Thriller

The Crying Game (1992)

Leave a comment

The Crying Game is a well-directed, well-scripted, taut thriller about an Irish Republican Army member who, after a hostage situation ends tragically, tries to regain his foothold in society. He meets a slender chanteuse at a nightclub, and after developing feelings for her, it turns out — spoiler — the woman is, as director Neil Jordan characterized her, “a transvestite and a gay man.”

You would think that character, especially in Jordan’s able hands, would be a memorable role displaying the hope, loss and salvation the film deserves. But you forget this was released in 1992, and even worse, you’re from Oklahoma.

So, in case you don’t remember, the movie had a foreplay scene where — spoiler — Dil (Jaye Davidson) had a full-frontal nude shot, and everyone lost their damn mind. Thank God we didn’t have the internet at the time!

When The Crying Game came out, it became the weak punchline to the year’s dirtiest, lamest jokes, with everyone from Bible-beating preachers to wacky morning disc jockeys getting in on the barbed fun, upholding their own homophobia and sliding us back a few years.

My own parents banned it in our house, in case it turned me gay. I finally viewed it, thanks to the new Criterion edition. While I’m not gay yet, the movie is not only a queer milestone, but a damn good crime film as well.

The IRA kidnaps a soldier on leave (Forest Whitaker) and stores him blindfolded in a greenhouse. Fergus (Stephen Rea) brings him food and slowly develops a bond with him, something he shouldn’t be doing. The soldier tells Fergus about his lover, Dil, and, after his hostage is killed, Fergus breaks from the IRA, moves to London, finds Dil and begins a semi-romance with her. After a few weeks, with Fergus becoming more amenable to his situation, his old IRA buddies come looking for him, with Dil caught in a trap.

Encountering conventions of homoerotic masculinity as well as window-rattling domestic terrorism, the movie defies conventions, both sexual and suspenseful. Both Rea and Davidson have a sweet romance despite the world around them and the violence they encounter.

I truly love Jordan’s previous work like The Company of Wolves and especially Mona Lisa, but with The Crying Game — great title track from Boy George, by the way — he made a film about difficult choices and the will to own up to them and, even more so, to embrace them.

The Crying Game is still a controversial title in Oklahoma, but the rest of the world has moved on. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

The Girl, the Body, and the Pill (1967)

Leave a comment

Parents are in a wadded-panty uproar over Ms. Barrington (Pamela Rhea) teaching their high schoolers the birds and the bees and the birth control pill in class. Meddling complaints to the pushover principal (Otto Schlessinger, Flesh Feast) force Ms. B to stop dispensing carnal knowledge or face the school board’s wrath.

But if mum’s the word, “mom” will result, Ms. Barrington reasons. Her solution is to hold the S-E-X lectures at her home on Friday nights, as long as the students have parent-signed permission slips. She’s so naive, mass forgery doesn’t even cross her well-intentioned mind.

Meanwhile, good girl Alice Nichols (Kay Ross) is madly in love with a classmate (James Nelson). He’s an upstanding young man, as his sport coat’s professorial elbow patches signal; nonetheless, Alice’s ill-tempered pop (Bill Rogers, Love Goddesses of Blood Island) is like a junkyard dog on 24/7 hymen protection.

Meanwhile meanwhile, ever the hypocrite, Mr. Nichols is having an affair with the trampy single mother (Valedia Hill) of trampy student Randy (Nancy Lee Noble, Loose Shoes). Randy’s secretly stealing her mom’s birth control pills and subbing them with saccharine tablets on the regular. So you know what happens next, right? Pat yourself on the back if you guessed “couch abortion.”

Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, a 40-something senior (Roy Collodi, The Gruesome Twosome) is so hormonally supercharged after weeks of absorbing the hot Ms. B’s hot syllabus of hot sex talk, he tries to rape her.

How is Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Girl, the Body, and the Pill not held in high esteem like his Blood trilogy? Its soapy, dopey mix of teensploitation and sexploitation proves irresistible to me, but I suspect its lack of imagery to trigger an R rating has something to do with that. By this point in his career, Lewis had, for example, removed a woman’s tongue in gory detail. In contrast, this film is as harmless as How to Make a Doll, another Lewis premise that sounds readymade for showing you things you hadn’t seen.

Regardless, this not-bitter Pill does more than its share of onscreen envelope-pushing. Louise Downe’s script is boldly progressive for its time (and, I would argue, today’s regressive times). Consider this a feature-length version of the postwar era’s classroom shorts designed to scare students into abstinence, but without the shock photos of, say, syphilitic genitalia in all their weeping-sore glory. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Timebomb (1991)

Leave a comment

When an apartment building goes up in flames, bystander Eddy Kay (Michael Biehn, The Abyss) runs inside to save a woman and her baby. There’s only one problem: Eddy Kay is thought to be dead!

Okay, there’s a second problem: Shadowy agents keep trying to kill Eddy. If he’s not being hit by a van, he’s attacked in his sleep by a knife-wielding intruder. (Two of his would-be assassins are played by The Last Boy Scout’s Billy Blanks and pro boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, which would absolutely intimidate me; a third is played by Watchers II’s leggy, never-more-scorching Tracy Scoggins, which would absolutely arouse me and put my guard down.)

But why aim to eradicate a simple watch repairman? Heck, Eddy’s practically a kid since he rides his bike everywhere, collects jigsaw puzzles, eats PB&J for lunch and showers with garden shears — children still do that, right?  When Eddy starts having weird visions in which he utters “I don’t have eggs, only sausages” in Hungarian, psychoanalyst Dr. Anna Nolmar (Patsy Kensit, Lethal Weapon 2) wonders if he’s having memory problems. Eddy disagrees:

“I’ve got a really good memory. I’ve always prided myself on that. I can remember, like, the smallest details of my childhood and my friends, their names. I used to have a friend named Kevin Richards. We used to call him Kevvy. We used to get into trouble together, play sports.” 

Well, in that case …

Don’t judge Timebomb by that rudimentary dialogue. Created at the height of Hollywood’s home-video premieres by Israeli writer/director Avi Nesher (Tales from the Crypt Presents: Ritual), the sci-fi conspiracy thriller is honestly four-fifths stellar, exhibiting a heavy, heady streak of Philip K. Dick-level paranoia. In fact, it’s embedded with enough shared elements to resemble Total Recall, but on a remembered-for-wholesale budget (hence the studio backlot’s less-than-towering inferno).

Luckily, Nesher isn’t parsimonious with the slam-bang. The movie’s imaginative set pieces are well-executed, from a 3 a.m. assault on a mental institution to a daylight shootout in an L.A. porno theater. That the latter occurs while porn star Victoria Paris (Miracle on 69th Street) feigns pleasure from the big screen has to be a joke on Nesher’s part.

I know for sure it is when Eddy and Dr. Anna, on the run and en route to Mexico, stop for cash at an ATM and the supposedly intelligent doc waits for a receipt. “Fuck the receipt!” Eddy yells. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Survive Style 5+ (2004)

Leave a comment

A recurring bit in Survive Style 5+ finds hitman Vinnie Jones asking each person he may or may not execute, “What is your function in life?” It’s a question the Japanese film itself cannot answer. As its nonsensical moniker suggests, logic commits harakiri. Mind you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Set in the run-up to Christmas Eve, five stories separately unfurl their setups before interconnecting thereafter to varying degrees of success. Aside from Jones (Snatch) and his interpreter (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Cloud), we meet three young burglars, and a man (Tadanobu Asano, 2021’s Mortal Kombat) constantly fighting with his wife (Reika Hashimoto, Blind Beast vs Dwarf) because she won’t stay dead no matter how many times he murders and buries her.

An advertising executive (Kyôko Koizumi, Tokyo Sonata) constantly churns out ideas for concepts that amuse herself, but not her clients, one of whom is played by legendary Street Fighter Sonny Chiba.

Finally, a hardworking family man (Ittoku Kishibe, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) is stuck thinking — and acting like — he’s a chicken after the hypnotist (Hiroshi Abe, Godzilla 2000) dies in the middle of his stage show. Although Kishibe’s mantle is hardly bare, he deserved an award for diving in headfirst, no matter how ridiculous.

As absurdist as it is go-for-broke, Survive Style 5+ is one of those movies better experienced than described. In fact, its state of delirium seems designed to resist description. Prior to this energy-to-burn omnibus, Gen Sekiguchi directed shorts and commercials, which may be why none of his debut feature’s segments quite lands with a satiating payoff. Among the quintet, the chicken dad comes close, but I know that’s strictly my adoration for Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive” talking.

When Survive Style 5+ works, as in the action-packed battles of spouses Hashimoto and Asano, it casts a spell. And when it doesn’t? Well, to jostle back to Jones’ pre-assassination inquiry of purpose, his unluckiest targets are swiftly dismissed and dispatched with a curt “You’re not necessary.” I wish Sekiguchi asked himself the same and excised the burgling trio — the one story that adds or offers nothing. As is, the movie stands at two hours, which can be death for a comedy, even a bizarro one operating by its own intermittent rules. Survive Style 4+ might have had fewer negatives as a result. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Ice Cream Man (2026)

Leave a comment

Baylen Bay, the fictional setting of Ice Cream Man, looks to be the dictionary definition of “idyllic.” Since the movie is directed by Eli Roth (Thanksgiving), you know that’s pure facade. Like, one block over, perhaps a young Kyle MacLachlan is stumbling upon an ant-laden ear in the grass.

On Roth’s block, however, the suburb’s children are all abuzz over the new dispenser of frozen desserts (Ari Millen, TV’s Orphan Black), whose truck blasts a Silver Shamrock-esque earworm of a jingle. Once kids eat his treats, they’re susceptible to an act of Weapons-style witchery hearing that tune unlocks: mass parricide.

Thanks to his lactose intolerance, our preteen protagonist (Charlie Zeltzer, a real find) is spared. He spends the last two-thirds of the movie under siege in school — shades of 2014’s Cooties — as his classmates prey upon anyone not following the Pied Piper of Popsicles. (“Is this some kind of Zombie Pajama Day Challenge?” asks one confused faculty member.)

This is Ice Cream Man’s demarcation point, as Roth, unshackled from an MPA rating, goes whole-hog on the gore — so soupy, so chunky — that you’re either in or long gone. I’d be the latter, if not for Roth and co-writer Noah Belson stirring in an equal amount of gallows humor. Sight gags get increasingly ghoulish, like a stairwell sight of two kids playing a game of Operation using a teacher as the bulb-nosed board.

Despite sharing a title and a tagline, this scoop of goop isn’t a remake of the 1995 Clint Howard vehicle. Call this one Children of the Cones — or, if you’re hip to the Brits, Children of the Corneo. Bound to offend more people than it delights, Roth’s exercise in splatstick with sprinkles feels less fully formed than his usual work, perhaps as a self-imposed challenge or an idea he simply needed to knock out of his system. I’m glad he did if that’s the case, although he’s capable of more than this flavor allows. Still, if only all genre throwaways were canny enough to visually reference Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, with neither a stretch. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Aug. 7.

Random Genre & Cult Movie Reviews