Comedy

One More Saturday Night (1986)

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Being shot in suburban Illinois, One More Saturday Night looks like it could take place one or two neighborhoods over from the shenanigans of John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles. The teen comedy could pass as an alternate-reality version, as it has direct counterparts for the Anthony Michael Hall and Justin Henry roles of, respectively, the geek aching to act cool and a precocious little brother. If only it thought to copy the laughs.

Produced in part by Dan Aykroyd, this unofficial Saturday Night Live movie marks the first — and last — big-screen vehicle for the legendary SNL writing/performing team of Al Franken and Tom Davis. Having helped change television forever, they aimed for the pictures, scripting and starring as co-leads of the touring bar band Badmouth. Franken is the one with the ’fro; Davis is the one with the ’fro. Both mainly just wanna smoke pot and get laid; both front the film’s least engaging minutes.

Luckily, One More Saturday Night is an ensemble comedy with multiple overlapping storylines. A sad-sack widowed dad (the great Chelcie Ross, Major League) has his first date in 23 years. His eldest daughter (Nan Woods, In the Mood) plans to lose her virginity. His youngest daughter (Nina Siemaszko, Airheads) throws a wild party while babysitting an infant. And so on, diverging, converging and interweaving until the sun rises, bygones become bygones, and everyone enjoys communal flapjacks.

Franken and Davis’ script quickly sets up the chessboard for maximum madcap antics that fall just shy of wringing no more than a couple of overly gracious chuckles. Here’s the thing: That’s fine, because One More Saturday Night is exceedingly affable, which many funny ’80s comedies are not. Ross and Woods each get nice moments that can’t help but feel real and tender. The movie’s shortage of laughs may account for why it barely played theaters. It contains nary a pair of stolen underpants, act of nonconsensual sex nor Asian stereotype.

Actually, it has no Asians at all. But it does have Black people and, remarkably for the era, they’re not made the butt of the joke. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Escape: Puzzle of Fear (2020)

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Of all the escape room movies I’ve seen, the obscure Escape: Puzzle of Fear seems the least interested in its exploitable concept. Directed by the basically and justifiably anonymous J. Jones, the film takes half an hour to get its vapid characters into one … and then, within minutes, out of it, switching gears so abruptly, it has to have damaged the clutch.

(To be fair, a brief prologue takes place in the desired environment. Harried contestants battle against the clock and say, “Oh, snap” and “Hey, I found another weird thing.” Yet this place isn’t the one Puzzle of Fear’s participants will tackle, so it reeks of “tacked-on in post.”)

Our main man is Matt (Tommy Nash, who also produced), a contemptible dude-bro talent agent we meet as he wakes in bed. Immediately, he gets blown by his girlfriend (Aubrey Reynolds, 2018’s Frenzy) and only reaches climax by thinking about a potato sack with eyeholes pulled over someone’s head — a weird fetish, if you ask me, but you do you, Matt.

Later that day, he’s mansplaining “escape room” to her when his Cuba Gooding Jr.-esque best bud (Omar Gooding, Ghost Dad) comes bearing tickets to the Escape Hotel. He hypes these tix like they’re for the Super Bowl sidelines or in the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards’ splash zone.

At the über-posh, white-gloved Escape Hotel, they play the “crime and justice room.” Objective: Find the two 8-year-old girls gone missing while trick-or-treating. It takes Matt a ridiculously long time to make the connection between the mission and a real-life event in his past involving two 8-year-old girls gone missing while trick-or-treating. When he does, you can see recognition wash over his face. I mean, what are the odds?

And what kind of trouble is two-time Emmy nominee Nicholas Turturro in that he has to take a sixth-billed part in this trash?

And why did scripter Lizze Gordon (#Captured) type the line, “Ew, it stinks in here. Did you do a wee-wee?” much less leave it in?

For narrative structure, story leaps, character behavior, infantile dialogue, atonal performances and much, much more, Escape: Puzzle of Fear is top-to-bottom baffling. Let me out. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

Decision to Leave (2022)

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When a 60-year-old man is found dead at the bottom of a mountain, police detective Hae-joon Jang (Park Hae-il, Memories of Murder) has reason to suspect the deceased’s much younger wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei, Blackhat), may be to blame. As in so many cinematic crime stories, from film noir to erotic thrillers, the more our protagonist investigates, the more he falls in love with this enigmatic beauty. Thus, a dual mystery forms: Did she or didn’t she, and will they or won’t they?

Despite drawing influence from so many films before it, Decision to Leave is hardly derivative — not in the hands of a top-shelf craftsman like Park Chan-wook. The South Korean filmmaker unspools this one at a dizzying pace that makes it as twisty as Oldboy and as visually sumptuous as The Handmaiden, to name two of his best in a long, distinguished career.

Even with those previous pictures setting the bar high, Decision to Leave clears it with seemingly little effort, although we know that’s not the case. Park is in total control of his material, matching the caution and preciseness Hae-joon does in examining crime scenes for clues; even when Hae-joon’s heart causes him to slip, the director never does. If anything, he grasps the reins even tighter as he weaves the remaining threads of a rich Hitchcockian tapestry of passion, peril and tragedy. Getting tangled within that is all too easy, for the characters and their viewers.

Like your Vertigo, the movie is oddly, even achingly romantic — a mix that wouldn’t work if either lead weren’t atop their game. Both actors are excellent, but Tang is the real surprise in a plot brimming with more than its share of them. Marked by masterful composition and transitions throughout, Decision to Leave is a spellbinding knuckle-cracker. Your loss, xenophobes. —Rod Lott

Comedy

Out There Halloween Mega Tape (2022)

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This year, film fans, we finally got the sequel we thought would never happen. After what seems like a lifetime, the retro vibes are back, landing from the skies on a highway to the danger zone! No, not Top Gun: Maverick, but Out There Halloween Mega Tape, the second part to 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special.

If you enjoyed WNUF, you need not know anything further to place this follow-up atop your watchlist. However, inquiring minds wanna know, so allow me to indulge them.

WNUF’s gifted director, Chris LaMartina (What Happens Next Will Scare You), continues the faux-show aesthetic without repeating the same joke. This time, we get two back-to-back programs, seemingly recorded years apart on the same VHS tape. First, a Halloween-themed episode of tabloid talk show Ivy Sparks, in which the eponymous and costumed host (Call Girl of Cthulhu’s Melissa LaMartina, absolutely nailing the Jenny Jones-style shenanigans) interviews a would-be vampire, alien abductees and someone claiming to have sex with the ghost of a Civil War widow.

Following that half-hour is an hourlong broadcast of Out There from Oct. 31, 1996. Co-hosted by a post-Sparks Sparks, the show airs live from a farm reported to be the site of recent UFO activity. Although it’s obviously akin to Fox’s Sightings and its infamous Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction special, to say more would spoil the surprises. What doesn’t ruin a thing is mentioning how accurately Mr. LaMartina captures the low-rent appeal of “the fourth network”’s exploitative programming of the time.

Of course, that UHF parodic pulse carries through each morsel of Mega Tape’s real meat: the commercials. As with WNUF, they’re dead-on, here with parodies of Cops, the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Pure Moods CD and Lorenzo Lamas’ Renegade syndicated series, plus station IDs, PSAs, newsbreaks and even lotto numbers. From spots for movies, toys, CD-ROM video games, a trucking school and local restaurants (“I’ve got a prescription for pepperoni!” exclaims Dr. Pizza), the ads are — like the whole of Out There Halloween Mega Tape — endlessly creative and pure pleasure. —Rod Lott

Get it at WNUF Big Cartel.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Intermate (2022)

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To date, the strongest argument against the multiverse concept as entertainment is Intermate, a witless waste of digital space. It posits a virtual dating game, also named Intermate, in which players visit actual “baby universes” and make a random hand gesture that triggers ultra-euphoric mindgasms.

The attractive Desa (Lauren York, Airplane Mode) serves as the game’s spokesperson, but she doesn’t play. Except when she does, joining equally attractive friends (Kidnap’s Malea Rose and Hunt Club’s Maya Stojan) in a round that sends them to Earth. They’re stuck on our strange world when a pink-necked space repairman (Jonathan Goldstein, Body of Influence 2) works to disrupt the game.

Or something like that. Written in part by director Richard Lerner (Revenge of the Cheerleaders), the story makes as much sense as the game’s convoluted rules: zilch. If only the repairman had disrupted his own movie!

Don’t just take my word for it; on the movie’s own website, Goldstein calls the script “really dense” on a “red carpet” interview: “We were all trying to figure it out.” Rose echoes that, admitting, “When you read the script, you’re like, ‘What is going on?’ … You’re thinking to yourself, ‘Oh, no, this is bad.'”

Boy, is it ever. The sci-fi tale plays like a comedy, but Lerner’s Q&A on the aforementioned site implies its campy vibe is accidental. That checks out because the movie is bereft of a single laugh, through no fault of the actors. Okay, there’s almost one good joke, however unintended: The ladies go to a rock club named, judging from the letter-sized piece of paper taped outside, Rock Club.

I imagine the real fun is the behind-the-scenes story, as Intermate originally came out as 2019’s slightly longer Flashout. Three years later, it sports a new opening and is “sexier.” I assume the former entails the exposition-packed title card that works against its purpose of adequately orienting viewers. As for the latter, Lerner depicts each male’s climax with quick cuts of bikini- and undie-clad torsos put through a tie-dyed filter, while a closing-credits disclaimer confirms as suspected, “Body and négligée shots in ‘flashouts’ not performed by Cast.”

None of this is sexy. In fact, running counter to the Lerner filmography, the whole thing is nudity-free — exceedingly odd since it resembles every Surrender Cinema release, down to the questionable computer animation. It’s as if whoever funded production found Jesus between shooting and editing, thereby threatening to pull out if the sex weren’t excised. That’s not to suggest any amount of added flesh could keep Intermate from being less interminable. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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