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V/H/S (2012)

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three star

Something about the traditional, pessimistic story arc of the horror genre can wear you down after overexposure. For instance, when a DVD sale sent me on a Tales from the Crypt binge a few years back, I started to get really weary of watching a horrible person suffer horrible punishment for their horrible deeds episode after episode. Although V/H/S is just one film, its anthology format allows the marathon of its segments to be equally exhausting, especially considering the kind of cretins the movie punishes in various, horrible ways. In abstract, I like the idea of a horror movie attacking bro culture archetypes as punishment for their predatory misogyny & sexual assault, but in practice I was a little worn down by the end of its too-long, two hour runtime. Besides, the movie did at times veer into the grotesque leering & sexual exploitation that it supposedly abhors. Still, there were too many enjoyable moments & interesting ideas in the film for me to brush it off completely, exhausting & compromised or not.

V/H/S‘ wraparound story sets the brotesque horror tone early. In a crude montage that faithfully recreates the blue screens & static flashes of an overused VHS cassette, a gang of reprehensible bro monsters are loosely profiled. The scumbags in question are prone to filming themselves having sex without their partners’ knowledge, forcibly stripping strangers for the camera to shouts of “Show her tits!”, casually using racist language, and mindlessly destroying private property with aluminium bats. The found footage format of the film works greatly to its advantage in the depiction of these atrocities (even if the shaky cam can be a bit tiresome), making the characters feel like real people that you really, really want to see brutally murdered. It’s a godsend, then, that they’re subjected to watching haunted VHS tapes that supernaturally end up offing them one at a time.

In the first, strongest segment a group of bro thugs are punished for attempting to film a hidden camera porno without the participants’ knowledge. They’re viciously ripped to shreds by some sort of humanoid, vampiric gargoyle for their transgression. Other segments include similar sexist pricks getting stabbed in their sleep, tormented by ghosts in the woods, and running a bizarre guantlet in a real-life, occult-themed haunted house. There’s one incongruous vigniette involving an Unfriended-esque videochat that doesn’t fit in with the film’s general Bro Culture on Trial vibe, slightly undercutting any clear message the film may be trying to get across (not to mention the lack of explanation as to why or how a Skype session would be committed to a VHS cassette in the first place), but that’s to be expected in a horror anthology that features ten different directors (including up & comers Ti West & Adam Wingard).

It’s interesting to see such a wide variety of voices fused together in a single work, which is often how the horror anthology excels as a format, but in other ways it’s that very same variety that also works to the V/H/S‘ detriment. Not only does the relentless horrible people horribly punished cycle get a little tiresome after a few segments, but some segments uncomfortably cross over from bro shaming into bro voyeurism. For instance, the awful “Show her tits!” scene from the wraparound is shown repetitiously in the end credits to a dance beat (provided by The Death Set) as if it were (worst case scenario) originally purposed for titillation & not abject terror. A compromised tone/message or not, V/H/S is a serviceable horror anthology. It’s just one that can either feel like an example of reprehensible bro culture or an indictment of the very same thing depending on exactly which minute of the film you’re watching. I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t often fascinating stuff or that the surface pleasures of the special effects & gore didn’t overpower my occasional moral objections with a few of its individual choices. I was by no means enthusiastic about V/H/S as a whole, but as far as generic, late night horror fodder goes, it’ll do.

-Brandon Ledet

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

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An offscreen narrator beckons us into a black & white underworld like a carnie ushering rubes into a mysterious tent, “Ladies & gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word & the act.” Promises of a “salacious new breed” of women whose “very existence are synonymous with violence” are followed by typical Russ Meyer rapidfire images– gogo dancers filmed from empowering low angles, jukeboxes, spinning records, leering men shouting “Go, baby! Go!”, etc. As soon as half a minute into Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! you already get the distinct feeling that Russ Meyer has finally made his masterpiece, eleven films & six years into a bizarre career still with a long way to go, baby, go. It’s a jazzy, psychedelic vibe just as much as it is a feature film, a true work of art that somehow amounts to far more than the sum of its parts. It’s also a very simple example of the “roughie” picture Meyer had been more or less tooling with since he broke away from his Immoral Mr. Teas-imitating nudie cutie work & decided to get much, much darker in his cinematic hondoggery. With Lorna & Mudhoney, Meyer was on the verge of accomplishing something truly great within the roughie genre, but fell just short. Faster, Pussycat! is that greatness.

At the center of this greatness is three larger than life superwomen: Varla (a beyond real Tura Satana), Billie (newcomer Lori Williams), and Rosie (Haji, who was the sole highlight of Meyer’s misogynistic abomination Motorpsycho!). Varla, described here as being “like a velvet glove cast in iron” is the undisputed leader of this girl gang & the undisputed highlight of the film. She runs a tight ship, leading her two cohorts to recklessly drive roadsters across a desert hellscape (Meyer’s specialty, because the perilous locations fondly reminded him of his life-threatening time spent as a WWII combat photographer) & torment any little pissant insects that have the misfortune to fall into her web along the way. While playing chicken & generally causing havoc, they encounter such insects in Linda (Sue Bernard, who is a literal baby) & her dumb-as-bricks beau Tommy (Ray Barlow). When challenged to a time trial race by Tommy, Varla barks “I don’t beat clocks, just people.” She follows up that promise by more or less karate chopping the schmuck to death while his girlfriend is held in captive horror. A lot of the dialogue in Faster, Pussycat! is delivered this way; one-liners are shouted atonally in an adversarial tone Meyer first struck in his near-likeable Mudhoney. Varla & her girls are more female impersonators than actual women, striking the image of exaggerated cartoon versions of violent femininity. When a still-alive Tommy offers Varla a soft-drink she retorts “Honey, we don’t like nothing soft. Everything we like is hard!,” a line that wouldn’t feel at all out of place in a drag show. It’s no wonder that this film turned a young weirdo John Waters into a lifelong Meyer fan.

After Tommy’s early demise, the girls move on to their next male targets: a physically crippled, thoroughly vile curmudgeon (played by a pitch perfect Stuart Lancaster) and his two sons: good cop & dumb cop (Paul Trinka & Dennis Busch, respectively). Varla & the gang arrive on the curmudgeon’s farm practically dragging the traumatized Linda by her hair and immediately start scheming to rob the three men blind. The evil, crippled paterfamilias, of course, has his own schemes, mostly involving unsavory activities targeted at the much younger, much freaked-out Linda. His youngest, simplest son is first depicted as a stuttering mess gently nuzzling a kitten, but is quickly revealed to be quite a threatening tool when manipulated by his old man. Not that any threat they could possibly pose as a pair could match the brute strength of the superhuman Varla, who always seems to be poised to take control of any situation through pure, unadulterated violence. The result of this cosy set-up is a tense, divided household. Two rival, isolated gangs grit their teeth in each other’s presence, aching for someone to make the first move so they can start to draw blood, a true testament to a war of the sexes vibe Meyer introduced to his work as early as Europe in the Raw & Lorna, a contentious atmosphere that would follow him through the end of his bizarre career.

Although Faster, Pussycat! is a brisk 83 minutes of carnage, it’s near-impossible to touch on everything that makes it great in a short-form review. Rapidfire sex jokes, transgressive (for its time) representations of homosexuality, stark black & white cinematography, incredible shots framed by flanking beautiful denim-clad rumps, a classically tragic/climactic bodycount that would make Hamlet sweat, every precious frame of Tura Satana’s performance as Varla, the list goes on. Faster, Pussycat! is the moment when the self-propelling rhythms and seething anger of Meyer’s work really start to take hold. It’s no wonder that Roger Ebert says of the film in his memoir Life Itself, “That was when it first registered that there was a filmmaker named Russ Meyer, and he was the same man who made The Immoral Mr Teas.” Meyer had arrived as an artist & his first significant work was a real doozy. There was a palpable violence to the film, especially in the scenes were Stuart Lancaster’s curmudgeon angrily mumbles to himself about passing trains and where Tura Satana manhandles underage actress Sue Bernard in a too-believable violent manner. When Linda pleads, “All I want to do is go home! Please let me go home!”, it may as well be Bernard pleading directly to Russ. There is real terror in her eyes.

Still, despite all of its brutality, the film has a compulsively fun vibe to it that makes it perfect fodder for midnight movie screenings & is a decidedly sexy picture solely to the credit of its three leads, given that there is no nudity & no fornication typical to a Meyer film (although it stops just short on both counts). All of this greatness came from a very simple idea: after filming a bunch of male brutes beating on women in the vile picture Motorpsycho!, Meyer thought, “Why don’t I have the women beat up men for a change?” Screenwriter Jack Moran (who had been with Meyer since the nudie cutie days of Erotica & Wild Gals of the Naked West) built a wonderfully strange, violently tense world from there & the rest is trash cinema history. It would be another five years or six pictures before Meyer could even come close to topping this achievement with the beyond-reason Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and some (not me) would contend that even that picture can’t match the lightning-in-a-bottle magic he captured in Pussycat!. The film is that remarkable.

-Brandon Ledet

Motorpsycho! (1965)

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halfstar

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With his first two black & white “roughies”, Russ Meyer was palpably building towards something special that just quite wasn’t in reach. In what critic & friend Roger Ebert dubbed Meyer’s “Gothic period,” the tirelessly perverted director had established a very distinct atmosphere of violent, maniacal, sex-crazed dread in Lorna & Mudhoney that was pushing his career towards the cartoonish war of the sexes trashterpieces that would eventually make him a B-movie legend. Unfortunately, before Meyer would more or less perfect the roughie picture with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he would end up making one of the worst films of his career, Motorpsycho!. Halfway between Marlon Brando’s landmark motorcycle gang classic The Wild One & Roger Corman’s Easy Rider-precursor The Wild Angels, Motorpsycho! is a fairly straightforward proposition of Meyer’s usual bevy of buxom babes recontextualized in a world of instrumental psych rock & loud motorbikes. Too bad it’s a grotesquely misogynistic bore & one of the most vile films of the director’s entire oeuvre. I’m usually on board with Meyer’s peculiar brand of brutish horndoggery, because it reveals such a deeply strange character underneath his militaristic, all-American façade, but Motorpsycho! is honestly too repugnant to excuse on artistic grounds, campy or not.

There isn’t really much plot to speak of here. A biker gang that looks like The Evil Beatles terrorizes a small desert community, particularly preying on isolated women. True to Meyer fashion, tragedy befalls couples wherein a man is inattentive or just generally a bad lover, but in this case the victims are almost invariably female. Early in the film when a man complains that his wife’s noisy playfulness “ruined the fishing,” she cheekily retorts, “You’ve got the best there is on your line right now!” This kind of banter might be entertaining if it weren’t immediately followed by the woman being physically assaulted by a bunch of young male punks in leather jackets. There’s no particular sense of purpose for the film’s ultraviolence. It just sort of happens without rhyme or reason. By the time Meyer appears in the film himself, playing a cop (of course) & remarking upon the body of one of the gang’s victims (to her grieving husband!) “Nothing happened to her that a woman ain’t built for”, the whole affair feels unbearably sleazy, nothing conceivably being able to redeem it from its own pointless, misanthropic cruelty.

As much as I despised Motorpsycho!, I’m still glad it was made. The story goes that after making the movie, Russ was stricken with a brilliant idea: to retell the story, except featuring buxom hotrod women instead of brutish motorcycle men. Thus, the basic idea for the much superior Faster, Pussycat! was born. Motorpsycho! also saw the first appearance of Meyer superstar Haji, who would go on to star in Pussycat!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Supervixens!, and so on. Haji only has exactly one memorable moment in Motorpsycho! (being shouted at by a male co-star to remove snake venom from a bite on his leg with hilarious, in bad taste shouts of “Suck it!” & “Spit it out!”), but it’s still a start. Besides its historical significance as a Faster, Pussycat! precursor, Motorpsycho! also partially inspired the White Zombie track “Thunderkiss ’65” & provided the name for a Norweigian indie rock band (much like Pussycat! & Mudhoney) as well as being credited as one of the first on-screen representations of Vietnam War-related PTSD (in the gang leader & last surviving member of The Evil Beatles). It also marks the beginning a period of time when Meyer significantly scaled back the nudity in his films (a godsend in this case), possibly due to the exhausting morality case coutroom battles instigated by Lorna & Mudhoney that later Hollywood productions would greatly benefit from. Otherwise, there’s not much else to see here. The best of Russ Meyer was still yet to come, one of his most repulsive works now thankfully behind him.

-Brandon Ledet

Mudhoney (1965)

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twohalfstar

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While filming the atypical yuck-it-up comedy Fanny Hill in Europe, Meyer received word from wife/producer (and titular star of Eve & The Handyman) Eve that his first venture into black & white “roughies”, Lorna had racked up a nice chunk of change in his absence. How did Meyer celebrate? He took his lastest white hot mistress Rena Horten (who played a sex worker in Fanny Hill) on a lavish mini-vacation. This affair, of course, ramped up some pre-existing marital tension & lead to a rather speedy divorce back home. Not to let a little old speed bump like the dissolution of a marriage get in the way of making a buck, however, Russ immediately talked his now ex-wife to produce his next venture in to pitch black roughies: Mudhoney, starring (of course) Rena Horten.

Reportedly lifting the title from, of all places, an Oscar Wilde quote, Meyer set Mudhoney in a Depression-era Missouri, later referring the film as his “homage to Grapes of Wrath.” Despite the incongruity of the setting, the film was in fact filmed in the desert, a tumultuous terrain that fondly reminded the director of his glory days as a WWII combat photographer “because you could die there”. Of course, Mudhoney actually has much more in common with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the ancient freak show Spider Baby than it does with The Grapes of Wrath, no matter what Meyer believed to be true. Depicting a maniacal family of impossible, sex-starved, rural lunatics & the small town of simple farm folk they terrorize, the film has the vibe of an unhinged party that’s taken a peculiarly violent turn after a marathon of day-drinking. Sidney, played by a leather-faced Hal Hopper (who starred in & sang the lounge lizard theme song for Lorna) sets the tone early after getting ejected from his favorite drinking hole with shouts of “Why don’t you go home to your wife for a change?!”. Unfortunately, he does go home to his wife (played by Antoinette Christiani, for whom this is her sole film credit), only to force himself on her in a truly grotesque display. Even in these opening minutes Meyer establishes that Mudhoney firmly in the roughie territory, the carefree days of the nudie cutie firmly in the rearview.

Despite a distinct, depraved atmosphere, however, Mudhoney doesn’t have too much going for it. A lot of the problem is its very slight narrative, the same Achilles heel that sunk the almost-enjoyable Lorna. A city boy drifter (John Furlong, who ended up working on many Meyer films & enjoyed a second life as a character actor) finds his way to Meyer’s warped version of Missouri & decides to take up work as a farmhand on Sidney’s property despite so, so many red flags. A nearby house that functions as a sort of brothel/drinking hole offers a gateway to vice that eventually drives Sidney & his corrupt priest cohort to a violent madness, intensified by the farm hand’s designs on his wife & his property, eventually leading to his public execution in the town square. Somewhere in there is the usual Meyer jabs at the city boy’s supposedly unmasculine weakness, best exemplified by Luther’s acidic line, “She needs a man. A real man! Not some gutless boy.” In this case, though, it’s Luther who’s punished for his transgressions. His wife spits the line, “I hate everything about you! Don’t ever touch me again!” in his face, threatening to stab him with a gigantic kitchen knife and, of course, the film concludes with his public execution, Meyer himself making a cameo among the lynch mob. The film may fail to sympathize with the violent alpha-male Meyer would usually side with (although his escalating mental illness in the back half does help a bit in that respect), but it does at least typify the adversarial war of the sexes vibes that plagues nearly all of the director’s onscreen romances.

Although Mudhoney doesn’t quite work on the whole, it has a great deal of killer atmosphere, of which I have a hard time finding any comparison points besides the aforementioned Spider Baby. So much credit for this has to go to the cast. Hal Hopper holds it down as a vicious brute as usual, but this time he’s backed up by the wild, toothless coot Princess Livingston (featured before in Meyer’s Wild Gals of the Naked West & Erotica), a hot to trot, go-go dancing Lorna Maitland (star of Meyer’s Lorna, duh), and, of course, Rena Horten, who portrays a deaf/mute beauty tactlessly described in the film as “the perfect woman” due to her handicaps (yikes!). The dialogue is a nonstop barrage of atonal yelling without any real breaks for breath or traces of human behavior, the exact kind of stuff that must’ve inspired many a John Waters performance down the line. The unhinged living room dance parties (accompanied by Princess Livingston’s one of a kind cackle) & moonshine swilling are a sight to behold, feeling like true glimpses into a maniacal, rural underwold that must exist somewhere, right? With all of this going for it, it’s no wonder that Mudhoney has sort of persisted as a cult classic despite its initial commercial flop, even going so far as to inspire the name of an infamous grunge-era punk band. Still, the bizarre atmosphere rarely overpowers the weak plot & the movie unfortunately works a lot better as a strange afterthought & a memory, like a half-remembered nightmare, than it actually does as a movie-watching experience.

-Brandon Ledet

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1964)

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three star

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With the sexploitation picture Fanny Hill: A Memoir a Woman of Pleasure (adopted from a somewhat infamous erotic novel of the same name) Russ Meyer returned to two things he was not particularly masterful at: broad, yuck-it-up comedy & favorably capturing Europe on film. Meyer was returning to the continent for the first time since he condemned it as a “highway of vice” & “a cesspool of cheap hotels, tawdry bars, and wanton women” in his laughably xenophobic “documentary” Europe in the Raw. He was lured back to Europe with the promise that he would helm the somewhat pricey production of Fanny Hill with complete creative autonomy as a director. Once he arrived, however, it became apparent that the film’s producer, Albert Zugsmith, was eager to double back on his own word. Not only did Zugsmith annoint himself as an unofficial co-director, undermining much of Russ Meyer’s creative vision, he also banned Meyer from the editing room, where most of the artistry of his best films usually come to life. What’s left, then, is a more or less amusing “erotic” comedy about a European brothel . . . just one with absolutely no trace of Meyer’s eccentric personality.

Set in 18th century London, Fanny Hill tells the story of a rural teenager getting bowled over by some big city reprobates more than willing to take advantage of her small town naiveté. A madame of an upscale brothel appoints herself as Fanny’s honorary aunt & claims that all the other sex workers under her wing are also her nieces, “all daughters of my 12 sisters”. There are some interesting characters mixed in these “women of ill repute”, such as a dominatrix, a woman prone to wear a false moustache during her sexual appointments, and a youthful lollipop enthusiast who is especially attractive older male clients (blech.). The men that frequent this bunch are a mixed bag of annoying European caricatures that spoil a lot of the good vibes with their over-the-top character flaws, including a john that leaves Fanny to drown & a sniveling weakling who begs to be punished for being “a naughty boy.” Even more frustrating is Fanny herself, who somehow does not know that she is working for a brothel for the entire length of the film. Frustratingly naïve, Fanny is the kind of girl who can watch every last one of the brothel’s “nieces” service half the Navy in an open field and still not be exactly sure of what is going on. At one point, she even takes on the job of setting up appointments for johns & somehow believes that she’s merely selling hats. Of the oddly frequent hat deliveries made at all hours of the day & night, Fanny says “The busier girls were wearing out several boxes each week.” The script has a funny way of being cheekily salacious in that fashion, purposefully far more aware of its sexual playfulness than its sex worker protagonist.

Featuring no nudity, no rapidfire editing, and no larger than life personalities, Fanny Hill is unrecongnizable as a Russ Meyer picture. There are, however, a few scraps of the director’s personality to be found scattered throughout the film. His second black & white film in a row (after 1963’s Lorna), the film at the very least fits into the current phase of work in a vague visual sense, even if it in no way can be understood as a black & white “roughie” (the genre he was working in at the time). True to most Meyer pictures, there is a weakling male character who gets continually punished for his supposedly unmasculine affectionate love. Fanny’s main beau’s life is intentionally derailed by the film’s Evil Madame to the point where he’s driven to crossdressing in order to sneak into the brothel & come to his fiancé’s rescue (a gag that was repeated in such respectable films as Leprechaun in the Hood). There’s also a repeat of a gag from Europe in the Raw where a chamber pot is emptied upon an unsuspecting passerby, possibly capturing exactly what the fiercely American Meyer thought of Europe in a nutshell. The film’s very light use of S&M and lipstick lesbianism was more of a telegraph of what was to come in Meyer’s work than a reflection of where it had already been. Otherwise, Fanny Hill has essentially no trace of the madman auteur/pervert’s unique touch.

That’s not to say that Fanny Hill isn’t enjoyable as a broad comedy about the sexcapades of a naïve sex worker that has no idea that she’s been employed by a brothel. In addition to erasing Russ Meyer’s personality from the picture, Zugsmith’s production also bears almost no resemblance to its source material, a novel often credited as the first English language example of pornographic prose, but it does squeeze by as a light romp that finds humor in the simple things: raw fish falling into cleavage, men dressing as women & getting hit on by their unknowing bosses, and an onslaught of cheap sex jokes soaring over the head of an unbelievably innocent protagonist. There are certainly much worse fates than that.

-Brandon Ledet

The Dungeonmaster (1985)

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twostar

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Although there’s no way to ever again think about or mention the proverb “too many cooks spoil the broth” without calling to mind the short film that took the internet by storm last year, few statements are more accurate when it comes to the abysmal failings of 1985’s The Dungeonmaster. The title is inaccurate, as there are absolutely no dungeons in this movie, nor is there a master of these unseen dungeons. The alternate title, Digital Knights, is also incorrect, as there is only one person who could reasonably be called a knight in this film. In fact, even the original title, Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate (as it was known before the reaction from a San Antonio test audience convinced the producers to change it), was also wrong, as there is no war in this movie whatsoever, and, despite it being mostly garbage, you’ll feel more unfulfilled by the movie’s underwhelming 73 minutes than moved to any strong emotion; this movie can’t inspire mild interest, let alone rage.

In 1989, Charles Band founded direct-to-video production company Full Moon Entertainment. Although it’s easy to ignore how revolutionary this was at the time, Full Moon was the first studio to create features exclusively for the burgeoning home video rental market in much the same way Netflix began creating content for its subscribers when streaming video began to catch on as an alternative to broadcast TV. Their first film was the surprise hit Puppet Master, which was not only a sharp and commercially successful film but also included a featurette about the film’s production on both the VHS tape and the Laserdisc, a novel idea at the time. When Full Moon released its fifth feature, the sequel Puppet Master II, it also introduced VideoZone, a video magazine that featured introductions from Band, featurettes, ads for Full Moon merchandise, and interviews that spotlighted upcoming releases. It was a brilliant and inventive business model that reflects how Band was an innovator, despite a less-than-stellar reputation that features (probably true) accusations of plagiarism and failure to properly credit artists involved in his ventures.

The strange thing about Dungeonmaster is that it also demonstrates innovation, or at least attempts to. The film is about handsome computer programmer Paul (Jeffrey Byron), who has created an inexplicably advanced computer named X-CaliBR8, which, in addition to acting as his FitBit/Google Glass/smartwatch, allows him to interface with ATMs and control traffic lights while being kind of a dick to commuters. Also, “Cal” (voiced by an uncredited actress) can process data like some kind of god, answering seriously open-ended questions featuring an anxiety-inducing number of factors with more speed than it took me to construct this sentence. Paul’s girlfriend, Gwen (Leslie Wing), is jealous of Paul’s relationship with the sultry-voiced computer, but she accepts his seemingly impromptu marriage proposal with only minor hesitation.

That night, the couple is kidnapped by Mestema (Night Court‘s Richard Moll–in fact, TV legend has it that he shaved his head for this role and then auditioned for the sitcom, leading the producers to suggest he keep it that way for all nine seasons), a sorcerer or demon or something, who transports Gwen and Paul to a quarry somewhere. He turns Paul’s magic computer into a gauntlet with buttons, and it is just as ridiculous and terrible as you are imagining; Cal identifies Mestema as the devil himself, which, were I Satan, I would find terribly embarrassing. Mestema exposits to Paul, to whom he gives the awful, awful name “Excalibrate,” that he has waited a long time for a challenger who’s up to his level or something and issues Excalibrate a challenge to seven trials, or else Mestema gets to keep Gwen. That’s where Band’s innovation comes into play: the rest of the film plays out as an anthology, with each of the seven trials being directed by a different person. This makes the story mostly incoherent overall, but some segments are better than others. In order to give the film a fair star rating, I’m going to rate each segment individually and then average them out.

The first trial contains the images that intrigued me most when I saw the trailer, as it features a Ray Harryhausen-esque stop motion statue monster. Entitled “Stone Canyon Giant,” this sequence was directed by David Allen; unsurprisingly, Allen’s earliest credit is for cult classic Equinox, where he worked on the movie’s beloved (if campy) visual effects. His only other feature directing credit is for the aforementioned Puppet Master II, but he was a stop motion artist and puppeteer on both classics like Willow, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and *batteries not included as well as disputably nonclassic but beloved movies like The Howling, The Stuff, and Prehysteria (which was released on Moonbeam Entertainment, Full Moon’s family-oriented division). The titular giant is bound to induce nostalgic reminiscence of Harryhausens of yore, and the segment also features an appearance by New Orleans native Phil Fondacaro, formerly the second most well-known little person in show biz (Peter Dinklage has knocked him down to third place, with Warwick Davis still in first by a wide margin, in my book). Overall, though, it’s mostly mediocre, and it isn’t helped by the fact that it includes the first of many times we will see Paul inexplicably shoot lasers from the wrist-mounted Cal. 2.5 Stars.

The second segment was directed by Band himself, and is a headache-inducing music video for W.A.S.P. in which Paul must force his way through a group of “scary looking” punks at a metal show before Blackie Lawless (as himself, I guess) can turn into Mestema and cut Gwen in half. It’s titled “Heavy Metal” and is just awful. 1 Star.

The third segment is titled “Demons of the Dead” and was directed by John Carl Buechler. Two years later, Buechler would direct the underrated classic Troll starring The NeverEnding Story‘s Noah Hathaway, a movie which has long been surpassed in popularity by its (notoriously and endearingly) awful not-really-a-sequel sequel. He went on to direct the seventh Friday the 13th as well as Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College (wait, what?), as well as a bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of. I knew that this would be Buechler’s segment from the moment I caught sight of Ratspit, a highly detailed and technically perfect goblin puppet who rules the dead. Most of the segment is utterly forgettable. Fighting reanimated corpses should be more exciting than this! 3.5 Stars.

The fourth segment, “Slasher,” relocates Paul to contemporary New York, where he spends most of the time he’s supposed to be saving Gwen from a serial killer trying to escape from the custody of two clumsy cops. This sequence does have some striking visual elements in its favor, but it, too, is largely forgettable. This was the only directorial effort ever put forth by actor Steven Ford, whose roles include such noteworthy appearances as “Secret Service #2” in Escape from New York, “Nuke Tech” in Armageddon, the nameless “Four Star General” in Transformers, and “Prometheus First Officer” in Babylon 5: In the Beginning. 1.5 Stars.

If I remember correctly, the fifth segment was Rosemarie Turko’s “The Ice Gallery,” which works in the sense that it feels like an homage to Hammer Films. Paul and Gwen are once again separated in a cave full of fictional and historical monsters frozen like wax figures in a museum. Marie Antoinette and Jack the Ripper are there, alongside the Wolfman, a mummy, a samurai, and, for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom, Albert Einstein. This is probably the most visually interesting segment overall, even if it’s dumb. Turko’s only previous film experience was writing, producing, and directing a film titled Scarred, about an underage girl who turns to prostitution to support her baby. She never directed, wrote, or produced anything after Dungeonmaster. 3 Stars.

“The Cave Beast” is the penultimate trial. It makes no sense. Paul gets lured into a cave and vanquishes a monster that is actually revealed to be an angel once defeated, or something, by figuring out how to reflect laser beams off of stuff. Director Paul Manoogian also directed Full Moon’s Demonic Toys and was the first AD on James Franco’s bombed directorial debut The Ape. 1.5 Stars.

The final segment was directed by Ted Nicolaou, director of TerrorVision and all of the Subspecies movies. He also directed Bad Channels, a Full Moon release about a radio station that is taken over by an alien infestation and features a Blue Oyster Cult soundtrack (I have a fondness for Bad Channels that I know is indefensible). His contribution to this film, “Desert Pursuit,” however, is a lazy Mad Max rip off that features, as you might have guessed, a pursuit through the desert in ridiculous vehicles. 1 Star.

Paul wins all the trials, challenges Mestema to a physical fight that the warlock loses, and throws Richard Moll into a convenient lava pit. The end. Wraparound story: 1.5 Stars. So, the average is just shy of 2 Stars (1.9375, if you want to get obsessive about it). Despite an intriguing approach, Dungeonmaster is a lousy movie overall. If you want a positive experience, track down and watch the film’s trailer, as it consists of the three good minutes of this movie and leaves out the chaff.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mother of Tears (2007)

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fourstar

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After nearly thirty years, Dario Argento returned to his “Three Mothers” trilogy, a sequence of films that began with Suspiria and continued with Inferno, and all of which centered around one of three ancient witches: Mater Suspiriorum of Suspiria, the Mother of Sighs, also known as Helena Markos; Mater Tenebrarum of Inferno, the Mother of Darkness; and Mater Lachrymarum, the titular Mother of Tears (and the titular third mother, per the original Italian title of La Terza madre). From the release of 1980’s Inferno until the premiere of Tears in 2007, there was much debate as to whether the trilogy would ever be concluded, and hope that it could be done so satisfactorily dwindled with each passing year. I went into this film expecting very little; perhaps that’s why, by the time the end credits rolled, I was shocked to discover that I had enjoyed it so damn much. Or maybe it’s because I’m sentimental.

Argento’s daughter with Daria Nicolodi, Asia Argento, has often discussed the contentious relationship between herself and her father. Hailed at birth as the “Princess of Horror,” Asia has revealed in interviews that she never felt as if she had Dario’s attention until she was old enough to begin appearing in front of the camera. His passion, she says, was for film over family. On the DVD of the film, released by Dimension Extreme (ugh), there is a half hour behind-the-scenes video that includes portions of a panel in which both Asia and her father participated; in it, Asia talks frankly (while Dario very subtly squirms next to her) about how working as a director made her a better actress, how she was effected by Argento and Nicolodi’s separation when she was nine, and how she convinced him to hire Nicolodi for Tears as a gesture of goodwill. “It was beautiful to see them working together on set,” she says. “Now the film’s finished and they’re back to not speaking to each other.” It’s an intensely personal nonfiction monologue, and that depth of intimacy extends into the film itself. When Asia’s character within the film weeps over photos of her long-dead mother with a baby–real photos of Daria and baby Asia–it’s intensely compelling in a way that may not be entirely earned by the film itself, but nonetheless produces a sympathetic emotional reaction that’s difficult to ignore.

The plot of Tears is much more straightforward than that of the previous two films in the trilogy. A priest uncovers a rune-covered centuries-old urn buried with a minor saint, and sends it to Roman museum curator Michael Pierce (Adam James), who he considers to be the foremost authority on occult paraphernalia. Vice-curator Giselle (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) and art restoration student Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) impatiently open the box while he is out of the office. Within, they find a knife, three statues, and a small tunic that is insistently referred to throughout the film as a talisman. Sarah leaves to retrieve a book and returns to find Giselle being brutally murdered–three monsters slice open her abdomen and then strangle her with her own intestines–and flees. She is pursued by Mater Lachrimarum’s familiar, a monkey, and is cornered for a moment before hearing a disembodied woman’s voice directing her and escaping through a door that was locked only moments before. The police are incredulous, including stunningly handsome Detective Enzo Marchi (stunningly handsome Cristian Solimeno). An evil veil then begins to fall over Rome, as interpersonal violence breaks out on an unprecedented scale and witches begin to arrive in droves. How evil and violent is the influence of Lachrymarum (Moran Atias)? A mother hacks her toddler to death with a meat cleaver before murdering a priest and then slashing her own throat (an image that is reminiscent of the end of Tenebrae). Another mother throws her baby over the side of a bridge (the horror of the latter is somewhat mitigated by the fake baby’s bathetic tumble, but it’s still a better infant prop than the “baby” in American Sniper). By the end of the film, we’ve seen assaults, murders, churches being burned to the ground by neophytes of Lachrymarum’s coven, eye-mutilating torture, a woman’s head smashed open by repeated door slams, and a seven year old being cannibalized.

Michael disappears at the hands of the witches, and Sarah escapes the city by train after defeating a hench witch (Jun Ichikawa) and learning to turn invisible from the disembodied voice (just go with it). She makes her way to see an exorcist (Udo Kier of Suspiria, although this is a different character), who provides the exposition about the urn and its owner. In his vicary, she also meets Marta (Valeria Cavalli), a self-described white witch who recognizes Sarah as the daughter of the extremely powerful but deceased good witch Elisa Mandy (Nicolodi). Elisa, the two tell Sarah, was a great force for good who fought the powerful witch Helena Markos many years before; the Three Mothers killed her in revenge, but Helena’s battle with Elisa is what weakened her to the point that she could be vanquished pretty easily by Suzy Bannion in 1977. The events of Inferno are dismissed fairly offhandedly, as they mention another sister died in New York some years prior. After more deaths, Sarah tracks down Guglielmo De Witt (Philippe Leroy), an alchemist who provides her with a copy of Varelli’s The Three Mothers, from which she learns about methods of vanquishing the witches. Lachrymarum’s power grows as new acolytes join her, and the talisman/tunic ends the prolonged weakened state she has been in since the deaths of her sisters. Marta lives long enough to show Sarah how to cause her mother’s spirit to manifest, then is murdered along with her lover. Violence continues to roil as Sarah tries to find and kill the Mother of Tears.

Does it strain credibility that someone with an academic background in art history would be surprised by the three faces of Hecate, or need to research that motif? Is the “spirit” effect used to make Nicolodi’s spectral aura hilarious in its horribly Charmed-esque failure? Does the attempt to weld together a fairly disparate canon err a little too much on the side of contrivance? Is it weird that there’s a lingering shower scene of Asia, given that the director is her father? Do the witches who show up in Rome look like the lovechildren of Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of Lost Boys and the distinctly unmenacing vampires of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie? Is there, perhaps, a little too much time spent training Sarah in her powers, given that she does very little in the way of magic and her ultimate triumph comes more from good hand-eye coordination than mysticism? Did I chuckle mirthlessly at the interview with Atias in which she talked about getting into the character of Lachrymarum, given that her entire “character” consists of being nude or nearly so while spouting ancient-sounding gibberish? The answer to all of these questions is “yes.” But did I thoroughly enjoy this movie? Also “yes.”

This movie is effectively creepy, pairing the psychological horror of a destabilizing and self-destructive society with the unhinged and violent imagery of a slasher, with some occult horror thrown in for good measure. Asia Argento turns in an absolutely dynamite performance, and looks gorgeous doing it, and her scenes with her mother are quietly beautiful despite the uncannily awful CGI–not the only bad CGI in the movie, but, to the movie’s credit, the effects are largely practical. The lighting and score are perfection, and the overall ambiance was reminiscent of Wes Craven’s work in the nineties like Scream and New Nightmare, with sumptuous visuals that play up earthtones in place of the vivid colors of Argento’s earlier work. Although the film seems to be rather widely reviled, it’s actually great–even perfect–in some places, and its weaker elements aren’t awful enough to weigh down the film as much as I expected.

This was a hard one to grade, but I’m going to have to give it four stars–with the Camp Stamp as caveat, the first time I’ve done so for an Argento movie. Partially, that’s in deference to the more silly elements (mostly the roving gangs of cackling witches and the eminently mockable sequences of Lachrymarum’s catacombs and catwalk sermons), but it’s also an admission that I can’t give this movie an exorbitant rating based on its straightforward merits alone. So much of my feelings about it are informed by the Argento-Nicolodi clan’s interpersonal relationships offscreen and my fondness for Suspiria that I couldn’t have found it within me to dislike this movie, even if it had truly been as awful as I was led to believe. Give Mother of Tears a chance; go in with an open mind, and you’ll enjoy yourself.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sinister 2 (2015)

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three star

In the first Sinister film children were often seen, but not heard. This is because Ethan Hawke’s protagonist lived in a house crawling with ghosts of the silent, but murderous tykes and kept this most unsavory detail to himself, struggling with the kids’ fucked up pasts on his own instead of involving his family. The film took a long time to get its mythology nailed down, but by the end it established that there was a real life “Boogieman” that recruited kids to murder their parents & join him in some sort of vague, blood-soaked otherworld. Part of what made the movie work was that the details of this set-up were kept vague & mysterious, revealed one at a time to an increasingly freaked out Hawke until he himself was confronted with one of The Boogieman’s pint-sized foot soldiers. Of course, it’s difficult to keep up this air of mystery in a sequel once the beans have already been spilled & the more Sinister 2 tries to flesh out the details of its predecessor the more it makes itself out to be an amusingly goofy slice of schlock by comparison.

Taking an exact opposite approach to the first film, Sinister 2 depicts The Boogieman’s recruitment tactics from a child’s POV instead of an academic one. This is a world where The Boogieman is very real, actually in your closet, and referenced in ancient texts “across all cultures” (sometimes known as Bughuul to his friends). The first film presents the idea that The Boogieman mayhem spreads when people living in a house where a family was once murdered by one of his child sentinels move to a new place. The first film also made it seem that this was a linear progression, that The Boogieman hopped from House A to B to C without ever looking back. Well, that idea’s thrown out the window here & apparently all the old Boogieman haunts are eligible for new victims. On top of that development, he’s now also able to haunt laptops through creepy computer viruses, because why not? There was also no indication in the first film as to why little kids were filming themselves brutally murdering their own families in the first place except that super 8 video looks really cool & grainy and it drove the too-curious protagonist crazy. Here, it’s given a purpose: the kids are filming their bloody deeds as gifts to The Boogieman, a sadistic sort of sacrificial offering, an “aesthetic observance of violence”, “murders captured in art”. For a thousands year old demon who manipulates children into becoming murderers & dresses like a Industrial Goth jackass, you gotta admit that his penchant for collecting art at the very least affords The Boogieman some cool points. At least his mayhem has some sort of a purpose (although it worked perfectly well in the first film without one).

The super 8 films are, of course, the main draw of the Sinister franchise and, as I stated in my review of the 2012 original, they sort of pose the series as a kind of throwback anthology horror with an extensive narrative wraparound. Sinister 2‘s super 8s open with a bang. An especially creative ghost kid, formerly a real kid, shows off a fishing trip where he tied up his family & fed them to a gator. I’m going to repeat that. This vile little tyke fed his entire family to a fucking gator. It’s a gnarly image & although there’s some really gruesome, inventive deaths involving electrocution, crucifixion, and ancient dental tools elsewhere in the film, I feel like the gator entry really drives home the half goofy, half . . . umm, sinister vibe the film achieves on the whole. The super 8s are where the movie’s terror is most effective & otherworldly, relying heavily on a grindhouse-era sound design & some meta reflections on the nature of the horror film as an artform. It’s also where the film is most enjoyable in pure surface pleasures.

Although there’s also some thought given to the cycles of domestic abuse & how the patterns of physical violence can be learned & passed down in a family here, it’s somehow still very apparent that there’s a lighter, goofier tone at play in Sinister 2 than there was in the original. A lot of credit for that tone goes to actor James Ransone (who’s had some wonderful turns as Ziggy Sobotka on The Wire, the pimp Chester in Tangerine, and Dingy Dave in John Waters’ A Dirty Shame) for being able to balance the sillier lines of thought with the distinct horror of occult-style massacres. Partial credit for keeping the tone light also goes to Shannyn “A Knight’s Tale” Sossamon’s awful Southern drawl for helping me remember to not take the film too seriously. This balance between goofy horror movie & something more affecting is also reflected in the film’s two distinct kinds of scares: the cheap jump scares & the legitimately creepy vibes of the grainy super 8s. Sinister 2 has its cake & eats it too. It’s not nearly as tasteful or artsy as the first movie, but it sort of goofs its way into earning just as much horror movie goodwill through its lighter tone & the fact that all we really wanted to see as an audience was more of those super 8s, anyway. I mean, that kid fed his entire family to fucking gator. How cool is that?

-Brandon Ledet

Lorna (1964)

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twohalfstar

campstamp

With 1963’s Heavenly Bodies! Russ Meyer effectively brought the nudie cutie chapter of his life to a close, summarizing nearly all of his post WWII pin-up work in a single, enjoyably frivolous (but financially disastrous) picture. Having effectively invented the nudie cutie with The Immoral Mr. Teas & more or less running into the ground with the five films that followed, it was high time for a change in Meyer’s career path, one telegraphed by his curmudgeony “documentary” on European sex trade Europe in the Raw. What was next for the moustachioed pervert was much darker territory than the playful narration & pastel voids of his nude comedies. Meyer would spend his next four or so features pioneering an entirely new kind of sexploitation picture: black & white “roughies.” Far from the hokey vaudevillian gags of nudie cutie titles like Mr. Teas & Wild Gals of the Naked West, roughies were vicious, often hateful pictures that would lean toward the violent & the salacious, but were also quick to damn the very characters they leered at with (in the films’ view) well-deserved deaths for their transgressions. Russ Meyer may have not made the very first roughie (many attribute that milestone to fellow schlock peddler David Friedman), but it was a genre he would eventually damn near perfect with his cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

Although Lorna may not have technically been the first roughie, it was easily one of the first recognizable & successful examples of the genre. A twisted tale about sexual inadequacy, adultery, and betrayal, Lorna paints an ugly, ugly picture, one that’s only made more ugly by the harshness of its vivid black & white cinematography. In the film’s opening minutes a preacher stops the camera from cruising down a desolate highway to ramble vague, Biblically-themed warnings about loose morals. The following scenes feature a pair of rough drunks following an intoxicated woman home, only to beat & undress her once she spurns their sexual advances (thankfully leaving the scene before it escalates to rape). As the horrifying, leather-faced bully Luther (played by Meyer-newcomer Hal Hopper) rolls out his dim accomplice in tow, his victim shouts “You bastard! You dirty bastard!” & a lounge lizard song (composed & sung by Hopper) about the titular Lorna overtakes the soundtrack. All of this unpleasantness before we even meet the main characters. With this slap to the unsuspecting audience’s face Meyer effectively drove the last nail in the coffin of the nudie cutie & revealed the weirder, meaner brute that had been lurking under his surface all along. And he hadn’t even really gotten started.

The central couple in this sordid tale is Jim (a square-jawed James Rucker) and his wife, duh, Lorna (a most buxom Lorna Maitland), prototypes of what would eventually solidify as the typical soldiers in Meyer’s never-ending war of the sexes. Jim is ostensibly a nice guy. He’s sweet to his wife, studies to better himself, etc., but these character traits actually play like flaws in Meyer’s fucked up sense of logic. In Meyer’s view, Jim is an irredeemable weakling who gets less & less admirable with every “I love you” he coos to his nonplussed wife. Jim’s major malfunction is that he’s bad in bed. In an early scene Lorna lies in post-coital boredom, musing about her husband’s “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” approach to lovemaking, asking “Why can’t he make love to me the way he should?”, and slyly suggesting that he just flat out does not provide her orgasms. There’s some classic Russ Meyer insanity in these moments, like when disorienting shots of running water appear as Lorna recalls a more lustful time in her relationship with Jim or when her daydreams about moving from their remote marital cabin to the big city devolve into rapid-fire montages of the well-endowed actress drunkenly dancing topless among flashing neon signs. It’s in these moments that Lorna shines brightest.

Unfortunately, the generally sour vibe of the roughie format drags the film down a great deal more than it should. When Jim leaves for work it’s revealed that his co-worker is none other than Hal Hopper’s leather-face Luther, a real prick who incessantly teases Jim about his white-hot wife & the distinct possibility that she might be committing adultery behind his back. This tension amounts to an on-the-job fistfight & near-fatal stabbing. Meanwhile, an unattended Lorna actually does become an adulteress at the roaming hands of an escaped convict (Mark Bradley). More than happy to play house for a “real” man, Lorna invites the convict home & into the bed she shares with her husband, which eventually leads to (of course) their infidelity being uncovered & nearly everyone involved getting fatally wounded in a bodycount-heavy finale that’s faithful to the chaos of a traditional stage tragedy. Somewhere in the kerfuffle the Grim Reaper makes an onscreen cameo & the preacher from the opening monologue returns to babble about the definition of adultery & the fate of Lot’s wife. It’s fairly straight-forward stuff, unpleasant or not.

Shot in just two weeks with a five man crew, Lorna featured Russ Meyer’s biggest budget to date & marked the first time he shot a feature on 35mm film. Meyer’s most vocal critical supporter & improbable friend Roger Ebert calls this picture the start of the director’s “Gothic period” & some credit it as the first mainstream film to combine the nudie picture with high stakes drama. Prosecuted in vain on obscenity charges in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida (courtroom battles that later New Hollywood productions would greatly benefit from), Lorna is unfortunately much more interesting as a historical milestone than it is as an actual film. There were elements of Lorna that really worked & you could tell that Meyer was really stretching himself thin trying to grasp for something new & exciting, but much of the film reads dull at best and heartlessly cruel at worst. The best five or so minutes of the picture arrive very early, when Lorna’s daydreaming about better orgasms & dancing topless in an urban, neon-lit fantasy world. Meyer would later learn how to better consolidate these more out-there moments with a feature-length narrative, but Lorna never quite reaches an enjoyable cohesiveness, which feels just out of its reach, thanks to the constraints of the newly found roughie genre holding it back.

-Brandon Ledet

12 Rounds 3: Lockdown (2015)

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twohalfstar

campstamp

In the first two 12 Rounds films, disgruntled domestic terrorists set up convoluted twelve round scavenger hunts (very similar to the one in Die Hard: With a Vengeance) as a means to teach lessons about perceived wrongs from the past. In the first film pro wrestler John Cena plays a police officer whose journey through the twelve round gauntlet works as a makeshift guided tour through New Orleans’ vast sea of tourist traps. In 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded pro wrestler Randy Orton plays an EMT whose scavenger hunt experience functions as an elaborate anti-drunk driving PSA, one with a bodycount. Curiously, 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown discards the twelve round scavenger hunt concept completely. Pro wrestler Dean Ambrose stars as the film’s good cop protagonist, John Shaw, who finds himself locked inside his own precinct with a gang of crooked narcs looking to end his life before he can expose evidence of their illegal deeds to the proper authorities. In this scenario, the “12 rounds” of the title refers to the dozen bullets in the sole gun Ambrose’s cop has to protect himself with as he faces an armed to the teeth gang of officers who are somewhat similar in character to the gang of DEA scumbags Arnold Schwarzenegger helms in Sabotage.

Removing the high concept silliness of the twelve round scavenger hunt was a huge mistake for 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown. Limiting the action to a single space & replacing the first two films’ mind games with a periodic reminder of how many of Shaw’s twelve bullets are left in the clip (“9 rounds left,” he vocally reminds himself, completely for our benefit) makes the film to be somewhat of a bore. All that’s left to distinguish the film, then is Dean Ambrose’s disappointingly underwhelming screen presence & an unusuallly large stockpile of dead cops. After the guided tour of New Orleans in the first film & the anti-drunk driving diatribe of the second, it’s interesting that 12 Rounds 3 tries to make up for its own narrative shortcomings with an onslaught of bloodshed & gunfights that result in a slew of deceased police officers. Shaw is surprisingly crafty in his cop-killing ways, careful not to waste a single one of his precious twelve rounds. In one scene he beats an officer to death with weights in the presinct’s gym. In another he ends a fight with a vicious head-stabbing. Other kills make thrifty use of electically charged doorknobs & his enemy’s own grenades. My personal favorite moment is when Shaw uses a taser to activate the body of an already dead cop to squeeze the trigger of an assault rifle resting his lifeless hand, creating enough cover fire for Shaw to escape through a comically small air vent. As much as these MacGyver shenanigans can be amusing, it never becomes clear why Shaw doesn’t collect guns or ammo from the crooked cops he kills & instead relies so heavily on those precious twelve bullets of the title.

Dean Ambrose has recently established himself as somewhat of a fan favorite in his run at the WWE. Posed as a sort of pretty boy Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ambrose is a chaotic nuetral element in “sports entertainment”. His character is a whirlwind of bad boy chaos that (heterosexual) female fans seem to find irresistibly attractive, despite the slight hint of a comb-over meant to mask not only the beginnings of male pattern baldness, but also the damage to his forehead left over from his history of extreme, hardcore “death matches” in minor wrestling promotions. Lockdown only makes minimal use of Ambrose’s wrestling background, which (like the disregard for the original 12 Rounds concept) is a damn shame. It is funny, as a fan, that women are the only characters who are nice to his down-on-his-luck cop Shaw in the film and during a boyfight in the precinct’s locker-room there’s a shot of him bodyslamming an opponent through a wooden bench that almost had me chanting “We want tables!,” but otherwise there aren’t nearly enough references to his wrestling career here. Who do they think is watching this movie?

Ambrose’s performance is a calm, brooding sort of good guy bravado that makes little use of the explosive, rebellious personality that makes him so compelling in the ring. Also, although these pro wrestlers are always understandably adept at selling pain during their martial arts sequences, it always surprises me that no use is made of their signature wrestling moves in their motion picture vehicles. The only time I can remember ever seeing that done was The Rock delivering a Rock Bottom to Jason Statham in Furious 7 earlier this year. Why couldn’t Lockdown find a way to work in an Dirty Deeds for Ambrose? It certainly bent over backwards to make its ludicrous locked-inside-a-precinct concept work. Even an elbow drop would’ve been nice, preferably with Ambrose taking out ten opponents at once, as he is known to do. Watching him conserve bullets, hack into the mainframe, and search for a cellphone signal aren’t nearly as entertaining as a little old elbow drop could’ve been. In fact, the film’s villain (Roger R. Cross) is far more exciting than Shaw, providing a full-form example of Roger Ebert’s Talking Killer trope to an often hilarious degree (favorite line: [after punching Shaw] “That was my good cop. Wait til you see my bad cop.”). That’s not to say that Ambrose is entirely underwhelming in Lockdown. At the very least he’s far more compelling than Randy Orton was in12 Rounds 2. It’s just that the film’s muted, stardard action movie concept & his protagonist’s restrictions as a consummate “good guy” make for an overall dull combo that all the dead cops in the world can’t seem to overcome, whether or not their corpses are being tased or exploded.

-Brandon Ledet