The Babysitters (2007)

Directed by David Ross
Starring Katherine Waterston, John Leguizamo, Lauren Birkell, Louisa Krause
Rated R
USA

"We're going to hell, aren't we?"
"Yep."

First of all, as someone who grew up in the inner city, I suspect that these sort of hijinks are going on in the suburbs on a near-constant basis. I mean, why else would you move to the 'burbs? Anyway, like the equally factual Weekend with the Babysitter, this story begins with a seductive teenage sitter. Unlike that one, however - which ends with a gangfight between greasy mustachioed drug dealers and chubby motorcross hippies - The Babysitters goes in a much crazier direction.

Shirley (Katherine Waterston) is an obsessive-compulsive high school junior. Too mature for boys her own age and too bored to deal with her goofy friends, Shirley spends her free time babysitting for neighbors - and occasionally scrubbing their floors and rearranging their furniture while she's at it.

One evening she gets a ride home from Michael Beltran (John Leguizamo, in one of his less over-the-top performances), the father of one of the brats she sits for. They stop for an innocent burger on the way home, which naturally leads to making out in an abandoned train car a few minutes later. His wife doesn't pay attention to him (Cynthia Nixon - that might be the problem!), she's lonely and virginal, you know the drill.

Mike and Shirley develop a discreet sexual relationship. To mask his guilt, Mike pays her handsomely for every tryst. Eventually, she spills the beans to her excitable and possibly pathological best friend Melissa (Lauren Birkell), who wants in on the action.

Mike brokers a 'babysitting gig' with one of his buddies, Shirley takes a cut, and the downward spiral into debauchery begins.

Things start to go awry - imagine that - when Shirley recruits her baby-faced spazzoid friend Brenda (Louisa Krause). At first, Brenda doesn't even know sex is involved. But she gets up to speed pretty quickly. Then she goes rogue and recruits her younger sister Nadine (Halley Wegryn Gross), who start up a competing babysitter-prostitute ring.

Worse still - at least to Mike - Shirley starts 'babysitting' for other clients. He thought they were, you know, exclusive.

Shirley finds out what Nadine's up to and trashes the entire high school as a warning. Everybody gets the fuckin' picture. Then she devises a weekend getaway where all the dads in the neighborhood take off to some cabin in the woods to guzzle booze, smoke weed, snort coke, and fuck teenage babysitters. Who does Shirley think she is, Caligula?

By the way, finally, one hour in, Shirley takes her shirt off. Of course at this point, she's so poisonous, it's almost not worth it. Almost.

When Jerry (Andy Comeau) - the mustachioed asshole who owns the cabin - tries to doggystyle Brenda while she's puking in a sink - well, that's pretty much it for her. She quits, and Nadine starts her side-business bullshit again.

Shirley and Melissa head out to kill the bitch, but before they toss her off the side of the parking garage, The Babysitters lurches into its shocking - but entirely logical - twist ending.

I'll leave it for you to discover, but suffice to say, there's a lot of crying and puking involved.

One of the oddest mainstream releases in recent memory, The Babysitters is, at it's core, 70's style gutbucket sexploitation, a tawdry youth-gone-mad tale tailor-made for seen-it-all sleaze beasts. Strangely though, it never fesses up to what it is: the scuzzy, goo-covered underbelly of contemporary teen flicks like the Bring It On and American Pie series. Instead, it plays itself out deathly straight, like a particularly berserk Lifetime movie. Even Leguizamo, a notorious scenery-chewer, keeps a tight lid on his smirks and tics here, and the actresses - all relative unknowns confined mostly to TV dramas - never tip over into full-on camp, even though the script fairly screams for it. You start to wonder if perhaps you're supposed to learn some sort of lesson here, even if none of the characters in the film do.

Writer/director Ross previously wrote Lucky McKee's equally weird The Woods (2006), another film about teenage girls in peril - albeit a supernatural, witchy sort of peril - so this is well-worn material for him, and indeed, the characters in The Babysitters are all fully-fleshed out people. They just make some seriously ridiculous choices. The idea of four teenage girls from upper middle-class families willing to form a fucking babysitter hooker ring is so far-out that this almost has to be a satire. That is, unless all my suspicions about the suburbs are true.

Either way, this is a great film, jaw-dropping, queasy-funny, and in it's own quiet way, as outrageous and subversive as any modern-day sex n' splatter shockfest.

- Ken McIntyre

Weekend with the Babysitter (1970)

Directed by Don Henderson
Starring Susan Romen, George Carey, Luanne Roberts, Annik Borel
Rated R
USA

"I've been reborn. Look, my apricot fag shoes!"

Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin, under the nom de plume Don Henderson, directed three films in rapid succession from 1969-1970. Two of them were about teenage babysitters who seduce a rich, wrinkly codger. Although the girls were different in the two movies, the codger was not: George Carey, who coincidentally wrote and produced both films, handled the love-making duties. The first, The Babysitter (1969), was shot in black and white and starred Patricia Wymer as "Candy Wilson". Weekend With the Babysitter, on the other hand, was in color, and starred Susan Romen as "Candy Wilson". Who was this mysterious Candy Wilson? Was she a real-life teen temptress that vexed both Carey and Laughlin enough that they were forced to exorcise their inner demons on film? Or did they both just enjoy the same masturbatory fantasy? And why make the same film twice?

I don't know what any of this means, and perhaps I never will. So let's just roll the film and see what happens.

It's a tale of ordinary suburban madness. Jim Carlton (George Carey, RIP) is a frustrated film director with a neglectful, pill-popping wife named Mona (Luanne Roberts, The Psycho Lover, Female Fever), who he can no longer connect with. One night their foxy go-to babysitter Candy (Susan Romen) shows up on the wrong night. Jim tries use this opportunity to take his wife out to dinner, but she insists on going to visit her mother and splits with the kid. Jim plans on paying Candy for her trouble and sending her off, but then she starts reading one of his scripts - a film about turned-on teens - and goofs on the lame dialogue. She offers to show him what the 'kids today' are really like, and after popping a couple martinis, they head out the local bar to hang out with Candy's groovy friends.

Meanwhile, Mona drops the kid off at mom's and heads over to her dealer, an ascot-wearing putz named Rich (former cowboy star James Almanzar, RIP). She hands him $10,000 - which probably would have bought all the heroin in California in 1970 - and waits patiently for her fix.

He splits for a couple hours and makes her sweat it out, and then tells her she's not getting the stuff unless she gives him Jim's boat. What a dick this Rich is.

As the weekend rolls on, Mona gets mired in a Mexican drug smuggling ring while her husband falls head over heels for the teenage babysitter. He smokes weed for the first time, she takes him out to some moto-cross races, and they make sweet 70's love by a crackling fire. He even flies her in his private plane to his cabin in the snowy mountains.

While Jim and Candy drink milk in bed and wrestle, Mona finds herself slipping into a far darker sort of lost weekend. After scoring a big pile of heroin from some shifty Mexican dealers, she shoots up to take the edge off.

Rich comes by lookin' for action, but when she attempts to rebuff him, he forces her into a girl-girl tryst with his girlfriend Doris (French beauty Annik Borel, Blood Orgy of the She Devils).

Doris snorts coke while receiving oral favors from Mona. Good times!

After showering off their love juices and flying back to reality, Jim and Candy say their goodbyes. No big deal, daddy-o. "Hey man, we swung," shrugs Candy. At least they vow to stay friends.

Jim goes to work and finds Smitty, the guy from the marina, waiting for him. Smitty tells Jim the coast guard was sniffing around his yacht - and that his wife is still out there on it, somewhere. Jim and Smitty pile back into Jim's plane and buzz around looking for the missing boat.

Meanwhile, a bloody mutiny sparks up in the yacht. Mona is forced to commander the craft and drive the smugglers to the pier. They scramble to get away, but Jim's called in Candy's motocross gang to head them off at the pass. It all ends in a Hawaii 5-0-esgue dust-up between the clean-living bikers and the dirty drug dealers while an acid-fried brass-rock band wails away relentlessly on the soundtrack.

And what about Jim? Does he choose his nubile hippy babysitter, or his beat-up, money-grubbing junkie wife?

Which would you choose? Well, Jim goes the other way.

Although Weekend With the Babysitter is surprisingly sedate, given it's sleazeball predecessor, it still hits all the right 70's b-flick notes: wonky acting, misguided 'drug abuse' scenes, phony psychedelic tunes, casual racism, a skinny heroine with teacup boobs, a few splashes of blood, and a last-minute stab at redemption. Don Henderson apparently worked out his seductive babysitter fetish with this one, because he followed it up with the Satanic horror-romp The Touch of Satan.

Susan Romen, whose frequent line-flubs and faraway eyes were perfect for this drowsy role, disappeared immediately after. It's a shame, because she could have carved out an amazing career as a go-to heavy-lidded, frequently topless hippy goddess. Which she might actually have done, just not in the movies.

Drop us a line, Miss Romen. Let us know what's, you know, up.

- Ken McIntyre

Triangle (2009)

Directed by Christopher Smith
Starring Melissa George, Rachael Carpani, Emma Lung
Rated R
UK

"You will come back...won't you?"

Usually I would just dismiss something this headache-making and undercooked, but Triangle has approximately 3.5 things going for it, so it probably deserves at least a glance. For one, it's ostensibly about the Bermuda Triangle, an easily dismissed legend about a mythical dead zone in the Caribbean that supposedly swallowed up dozens of ships and airplanes without a trace. Despite the overwhelming evidence that nothing out of the ordinary ever happened there, Bermuda Triangle Mania took over the US in the mid-70's, sparking endless debate and a flurry of cash-in books, documentaries, TV movies, and shoddy exploitation films, including the infamous lost/imagined/maybe-real Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in the Devil's Triangle.

Since humans are a tiny bit more sensible now, the Bermuda/Devil's Triangle chatter has died down significantly, so it warmed my 70's nostalgia cockles to see a modern film take on this decidedly creaky premise.

Also, Triangle is directed by Christopher Smith, who scored big with cult-flick fans for his 2006 woods-bound slasher Severance which featured, among other tasty treats, shirtless Chechnyan prostitutes shooting machine guns. His previous film, Creep, was a pretty swell hot-chick-VS-subway monster nail-biter, as well. So, you know, high hopes.

It's also got an amazing poster. And in the good old days of exploitation, that was really all you needed.

Perhaps most importantly, Triangle also stars volcano-hot Melissa George wearing short-shorts and a cleavage-hugging wife-beater. For the entire film.

So, how can you go wrong, really? Well, you could cobble together an incomprehensible script that no one, including the film's cast, could possibly understand. George is Jess, a beleaguered single mom with an autistic son. She works as a waitress in a diner near a marina, and makes friends with one of her frequent customers, a sailboat skipper named Greg (Michael Dorman, Daybreakers).

Greg invites her out for a sail one sunny afternoon. Along for the ride is his young charge Victor (Liam Hensworth) and a trio of his old friends. They hit the open sea and are suddenly beset by a freak storm that destroys the ship and leaves them stranded, floating helplessly on the hull of their shattered boat.

Out of the fog arrives a mysterious, ghostly cruise ship. They jump on board to find it abandoned. Or is it? Jess finds her own house keys and other artifacts from her life on the ship, and before they can figure out exactly where they are and why they're there, a sniper with a very familiar-looking pair of shoes starts picking them off, one by one, with a rifle. From there, the story begins to peel away, like an onion, wavering queasily between the supernatural and the delusional. Is it really happening? Is it all a dream? Are they all dead?

Listen, if I knew, I'd tell you. While the film bears more than a passing resemblance to the far superior Time Crimes (2007), that film's logical narrative kept you tethered to reality during even its loopiest moments. Triangle, on the other hand, has no idea what it's talking about. By the eye-rolling anti-climax, you are no closer to an answer than you were 90 minutes ago. It's like asking a schizophrenic for travel directions - you get plenty fanciful mumbo-jumbo, but after it's over, you're still lost.

A UK/Australian co-production shot in New Zealand, Triangle looks great, and there's a couple of inspired moments of horror buried in the mix. In one hair-raising scene, a character crawls into a corner to rest and nurse her wounds, only to find a hundred dead doppelgangers who also had the same idea. The design work on the ghost-ship - a sort of 1930's art/death deco - is suitably unnerving, and the cast, as clearly befuddled as they are, do a fine job with what they've been given. It's just fucking annoying to invest so much time in a film that offers nothing in return.

Melissa George appears to relish these heroine-in-distress roles - see also Amityville Horror (2005), Derailed (2005), Turistas (2006), and 30 Days of Night (2007) - but this is clearly the least of her ongoing 'violent thrillers' cycle.

But still. Hot girl with an axe!


Men are such suckers.

- Ken McIntyre

Angel of Heat (1983)

Directed by Myrl A Schreibman

Starring Marilyn Chambers, Mary Woronov, Remy O'Neil

Rated R
USA

Myrl A. Shreibman has one of the greatest names in the business. How could a guy named Myrl A. Shreibman make a bad movie? Couldn't happen. Myrl is a cinematic journeyman who has spent the past few decades teaching and writing how-to film-books, but he's done it all in his time, and although his producing/directing resume is relatively slim, it packs quite a wallop. Highlights include producing Fred Williamson's notorious blaxploitation-western mash-up Boss Nigger (1975), writing and producing the exceedingly weird low budget sci-fi cult-flick Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), and producing bloody/cheeseball Rambo rip-off Hunter's Blood (1986). This, however, was clearly his finest moment. Relentlessly silly and hilariously out of touch, Angel of Heat is exactly what happens when your goofy Uncle Myrl attempts to make an edgy spy satire, but loses all control of the project on the first day and just lets the crazy roll on until the film runs out.

Along with Deep Throat's Linda Lovelace, Georgina Spelvin (The Devil In Miss Jones) and Bambi Woods (Debbie Does Dallas), Marilyn Chambers was one of the 70's biggest sex stars. Chambers famously got her start in show business as the baby on the box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent*, but the world knew her best for her energetic sexual performances in films like Behind the Green Door (1972) Resurrection of Eve (1973), and Insatiable (1980). Her winning combination of girl-next-door looks, athletic body, and aerobic sex maneuvers made her a worldwide star, and she soon graduated to mainstream roles. Although Traci Lords is usually cited as the first porn starlet to crossover into mainstream film, it was Chambers who first took that leap. She appeared in a very memorable role as the Patient Zero in 1977's Rabid, a horror film about a sexually transmitted virus that spirals wildly out of control by Canadian creep king David Cronenberg. While that was probably her highest profile mainstream role, she continued to act, both in porn and non-sex B-movies, throughout the 80's. Angel of Heat was her second major mainstream role, and it was a fuckin' doozy.

The credit sequence features Marilyn Chambers doing naked Karate movies while the worst disco ballad imaginable (by international non-star Denise McCain) blares tunelessly away on the soundtrack. It is the perfectly awful/awesome introduction for the mayhem that follows.

In a rickety plot piled sky-high with mumbo-jumbo, a frequently nude Mary Woronov, a bunch of squares with combovers, and former skin-star Chambers are all super-spies in two warring, top-secret government agencies. Miss Chambers - looking impossibly buff - is Angel Harmony, the number-one agent in "The Protectors". She is outfitted with a booby-trapped apartment that can make her magically disappear during moments of trouble and be instantly replaced by a hologram of either a fat lady or a stuffed lion. So that’s pretty cool, right?

She needn’t worry though, because the hooded interloper that busts into her pad in the opening scene is merely her on-again off again lover, Mean Wong (porn stud Randy West), a Japanese double-agent. This is somewhat confusing since he’s as white as a glass of milk and his jivey accent sploshes back and forth between vaguely Asian and sorta Dutch. They try and make up for this deficit by providing vaguely Asian-looking subtitles on the screen whenever he shows up.

So anyway, they fuck so hard, Angel’s house nearly collapses.

Meanwhile Samantha (cult-movie goddess Woronov) and the two nerds zip down a tree-lined highway as one of then blabs away about micro-chips and the Russians. Somebody stole something. That’s the plot. They visit a scientist who tells them that his son, Albert, was the chief engineer on their new micro-computer technology, but he recently got into dropping acid, and now he’s preoccupied with building supersonic guitar amplifiers or something. The guy’s entire speech sounds like something from 1967.

"Your son is one of your key designers?"
"Yes. He could have been one of the best. The fact is, he’s an irresponsible ass. MIT degree in physics – Sigma Cum Laude – was just finishing his PHD degree in micro-circuit technology at Berkeley. All of a sudden, he begins dropping LSD, ‘man’, walking to the beat of a different drummer, ‘dad’. His grand acid insight was that his mission in life was to provide high technology equipment for rock n’ roll…as if anything could help that sound."

Haha, what are you talking about, grandpa?

In exchange for giving up drugs, dad set his snotty kid up with his own lab in a castle on an island in the Bay. So that’s what’s up.

Meanwhile, Angel goes to Karate class with Wong. Everybody in the class is wearing novelty t-shirts. One guy wears an eye patch and a shirt that says "Sodomy and Taxes". I’m not sure if that’s a joke or not. The Karate master – a Japanese guy with a German accent – shows Angel a new move to try out on her boyfriend. It kills him instantly. Her teacher applauds her.

After class, she gathers all the students and tells them they’ve been assigned a new mission – to go to the kid’s castle and fuck up his invention before anybody else gets their hands on it. Then she asks the Karate master to show her the secret move that makes people retarded when you hit them.

Albert (Dan Jesse) turns out to be whiny, Howard Stern-looking jerk who favors punk rock and bosses his hot wife Andrea (Remy O-Neill, Hollywood Hot Tubs) around a lot. Samantha and the nerd pay them a visit and then drag Andrea with them to a disco to watch a mud wrestling match.

Two weird things happen at the disco. Angel shows up dressed like a hooker and gets upstairs to see the owner, Mr. Big. Naturally, he’s a dwarf. She auditions for a singing gig and then has sex with him on the floor. Midway through, she puts the half-retard Karate move on him to get some info. Then she splits.

Also, Andrea and Samantha join in on the mud-wrestling action. They both end up topless and almost start making out before a four-girl brawl erupts.

Several more things happen, but the crux of it all is that Albert has made a bunch of sex androids and programmed them to kill Angel and the glasses guy with their instatiable robotic love-making. Luckily, Angel manages to out-fuck the fuck-bots.

By the way, one of the more curious aspects of this film is that nearly every shot has a wind-up robot, novelty phone, rubber duck, or some other toy in it.

Coupled with the sex-robot/punk rock laser-gun weapons and the bushy-mustachioed nutbag villain (did I mention that he wears a purple cape?) who wants to take over the world with what amounts to a really loud box, this whole operation looks much more like a Sid and Marty Krofft Saturday morning kid’s show than an R-rated softcore spy spoof.

Anyway, the climax is too amazing to spoil here, but I will say that you learn a very important lesson about love before it's through. And that lesson is this: Don't fall in love with lesbian robots. They'll just end up exploding on you in the middle of a batttle between laser-weilding punk-droids and fat Kung Fu dudes.

I am sure if you asked him, Mr. Myrl A Schreibman would have a sensible answer for what this goofy mish-mash was really all about, but I believe this particular nectar is all the sweeter because of it's sheer inscrutability. The acting is loosey-goosey, the effects are jaw-droppingly shoddy, and the script is incomprehensible. Not only does Angel of Heat not make a lick of sense, it's also hilariously dated - nothing about it, save for the heady concepts about computer chips and "Micro-circuits", would suggest that it was made in the 1980's. I mean, a disco soundtrack? References to punk rock? Kung Fu fighting and a porn star in the lead? It's also so gloriously 1977.

As of today (i.e. 2010), Myrl's latest project is a kid's show called All Aboard for the Magical Music Voyage. That makes complete sense. After all, that's what Angel of Heat is, basically: a demented live action kid-vid, only with bonus boobs and bush shots. Therefore, the kid in you will love it. And so will your grown-up parts. So everybody wins.

PS: Marilyn Chambers RIP.

PPS: FYI: this is your go-to movie for Mary Woronov nudity.

PPPS: Can someone remaster this, already? The "official" DVD looks like garbage.

- Ken McIntyre

* Or, as some have claimed, the girl holding the baby on the box.