Get Away (2024)

You know folk horror has enjoyed a cultural moment when it’s earned a parody. For the UK comedy Get Away, Shaun of the Dead sidekick Nick Frost gives it just that, scripting himself in the lead role as the patriarch of a family on summer holiday. They’re headed to Svälta, a Swedish island commune days away from its decennial festival commemorating a 19th-century incident that turned its inhabitants either into corpses or cannibals. The main event: a reenactment, of course.

Despite every frickin’ red flag unfurled, hoisted and erratically waved inches from their faces, the family of four rents an Airbnb on the otherwise stuck-in-the-past isle. The cottage’s owner is a pervy, Roman Polanski lookalike (Eero Milonoff, Border) who has eyes for their daughter (newcomer Maisie Ayres).

You can see where this is going: The Wicker Man meets National Lampoon’s Vacation. Except Frost and screen wife Aisling Bea (Home Sweet Home Alone) are both Clark Griswold, with their longtime-spouse interactions giving Get Away an immediate leg up for laughs. Their marriage as well-worn as a college sweatshirt, they call each other “Mummy” and “Daddy,” much to the disgust of their son (Sebastian Croft of Netflix’s Heartstopper series). Frost may be the draw, but Bea, a deadpan delight, stakes her claim as Get Away’s winsome secret weapon.

Get Away suffers whenever those two aren’t front and center. This is especially true with the Festival of Karantän — essentially the Svältans’ bloodier, duckier version of Christianity’s passion play — which director Steffen Haars (New Kids Turbo) allows to overstay its welcome by half. The overstuffed sequence then gives way to a polarizing loop-de-loop in plotting, depicted with enough pulverizing excess — underneath Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” on the soundtrack, no less — to make your head spin in disbelief as the movie becomes something else.

With this redirect, Get Away gets away from itself. After a strong hour, that shift qualifies as a misstep. Unfortunately, the movie never regains its footing, losing not only the goodwill it worked so hard to build, but much of its sense of humor. In particular, Frost’s last line just before the credits roll is a real groaner, so many rungs lower than the film’s established place on the comedic ladder, it’s embarrassing. —Rod Lott

Art of the Dead (2019)

In the late 1970s to early 1980s, it seems like you couldn’t pass an intersection without seeing the original pop-up shop: some guy selling velvet paintings propped against his van. Remember those? 

Good. Now cast aside all assumptions of reality and imagine the dude’s entire inventory were worth half a million bucks. Now imagine the perfect person to broker that sale were Tara Reid. Now you’re prepared for Art of the Dead, from writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky (The Erotic Adventures of the Invisible Man).

The gaudy and gauche oils at this horror movie’s necrotic heart depict the seven deadly sins as represented by animals. All come from the brush of the appropriately named Dorian Wilde (Danny Tesla, Attack of the Unknown), who looks like a cross between Frank Zappa and a haberdashery. Wilde’s septet of “masterpieces” — at best, they scream high school art class — is in high demand, despite making people go nuts upon gazing. The prologue illustrates just how, with a cameoing Richard Grieco (Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill!) slaughtering his family.

After outbidding others for the cursed collection, members of the Wilson family find out its downside fast. The goat painting makes Mom (Jessica Morris, Reel Evil) so horny, she fucks a goat — or an NBA-mascot facsimile of one. The snake artwork makes Sis (Cynthia Aileen Strahan, TV’s The Offer) give herself a boob job — using the torn-off breasts of her bully. The frog one makes her brother (newcomer Zachary Chyz) paint the nude body of a sex worker (Sarah French, That’s a Wrap) — with words like “WHORE CUNT SLUT BITCH.” 

Too much? But but but I haven’t even gotten to Wilde creating canvases from the skin of a prostitute! And paint from her blood to match! It’s like Ray Bradbury’s legendary short story “The Veldt,” but with 100% more demon-tonguing.

Yes, Art of the Dead is completely preposterous in premise, yet I can’t deny the appeal of its gimmick. Luckily, the film puts you in the proper frame of mind upfront with the credit “a Rolfe Kanefsky flick,” rather than “film” or “movie” or “picture” or another Pauline Kael-friendly synonym.

Even if it hadn’t, is anyone in danger of taking this Mahal Empire production seriously? If so, then they’re not paying attention to the auction worker who drinks from a hose until his belly literally explodes. Or the priest with a milky eye. Or the twin kids turning into giant snails. Or the snakes earning credits as “Hisser” and “Pumpkin.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

The Perils of Pauline (1967)

A contemporary adaptation of the iconic 1914 serial, The Perils of Pauline is one Hail Mary of an action comedy, patched together from three episodes of an intended TV series canceled before it could air. The production attempted to capitalize on the mad, mod, quasi-parodic pop sensation known as ABC’s Batman — and boy, is that evident, for good and ill. 

Aging out of the orphanage that’s raised her since infancy, the virginal Pauline (Blue Hawaii cutie Pamela Austin) enters the real world and gets into and out of one scrape after another. Her trouble begins in Africa, where she tutors a 12-year-old royal prince (Rick Natoli, Hang Your Hat on the Wind) who wants her for his harem. The kid’s so horny, he chases her around the palace. She’s also pursued by tigers, dangled over a pit of stock-footage sharks and kidnapped by a gorilla — twice! 

From the sewers to the high seas to even outer space, Pauline’s inadvertent adventures find her pursued by the three über-wealthy men, including Terry-Thomas (The Vault of Horror) and Edward Everett Horton (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). But the only one who has her heart is an age-appropriate fellow orphan (’nilla crooner Pat Boone), who spends a chunk of Perils in a block of ice floating in the ocean. Trust me; it’s a long story, figuratively and literally. 

Innocence personified, Pauline doesn’t go chasing waterfalls; they just seem to find her. Every time she faces danger, the parlor piano music kicks in and the film is sped up, all the better to ape its chapter-play origins. Pre-“talkies,” silent films, including serials like The Perils of Pauline, relied on exaggerated physicality to help impart emotions. That performative spirit haunts this update through barn-broad slapstick — a style that pays off in the whimsically entertaining prologue, then lacks ingenuity thereafter. The real cliffhanger is how much of your bat-time you’ll cede before changing the bat-channel.

Try as the producers might to cobble the individual eps into a functional feature, it just doesn’t work in the more demanding format of cinema — even the semi-spoofy kind. Prestige TV, Pauline ’67 was not. Adam West’s Batman influence notwithstanding, this flick lands amid the female-fronted, spy-fi likes of Fathom, Modesty Blaise and Deadlier Than the Male. As with Pauline, each is a sexed-up send-up of pre-existing IP … and we know how those turned out: best viewed via their posters. —Rod Lott

Frankie Freako (2024)

I loved the idea of Garbage Pail Kids and desperately wanted to collect them, trade them and engage in their anti-social behavior. Especially their anti-social behavior.

Sadly, my mother hated them. I wasn’t allowed to collect them, manhandle them, even give a look at the disgusting, fetid, stomach-churning cards. Of course, it made me the odd man out in 1985. Thinking about it, I do wonder how my life would have turned out if I got to take part with the snotty crowd …

Either way, when The Garbage Pail Kids Movie came out in 1987, it ostracized the GPK into nostalgic oblivion — until now, that is, with Frankie Freako coming upon the scene and wiping its butt with it, making me remember that wave of mutilation.

Frankie Freako is the movie that Garbage Pail Kids should have been and, as you can tell, wasn’t. A mixture of gross-out humor and full-on Pop Art sensibilities, it’s all played in a mockingly daft tribute. Frankie Freako provides both a spot-on parody of the “of their time” shock products and a snot-riddled love letter to the terrible fictionalized characters and their very freaky situations.

Freakout!

In the movie’s self-referential, low-rent 1980s universe, utterly boring Conor (Conor Sweeney) leads a sterile life of compressed stability with his British wife. Acting on a TV ad for a 1-800 number, he invites the ultimate party animal, Frankie Freako, and his soft-foam diminutive compatriots to the ultimate freak-out.

Understandably, things get very freaky.

As Frankie and friends tear up his place, Conor winces in discomfort. Eventually, they all come to an understanding that it’s okay to be freaky. But when they’re transported to the planet of the freak, they try to get home in the freakiest way possible, which usually means farting, boogers and other bodily distractions.

Although its budget is moderately low and puppet-rigging is quite lax, it completely works. The limited money makes it work, giving Frankie and friends a ribald, sleazy, grotesque personality that is infectious. The live-action actors, really, are secondary to the Freakos, but it really lets them be their whole slobbish personalities and all their affections and it truly works.

With knowing, mocking direction from Sweeney’s fellow Astron-6 member Steven Kostanski, it’s got a rocking attitude with sheer comic depravity. Besides GPK, Frankie wears its stop-motion inspiration on its sleeve, including Ghoulies, Critters and The Gate. It’s a near-perfect distillation of the wack pack of pint-sized monsters on the loose, making everything in its path disgusting, rotten and, of course, totally freaky. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Kingkong Is Coming Back (2024)

Thanks to the People’s Republic of China, Kingkong Is Coming Back! And copyright lawyers are nowhere in sight! 

That’s right: Kingkong, one word, as if that qualifies as ethical and saves the keisters of all involved parties from the threat of litigation. Still, this so-called “giant” gorilla isn’t large enough to hold anyone in the palm of his hand. Imagine a primate the size of Harambe after going without Mounjaro shots for six months, including year-end holidays. Also, his face gives “durrrrrr.”

Story? I mean, I guess. A mineral exploration team in the mountains is ordered by their bald, bad benefactor to stop searching for mines and capture the ape. Or else their families will pay … in blood. (This movie should pay … in steep tariffs.)

You might predict ’kong (not Kong) will save our scientists. You will not predict the movie’s other freak of nature: a veritable Tarzan Boy raised in the wild. Clad in long hair and short loincloth, he moves and flies and flits and spins and scales like he’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Encino Man. The kid also punches and kicks CGI wolves that cast highly unnatural shadows. 

From Youku, China’s equivalent of The Asylum, Kingkong Is Coming Back is cheaper than cheaply made, with poorly layered effects that scream “rush job” (or “加急工作!” per the Google machine). Although sitting at 63 minutes, they are a punishing 63 minutes, capped by an anti-ending that’s written like a transition into an actual ending. Take the title’s passive voice as a sign of the action’s quality. —Rod Lott

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