RED CHRISTMAS (2017) ****

Neo-Ozploitation has been kind of hit and miss for me.  I can’t say I’ve enjoyed much of it from Wolf Creek on down to the recent Patrick remake.  Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas proves that Ozploitation is alive and well.  Not only that, it’s one of the best Australian horror films ever made.

Twenty years after a horrific incident at an abortion clinic, Diane (Dee Wallace, who also produced) prepares for a nice Christmas with her family.  A dark shrouded figure named Cletus (the awesomely named Sam “Bazooka” Campbell) arrives unexpectedly at the house.  In the spirit of Christmas, Diane feels charitable and opens her home to the bandaged vagrant.  When he reads a letter that offends her, she kicks him out.  Before long, Cletus is picking off the family members one by one with his trusty ax.

Red Christmas would pair well on a double feature with Inside as they are both pregnancy-themed Christmas horror movies.  It also has a bit of a You’re Next vibe as the gaggle of constantly bickering characters are quite amusing.  What makes it unique is that they feel more like real quirky people instead of characters trapped in a horror flick.  

The offbeat tone helps propel the film.  It starts out almost like a Troma movie before becoming a Lifetime Original with shades of the slasher genre thrown in there.  That is to say it never goes where you’d expect it to.  It’s simultaneously fun, disgusting, and heartbreaking, which is quite a feat.  All this could’ve wound up being in extremely poor taste, but the cast really sells it.

Red Christmas is anchored by the fierce and funny performance by Wallace.  This is probably her best role since Cujo.  Like that film, she must protect her family at any cost from a menace in a claustrophobic setting.  It’s Gerard Orwyer who steals the show as her son who has Down syndrome and is obsessed with Shakespeare.  He’s hilarious, has genuine screen presence, and I hope to see a lot more of him in the near future.  

Then there’s Campbell as the killer, Cletus.  Even though he looks like a leper version of Mumm-Ra from Thundercats and chops victims up with the best of them, Campbell brings a tender vulnerability to the role that’s unexpectedly touching.  You can’t help but feel sorry for him.  I for one hope he returns for a sequel mighty soon.

The editing gets a little wonky near the end (it looks like they either ran out of time or money), but the finale is truly devastating.  I haven’t even gotten to the showstopping murder set pieces (which I won’t go into as I wouldn’t dream of spoiling them).  I have a feeling this might find its way into my Christmas Horror marathon come December 25^th.  

INCONCEIVABLE (2017) **

Brian (Nicolas Cage) and Angela (Gina Gershon) are a wealthy couple whose child was conceived by in vitro fertilization.  When Angela decides to go back to work, they hire a friend of a friend named Katie (Nicky Whelan, who has a topless scene) to be their live-in nanny.  Brian and Angela decide to try for another baby, and they ask Katie to be their surrogate.  Unbeknownst to the couple, she has an ulterior (and deadly) motive.  

Inconceivable is basically an updating of the old Nanny from Hell trope from the ‘90s.  Actually, “updating” is the wrong word because nothing has been updated.  Merely rehashed.  The big twist is also predictable, especially if you’ve seen more than one Lifetime Original Movie.

It’s good seeing Gershon and Cage together again two decades after their appearance in Face/Off.  It’s particularly nice to see Gershon in a leading role.  If you came to the party hoping the third-billed Cage partakes in his usual Cagey activities, you’re bound to be disappointed as he’s relegated to the stock “husband” role.  Faye Dunaway has some good moments though as Gershon’s meddling mother in-law, who doesn’t trust the nanny as far as she can throw her.

This was the directing debut of Jonathan Baker (who also appears in a small role).  If you’re a fan of reality shows, you’ll know he was the asshole on The Amazing Race.  I don’t know about that because I don’t watch reality shows, but he has a workmanlike style and a straightforward approach that befits the standard-issue material.  More interesting is that the screenwriter was none other than Zoe King, daughter of Red Shoe Diaries czar Zalman King, who also wrote Poison Ivy 2 back in the day.

Inconceivable is competently put together.  The actors turn in respectable performances.  It’s just all rather unremarkable.  Ultimately, Inconceivable is forgettable.  

AKA:  Unthinkable.  

SUSPIRIA (2018) **

Director Luca (Call Me By Your Name) Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s iconic Suspiria is an odd duck.  It’s almost as if Guadagnino took a look at Argento’s film and did the exact opposite.  Gone is the original’s colorful look.  The color palette here is muted, mostly with a lot of drab browns and beiges.  Goblin’s searing, pulsating score has been replaced with Thom Yorke’s somber tones.  Argento’s bloody death sequences have been traded out for some relatively bloodless scenes (well, until the end that is).

Guadagnino’s approach is closer to a Roman Polanski psychological slow burn than Argento’s poppy, brightly colored waking nightmare.  I get that Guadagnino was trying to distance his picture from Argento’s so it could stand on its own.  It’s just that it’s so different that it makes you wonder why he didn’t just make his own movie unconnected to the original.  

The basic plot is the same.  Susie (Dakota Johnson) comes to a dance school and uncovers a plot by the secret society of witches that run the place.  Having Tilda Swinton playing the headmistress was a nice touch.  It’s just the theory is better than the execution.  I mean having Swinton playing multiple roles seemed like a sure bet.  Anyone who bets enough will tell you the house wins eventually.

There’s also a heavy emphasis on dancing, which is fine.  I guess.  Even though in doing so it makes the movie feel like a David Lynch remake of A Chorus Line.  There was no goddamn reason it needed to be over two and a half hours though.  I kept asking myself, “When is something going to happen?”  When it did, it was wild enough to keep me watching (and awake).  Mostly, it’s just a slog in between the good stuff.  Oh, and did we need the Epilogue that was nothing more than an Exposition Dump to stuff that really didn’t need to be explained in the first place?  

Another problem is the character of Susie.  There is nothing wrong with Johnson’s performance as she is only working with what she was given (which wasn’t much).  It’s that her sole focus is dancing, which makes her character wafer thin.  

I wanted to love Suspiria.   Although I love the original, I was receptive and open to a reimagining.  Guadagnino’s film just never clicked for me.  The slow burn is a bit too slow and the burn is more of a fleeting spark than a sustained ember.  The ending is a bit of a letdown too and isn’t scary in the least, unless you think the sight of old women’s boobs are immediately scary.

CRASHING LAS VEGAS (1956) **

The forty-first installment in the long-running Bowery Boys franchise finds Slip (Leo Gorcey) and Sach (Huntz Hall) trying to get enough money to save Mrs. Kelly’s boarding house.  When Sach receives a huge electric shock, it gives him the inexplicable ability to predict numbers.  Slip makes him go on a game show and thanks to his uncanny gift, the boys wind up winning a trip to Las Vegas.  They then set out to win a fortune in the casino, and naturally become targets for unscrupulous gangsters.

Directed by Jean Yarborough (who directed many Abbott and Costello comedies), Crashing Las Vegas is a typical Bowery Boys entry.  It features Sach getting into fantastic misadventures while Slip rattles off a series of quips and malapropisms.  The laughs are sparse for the most part.  The best stretch comes when Sach gets mixed up with a gangster’s moll played by Mary Castle (who has sort of an Adele Jergens quality about her).  The fantasy sequence involving the Boys in prison stripes playing a game of “Musical Electric Chairs”, is amusing, but it feels like it came out of another movie.  Even though it’s consistently inconsistent, it’s nowhere near the bottom of the Bowery Boys barrel.

Unfortunately, Crashing Las Vegas is memorable for all the wrong reasons.  This was the final appearance in the series for Gorcey.  Still hurting from the recent death of his father (who also appeared in many of their movies), he apparently drowned his sorrows in drink.  He spent most of the filming drunk and was fired from the movie halfway through.  He’s clearly hammered in some scenes (most notably in the casino and hotel sequences) and slurs his dialogue, which lends a depressing pall over the film.  

Look fast for Three Stooges straight man Emil Sitka in a bit part during the game show scene.

HIGH SCHOOL U.S.A. (1983) **

Michael J. Fox stars as the class cut-up who draws the ire of the school preppie (Anthony Edwards) when he falls in love with his girlfriend (Nancy McKeon, who was in Poison Ivy with Fox two years later).  Naturally, Edwards gets jealous, and plays a prank on Fox that lands him in detention.  Michael J. then challenges him to a drag race to settle the matter once and for all.

I’m kind of a sucker for these all-star Made for TV movies, especially ones that have teenage casts chockful of ‘80s stars.  Even with my predisposition for the genre, High School U.S.A. left me a little cold.  I wanted to like it, but it’s high on clichés and low on laughs.

Still, it’s worth watching solely for the incredible cast.  I mean where else are you going to see Bob Denver and Crispin Glover playing father and son?  There’s also Tony Dow as the principal, Dawn Wells as a home economics teacher, David Nelson as the janitor and Dana Plato, Todd Bridges, and Crystal Bernard as students.  Seeing all these familiar faces in one place has its charms.  If only they had some decent material to work with.  

High School U.S.A. is sprawling and ramshackle.  It’s at its best when it’s focusing on the students, but it unwisely gets bogged down with a lot of unnecessary subplots involving the teachers.  Director Rod (The Garbage Pail Kids) Amateau sets up the gags in an obvious manner and many of the punchlines are foregone conclusions.  It may be an ‘80s movie, but most of the clichés (like the drag race finale) come straight out of the ‘50s.

It’s not all bad though.  I liked Bridges’ robot, who at one point, falls in love with a soda machine.  There’s also a scene where the girls spy on the boys in the locker room for a change.  No matter what you think of High School U.S.A., it does have a scene where Michael J. Fox saves Crispin Glover from a bully two years before he did the same thing in Back to the Future, so it has that going for it.  

A TV pilot, which featured some of the same cast members playing different characters, followed the next year.

ARMED RESPONSE (2017) *

The government covertly sets up several “temples” around the globe. These temples are high-tech rendition centers that utilize a super computer to extract information from terrorists.  (It’s kind of like a liar detector on steroids.) When one of the temples mysteriously go offline, Wesley Snipes enlists the help of its inventor (David Annable) to figure out what happened.  Snipes and his team gain access to the temple and find the temple’s security team dead.  The computer then locks Snipes and his crew inside and sets out to make them its next victims.

Director John Stockwell sets everything up economically enough, but once Snipes and company arrive at the temple, it becomes a shitty Guys with Guns Walking Around in the Dark movie.  Speaking of dark, the whole movie is so dark at times that it’s difficult to tell what the hell is going on.  (The overuse of shaky-cam footage captured from GoPro cameras attached to the soldiers’ helmets and guns gets nauseating almost instantly.)  It’s a big departure for Stockwell whose bread and butter is brightly-lit movies such as Blue Crush and Into the Blue.

The horror elements that rear their head in the second half are painfully half-assed too.  It’s sort of like a variation on those Your Worst Fear Can Kill You movies.  When you finally see what the hell it is that’s been attacking them, it’s a fucking joke.  There are a few gore scenes in the final act, but it’s too late in the game to make much of a difference.

Obscured behind a pair of big sunglasses and a low brimmed hat and speaking in an overly gravelly voice, Snipes rightfully tries to hide his face for most of the movie.  Gene Simmons is equally unrecognizable in a small role, and Anne Heche looks miserable as Snipes’ second in command.  I can’t say I blame any of them.  Since it was a WWE production, you’ve got to have a wrestler in there somewhere.  That dubious dishonor goes to Seth Rollins, who skates by from just acting like he’s still in the ring.

Stockwell is a talented filmmaker.  He recently made the Kickboxer remake, which was tons of fun.  Armed Response on the other hand, is just a dark, dreary, murky mess.  

LORNA (1964) ** ½

Lorna (Lorna Maitland) is an impossibly stacked, hopelessly bored housewife trapped in an unsatisfying relationship with Jim (James Rucker) who yearns for some excitement in her dreary life.  She gets more than she bargained for when an escaped convict (Mark Bradley) has his way with her while her hubby is at work.  At first, she tries to fight him off, but it doesn’t take long before they’re playing house together.  Predictably, it ends in tragedy when Jim comes home early and finds them in the throes of passion.

Lorna is a prototypical Russ Meyer movie.  It was a transitional film for Russ, seeing him moving away from the nudie-cuties of his early work and heading into his southern-fried gothic melodrama phase.  It doesn’t quite have all his hallmarks yet (the editing isn’t nearly as rapid-fire as it would later become), but there are certainly shades of his future greatness here.

Meyer’s eye for beautiful compositions (both of the female form and the landscapes of nature) is as strong as ever.  The cinematography is crisp, and the film is quite gorgeous to look at.  I also enjoyed the narrative device of the fire and brimstone preacher (Jim Griffith) who narrates and casts judgment upon our characters.  

Maitland is good at projecting her character’s isolation, yearning, and loneliness.  She holds her end of the film.  Bradley is sort of a bore as her husband, but Hal Hopper has his moments as Jim’s drunk co-worker.

I said earlier Lorna is a transitional film.  Like most transitions, not everything is quite worked out and fully formed.  For example, the scenes of Lorna’s cuckold husband getting made fun of at work isn’t nearly as hard-hitting and involving as the stuff with Lorna and the convict.  It all ends in a typically violent, highly moralistic Meyer fashion.  I can’t say it’s totally successful, but it’s interesting seeing Meyer forging the building blocks that would become the foundation of his entire career.