Horror

Scare Zone (2009)

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So, hypothetically speaking, how many rock-song montages should a movie be allowed to have? Because in Scare Zone, I counted seven, each with its actors and/or extras gesturing wildly for the camera while the likes of Soulguard, Hydrosonic and Orange Avenue rip through all the hitz* on the soundtrack!

Shot largely at Universal Studios Florida, Scare Zone is set at a three-nights-only haunted-house attraction — the Scare Zone Psycho-Splatter Raw-Topsy Slaughter Dungeon, to be specific. Run by Oliver (Simon Needham, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector), the rooms include a mad surgeon’s table, a vat of lye and poopy toilets, all of which are on the tour he gives to his new employees; from the sassy Black guy to the slutty blonde girl, all stereotypes are covered.

It doesn’t take long for writer/director Jon Binkowski (The Visitant) to thin his cast of unknowns, but those scenes have no sense of suspense — a common problem among low-rate slashers. Not so common: cartoon orchestration punctuating so many lines of dialogue and character movements. It’s almost as if Scare Zone is unsure whether it’s a horror movie or a comedy. Supporting that theory are visual throwaway gags, like the celebratory round of “Killer Lite” beer, and lame exchanges on the level of grade-school joke books, like:

“She told me about her family.”
“Yeah, who, the Addams Family?”

Scare Zone’s single grace is that in using the sets from Universal’s actual attraction at the time, it boasts production value for days (or 6.25% of one, if you dislike hyperbole). However, great sets aren’t enough to save a picture. Scare Zone remains, to borrow a phrase from Oliver, “juvenile tomfuckery.” I am looking forward to fall, though. —Rod Lott

*Misspelled on purpose, but appropriate for what sounds like Collective Soul, but watered down, then shrunk in the dryer.

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Horror

Row 19 (2021)

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Last month, I took an overnight, eight-hour flight with mechanical issues, a significant delay in departure, spine-crunching seating to render sleep impossible, mayonnaise on the turkey sandwich “dinner,” Venom: Let There Be Carnage playing on the screen and a couple of passengers getting a little too mouthy about having to wear masks. All that’s to say today’s airlines make for a stressful, terrifying experience.

Sadly, Row 19 is neither. Unlike my seat, it’s by no means painful. For a supernatural spooker at 30,000 feet, the Russian film is at least more entertaining than America’s own, higher-profile Flight 7500. Its ultimate destination is what sinks it.

Twenty years after emerging as the lone survivor of a catastrophic plane crash, doctor and single mom Katerina (Svetlana Ivanova, Cosmoball) bravely takes off again. With her daughter (fellow Cosmoballer Marta Kessler) in tow and the same age as Katerina was at the time of tragedy, she boards a red eye with only about half a dozen passengers — I mean, unless you count the ghosts, spirits and other phantasmagorical stowaways eventually causing havoc.

What It All Means can be sussed out well before director Alexander Babaev (Bornless Ones, not to be confused with boneless ones at your neighborhood Buffalo Wild Wings) intends. Although Ivanova succeeds in selling the hell out of the concept and Babaev brings it in at a tidy 78 minutes (with credits), Row 19 lands as a rough and routine trip of terror. Barring a different language, the slick flick is nothing you haven’t seen before — especially if Flightplan is stamped in your cinematic passport. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

The Private Lives of Adam & Eve (1960)

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You may not find it in your version of the Bible, but on the eighth day, God created Mamie Van Doren. And He saw that she was good — very, very good.

So to me, it kinda makes sense to have her play the world’s first woman in Albert Zugsmith’s first sex comedy, The Private Lives of Adam & Eve. After all, it makes perfect sense to cast Mickey Rooney as Satan, a fancy way to say “himself.”

The film begins in black and white in present-day Paradise, Nevada, population 7. Van Doren’s Evie and husband Ad (Martin Milner, 1960’s 13 Ghosts) are among eight passengers on a bus headed for Reno. Also aboard is Rooney, resplendent in Col. Sanders regalia as a casino owner. All’s well until the 27-minute mark, when stock footage of flash floods and landslides forces them to take cover in a church. Ad and Evie pass the time with a shared dream, kicking the flick into “SpectaColor,” a fancy way to say “color.”

Cue the meat on Private Lives’ calcium-starved bones: a wacky take on the Book of Genesis. Ad, now Adam, frolics with animals as he runs around in his little Tarzan pants. Among his harem of sexy sinners named after days of the week — The Bellboy and the Playgirls’ June Wilkinson among them as Saturday — Rooney’s devil sends cat-eyed Lilith (foxy Fay Spain, 1957’s Dragstrip Girl) to seduce Adam over to the dark side. Tempting … until Adam gets a load of Evie — er, Eve — despite her long hair prodigiously pasted over her bosom.

An entire decade and a half have passed since my two-year stint teaching Sunday school, so I assume all of the above remains biblically accurate. Still, Zugsmith skirts the fact that Adam and Eve’s all-fruit diet would lead turn the Garden of Eden into one of chronic diarrhea.

If you can turn yourself away from trying to catch glue failing, you’ll note Van Doren’s adorable breathy lines: “Maybe next time we can have apples. Big … red … apples.” When Adam finally takes a bite, so does the movie, reverting to B&W and an ending that makes one wonder the point of the entire exercise.

As chaste as it is overly cast (with Tuesday Weld, Mel Torme and Paul Anka also taking part), The Private Lives of Adam & Eve is light of heart and dryer-lint disposable. Zugsmith and Van Doren reunited twice that year for the far more fun College Confidential and Sex Kittens Go to College. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

Thriller

Human Factors (2021)

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Some weekends are made for a getaway; Jan and Nina soon wish they had just picked another. Mere minutes after the married ad execs arrive at their second home with their two children, their idyllic escape is the site of a home invasion.

Or is it? After all, Jan (Mark Waschke of the Netflix series Dark) was outside at the time and didn’t see a thing. Nina (Sabine Timoteo, Sarah Plays a Werewolf) was in the house but only saw a flash; nonetheless, she is beside herself with adrenaline and fright. By the time writer/director Ronny Trocker’s Human Factors concludes, both of their perspectives are revealed, as well a third from an identity I’ll leave unspoken.

The German film isn’t exactly Rashomon, but with each shift of the storyteller, Trocker peels back more layers in his characters and their respective secrets. If anything, it bears more resemblance to Force Majeure as the trust between spouses dissolves, with a tad of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games thrown in — the original or the remake, your choice.

While Human Factors shares their intelligence, but lacks their resonance, Trocker (The Eremites) does succeed in making his point of not everything being what initially seems. That includes learning his sophomore feature is not quite the thriller it sets itself up to be, particularly after an unbroken three-minute opening shot that’s a masterpiece of timing. I’ll contend that, too, may be by design. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Meat Cleaver Massacre (1977)

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Albeit via all-American trickery, British horror icon Christopher Lee bookends the ultra-cheap chiller Meat Cleaver Massacre by appearing as himself. Sitting in his home library with what looks like the robot owl from Clash of the Titans behind him, Lee spouts a four-minute snore of a monologue on the occult. One wonders how many of Meat Cleaver’s scant few moviegoers sat through all the final credits like today’s trained Marvel movie fans, only to be greeted with Lee continuing to drone on and on: “One day, at a shaman convention …”

In his first and last (comparatively) legit film, X-rated vet James Habif (Female Chauvinists’ “Sperm Donor with Mustache,” per the IMDb) plays Valley College professor Cantrell, who teaches his class about one Morak, a vengeance-obsessed demon he calls the “destroyer of destroyers,” presumably because once you hire him, you can’t fire him. This STFU lecture irks sullen nonbeliever Mason (Larry Justin, Female Chauvinists’ “Doctor at Sperm Bank”) enough to round up three pals, stick a panty on his head, break into Cantrell’s house, whack him on the noggin with a candlestick and thrill-kill his wife and daughter. Connections to Chuck Manson cannot be coincidental.

Only here’s the deal: Professor Cantrell survives! And although he’s paralyzed, cranially fractured and comatose, he summons Morak to get his revenge. Let the Meat Cleaver Massacre begin, right? Wrong. Nary a cleaver can be found (afforded?), so let’s just chalk up the pic as Death Wish meets Patrick, plus with a dog named Poopers.

With the advantage of adequate optical effects and “disgusting makeups” (per the credits), one-time director Evan Lee gives Mason and each of his co-conspirators a unique demise, like being slammed to death underneath the hood of a car. Meanwhile, police investigate all this “mystic mumbo jumbo.”

Rumor has it Lee is a nom de plume for none other than terrible-movie titan Ed Wood, but Meat Cleaver Massacre’s incompetence feels of unknown origin. Although still a Hydrox to other horror films’ Oreo, its grime carries a viscosity impossible for Wood at this stage of his gimcrack career. Then again, after learning they failed to off Cantrell, members of Team Mason have this irony-free exchange:

“He’s just lying in that bed. Like a carrot.”
“I never did like carrots.” —Rod Lott

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