At 17, the cute and comely village gas station attendant Carol (Janet Lynn, In the Devil’s Garden) is desperate to move to London to parlay her recent beauty contest victory into a modeling career. Her bored friend, the butcher’s assistant Joe (Robin Askwith, Queen Kong) seizes the moment, lies about having a big job lined up there, invites her and off they go!
I forgot to mention Carol’s also an exhibitionist. They fuck on the train.
Livin’ it up in London, they quickly run out of cash and begin to starve — nothing a quick dip into sex work can’t fix! Joe becomes her de facto pimp as “just this once” soon snowballs into a not 100% consensual train ride of another kind: five guys, some with unruly eyebrows thicker than my thumb. Luckily offscreen, the encounter is icky … and then possibly worse when the depressed, defeated Carol makes Joe the caboose after he professes his love to her minutes later. Dude, read the room.
As odd as this sounds — and as nude as Lynn often is — the sexploitation aspect of Pete Walker’s film seemed secondary to me. I got really invested in these two crazy kids. Both are likable, even with every stupid step they take.
Cool It Carol! captures Askwith just before he became a huge UK box-office draw with the four-flick Confessions series of sex comedies. This is the first time I’ve seen him in action. I was prepared to hate him based on his atrocious haircut alone, but I gotta admit, he had something. His face suggests Mick Jagger shagged Matt Damon. No telling from whom he inherited the hairy ass. —Rod Lott
If Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Darkdidn’t make it clear enough, take it from Paul W.S. Anderson: You really don’t need eyes to see. At least, you don’t need them after you take the scenic route through an interdimensional version of hell, courtesy of the titular spacecraft in the grimdark, sci-fi schlock-fest, Event Horizon.
In 2040, the Event Horizon, a massive ship designed for high-volume space travel and colonization, vanished during its first cruise. Seven years later, it re-emerges. Capt. Miller (Laurence Fishburne, The Matrix), Dr. Weir (Sam Neill, Possession) and a handful of other unfortunate crew members fly out to investigate it aboard the Lewis and Clark, a vessel about one-hundredth of the Event Horizon’s size.
The Lewis and Clark crew discover the Event Horizon abandoned, save for a few eviscerated corpses. A few audio logs and one horrific recording later, Capt. Miller resolves to abandon ship. That’s easier said than done, however, as the seemingly possessed craft reactivates its warp drive, trapping the crew of the Lewis and Clark aboard. The survivors race to execute a desperate backup plan as the demonic presence that seized the ship slowly digs its way into their psyches.
Hellraiser: Bloodlinewishes it were Event Horizon. Not that the bar for sacrilegious sci-fi horror is super-high, but for his film, Anderson (the Resident Evil franchise) brings tight cohesion, a genuinely intriguing setting and a quality of acting that leaves the rest of the genre in shambles. Fishburne and Neill transition from contentious comrades to cosmic nemeses believably enough, and the sparse comic relief from Richard T. Jones (2014’s Godzilla) doesn’t feel terribly forced despite being cheesy as — appropriately — hell.
While some may call Alien’s Nostromo the quintessential haunted house in space, Event Horizon’s lead spacecraft may actually exceed it. No, it doesn’t feature cramped quarters and an acid-bleeding Xenomorph, but it is actually haunted by the impression of an ineffable, chaotic dimension. Unlike the versions of space hell seen in Warhammer 40,000 or Doom, however, Event Horizon is less concerned with socketing in demons to make itself a half-baked creature feature. Instead, its terror is predicated largely on just the idea of hell.
Leaning on the concept as a source of horror instead of an overly manifested version of it (like the aforementioned Hellraiser sequel) likewise helps push the film’s theme. Event Horizon centers on a civilization that has pushed too far. It wasn’t good enough for us to get to another planet in a few days; we had to go faster than light itself, and in doing so, we didn’t just travel beyond humanity’s physical limitations, but the psychological ones as well.
Dr. Weir’s transformation into essentially a cenobite at the climax undermines this idea a bit, but otherwise, the crew of the Lewis and Clark aren’t fighting ghosts or demons. They’re fighting their own minds as punishment for not just fucking around and finding out once, but twice. This isn’t necessarily anything new in sci-fi, but using hell as an allegory for what little we know about space is still clever. (And maybe just a little heavy-handed.)
If anything, Event Horizon is worth the price of admission to catch the 30-or-so seconds of the sadomasochistic slaughter orgy captured on the recording the Lewis and Clark crew recover. This includes a follow-up line from Fishburne that is timed so well, it’s sort of baffling Anderson didn’t use it as the film’s tagline: “We’re leaving.” You should stay for the movie’s entirety, of course, even if it means disobeying a directly order from Laurence Fishburne. He’ll probably understand. —Daniel Bokemper
Co-opting more than a cue from Mel Brooks’ The Producers, a studio mogul played by Tony Curtis faces debt so deep, his only hope is to make a movie guaranteed to fail in order to claim it as a tax write-off. In walks a nebbish kid filmmaker (Dean Jacobson, Child’s Play 3) with his latest opus, a 1950s-style sci-fi cheapie called Lobster Man from Mars.
As you can guess, Lobster Man tonally plays like the titular spoof of Amazon Women on the Moon. But that all-star comedy has the good sense to include about 20 other sketches. This sticks to its one, only occasionally cutting to the studio screening room where Curtis watches the mess unspool. The look on Curtis’ face is so pained, one can infer he’s thinking of the great works of art he used to be in, like Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Janet Leigh’s cleavage.
In the movie within the movie, the red planet’s king (Bobby “Boris” Pickett of “Monster Mash” fame) sends the giant crustacean creature (S.D. Nemeth, RoboCop) to Earth to steal our air supply. Witnessing the alien’s crash-landing are an all-American sweater girl (Valley Girl’s Deborah Foreman, adorable as ever) and her British beau (Anthony Hickox, Foreman’s Waxwork director). Few believe their story, other than Tommy Sledge, P.I., played by comedian Tommy Sledge, which is to say he performs his stand-up routine parodying noir detectives. He’s also the best part.
I put off seeing Lobster Man from Mars for decades because I had my fill of its trailer while working at Blockbuster Video in college. For months on the store’s overhead TVs, management played a preview tape with a spot pairing the movie with Girlfriend from Hell, presumably due to their schlocky titles. With the opening notes of “Rock Lobster” announcing its arrival, I heard it multiple times a shift. To this day, any second of The B-52s’ hit elicits a Pavlovian shudder, although the flick uses a soundalike band in place of the real cosmic thing.
There’s a reason the radio version of “Rock Lobster” trims two minutes or more. I bring that up because here, Stanley Sheff (Vincent Price: The Sinister Image) and co-writer Bob Greenberg grossly misjudge audiences’ tolerance for their lampoon. It suffers from the same problem as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: The joke just isn’t good enough to drag into lollygagging territory, wearing my goodwill down so much, I turned on it. That leaves me without the patience to discuss Billy Barty in swami get-up, narration by Dr. Demento, a clown named Nose-O, former Playboy Playmate Ava Fabian, future Price Is Right model Mindy Kennedy, Robot Monster’s space gorilla or opening credits that feature scissors-cut faces of the actors next to their names. —Rod Lott
While it might be one of the most recent examples, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was hardly the first film to use bizarre and outlandish horror to earn critical acclaim. Possession isn’t necessarily the first, either, but you’d be hard-pressed to call 100-plus-year-old flicks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu even remotely as jarring Andrzej Zulawski’s plunge into one of the worst breakups imaginable.
That’s not hyperbole, either: Like, have you lost a spouse to a free-loving German karate expert, only to find out later your ex also left him for — spoiler — a primordial, tentacled man-beast that feeds on human flesh? (If you have, please contact us.)
After wrapping his latest mission and coming home to West Berlin, Mark (Sam Neill, Event Horizon), likely the most mundane international man of mystery, is greeted by his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani, 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre), with the news she wants a divorce. Mark naturally goes on a skin-crawling bender, but snaps back to reality after realizing Anna has left Bob, their young son, by himself and on the verge of neglect.
They loosely attempt to mend things for Bob’s sake, but they mostly just harm themselves with an electric meat carver instead. Mark tries to move on with the help of Helen, Bob’s schoolteacher who suspiciously looks like Anna (and is also played by Adjani), except for her lighter hair and greener eyes. Meanwhile, Anna rents a dilapidated apartment that practically pushes against the Berlin Wall to look after her latest, more monstrous lover.
Dichotomies define Possession. Anna and Mark both vie for better versions of themselves. The former struggles with trying to reconcile her “Faith” and her “Chance” before “Faith” violently ejects itself from her uterus in an empty subway. The latter, however, forces himself to step up as a more present father, only to inevitably devolve into a self-destructive lunatic. All of which, appropriately, takes place in a physically and politically divided city. If Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is an examination of how to potentially heal Berlin’s scar tissue, Possession is a nosedive into its festering wound.
What grounds the film is a pair of performances that shift on a dime. Adjani absolutely outshines Neill, but both show a physical and emotional toll from filming that rivals — and even matches — the very real distress seen from Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson just a year earlier in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Most will point to Adjani’s subway sequence, where Zulawski simply told her to “fuck the air,” as one of the main justifications for her Best Actress win at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but the scene just before that, where she whimpers and whines at a statue of Christ, might be even more telling of her character’s condition. Anna essentially begs for some answer to chaos, for some cosmic force to “fix” the calamity that’s tearing her and every relationship she has apart. But all she’ll ever get is a stone-cold stare from yet another man (or even a symbol of a man) who has no chance of understanding her. And no chance of helping, either.
Scholars have managed to dissect almost everything about Possession, and yet it still persists as a bizarre, mysterious and even schlocky horror drama. Maybe that’s what makes it so challenging. Even as touching and shocking as movies can be, this feels like something different and perhaps more intrusive. It’s like putting the saddest song you can think of from The Cure or Nine Inch Nails on loop, with every iteration getting a few seconds slower until it’s incomprehensible two hours later.
Possession is a free fall into an emotional chasm. You’ll catch your head on a protruding rock every few hundred feet. Eventually, you’ll forget that you ever stood on solid ground. —Daniel Bokemper
A radio DJ conveniently named DJ Miller is at risk for being squelched after his flame-emblazoned motorcycle is, unbeknownst to him, “borrowed” to steal a shipment of dope belonging to local drug kingpin Supermack (Lou Walker, 1979’s The Visitor). Presumably named after Super Fly, this gangster looks like that blaxploitation icon on a Whataburger Patty Melt diet.
In between ducking Supermack’s jive-talking henchmen and deposits of dynamite, Miller stops to aid a stranded female motorist. She offers to pay, but Miller refuses cash; instead, he says he’ll take it out in trade, and forces her into some backseat bangin’. Mind you, this is played for laughs. Also mind you, the woman is Supermack’s best gal, thus further enraging the smack slinger.
Al Adamson regular Geoffrey Land (Blazing Stewardesses) has no charisma as Miller, who hops around the clubs and beds of Charlotte, North Carolina, like he’s King Shit. Dude, he’s a DJ. And it’s not like we’re talking Wolfman Jack territory here. IRL, Mr. Miller would be appearing at an appliance store’s “everything must go” inventory sale, then doing spokesman duty on an UHF TV commercial for a roofing company, and maybe introducing the sneak preview of Silver Streak at the twin-screen bijou.
From Summerdog director John Clayton, the hicksploitation obscurity Redneck Miller is most likely to find favor with those who delight seeing a honky outsmart a bunch of Black guys for 90 minutes. It’s pretty dull. You really have to be into banjos, slide whistles, ahooga horns, canary-yellow bedsheets, floral-print couches, stars-and-stripes trucks, astrological necklaces, shag carpets as wall art, pool halls with Elton John posters, canned Schlitz, fake tits and those rock-hard stuffed animals people “win” at carnivals. In other words, not I. —Rod Lott
