TUBI CONTINUED… DARLING NIKKI (2019) *

Nikki (Nicole D’Angelo) is a beautiful woman stuck in a boring marriage to her musician husband (James Duval).  Or is she the co-hostess of a cooking show?  Or is she a high-priced call girl?  Whatever she is, she gets bored of all that shit, and begins taking drugs until she occasionally starts to slip into a half-assed DTV version of Alice in Wonderland, further infuriating/confusing/confounding the viewer.  There’s a guy dressed like the White Rabbit, a Cheshire Cat wannabe, a hookah-smoking pimp, and Lisa London is the Mad Hatter.  

This movie is like the White Rabbit as it hops from place to place so much that you can never get your bearings.  Tubi describes the flick as such:  “A busy bachelorette with her hands full of romantic prospects plunges into a fantasy world that becomes indistinguishable from her secret life.”  It’s one thing for a character in a movie not to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.  It’s another thing when the audience can’t either.  

The big problem is that director Gregory Hatanaka (who also made the equally awful The Awakening of Emanuelle with D’Angelo) makes the early scenes so chaotic that it’s hard to tell if Nikki has already gone off her rocker or not.  He should’ve at least grounded the early scenes in some semblance of mundane everyday reality to better disassociate it from the Alice in Wonderland shit.  Is the cooking show scenes part of the Lewis Carroll-inspired nonsense?  Is the hooking scenes (she never has sex, so I don’t know why they made it a big deal that she was a prostitute) part of the Wonderland sequences?  It’s almost impossible to tell.  Since nothing makes a lick of sense, it’s hard to care one way or the other about Nikki’s fantasies, or her reality for that matter.  Oh, and naming the movie after a Prince song does nothing to clarify any of the resounding plot questions posted above.  

TUBI CONTINUED… KITTY KILLS (2017) ***

After her parents’ brutal murder is left unsolved, Susie (Lina Maya) takes it upon herself to bring the killers to justice.  While trying to gather evidence, Susie is kidnapped, raped, and left for dead by the drug dealers responsible for her parents’ death.  On Halloween night, Susie returns from the brink of death, now calling herself “Pussy”, dressed in a sexy skintight catsuit (complete with cat ears and tail) and seeking vengeance.

Kitty Kills is a low budget affair, but it’s highly entertaining.  Writer/director Gabriel Black has a knack for economical storytelling (especially early on) and keeps things moving at a steady clip.  Most of these faux-comic book movies spend way too much time setting up the origin story.  This one breezes through the set-up and cuts right to the chase, which is appreciated.  Black makes good use of color-tinted scenes (green, purple, blue, etc.) to heighten the comic book atmosphere and does a solid job directing the various shootouts and fight scenes.

Despite the fact that it is essentially a Rape n’ Revenge picture, Kitty Kills isn’t as exploitative as you might think.  Most of the unpleasant stuff happens offscreen and Maya remains fully clothed throughout the movie.  It also earns points for allowing its heroine time to come to terms with not only the ramifications of vigilante justice, but her sexual assault as well; something you normally don’t expect to see in something like this.  Don’t worry though, there’s still plenty of good comeuppance scenes as drug dealers, bad guys, and henchmen die via axe, strangulation, cyanide hidden in cocaine, and (lots of) stabbing.      

The film also benefits from a strong central performance by Maya as Susie/Pussy.  She’s equally memorable during her psychotic episodes as she is dishing out vigilante justice.  The supporting roles are also much better than you might expect.  

In short, if you’re looking for a badass vigilante thriller, Kitty Kills is the cat’s meow.

AKA:  Pussy Kills.

TUBI CONTINUED… LADY OF THE DARK: GENESIS OF THE SERPENT VAMPIRE (2011) *

Boy, how’s that for a title, huh?  

When her husband goes away on business, housewife Eve (Melanie Denholme) is left home alone.  She spends much of her time frittering her day away, much to the audience’s chagrin.  While meditating in the garden, she gets bit by a snake.  After sucking the venom out, she celebrates by eating an apple.  You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to realize the shit will hit the proverbial fan soon after.  Eventually, Eve turns into a vampire and begins keeping a gimp in her basement to feed on.  

As its title suggests, Lady of the Dark:  Genesis of the Serpent Vampire is all over the place.  Some scenes feel like a low rent Playboy Video Centerfold of a scantily clad woman walking around her home and narrating about her daily routine.  Some scenes feel like a shaky-cam horror flick.  Some scenes feel like they came out of a film student’s short film.  Some scenes feel like an amateurish music video.  Some scenes look like a Skype call.  Some scenes look like a cheap bondage video.  None of it sticks.  

Mostly though, the flick is nothing more than long, irritating scenes where nothing much at all happens.  When something does happen, it’s little more than Denholme wandering around her house.  I mean, she looks hot and all, and the scenes where she gets naked and/or seductively exercises and does yoga help to alleviate the boredom… a little.  It’s just nothing to base an entire movie on.  I wouldn’t be against seeing her in something else, provided that it actually had, you know, a coherent plot.      

Lady of the Dark:  Genesis of the Serpent Vampire reminded me in a lot of ways of a Chris Alexander film.  It’s got a cast of (mostly) one actress who wanders around one location for most of the running time with a blank look on her face, oh and there’s some occasional nudity.  That, if you can’t tell, isn’t exactly a compliment.  However, I will say that this is probably the best biblically themed vampire movie starring one actress (and a gimp) that was filmed in someone’s mom’s house for $20 I’ve ever seen. 

SCREAM VI (2023) **

Scream VI continues the great horror movie sequel tradition of setting your sequel in New York City and then doing absolutely nothing with the concept of setting your sequel in New York City.  Like Friday the 13th Part VIII:  Jason Takes Manhattan, Ghostface doesn’t hack people up in The Empire State Building, stab victims at The Statue of Liberty, gut teenagers at Yankee Stadium, or splatter someone’s brains all over Broadway, which is bullshit if you ask me.  In fact, the only sequence that really feels like it’s set in New York, is the subway scene you’ve already seen in the trailers.  

I guess this wouldn’t matter if the film had a strong hook.  All the previous Scream movies skewered the concept of horror movies, sequels, remakes, and “requels”.  This one never decides what its intended target is.  When the movie nerd gives her big speech, she says the murderer could be following the pattern of Scream 2, or maybe sequels to requels (since this is basically the second film with the “Legacy” cast) or even franchises, but the killers never follow through with either pattern.  In fact, one of them even says, “Fuck the movies!” at one point, and you have to wonder if the filmmakers didn’t feel the same way as this is probably the most soulless (but not worst… that would be part 4) entry yet.  

The opening sequence is rather strong though and suggests an interesting concept the rest of the film never follows up on.  I don’t want to give too much away as it is the most worthwhile scene in the whole movie.  All I’ll say is that if the killers continued going after their own copycats, it could’ve been a neat meditation on the assorted rip-offs and cash-ins that litter the slasher genre.  Unfortunately, the movie never commits to this intriguing idea.  (This sequence, while having a clever twist, loses points however for being a criminal waste of Samara Weaving.)  

There was some pre-release talk about this being the goriest Scream yet, but I have no idea what they were going on about.  Other than a knife to the mouth scene, there’s a fair amount of blood, but nothing remotely gory.  Actually, this movie might set a record for how many times someone gets stabbed and DOESN’T die.  I mean, I think the body count is only about five or six because the kills are so fucking weak that they don’t even register as kills because the person survives.  All this wouldn’t matter if the suspense scenes (aside from the opening) weren't so watered down and routine.  I did like the killers’ shrine though, which looks like a Scream version of a Planet Hollywood.

The absence of Neve Campbell (who held out for more money and got shot down) is sorely felt here.  She wasn’t given much to do in the last one, but her presence at least made it feel like a legit Scream movie.  Courteney Cox is still around, although in a limited capacity, and (to make matters worse) she basically does the same shit she always does in these movies.  That is to say, write a book, get punched, and then grudgingly help out the rest of the cast solve the killers’ identities.  With Neve nowhere to be found and Courteney stuck with a reduced role, it’s up to “The Core Four” to shoulder much of the movie.  While the new cast members did an OK job in the previous Scream, the screenwriters do very little to make them memorable this time around.  You know it’s a desperate move when they bring Hayden Panettiere, the most forgettable character from the most forgettable Scream back.  (Yet another person who got stabbed and didn’t fucking die.) 

MILLIGAN MARCH: TORTURE DUNGEON (1970) * ½

Norman, the Duke or Norwich (Gerald Jacuzzo) is mad with power (and sexual energy).  He wants to become king, but there’s a matter of a couple of pesky relatives who are ahead of him in the line of succession.  Norman soon sets in motion a dastardly plan to kill anyone who stands in his way and take the throne by any means necessary.

One of FIVE films writer/director Andy Milligan made in 1970, Torture Dungeon is less a horror movie and more of a medieval melodrama.  As such, it has way too many characters (although I did like the dotty old “Marriage Counselor” and the one-eyed hag), unresolved subplots, and weird asides.  There’s an occasional gore scene (beheading, crucifixion, stake through the heart, stabbing, pitchforking, etc.) here and there, although they’re nowhere near as graphic as some of Milligan’s other pictures.  

The movie kicks off with a pretty good decapitation scene before things quickly get bogged down in a lot of soap opera plotting and Renaissance Fair theatrics.  If you can stomach all the palace intrigue shit, you’ll be treated to a head-spinning last minute plot twist/happy ending that is just plain ludicrous.  There are a few worthwhile moments here, such as the extremely awkward wedding night, and the screen’s only menage a trois involving a corrupt Duke, his chambermaid, and his trusty hunchback henchman/lover.  These sequences, taken on their own merits, are kind of fun, but they are no match for the dull dialogue scenes.

Oh, and if you go in expecting to see a lot of torture, forget it.  For a movie called Torture Dungeon, only about a minute or two actually takes place in the titular establishment.  Even then, there’s no actual torture, just a bunch of shots of dudes chained to the wall.  It’s kind of a rip-off if you ask me.  

While all of this is just short of being torturous, it’s definitely a bit of a chore to sit through.   

One thing you can say about Torture Dungeon is that it is an Andy Milligan movie through and through.  It was shot in Staten Island, has cheap gore effects, costumes that look like they came out of a high school play, overly theatrical acting, gay overtones (like The Ghastly Ones and Nightbirds), hunchback henchmen (The Ghastly Ones and The Body Beneath), incest (The Body Beneath), English characters that speak with a Noo Yawk accent,  characters nailed to a wall (The Body Beneath), stock library music, and a family's plot to breed to further perpetuate the bloodline (The Body Beneath).  Plus, the cast is comprised almost solely of Milligan regulars.  

Jacuzzo gets the best line in the movie when he says, “I’m not homosexual!  I’m not heterosexual!  I’m not asexual!  I’m trisexual!  I’ll try anything for pleasure!”

AKA:  Dungeon of Death.   

TUBI CONTINUED… NAUGHTY NEW ORLEANS (1954) ** ½

After a brief travelogue tour of New Orleans, the plot begins.  Burlesque dancer Julianne (herself) gets a surprise visit from her boyfriend, who has no idea she’s a stripper.  She tells him she has to “go to work” and says they’ll get together later in the evening.  While kicking around the city, he wanders into a Burlesque house where Julianne is the star attraction and he learns the hard way his girlfriend is “The Baby Doll of Bourbon Street”.

Of course, the “plot” is secondary (tertiary?  quaternary?) to the Burlesque acts.  If anything, Naughty New York exists to replicate the experience of going to a Burlesque show.  The mildly amusing host (“Pat Patrick”) does a stand-up act and announces the dancers, who take off most, but not all, of their clothes.  (Most of them wear panties under their panties and bras under their bras.)  Sometimes, a third-rate Abbott and Costello comedy duo come out for some lame sketches.  There’s also an African American tapdancing duo in there too.

Honestly, the real reason to see it is for the strippers.  There’s a French girl, a can-can number, and a Mexican spitfire, just to name a few.  The most memorable act is a tassel twirler who even has a tassel on her ass.  Julianne is the closer, and no wonder as she does the most energetic and feisty striptease.  

Naughty New Orleans is kind of review-proof in a way, especially if you know what you’re getting yourself into.  It contains 20% plot and 80% Burlesque show.  Anyone hoping for a different ratio of plot to Burlesque acts is going to be severely disappointed.  The brief running time (it’s just over an hour long) certainly helps too.  Sure, the comedy duo sketches are the weakest part (the train station sketch goes on far too long), and there isn’t any actual nudity to be found.  However, as an archeological relic of a bygone era, it’s relatively amusing.

MILLIGAN MARCH: NIGHTBIRDS (1970) ***

Dee (Julie Shaw) finds Dink (Berwick Kaler) puking in the gutter and buys him a cup of tea.  She’s attracted to Dink, and feels sorry for the guy, so she invites him to stay with her in her ramshackle flat.  Despite their mutual attraction, Dink shrinks away every time Dee tries to initiate sex.  Dink seems to be more into an old biddy named Mabel (Elaine Shore) who reminds him of his mother, which further puts a strain on his budding romance with Dee.  As time goes on, their relationship becomes more awkward and dysfunctional, and it ends with predictably tragic results.  

Nightbirds is a fascinating, stark, and realistic drama from writer/director Andy Milligan.  If you just know him from his cheesy horror movies, this will be a pleasant surprise.  It almost feels like a ‘60s skin flick directed by Ingmar Bergman.

The first portion of the film with Dee and Dink meeting and testing the sexual waters is riveting stuff.  Many scenes are awkward and painful to watch, but when you’re dealing with characters that have so much emotional baggage, it rings true, and almost unbearably so at times.  It becomes a little less effective once the peripheral characters are introduced, but whenever Milligan is exploring Dee and Dink’s gloriously messy relationship, it’s equal parts captivating and heartbreaking.  Ultimately, they are two pieces of different puzzles trying hopelessly to fit together.  

I’m only a few films into this box sex, but I feel confident in saying Nightbirds is one of Andy Milligan’s best.  Although it often feels stage bound due to the fact it mostly takes place in one apartment, the acting and staging feels much more natural than Milligan’s typical theatrics.  Both performers are excellent, especially Shaw (who unfortunately only appeared in a handful of films in her short career) whose character yearns for love but settles for companionship.  Kaler is also memorable as Dink, who often appears uncomfortable in his own skin, particularly when anything sexual is about to go down.  

Like The Body Beneath, this is one of the movies from Milligan’s England era.  It also features many cast members from that film including Felicity Sentence, Susan Heard, and Kaler.  And as with many Milligan pictures, it features a character that has a domineering mother.  (Milligan had one in real life.)