Horror

The Scorpion with Two Tails (1982)

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As is de rigueur with the giallo, the title is meaningless. But The Scorpion with Two Tails is no giallo. It’s more like Jell-O, but if director Sergio Martino didn’t bother reading the recipe, so the result fails to cohere. It’s a mess that falls apart almost instantly.

Joan (Elvire Audray, Ironmaster) is plagued by nightmares of an ancient Etruscan cult killing its members in a cavern filled with dry ice. The cult members wear full masks seemingly donated by Dumb Donald from the Fat Albert cartoon. These visions might have something to do with her archeologist husband (John Saxon, Cannibal Apocalypse) studying ancient whatnot in an Etruscan cemetery at that very moment. If only he were killed while sharing this info with Joan on the phone, we would know for sure.

He is killed while sharing this info with Joan on the phone, not even 11 minutes into the movie. So she has no choice but to investigate what happened to him, what’s happening to her and what her wealthy asshole of a father (Van Johnson, Concorde Affair ’79) has to do, has to do with it.

Martino being Martino (Torso, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, American Rickshaw, et al.), more murders occur; the film has more neck-twisting than the average chiropractor’s weekly appointment book.

Reportedly, Two Tails is edited down from an eight-hour miniseries. I cannot fathom watching this at that length, because what’s here amounts to so little action and other items of interest. We get slithering snakes, phony bats and, memorably, Joan’s hands swarming with real maggots. To be honest, I got more anxiety from the sheer amount of tiny Styrofoam beads thrown about as Johnson frantically searches for a vase by tearing open crate after crate. Cleaning up said beads requires more effort than Scorpion’s script received. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

The Drone (2019)

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It’s amusing to see viewers of The Drone trash the film on whatever site they streamed/stole it from, tapping such keen observations as “This isn’t scary at all.”

Well, duh, because it’s not meant to be. Granted, shame on the Lionsgate marketing department for misleadingly pushing The Drone as a straight-ahead horror-thriller, but anyone paying a quarter of attention to tone — hell, I’ll be generous and round down to one-eighth — can tell it’s a comedy.

After all, we’re talking about a remote-controlled drone possessed with the soul of its late owner — a serial peeper-cum-rapist-cum-killer of redheads, known as The Violator (Neil Sandilands, TV’s Hap and Leonard) — upon being struck by a fatal bolt of lightning. Hey, it worked for Chucky, right? That its very premise is beyond preposterous is very much the point.

The titular gizmo finds its way to newly married new homeowners Rachel (Alex Essoe, Doctor Sleep) and Chris (John Brotherton, The Conjuring), where it surreptitiously makes a sex tape of them and senses the family dog as a threat to its existence — so much so the machine Googles “animal shelter”! Anyone taking the “flying pervert machine” as anything but parody of contemporary horror, The Drone has whooshed over their noggin like a joke they didn’t get or, well, like a drone.

At the helm of this techno-terror circus is Zombeavers director Jordan Rubin, bringing his fellow writers, Al and John Kaplan, for another round of making light of ridiculous horror-flick trends. While not up to the hilarious heights of that underrated 2014 comedy, The Drone offers enough absurdity to keep Rubin on my radar.

If nothing else, you could spend the movie looking for visual nods to iconic scenes from other genre fare, including Alien 3, The Exorcist III and numeral-free The Shining. But don’t let that distract you from seeing the drone using Snapchat and committing murder by invading someone’s rectum. —Rod Lott

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Action

Sisu (2022)

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Finnish director Jalmari Helander already has one modern cult classic under his belt with 2010’s twisted Christmas fantasy Rare Exports. He has another at the ready in Sisu.

As a title crawl explains, practically doubling as a synopsis, the word “sisu” means white-knuckled courage that comes forth only when all hope is lost. In 1944 Finland, a battle-scarred soldier (Helander regular Jorma Tommila, Big Game) deserts the war (WWII, you may have heard of it) and wanders the sprawling vistas of the wild with his trusty dog.

Lucking into a life-changing cache of gold, he needs all the sisu he can muster, which is a lot, when tanks and trucks of Nazis cross his path. (Understandably in today’s topsy-turvy world, it’s not enough for them to be Nazis; Helander makes them child-raping Nazis.) Led by an SS officer with the appropriate name of Helldorf (Aksel Hennie, The Martian), they’re rendered surface-level despicable — more characterization than they deserve.

From there, Sisu is one set piece after another, with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of bloody action. Painted with strokes as mythic as The Man with No Name, Mad Max and Rambo, our rumored-immortal hero exacts justice that’s swift, brutal and cathartic, whether navigating minefields or hanging on an ascendant plane via pickax; not for nothing was he known as a “one-man death squad” while under conscription. Helander knows just how to handle him: as a movie icon in the making, even if his exploits are one or two reels too long in the knocked-out tooth. —Rod Lott

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Action

Short Fuse (2016)

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A rep-tarnished attorney in between at-law jobs, Ares has little choice than gigging as a delivery driver. His shift’s last drop-off takes him to an address bearing the number 13, so you know something’s not on the up and up. He’s knocked out and awakes with timed C-4 explosives strapped to his chest.

Via earpiece, a Jigsaw-modulated voice gives Ares (Apostolis Totsikas) a series of missions to keep the device from detonating. The fun of Short Fuse is seeing the obstacles he’s thrown at — and in between — each step, from cops and gangsters to mines and even a booby-trapped exercise bike.

Co-directed by Andreas Lampropoulos and Kostas Skiftas, the film plays like Greece’s version of David R. Ellis’ 2004 breakneck thriller, Cellular. Totsikas even seems cast from the early-career Chris Evans hothead mold. No kidnapped Kim Basinger exists here, but Evgenia Dimitropoulou (The Two Faces of January) fills the distressed-damsel role with more active participation.

With chases by wheel and by foot, gunfights galore and, yes, explosions aplenty, Short Fuse is less a white-knuckle experience, more a pleasant discovery. It may not knock your socks off, but your toes won’t get cold. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Attack of the Doc! (2023)

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G4, I hardly knew ye.

I knew of you, but never watched you. And what I knew was limited to absorbing media mentions of Attack of the Show!, your channel’s daily flagship program — mostly that you covered video games and launched the career of OKC’s own Olivia Munn.

So when Show! contributor Chris Gore’s look back at the irreverent live TV series opens with a declaration of being made “by the fans for the fans,” I understand I’m not the documentary’s target.

Still, as hagiographies go, I enjoyed Attack of the Doc! all the same. (More still, Gore, where are those Film Threat retrospective projects you talked up years ago?)

Fast and frenzied, the Doc!-umentary functions well as a clip show — a greatest-hits collection for both the fervent and the uninitiated. In an hour and a half, it breathlessly clicks through such highlights as:
• a contest of drinking Cholula hot sauce,
• diving into a giant chocolate cream pie,
• turning someone’s anal canal into a live hot spot,
• James Cameron beating a mannequin with a folding chair,
• James Cameron talking “space dragon sex”
• and comedian Eric André spontaneously demonstrating Buffalo Bill’s dick tuck from The Silence of the Lambs.

Good times. And as the voiceover interviewees emphasize more than thrice, a lot of the things they did then would not go over well today. That’s an understatement, but then again, last year’s Jackass Forever didn’t exactly play it safe (in fact, I haven’t seen that much nut damage since the floor of a Texas Roadhouse after closing).

Whether Attack of the Show! “changed everything” as Attack of the Doc! purports, I’m not qualified to say. (I don’t game. I don’t buy Funko Pops. I don’t worship Stan Lee.) But I’m willing to let them have it on the basis for acknowledging how ridiculous and petty fandom can get. That said, if Show! is truly responsible for Jimmy Fallon’s Celebrity Party Game Ha-Ha Power Hour (formerly known as NBC’s The Tonight Show) as suggested, I reserve to right to take it back. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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