away unscathed. In retrospect, the entire movie feels like a pre-cursor to Bobcat Goldthwait’s Windy City Heat, in which the victim is a poor, deluded old woman too feeble to understand how foolish she is being made to seem. It’s a massive assault on our collective dignity that could have been avoided if only one person at the time had the balls to speak the plain truth.

Based on a play she wrote decades earlier, the legendary Mae West portrays Marlo Manners, the world’s most celebrated movie star, who has famously married every man she slept with. Her latest hubby is a pre-007 Timothy Dalton, who has taken her to a very prestigious hotel to celebrate their honeymoon. Before they can consummate their marriage, the two are constantly interrupted by terrible musical numbers (including one with Alice Cooper!) and a legion of Marlo’s ex-husbands, all of whom are desperate to have her back.

Looking at least two decades older than her 84 years, neither West, her castmates nor the filmmakers ever acknowledge the absurdity of the film’s premise, which only makes it that much more pathetic and sad. It also doesn’t help that the thought of she and Dalton actually fucking is so repellent, the viewer cannot help but get anxious every time they embrace — making the film scarier and more tension-provoking than any horror movie ever made. —Allan Mott

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Action

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

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After being absent from the Resident Evil franchise director’s chair since the 2002 original, Paul W.S. Anderson returned for the fourth, Resident Evil: Afterlife, the first in 3-D. It’s a definite improvement over Apocalypse and Extinction, but still well below the sheer coolness factor of the first.

One problem is that Anderson has overestimated viewers’ previous knowledge of the franchise mythos. I’ve tried to wipe my mind of the awfulness that was Extinction, so while I was wowed at Afterlife‘s opening sequence of numerous Milla Jovoviches — Jovovi? — laying waste to the Umbrella Corporation’s underground Tokyo headquarters, I was lost as to why and how she had all these clones.

The film is more of the same, with Alice (Jovovich) defying gravity and kicking ass, saving friends from the occasional threat of zombies with mouths that open to reveal vagina dentata thingies. Here, she reunites with her Extinction pals, including lithe Ali Larter, hiding atop a big tower. Wentworth Miller is there in a cage, which is kinda funny considering he spent four years breaking out of them on TV’s Prison Break. (You’re right, it’s not funny.) There’s also Asian Guy, Sleazy Producer, Bald Tuffie, Hot Brunette, Not Scout Taylor-Compton and Evil Sunglasses Guy Who Shops at Big & Tall & Matrixy.

And don’t forget the zombie Dobermans! It’s weird how everyone in this movie responds to being shot at the same way: doing a backflip. It’s so predictable, that I’d just fake a straight shot and then aim high. Then the series would be over. I was excited that sexy Sienna Guillory was returning as Jill Valentine from Apocalypse, but she gets one scene, and it’s buried in the end credits. Oh, well, Resident Evil: Whatever 5 Will Be Called, perhaps. —Rod Lott

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