LUCIFER’S WOMEN (1974) *

It doesn’t get any better than the opening scene.  A magician does the old levitating woman trick, but this guy does the ancient gag one better.  He cuts the neckline of the floating woman’s dress, exposing her breasts to the audience.  No strings indeed!

Dr. Wainwright (Larry Hankin) is the living reincarnation of Svengali.  To maintain his powers, he must offer up a human sacrifice to a Satanist (Norman Pierce).  When the doctor falls in love with the woman meant to be sacrificed (Jane Brunel-Cohen), he struggles to break free of Svengali’s hold to save her.

Lucifer’s Women employed none other than Anton LaVey as its technical consultant.  I’m not sure how much he advised on the project because it looks like the same old sacrificial shit you’d see in a typical horror movie.  I don’t know how much time went into making the Satanist scenes accurate.  All I know is that they should’ve spent more time trying to make the film good.

The plot is just too stuffed to ever really work.  We’ve got possession, Satanism, human sacrifices, mysticism, and none of it gels into a cohesive whole.  The scenes with Hankin romancing Brunel-Cohen are dull and the sequences where he battles for his soul are weak.  The only parts worth a damn are the hypnotism scenes.  They have a She-Creature type of vibe to them, and the final magic trick is reminiscent of The Wizard of Gore.

To make matters worse, there’s an entire subplot about a small-time pimp (played by porn star Paul Thomas) with a lisping southern accent that’s practically unbearable.  Thomas acts surly to mimes and threatens to push Brunel-Cohen into a life of prostitution.  This subplot gets in the way of the Svengali stuff and more or less stops the movie on a dime.

Lucifer’s Women contains more skin that you’d expect to see in an otherwise tepid Satanism picture.  The majority of the scenes are lukewarm, although I did like the “Butterfly Girl’ striptease number.  The scene where Brunel-Cohen gets turned on while reading a lesbian porn comic is pretty funny too.

Credits Watch:  David Webb Peoples was the editor.  He later went on to write Blade Runner and Unforgiven!  I guess you’ve got to start somewhere.

TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (1978) * ½

Terror Out of the Sky starts off with an odd dream scene in which Tovah Feldshuh is attacked by killer bees while driving a Beetle.  At first, I thought this was supposed to be some half-assed dream symbolism.  Get it, because she was driving a BEE-tle?  

As it turns out, this is a Made for TV sequel to The Savage Bees.  I didn’t realize it till later because I haven’t seen that movie.  Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have recognized the footage because Gretchen Corbett played Feldshuh’s role in the original.

Anyway, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. works at The Center for Bees.  He mistakenly sends out a killer queen bee and must race against time to find all the shipments before the queens can mate and spawn thousands of killer bees.  He wants Tovah to go along with him, but she’s still skittish because of her rampant bee nightmares.  She gets her pilot boyfriend Dan Haggerty (who wears the same bracelet he wore in Elves) to help fly them around to the spots where the bee boxes have been sent.  Predictably, the last queen mates, and hundreds of bees descend on a baseball game in a small town.

The only part that’s worth a damn is when a guy at The Center for Bees gets a mouthful of bees.  This scene is pretty strong stuff for a Made for TV movie from the ‘70s.  Too bad nothing else in the film comes close to matching it.

The scene where our heroes try to save a bunch of boys from a school bus crawling with killer bees is the worst.  In fact, I think Terror from the Sky challenges Jeepers Creepers 2 for the worst horror sequel featuring a bunch of shirtless boys trapped aboard a school bus.  This rescue sequence is laborious and just goes on and on.  By the way, have you ever noticed how all these Made for TV killer insect movies always have that one longwinded scene of people being evacuated?  What’s with that? 

If director Lee H. (World Gone Wild) Katzin ended things after the bus rescue, it would’ve been okay.  Unfortunately, the movie continues on another twenty agonizing minutes.  It’s here where Zimbalist, Jr. wanders endlessly around in a beekeeper’s outfit walking down corridor after corridor while hundreds of bees crawl all over him.  

The most ridiculous part of the movie though is the fact that a woman could be caught in a love triangle with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Dan Haggerty.  

AKA:  The Revenge of the Savage Bees.

ROBOT NINJA (1989) *** ½

I was a fan of J.R. Bookwalter’s Dead Next Door, but this might be his ultimate epic.  While that film had the help of Sam Raimi as producer, this one had David DeCoteau.  Because of DeCoteau’s influence, Linnea Quigley has a small role as Burt Ward’s secretary!

Michael Todd stars as a comic book artist who gets upset when a television producer (Ward) waters down his beloved creation, Robot Ninja for television.  He then gets his friend (Bogdan Pecic) to make him a real Robot Ninja costume (using royalties from the comic to bankroll the endeavor) and goes out and fights crime.  He crosses a gang of thugs led by a tough-talking woman (Maria Markovic) who take it upon themselves to destroy the Robot Ninja once and for all.

The thugs are low rent and cartoonish, but they make for a worthy adversary for a comic book artist with no formal martial arts or weapons training.  Bookwalter films the action in an efficient manner, especially considering the constraints of the miniscule budget.  He gets a lot of mileage out of the extreme gore too.  Eyes are clawed out, hands are cut off, and guts are ripped out.  There’s also a gnarly scene in which a gun is shoved into someone’s eyeball and the shots of the Robot Ninja performing self-surgery are disgusting.

Robot Ninja is a precursor to the likes of Super and Kick-Ass.  Not only was it ahead of its time, it’s probably ripe for a remake.  It was made in 1989 at the height of the second wave of Batmania and seeing nerds congregating in comic book shops wearing Batman T-shirts is like stepping into a time warp.  That is to say, I loved it.  Speaking of time warps, I dug Todd’s studio that had dozens of ‘80s movie posters (including some of Bookwalter’s own films) plastered on the wall.

BLACKHAT (2015) * ½

Blackhat is your typical Michael Mann film.  Well, typical except it sucks.  It follows his usual fetishes for cops and robbers stuff.  There are lots of police procedural scenes, frantic phone calls, and cops staying frustratingly one step behind their man for most of the movie.  Instead of a bank robber or a drug dealer, the bad guy the cops are chasing is a computer hacker.  

As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”  Now, I’m not a tech guy.  I can barely blog.  Because of that, most of the computer gobbledygook went over my head.  It doesn’t matter if half the dialogue in the movie sounded like a foreign language to me, that doesn’t excuse the lethargic pacing and insurmountable running time.

Even with my computer illiterate handicap, I’m smart enough to know that the CGI shots of a virus running through a computer looked like the half-baked stepchild of Tron:  Legacy and an HBO promo from the ‘80s.

Hemsworth is good.  The sign of a quality actor is the ability to rise above the excruciating dialogue he’s been given and coast on charm alone.  He does that in spades.

Another big detractor for me was Mann’s continued use of digital video.  Although many of the exterior shots are slick and moody, the action scenes are often grainy and use a lot of irritating shaky-cam camerawork.   Seriously, it looks like Mann filmed half the action on his phone.  And I’m not talking an iPhone either.  Mann straight up Jitterbugged that shit.  

I’m not afraid to admit I was lost throughout most of this movie.  It’s one thing to be lost because you can’t understand what the characters are talking about.  It’s another thing when the camerawork is so bad you can’t tell what the hell is going on during the action.

What’s worse is that it takes an hour-and-forty-two minutes for Hemsworth to finally put on a black hat!  What the fuck?  By that point, I was rooting for Thor to pull out his hammer and smash his laptop to pieces.

AKA:  Hacker.

SPACE PROBE-TAURUS (1965) ** ½

A rocket carrying four scientists is launched into space.  On their voyage, the crew makes contact with a ship from another world.  They board the vessel, run into an alien, and kill it within minutes of their historic meeting!  The astronauts hop back into the ship and are thrown off course by a meteor shower.  They wind up landing on a mysterious moon where they recharge their batteries.  Before they can blast off, they must tussle with some giant crabs.

This kind of sci-fi exploration movie was on its last legs when Space Probe-Taurus was released.  2001 was only three years off and after that, chintzy rocket ships and astronauts sitting in La-Z-Boy chairs would be a thing of the past.  There’s even the obligatory sexist astronaut that doesn’t think a woman should be up in space.  Also, revolvers are standard issue astronaut equipment… you know… in case you want to shoot an alien immediately after you make first contact with it.  

I have a high tolerance for these movies.  Space Probe-Taurus won’t convert any new fans to the genre, but anyone who appreciates a cheesy space exploration movie should have fun with it.  It gets points for getting the show on the road pretty quickly, although some of the relationship drama that clogs up the middle section is laughably bad.

Even though they were using the same techniques Flash Gordon used thirty years prior, the effects are still entertaining for the most part.  While the bulk of the effects are cheesy, the shots of the astronauts floating around in space are well done.  The monsters are cool too.  I especially liked the rubbery looking alien who kept frantically licking its lips.  The giant crabs, which are just regular crabs walking around an Estes rocket are also good for a laugh.  There’s also a Creature from the Black Lagoon-inspired monster that wears a long black wig and swims around.  The mask looks like it could fall off the diver at any moment, but that’s part of its charm.

AKA:  Space Monster.

THE LOOKOUT (2007) **

Chris Pratt (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, not Chris Pratt) has his sports career is cut short when he gets into a car accident that leaves him brain damaged and suffering from memory loss.  Because of his condition, the only job he can get is an after-hours janitor in a bank.  (Also, because of his condition, he thinks he’s Chris Pratt and not Joseph Gordon-Levitt).  He spends his spare time hanging out with his blind roommate/sponsor (Jeff Daniels) while pining away for a “normal life”.  (And presumably, a role in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.)  Chris is befriended by an old schoolmate (Matthew Goode) who helps beef up his confidence, but it’s all a ploy to manipulate him into robbing the bank.

I was a big fan of writer/director Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones, so I was curious to check this out, as it was his directorial debut.  I also immensely liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance in The Walk.  Because of that, I thought The Lookout couldn't miss.  Man, was I wrong.

The early scenes are the best.  Frank does a good job infusing his characters with personality. Daniels in particular excels as the blind roommate.   Once the heist kicks in, the movie oddly enough stops on a dime.  I thought there'd be a big twist or something at the end to justify the lackluster third act, but no.  This has got to be one of the least impressive heists in cinema history. 

Still, Frank does a fine job at establishing a nice atmosphere.  All the ingredients were there for a fine drama.  Frank had the marinade ready; he just forgot to bring the meat.

HAIL, CAESAR! (2016) ** ½

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a fixer at a Hollywood studio who is overseeing the finishing touches on a big budget Biblical epic.  When his leading man (George Clooney) is kidnapped by Communists, he has to scramble to get him back.  He enlists the help of a cowboy star (Alden Ehrenreich) to find the mastermind behind the scheme, which could be one of the studio’s top stars.

Hail, Caesar! is the Coen brothers’ love letter to the Golden Age of cinema.  There’s probably too many side characters and subplots swirling around that prevent it from gaining any sort of momentum.  The crux of the story is involving, but the Coens seem to be having more fun with their little plot detours, character embellishments, and recreations of old movies.  

I liked how the audience is introduced to each movie star by watching them film a scene from their latest picture.  Channing Tatum has a long Gene Kelly-inspired tapdancing sequence and Scarlett Johansson gets her own Ethel Merman underwater number.  Unfortunately, most of the characters (with the exception of Brolin) are thinly sketched.

There are a few winning moments.  The scene where Ralph Fiennes tries to help Ehrenreich with his dialogue is hysterical.  This sequence alone has more laughs than what’s found in the rest of the film.

Hail, Caesar! is much too unfocused to be wholly successful, but it’s still watchable just for the performances.  Ehrenreich proves he’s a star in the making.  He looks good in a cowboy hat and bolo tie too.  If he doesn’t take off playing Han Solo, he can tide himself over with a Joe Bob Briggs biopic.  Brolin is quite good in the lead and does what he can to hold the film together.  Clooney makes do with his admittedly flimsy role, although he's seen better days.  

It’s the supporting performances that make it fun.  Most people are only on screen for two or three minutes.  No matter how scattershot it gets, it’s hard to completely hate a movie that features Clancy Brown, Christopher Lambert, and Dolph Lundgren in bit parts.  I mean where else are you going to see Channing Tatum salute Dolph Lundgren?