As of November 2022, the magician Max Maven is no longer of this earth. Anyone watching TV in the 1980s will likely remember him; he was the guy who wasn’t David Copperfield, Doug Henning or Harry Anderson. With ink-black slicked hair, a single earring and pencil-thin mustache and goatee, he’s the one who looked like a satanist, albeit a satanist who could produce a rabbit from a hat.
Pioneering at the time, Max Maven’s Mindgames was an hourlong special made exclusively for home video. Marketed as “the video that reads your mind,” it’s plant-the-camera directed by Bruce Seth Green, the guy behind such VHS rental gold as Nudes in Limbo and Massage … the Touch of Love.
Maven “communicates” with viewers through a series of magic tricks. Most are considerably lame, like the opening stunner of “making” your two index fingers touch one another. Oooooh! On a set reminiscent of Match Game PM (if Gene Rayburn had tolerated strobe lights and dry ice), Maven uses his brain powers to force you choose a preselected flag (the true neat bit) before moving on to the requisite card tricks. In between, he acts like a moron in some horrid “comedy” bits; as the writer, Maven only has himself to blame.
Many tricks have themed backdrops — the jungle, a surgical ward, a Vegas casino — but no matter the locale, they reek of cheap thrills. The guy had talent, but the limitations of videotape don’t exactly make for mesmerizing feats of mentalism. With support from a talking computer, a rotund ratings rep and a pair of sequined sweeties, Mindgames includes a musical number to “Yankee Doodle,” a clip from Battlestar Galactica and a man in a duck suit. —Rod Lott
Between Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire, Joan Severance’s Black Scorpion and Nicole Eggert’s The Demolitionist, 1995-6 proved to be a banner year for B movies starring surgically enhanced TV vets befit in tight black leather costumes. Also in this club of sexed-up superheroines within that calendar range? Electra! As in Shannon Tweed’s with-a-C, not Jennifer Garner’s with-a-K Elektra.
Tweed (Hot Dog … the Movie) is Lorna, a quiet woman who favors farm life and floral prints. She’s stepmom to Billy (Joe Tabb, 2002’s Feedback), a muscular, blank-faced, long-haired, Jersey-accented, bare-chested bo-hunk whom she lusts after. And what soccer mom wouldn’t? The boy’s got freakin’ super powers! In addition to allowing him to jump real far, run real fast and flip real vans, Billy’s powers are youth- and health-restorative.
Naturally, that appeals to the evil Dr. Roach (Sten Eirik, Darkman II: The Return of Durant). Being confined to a wheelchair outfitted with two expandable TV antennas, he longs for the young man’s goods. Trouble is — and here comes the genius part of the Damian Lee/Lou Aguilar screenplay — they can be transmitted only through Billy’s semen and, well, Roach doesn’t play for that team.
So when the leatherbound wiles of a pair of backflippin’ bitches fail to extract the mighty virgin’s super juice, Roach kidnaps Lorna, teases her with a vibrator and makes her up to be some ultra-hot harpie who can bare vampiric fangs, levitate during catfights and shoot bolts of electricity from her palms. Needless to say, she’s up ’n’ grindin’ on her jeans-model stepson in no time, tricking him into making a small deposit.
Speaking of unloading, director Julian Grant (The Cropsey Incident) does that with a slew of bloopers during the sequel-threatening end credits. Most of the foul-ups, bleeps and blunders entail one cast member or one another saying “fuck” or variations thereof. In addition, Tweed claims she’s about to barf, and I can’t say I blame her. —Rod Lott
While white people steadily line up to fork a few bucks for the race-baiting Avatar: The Way of Water, a true Indigenous sci-fi flick came out a few months ago: the alien-infused, back-biting cut of Slash/Back, directed by the daring Nyla Innuksuk.
A community of wholesome-but-troublesome pre-teens are petering around their small Intuit town. Taking their father’s boat to a neighboring island, they have to fend off a snarling bear. But the animal is seemingly part of a cosmic invasion, beginning with small, cuddly scenes of true wildlife to extraterrestrial-possessed, snarling-spittle man-things.
After said bear is taken out by the girls, the aliens want revenge. Now inhibited the town’s small police force, they come after the girls — and these are no shrieking violets! They formulate a master plan: armed with a hunting rifle, harpoon and other tools of the trade, to take out the menace with extreme prejudice, all in time for the conclusion of the town’s community center dance.
A Native-twinged riff on malingering post-mortem possession along the lines on John Carpenter’s The Thing and other stalwarts, Slash/Back takes the changeling formula and breathes new life with the Innuksuk’s innovative story, set in a dying town where tradition lumbers forth and swings back with a sick crack — with, of course, an alien invasion theme.
Slash/Back’s leads — especially Tasiana Shirley and Nalajoss Ellsworth as two of the young warriors — are up to the task, quelling any incoming invasion with both their Indigenous heritage and their pop-culture breakdown, giving this movie another rung of the absolute ladder of total domination … with space monsters to boot. —Louis Fowler
M3GAN is a bit of sugar, spice and stab you twice. Housebound director Gerard Johnstone is no stranger to melding horror with humor despite his sparse filmography. And it’s not like the rogue AI is anything new, either. Between HAL 9000, Agent Smith or (my personal favorite) AM, it’s hard for a hostile ghost in the machine to get a circuit in edgewise. M3GAN doesn’t try to break new ground as much as it flosses all over it.
Violet McGraw (The Haunting of Hill House) plays Cady, a tween whose parents die in a tragic snowplow accident. She’s placed with her aunt, Gemma, played by Allison Williams (Get Out). Gemma’s career is built on AI, robotics and toys that can shit themselves. Unfortunately, the well begins to run dry as her CEO fears their company’s competitors — who announce a cheap knockoff with a reactive LED butt — will overtake the Tamagotchi-Furby monster market.
Her grieving niece and an unrealistic deadline pushes Gemma to complete M3GAN, an almost-lifelike doll portrayed in body by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis. M3GAN’s prime directive becomes protecting Cady’s physical and emotional well-being. The toy takes a few liberties — and heads — to ensure her purpose.
M3GAN is everything Lars Klevberg’s abysmal Child’s Play remake tried to be. It asks us to consider how we exploit grief and enable tech dependency without a heavy-handed, dogmatic message. Tech is comfort, and the film slices through how emotionally vulnerable it can make us with a sentiment akin to Spike Jonze’s Her. Granted, it’s not nearly as good as Her, but it ditches alarmist copouts to deliver something simple and telling.
This is also not much of a horror film. While you’ll see clear opportunities for M3GAN to be more unnerving and terrifying, the restraint is honestly appreciated. (After all, M3GAN’s eyes are unsettling enough; is there really a need to pile onto that?) Instead, it opens the door for humor. And it takes advantage of this with a surprising amount of tact.
M3GAN has a near-perfect balance of dark revelations and clever comedy. The story would fit snuggly within Black Mirror’s first and second season — you know, when the series was still pretty good. That’s not to say every joke lands, but it’s very hard to deny its wit by the time M3GAN converts Sia’s “Titanium” into a lullaby.
Unfortunately, M3GAN hits so many things right, its few weaknesses are as jarring as a Tickle Me Elmo with dying batteries. For one, in the era of Siri and Alexa, it feels outdated to lean on cheap tricks like overt voice digitization to remind us something is artificial. It wasn’t needed in Ex Machina, and it’s definitely not needed to sell M3GAN’s malice.
Second, she’s already menacing, and the implication she can cease control of electronics and infiltrate vast defense networks makes her more so. It’s just hard not to yearn for a little bit more storytelling to that end. It’s a stretch to suspect the full extent of her Wi-Fi enabled powers will probably be saved for a sequel. But that’s the double-edged sword of an emerging horror villain: You want so much of them before they’re spoiled by a half-baked franchise.
Ultimately, there’s no guarantee M3GAN will get a sequel at all. The character definitely deserves it, but if this is truly all the time we get with her, we’d be wise to cherish it. M3GAN isn’t the brand-new caboose to an ever-growing hype train. This diamond-studded droid does, in fact, slay. —Daniel Bokemper
In ’60s cinema, Italian superhero movies were 2 lire a dozen. However, only one is from the guy who would give cinema a naked Amazonian girl impaled anus-to-mouth on a spiked pole. Working under the Americanized moniker Roger Rockefeller, future Cannibal Holocaust chaos agent Ruggero Deodato wrote and directed Fenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen early in his career.
Mauro Parenti (Justine de Sade) stars as Guy Norton, bearded count by day, Parisian superhero by, well, day. Norton exhibits primo sartorial choices that go out the window when costumed as his crimefighting alter ego. As Fenomenal (Italian for “phenomenal,” if you haven’t guessed), he’s dressed all in black, save for his hands and belt buckle; capping the outfit are sensible shoes on his fleet feet and pantyhose over his head. Super powers are nil, but he can legibly write his name inside a briefcase to trick a thieving bandit.
Fresh from foiling a heroin ring at sea, Fenomenal is tasked with hunting for an ancient relic, the whereabouts of which are hidden in hieroglyphics on the mask of ol’ King Tut, currently on exhibition. Villainous Gregory Falco (Gordon Mitchell, White Fire) wants his hands on it. A woman named Mike (Enter the Devil’s Lucretia Love, Parenti’s soon-to-be spouse) wants her hands on Norton; she introduces herself as being the daughter of “the canned meat king.”
Because Bruno Nicolai’s score is seasoned with jaunty “ba-da-bah-bah-bah” ziggalybops, none of Treasure of Tutankamen is to be taken seriously — good to know since logic is negligible. People get double-crossed; take the pic’s word for it when you’re told. A Eurospy staple, fun is had with all kinds of transportation — cars, speedboats, yachts, helicopters, wheelchairs — but the best scene is something right out of the MattHelmpictures: Fenomenal fights a fez-wearing goon in a ladies’ sauna. As towel-torsoed women run and scream, Feno dodges thrown chairs and punches.
Phenomenal? Hardly. But it’s passable, as long as you know it’s no second coming of Danger: Diabolik. —Rod Lott
As of November 2022, the magician Max Maven is no longer of this earth. Anyone watching TV in the 1980s will likely remember him; he was the guy who wasn’t David Copperfield, Doug Henning or Harry Anderson. With ink-black slicked hair, a single earring and pencil-thin mustache and goatee, he’s the one who looked like a satanist, albeit a satanist who could produce a rabbit from a hat.
