Rise

Unlike his wackily successful "Melt", this four-letter title from David Stanley indulges his mystical fetish with asinine results. In the roster of his liabilities and assets as a filmmaker, it counts against him as I examine his prolific yet somehow forgotten career.

An early Stanley feature starring Raylene is among my favorites, and quite similar to this one (quality is the difference): "All There Is", which concisely showed us Raylene from teenage to old age. This time we have Randy Spears (Stanley's go-to actor, unfortunately not always a wise choice) walking through a door in the desert to enter presumably Puragtory. Shooting very much on the cheap (this being a decidedly B- level feature from Vivid's assembly line), he is shown in a movie theater, forced to watch episodes from his life as presented by an angel played by Kaylanio Lei, the contract girl stuck in this very weak vehicle.

What we get is five sex vignettes featuring the male cast wearing truly awful rugs, so bad it reduces this feature to the level of some '50s variety show skit on TV. Fearlessly, Stanley garbles the chronology in order to get in whatever nostalgia licks popped into his head, including: Spears' parents making out in a convertible in the '50s; hippy garb for making out in the '60s; gargantuan size cell phones as props in the '70s, and so on.

During this "life review", Spears is repeatedly criticized for not catching on to the meaning of life, only making me wish that by some similar garbling of time frames Monty Python at their peak could have satirized some of Stanley's films from a decade or so ago. As obscure as that sounds, it would be a lot more fun than such major cults that have arisen around lesser (and far less interesting) purveyors of bargain- basement entertainment like Ed Wood or the Troma Team.

Besides Kaylani, some attractive, if B-list, actresses are wasted in this silly exercise, such as Brooke Banner and Roxy DeVille as lesbians and busty Kendall Brooks. Long before Stanley has Kaylani say to Spears "You do know you're dead?" the viewer will have figured out where this is going, and I won't spoil the non-suspense of whether the big lug does in fact "Rise" to heaven at the end, or is merely sentenced to one of many reincarnations as threatened by Lei.

One of numerous Stanley features that qualify as midnight movies, if in fact XXX porn were eligible for those wonderful theatrical showings of my youth (often at Adult theaters, but after midnight for more general audiences). I'm not sure if "Rise" would generate cat calls or merely walkouts, but it's way below the David Stanley standard.

P.S.: Both Stanley's and Spears' prominent foot-fetish is honored here by Randy's late in the show cum shot onto high-top fishnet hose, not mystical, just self-indulgent.