Thriller

Love Crime (2022)

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For Love Crime, Nicole D’Angelo blamelessly jumps aboard today’s true-crime gravy train with her telling of Jodi Arias’ 2008 murder of boyfriend Travis Alexander. Not only does D’Angelo (The Awakening of Emanuelle) direct, but brings her irresistibly wispy lisp and chameleon-like quality to portray Arias as well. Barely over an hour, the movie does more time-shifting than a full season of Quantum Leap.

Her Jodi is devout, virginal and clingier than flypaper soaked in Gorilla Glue. After a couple of dates with seminar-bro Travis (Amateur Porn Star Killer’s Shane Ryan-Reid), she’s convinced the Lord’s holy matchmaking has brought them together. Travis isn’t 100% sold on divine intervention. In response, she pulls down her shirt to show her cups floweth over; immediately, his tune changes to hallelujah, He is risen, pass the plate, where do I tithe and all that. I get it.

Life-affirming cleavage aside, no scene allows an understanding of what made their relationship tick, much less tock; overall, more attention is placed on her breakfast egg preferences, a bartender’s war scars and a waiter’s cheesecake recommendation than to the nuts and bolts of their ultimately fatal attraction. However, every scene is fragmented into a montage. Reflective of the hand of frequent collaborator Gregory Hatanaka (here, producer and cinematographer), D’Angelo is unable to resist cutting to another time and place — or times and places, plural — often slowed and involving dancing and/or smooching. Love Crime has to contain more kisses than actual minutes.

Utters a police detective played by H.O.T.S. vet Lisa London, “That darkness inside of her … it operates on its own logic.” I would suggest the same is true of the film, if not for the film proving it seconds later when London adds with no certain cynicism, “If truth is bitter, my coffee should be.”

Indeed it is: Love Crime is so scattershot and undercooked, it hasn’t got a prayer. But I recommend the cheesecake. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Documentary

Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal (2003)

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On May 19, 1984, Michael Larson changed game shows forever, earning the largest single-day take by a contestant: $110,237. He did it on CBS’ Press Your Luck, going dozens of rounds without landing on one of the game board’s bankrupting “Whammies.” While not statistically impossible, his streak was statistically improbable. More remarkable is Larson didn’t cheat. Instead, the unemployed, former ice cream man took advantage of patterns he discovered by obsessively watching episodes on his VCR for months.

The whole sordid story, complete with unhappy ending, is told on Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal, a Game Show Network feature-length documentary. Hosted by Peter Tomarken, the host for Luck’s original run, Big Bucks could have taken the easy route of planting narration over the pair of Larson episodes to discuss how he did it. Instead, the doc employs frickin’ CSI-level forensics to show how he did it, using every video tool at their disposal: slow motion, timecodes, unaired footage.

Tomarken even invites Larson’s never-had-a-chance opponents to try their hand at the strategy nearly 20 years later, before sharing the rest of the story. Yes, as with every get-rich-quick scheme, Larson’s one true hit was followed by miss after miss — including running afoul of federal law. A big bonus round to Big Bucks writer J.V. Martin for prefacing the considerable downfall with this hilarious line: “The ultimate whammy came for Michael Larson.”

And how! This is my kind of American history. —Rod Lott

Action

Double Nickels (1977)

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Having worked on both sides of the camera for H.B. Halicki’s pioneering hicksploitation indie, 1974’s Gone in 60 Seconds, perhaps Jack Vacek thought he could do that, too. And he did, editing, producing, writing, directing, stunting and starring as Smokey in Double Nickels (as in 55, which some can’t drive, but you got that).

Smokey and partner Ed (Edward Abrahms, also of 60 Seconds) work as California highway patrolmen. For a while, Double Nickels plays aimlessly, like a slice-of-life account of their day as they pluck ukeleles, play pinball and pursue a speeding motorcycle, dune buggy and truck — the latter straight through a watermelon stand. Then one traffic stop yields a unique opportunity that changes the movie’s course: a side hustle of repossessing cars. Smokey and Ed sign up, leading to more scenes of someone saying, “That’s my car!” than the silver screen has ever witnessed.

What they realize too late is the job isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, legally speaking; they’ve been working for a criminal enterprise! Cue the big chase finale, as Smokey tears through a swap meet, a fireworks stand, a public park and, presumably post-credits, his best girl’s tube top. (Patrice Schubert, aka Mrs. Vacek, plays said best girl.)

From today’s perspective, Vacek exudes big Dax Shepard energy and likability — and looks similar, too, which is extra-ironic, given that the comedian would be behind the wheel of his own star vehicles (literally) some 35 to 40 years later with Hit & Run and CHiPs. As such, Double Nickels coasts on a laid-back, we’re-all-family vibe, even in pulse-quickening, stunt-heavy action sequences that appear to put extras closer to real danger than union shoots would allow. When you have that in surplus, being light on plot matters not.

On the funometer, Double Nickels easily clears 85. Make some “vroom” in your viewing schedule. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture

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Writes Jon Lewis in his introduction to his new book, “In counterculture Hollywood there were any number of road trips, and most of them … led nowhere, at least nowhere good.” The next 251 pages prove that true. But out of “nowhere good” comes greatness, because Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is the smartest, most fascinating film book 2022 has brought.

Don’t be put off by its publication from University of California Press or Lewis’ day job as a college film professor; it’s as accessible as it is intelligent (mangling of Cybill Shepherd’s name as “Cybil Shepard” aside).

The second word of Road Trip to Nowhere’s title should be plural, for its structure is vignette-driven: four separate essays with the commonality of time, place and mood. At roughly 60 pages apiece, do the individual pieces of Lewis’ quartet flow into a whole? Not really. Do I care? Not a whit. Each chapter is utterly fascinating and intoxicating in its mix of criticism and cultural history, reminiscent of the pleasures of Charles Taylor’s Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s.

Lewis starts with the stories behind a pair of key youthquake movies. The first, Dennis Hopper’s independent Easy Rider, proved such a from-nowhere hit, it sent an empty-handed studio system into panic mode. The second, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, is one of the panic-spawned results — and proof the suits didn’t have a clue at how out of touch they were with the a-changin’ times. (For those interested in more on Zabriskie and the literal cult from which its doomed lead was cast, I highly recommend Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.)

Next, “Christopher Jones Does Not Want to Be a Movie Star” chronicles the quick rise and quicker flameout of Jones, a troubled youth briefly turned into AIP’s top dog at the box office, thanks to a resemblance to James Dean — all in the face, not talent. After climbing from B-movie maven Samuel Z. Arkoff to A-list director David Lean, he walked away from it all … and into homelessness, yet another sad casualty of Tinseltown.

Chapter three is similar, but charts the paths of four actresses of varying fame: Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Dolores Hart and Barbara Loden. That only two got happy endings says a great deal about the system’s meat-grinding machinations; that one of those happy endings required getting thee to a nunnery says a great deal more.

Finally, Lewis considers Charles Manson. And really, how could he not? As Lewis posits, “Being counterculture in Hollywood meant one thing before August 1969 and something else again afterward.” Rather than simply revisit the details of Sharon Tate’s slaughter, Lewis tells a cautionary tale of Hollywood with “unsavory characters” in its orbit, from Manson back to the horrific dissection of Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short in 1947 and the unsolved murder of actor William Desmond Taylor in 1922. The line from one to the next is so smoothly drawn, it may as well be the Pacific Coast Highway.

With Road Trip to Nowhere somehow being my first exposure to Lewis, I grew anxious when I hit its halfway point, facing an inevitably end. Immediately, I ordered two more Lewis titles of film history, Hard-Boiled Hollywood and Hollywood v. Hard Core. For Road Trip, I can think of no finer praise than that. To borrow chapter four’s last line, “The defense rests.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Resurrection (2022)

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All at once, life for the otherwise successful Margaret (Rebecca Hall, The Night House) is unstable. She’s bedding a married co-worker. With her daughter set to leave for college, Margaret faces an empty nest. Worst of all, her past suddenly and literally has come back to haunt her.

It comes in the form of David (Tim Roth, The Hateful Eight), a former flame from more than 20 years prior. Margaret sees him pop up wherever she goes: work conference, department store, the park. Why he’s there and what he wants, I leave for viewers of Resurrection to discover on their own. That said, it’s clear their relationship was abusive and toxic, and his controlling nature — okay, brainwashing — picks right back up, essentially holding Margaret’s sanity hostage.

Hall does stress — and distress — very well. Over the course of the film, what begins as suspicion morphs into suffocation. That festers into such all-consuming panic, you’re watching each frame for signs of fracture for Margaret to crack. I don’t know why writer/director Andrew Semans (Nancy, Please) took a full decade before making this sophomore feature, but if it were a case of securing just the right actress, his wait was worth it. Her performance works hand in hand with Semans’ cold, clinical, antiseptic view of Albany, New York, purposefully disallowing viewers to feel comfortable at any point.

On the downside, he keeps Resurrection’s secrets tucked away for too long, sure to frustrate many. As a whole, the movie would be all the more potent shorn of half the second act. Then again, Resurrection was never intended for mainstream consumption, best evidenced by the whammy of a climax, as oblique as it is flabbergasting — an ending, perhaps, only a mother could love. —Rod Lott

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