Thriller

Fall (2022)

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Having sent two young women to the sea floor in 47 Meters Down, the enterprising producers flip that sleeper hit’s script by sending two young women to the tippy-top of a TV tower for the vertically challenged, survive-or-die suspenser Fall.

In its Cliffhanger-reminiscent prologue, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, Shazam!) watches her husband (Mason Gooding, 2022’s Scream) plummet to his doom in a rock-climbing accident. One year later, Becky is basically a barfly unable to get to that fifth stage of grief, until her fearless friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner, 2018’s Halloween) proposes they climb a 2,000-foot-tall tower in the middle of nowhere.

As Becky and Hunter scale it rung by rung, director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) skillfully wrings every step for maximum viewer discomfort. (From my perspective, the metal contraption stands at such great heights, it’s a real testicle-retreater.) Despite the prologue’s ropey green-screen effects, this main section looks more real and, therefore, harrowing. And that’s even before the girls get stuck at the spire, thanks to the laziest bolt-tightening in construction history, causing the ladder to come loose and collapse. The acrophobia! The wind! The vultures!

Look, Fall is imperfect. At times, it’s cheesy, plus Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” is used as a plot point. But here’s the thing: It would be hypocritical to knock a movie too much when it prompts your palms to perspire for an hour. As escapist, so-glad-that-ain’t-me entertainment, it got on my nerves in the good way. It works. —Rod Lott

Horror

The Dead Girl in Apartment 03 (2022)

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In a Queens apartment, Laura (Laura Dooley, TV’s Mr. Mercedes) discovers her roommate, Elizabeth, is dead — like, a stinky two days dead — but signs of neither struggle nor trauma exist. Arriving to investigate are detectives Miller (Frank Wihbey, 2015’s The Sadist) and Richards (Adrienne King, 1980’s Friday the 13th). Perhaps, Miller suggests, Laura should to a hotel for the night? No go; she can’t afford a room (yet has no qualms about calling crime-scene cleaners minutes later), so she’ll just stay put.

From there, The Dead Girl in Apartment 03 alternates between two things: Laura in apartment 3 (not “03,” title be damned), and Richards and Miller discussing the case. Only one of these branches extends toward intrigue. Naturally, it’s the former, as Laura hears mysterious scratches and doors opening on their own, panics when the electricity go out and sees weird cultists pop up who look straight off The Long Night’s call sheet.

A true narrative doesn’t take hold until the final 20-minute stretch, when Laura learns about her roomie’s favorite hobby. Graft the film’s opening 10 minutes onto that (minus the two-minute Bond-villain speech) and, wow, writer/director Kurtis M. Spieler (New York Ninja) would really have something.

As is, a meandering middle hinders a decent ghost story. It’s also longer on atmosphere than action, which isn’t automatically a strike against The Dead Girl in Apartment 03; good when your eyes dart about the frame to look for an approaching wraith, but bad when the photography is so dark, you have to squint to spot. No worries — the score by Satanic Panic ’81 lets you know each and every time Elizabeth’s ghost appears. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Dawn (2022)

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As the near-robotic, deplorable driver-for-hire Dawn of Dawn, Jackie Moore (Verotika) is all crazy-eyed and lead-footed, picking up rides and taking their lives as her fare. (Among her early victims is Eric Roberts, in one of 37 movies he’s made as I wrote this sentence.) Then she uploads the homicidal results to her dark-web channel, as one does.

Nearly all of Nicholas Ryan’s directorial debut follows the backseat travails of a newly engaged couple: salesman (Atlantic Rim: Resurrection’s Jared Cohn, redefining “simpering”) and a first-grade teacher (Sarah French, Death Count). Dawn menaces them with mind games — not to mention schools them on wealthy white privilege — before threatening bodily harm. Neither spouse-to-be (Cohn especially) is interesting enough to follow for a feature. Nor is Dawn.

“The audience loves tension and drama,” says Dawn, yet her namesake film, despite a slick look, is inert. Unless you’re Locke, constant talking in a moving car makes for sluggish, über-dull cinema. Halfway through, respite looks to arrive when Dawn pulls into a gas station, where a demented fan (Nicholas Brendon, Psycho Beach Party) asks for the honor of being stabbed to death, but it’s a nonsensical scene. Dawn fulfills his wish, but not ours. Later, she’s pulled over by a sheriff (Michael Paré, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich). He’s the best part of the movie, so of course he’s swiftly dispatched.

For a raucous rideshare gone wrong that achieves everything Ryan aims for — thrills, dark humor, social commentary — see Spree. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries

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In 1981, my fifth-grade homeroom teacher postponed class to warn us about a clown seen around Oklahoma City school playgrounds. “If he offers you candy or stamps with cartoon characters on it, don’t take it!” she said sternly. “It’s laced with acid.”

We were scared straight, plus downright scared. Children, parents, teachers and authority figures nationwide were. The clown didn’t exist, but the “satanic panic” did, and kid-friendly tabs of LSD were one whispered method of indoctrination. As Rick Emerson delineate in his new nonfiction book, we have the bestselling “diary,” Go Ask Alice, to thank. Or “thank,” because while the book helped some YA readers, its anonymous author, Beatrice Sparks, lived on lies to fuel a delusional ego and desperate need for attention, no matter the lives she destroyed and discarded along the way.

I’ve never read Go Ask Alice or seen the 1973 Emmy-nominated telepic it spawned, starring William Shatner and Andy Griffith. But being familiar with both and living through the resulting hysteria that pilloried everything from rock music to Dungeons & Dragons, Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries held an undeniable lure. It’s unmissable.

Published in 1971, Go Ask Alice recalled a normal suburban teenage girl’s descent into drugs and ultimately death, via the journal entries she left behind. America was horrified — and gripped. The big problem is, it was all made up, which Sparks failed to inform her publisher, not that the publisher did anything about all the red flags. The bigger problem is, she didn’t stop there.

Emerson uses Unmask Alice as a triple-purpose biography, charting three lives: that of Sparks; her book, formed from such external cultural forces as Art Linkletter, Charles Manson and Richard Nixon; and poor Alden Niel Barrett, whose abrupt existence was essentially stolen by Sparks for her family-wrecking follow-up. While Emerson does a terrific job in chasing each inexorably linked strand to its end, sharing Barrett’s story — and restoring the reputation of him and his parents — appears to hold the most amount of passion for the author.

Emerson’s hit-the-pavement research keeps Unmask Alice grounded in facts while a fiction-like knack for storytelling never fails to drive you forward. He employs what I call “the Dan Brown method” of structuring chapters, often limiting them to a super-short three or four pages. That way, to paraphrase Lay’s Potato Chips tagline, betcha can’t read just one. I sure couldn’t. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Bigfoot or Bust! (2022)

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Exclamation his, Jim Wynorski’s Bigfoot or Bust! packs three scenarios — note I didn’t call them “stories” — into one lame-brained comedy. So similar are they, “Never the twain shall meet” need not apply:
• A large-breasted woman whose father died in a Bigfoot hunting expedition embarks on a Bigfoot hunting expedition.
• A large-breasted doctor and her large-breasted friends embark on a Bigfoot hunting expedition.
• Three large-breasted women from the future embark on a Bigfoot hunting expedition. But mostly for his giant turds.

Across all, the “joke” is Bigfoot (some guy in a Harry Knowles costume) is always around, usually peepin’! And the ladies don’t notice on account of their large breasts, ha!

For this sad, tired exercise, Wynorski has cast The Expendables of top-heavy starlets: Becky LeBeau, Gail Thackray, Rocky DeMarco, Cindy Lucas, Christine Nguyen, Tane McClure, Antonia Dorian and Deborah Dutch. All but Lisa London hail from booby movies of his past, including but by no means limited to Sorority House Massacre II, The Bare Wench Project and Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre.

While Bigfoot or Bust! digitally blurs out any instances of nudity, it remains T&A-minded, costuming the women in bikinis, bras and other push-up, skintight contraptions designed to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive. Because having no story requires heaps of padding, the shot-on-video flick asks them to jump on a trampoline (shown in slow motion, revealing an unforgivable frame rate) and perform endless stripteases, one of which begins in a row of Coldwater Canyon Park port-a-potties.

If you believe Thackray and LeBeau doing childish impressions of apes will be the most embarrassing moment, hang tight for Bigfoot bustin’ a move as the girls DJ some rockin’ tunes. And for the sped-up film. And for the cartoon sound effects. And for the fart noises. And for Wynorski pausing the movie to get pied in the face. And for the laugh track. (Speaking of, I found one genuine laugh: a surreal, single-shot throwaway cameo by internet urban legend Momo.)

Many online reviews and comments object to the women being “old” and, therefore, “unattractive.” That’s ridiculous. If you’re going to knock them for anything, it should be their acting. That said, Lucas possesses real comedic timing, and I think Nguyen actually can act. Among all 77 minutes, a great deal feels improvised. I long for the days when Wynorski made real movies with real plots, like — as the cover art reminds — Chopping Mall and The Return of Swamp Thing. As he proved right out the directorial gate with 1985’s The Lost Empire, he’s perfectly capable of making a feature that’s sexy, funny and, yes, written.

Although not a Bigfoot movie completist, I don’t exactly turn one down when a screening opportunity arises. Following Bigfoot or Bust!, I may need to enact a no-go policy for any made after the 1980s. I’m sure everyone had a blast shooting this one, but it doesn’t translate to the viewer. The finale could not come soon enough. When it does, it taunts, “THE END?” No, Jim, no. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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