Industries die in the wake of global masturbation

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The H-Man revisited

Nearly avant-garde in spite of itself, Ishirô Honda’s The H-Man (1958) is an anomaly from Japan’s Godzilla era, a faceless, shapeless blobby monster contaminating the water supply and making people dissolve on contact. Honda segues freely from policier to gangster picture to noir (complete with a Gilda-esque chanteuse belting out the blues in a local nightclub), with moments of Sirkian melodrama, Stray Dog-ish location vérité to far-from conventional monster shenanigans and a flexible roster of faces who challenge the need for having a lead character at all. Fascinating.

Things I understand about Things I Don’t Understand

After surviving an ‘experiment’ in suicide, twenty-something Violet Kubelick (Molly Ryman, inset) wanders around an emotional cul-de-sac. Her minimum wage gig at a bookstore unleashes an antisocial streak, turning her into a salesperson with no desire to make any sales. She shares an apartment in Brooklyn with an artistic pair who are only slightly less unhinged than she: the performance artist Gabby (Meissa Hampton) and struggling musician Remy (Hugo Dillon). Fiercely intelligent — unlike most movie suicides, she knows to cut her wrists along the length of the vein rather than across — Violet’s grad school thesis, a study of people who’ve had near-death experiences (she refers to them as “near-deathers”) prompts a meeting and eventual friendship with terminal cancer patient Sara (Grace Folsom). All the while, poking at her conscience, a brooding bartender/would-be boyfriend named Parker (Aaron Mathias) and a psychiatrist whose laidback drollery flows through deadpan delivery, Dr. Blankenship (Lisa Eichhorn), gently rattle Violet’s cage, forcing her to examine some ugly personal baggage she’d much rather sweep under the rug.

    This is the framework of Things I Don’t Understand (2011), writer-director David Spaltro’s new comedy about self destruction, loss and cancer. As in his first feature, . . . Around (2008), Spaltro orchestrates a bluesy atmosphere surrounding characters caught momentarily out of sync with everyone and everything else. He treads perilously close to the narcissistic whining of some Woody Allen and Henry Jaglom films, out on that dicey plateau where underlined confusion collides with the protracted adolescence of the privileged and their sundry insecurities. Spaltro’s dialog, however, is mostly genuine and believable, his characters true-to-life creations trudging the rocky urban streets to some kind of epiphany. For what it’s worth, Jaglom has never made a film as coherent, enlightened or as funny as this.

Above: David Spaltro and Molly Ryman go over a scene; click to enlarge. “Sometimes an actor and director become working soul mates,” says the director, “and they choose to collaborate on multiple films. This is somewhat of a mysterious phenomenon. It is hard to say what exactly makes the actor/director relationship ‘pop.’ They inspire each other. They trust each other. They just ‘get’ each other. Whatever it is, it’s fascinating.”

    I’m sure it’s no coincidence that ‘Violet Kubelick’ will remind some of us of the equally promiscuous and self-destructive Miss Kubelik played by Shirley MacLaine in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). With her pricey coiffure, meticulous makeup, tasteful wardrobe, trendy wit and elevated IQ, Ryman’s Violet appears to have her act together. At first it’s difficult to grant her any sympathy — isn’t she too smart, too pretty, too cool? She contradicts the common gloomy image of a suicide, as Spaltro’s screenplay wisely recognizes the superficial trappings used by troubled people to camouflage their broken hearts and fatigued, racing minds. And Molly Ryman, whose ‘indie’ career has so far consisted of just a handful of shorts and three barely-seen features, has crafted such a rich, full-bodied character that, if we’ve any compassion at all, our defenses should crumble once Violet’s quiet desperation emerges, usually on mornings after nights of blackout drinking, or being shunned for casual sex by the philosophical mixologist. (Her line, “You just don’t want to fuck me,” slaps the ear with the anguished melancholy of someone who knows rejection all too well.)

    Seasoned with enough characters to fill a good novel, the script challenges its cast and director to overcome the dozens of limitations facing the (very) independent production. Not without its technical gaffes (the audio dips in a couple of spots) and minor flaws, Things I Don’t Understand occasionally lapses during its final act by trying to tie up a few too many loose subplots. (The story of the bartender and his wife, for example, holds enough of a plot for its own movie.) Regardless, everyone works diligently on cramped sets and isolated exteriors — where Spaltro and cinematographer Gus Sacks guide the camera softly and thoughtfully, never obtrusively — to mine the human condition, and are rewarded by an ensemble of mostly unknown actors evidently willing to go the distance.

    This speaks volumes for the talent, charisma and passion of the director, who, at the very least, holds an innate gift for casting. Grace Folsom transforms the cancer patient Sara into a fount of inner beauty and peace prevailing over her disease, evolving into a perfect counterpoint and friend to Violet. Supplying a touch of broad comedy relief, Meissa Hampton and Hugo Dillon appear like a trendy downtown couple ready for their own sitcom, the latter gambling with the film’s low key tone by approaching scenes as if shot out of a cannon. Give him props, however, for delivering the line “This vagina’s got balls!” with unyielding conviction. Last but certainly not least, Spaltro pulls a casting coup with Lisa Eichhorn as the psychiatrist. She had prominent roles in John Schlesinger’s Yanks and James Ivory’s The Europeans (both 1979), while readers of this blog may remember her best as the woozy Maureen ‘Mo’ Cutter in Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981). Her Dr. Blankenship in Things I Don’t Understand comes off as guarded and steely-eyed but far from humorless, a sense of empathetic irony quietly resonating in her restrained expressions. Combined, they make the would-be suicide’s recovery story palpable and strangely appealing, tucked away into a private corner of Brooklyn that’s bursting with life.

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"Battle Axe: The Making of Strait-Jacket"... and a lot of fun!

The Flickhead year-end list: ten additions I made to my DVD and Blu-ray library in 2011

Amer (2009) Or, Last Giallo At Marienbad. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani pay homage to the Italian giallo genre of the 60s and 70s in this otherwise contemporary visual puzzle which interlocks key moments in a woman’s life. Heady, sensual and violent, this is an acquired taste; throughout it all I wondered what Donald Cammell could’ve done with this technology at his disposal.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009) On the surface, a fairly straightforward account of Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 production, L’enfer. But as the story unfolds through the reminiscences of those who were present (including William Lubtchansky, Thi Lan Nguyen, Catherine Allégret and Costa-Gavras) and surviving footage of location exteriors and fascinating studio experiments (the latter recalling Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), a sketchy portrait emerges of a filmmaker faced with self doubt, inner demons and a sense of impending doom. Directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea discover that Clouzot was inspired by Fellini’s personal approach to cinema in 8½, but what’s here is not one director emulating another, but rather Clouzot’s own descent into the life-altering conundrum snaring Marcello Mastroianni’s character in that picture. Curiously, no mention is made of the 1994 version of L’enfer Claude Chabrol constructed from Clouzot’s script.

Machete (2010) I’ve an on-again/off-again appreciation for Robert Rodriguez (here co-directing with Ethan Maniquis), and this is definitely ‘on,’ a movie determined to make the retro-Deuce dream of Grindhouse a reality. Suggesting Sam Peckinpah by way of Tex Avery, Machete blisters in the desert heat where everyone is bent on fucking over everyone else. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world, brilliantly cast (can you top Steven Seagal?), down to the blinding eye candy of Jessica Alba (“Hold the spit, please”) and Michelle Rodriguez — the latter one tough cookie flaunting abs to die for. Needless to say, when Danny Trejo gets it on with the two dollbabes in the pool (mother and daughter, no less, the latter Lindsay Lohan!), I was hooked.

The Night Heaven Fell (1958) 2011 turned out to be the Year of Bardot in my living room, as we covered a great deal of Brigitte’s oeuvre. A lot of it is dross, but there were the occasional stand-outs, such as this overripe melodrama. Playing a young innocent fresh from the convent, BB is thrust into a provincial soap opera of lust and decadence, a scenario that could’ve soared in the hands of Luis Buñuel. (Remember Susana?) Instead, it’s Roger Vadim titillation, and there’s very little nuance or satire evident, just a lot of extremes. But he instinctively knew how to photograph the former Mrs. Vadim, especially naked, truly a sight to behold.

Road to Nowhere (2010) Any charges of arty pretentiousness affixed to this are warranted, but only among those who’ve never enjoyed the singular beauty of Monte Hellman’s vision. In his first substantial, feature-length picture since 1988’s Iguana, he returns to the quiet visual poetry of his best work: The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter and China 9, Liberty 37. Plus it stars Shannyn Sossamon, a recent favorite of mine. Meanwhile, Monte completists should take note that his atypical and gamy Silent Night Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! has surfaced on DVD as part of a discount horror set — click here.

Sci-Fi Invasion This is the first time I’ve ever bought an inexpensive collection of public domain movies, and for a sale price of ten dollars and ninety-nine cents I now own fifty SF (and pseudo-SF) features packed onto twelve DVDs! Before you can say, “How great is that?!?” let it be known that the only reason for my purchase was Mission Stardust, a 1967 Italian production originally titled ...4 ...3 ...2 ...1 ...morte. Back when I was a wee Flickhead, I’d see photos of its blonde bombshell star, Essy Persson, in the pages of Famous Monsters magazine, and now, more than forty years later, figured it was time to check things out. And what we found was a sketchy James Bondian scenario involving the ever-resourceful Perry Rhodan landing on the moon, getting hijacked by condescending extraterrestrials and battling it out with an Earth-bound megalomaniac, served in an image quality equal to a Goodtimes VHS tape. On a few occasions I had to reverse the disc a few minutes because I kept nodding off.

Serial (1980) With growing concerns over the probable demise of music CDs (read about it here), I assume DVDs and Blu-rays are also headed for extinction once online streaming takes over. I’m grabbing up any small, relatively unknown films that may not make the transition, hence this sharp, deceptively low key satire of Marin County trends of the late 1970s: encounter groups, fad vegetarianism, suburban orgies, sham spirituality, cult brainwashing, quack psychology and gay outlaw bikers, set to an Easy Listening score by Lalo Schifrin echoing the beige era of Love, American Style. Directed by prolific TV vet Bill Persky, this time capsule stars Martin Mull, Tuesday Weld, Bill Macy, Peter Bonerz, Sally Kellerman, Tom Smothers, Barbara Rhodes and Christopher Lee in one of his more interesting roles as ‘Skull.’

Sucker Punch (2011) At first put off by the antiseptic tone and dead-eye posturing I’ve come to associate with the Ritalin Generation, the film gradually seduced me as it bounced from scenario to scenario, trading off its lead characters with druggy dexterity. (Admittedly, watching this under the influence helps immeasurably.) Having seen both the theatrical version and an alternate cut extended by seventeen minutes, I prefer the leaner one: characters and situations are tighter, while the longer version occasionally wades in dreary repetition. I’m not familiar with director Zack Snyder’s other pictures, but kudos to his casting here, with a special shout-out to Jena Malone and Scott Glenn (and his endless barrage of cliché homilies).

Welcome to the Grindhouse: The Teacher and Pick-Up Recently I wrote about The Teacher (1974), a notorious teen-boy-meets-cougar romp (read it here), but its cofeature on this double set (meant to emulate the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse, only with films and trailers actually from the 1970s) is an outré endeavor bordering on the avant-garde: Pick-Up (1975), the sole directorial credit of Bernard Hirschenson, who rearranges the basic ingredients of sexploitation for something wholly unique, at least as far as Crown International Pictures are concerned. An odyssey through a Florida swampland, it combines lusty young folk, a sweaty authority figure modeled after Rod Steiger, youthful rebellion and visual effects evoking the spirit of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.

The Women in Cages Collection There are some nights when a Flickhead needs to don his fez, fire up a White Owl and cut loose, and what better accompaniment than a Pam Grier triple feature? In interviews she’s referred to these as the “hooties in the jungle” pictures she shot in the Philippines for Roger Corman, the cinematic equivalent of those sultry and ribald men’s ‘sweat mags’ of the 50s and 60s: Big Doll House and Women in Cages (both 1971); and The Big Bird Cage (1972) co-starring Anitra (Invasion of the Bee Girls) Ford. If you’re wondering which one’s the best, then you’re probably not ready.

For you blue

Mentally distanced from contemporary means of music broadcasting (I have no idea who’s hot on the Billboard charts — if such a thing still exists — and couldn’t navigate my way around a radio dial if you paid me), most of my exposure to new sounds often arrives via the internet or through music channels such as Palladia. This dirge, “Video Games” by the heretofore unknown (to me, at least) Lana Del Rey was recently discussed by Erich Kuersten on his blog, Acidemic. The first time I listened and watched, I imagined a young Angelina Jolie playing the ghost of Amy Winehouse singing from the grave. The second time, it evoked a memory from 1965 or ‘66, when the girl next door (Beverly) and I crashed a neighboring girl’s birthday party the two of us were most definitely not invited to while all the other kids were. I remember the celebrant, one Elaine Jacobs, telling me in no uncertain terms that she hated me and wanted me out of “her” house immediately. (Mind you, we were all seven- or eight-years-old.) Beverly and I both ran, she in tears, and took refuge in my basement while Elaine’s mother yelled arbitrarily in the wind for us to come back because we “were wanted.” We stayed away, milking sympathy but getting none. And then I tried to think of just one childhood memory that wasn’t in some way tainted by feelings of inadequacy, but came up empty.

Son of Harpo Speaks!

Son of Harpo Speaks! By Bill Marx. 328 pages, soft cover, illustrated. Published by and available from Applause Books. ISBN: 9781557837905.

Book review by Nelhydrea Paupér

Bill Marx’s autobiography, Son of Harpo Speaks!, is notable among the memoirs of celebrities’ children for the complete and unabashed love Marx has for his father and mother, actress Susan Fleming. It’s rather a relief to read about Hollywood parents who adored their children and who stayed together for life. The fact that Marx doesn’t find this unusual enough to point it out speaks volumes about his upbringing.

    The portrait of his father Harpo is uncomplicated. A loving, devoted, gentle man, Harpo is full of humor and practical jokes, an almost avant-garde openness to new types of art and music (including modern jazz and an enthusiastic announcement in 1964, much to his Julliard-educated son’s consternation, that he loves the Beatles) and a deep, wise intelligence that gives no hint of an education limited to the second grade.

    Like his three younger siblings, Bill Marx was adopted by Harpo and Susan at a time when would-be parents still visited orphanages and pick out the child they wanted. Bill’s adoption required assistance from Susan’s friend Marion Davies, who helped smooth the way for a second wedding, this time Catholic, between the Jewish Harpo and nominally Episcopalian Susan, allowing them to meet the birth mother’s stipulation that the boy be raised in a Catholic home. Following the adoption the family experienced several months of weekly home visits by a woman from the agency, causing the Marxes to drag out crosses and holy water from the closet for each visit. Harpo finally had enough and one day answered the door stark naked. They were never visited again.

    Later in the book he details the absolutely astonishing story of how he accidentally discovered his birth family, a tale so farfetched it could only have been either conceived by Dickens or actually be true.

Harpo on I Love Lucy

    Harpo hired his son at age twelve to be his personal prop man while he toured England with brother Chico in 1948. Thus young Billy was responsible for maintaining the innumerable items that filled the various pockets and sleeves of his father’s famous coat. He goes on to describe accompanying Harpo on his various TV appearances, including the legendary episode of I Love Lucy.

    Marx the Younger went on to become the music arranger for his father’s two 1950s instrumental albums, which hover between muzak and exotica, the first of which features the Chico Hamilton Quintet as Harpo’s band. Marx went on to make a name for himself as a composer and arranger, notable for his early 1970s AIP film scores (Count Yorga, Vampire; Scream, Blacula, Scream, etc.)

    Marx’s career is a curio to anyone interested in 1950s and ‘60s American popular music. He was signed as the first white artist on the black-owned label Chicago Vee-Jay Records (before the Beatles) for which he released a few easy listening LPs, mainly as The Castaway Strings (“The Bobby Vinton Songbook”). He spent most of the Sixties as the piano man at Dino’s Lodge, Dean Martin’s famed cocktail lounge on the Sunset Strip. Aside from his stint at AIP, he has sporadically scored and arranged music for films and TV (Murphy’s Romance, Who’s That Girl, Fantasy Island), as well as composed concert commissions.

    Marx makes no bones about the fact that he is not a writer, and the book could have used more guidance. More detail about his day to day home life growing up with his family would have been especially welcome. But enthusiasm and warmth fill the book, and personal photos are everywhere, making this a must for Marx Brothers fanatics.

Available from Applause Books

Hot for ‘Teacher’

Why is it I never saw The Teacher until now? Despite its low budget and a release limited primarily to drive-ins and dollar theaters, this 1974 softcore wonder written and directed by the adventurous Hikmet Avedis received a fair amount of press back in the day, most of it having to do with second-billed Jay North, all grown up from TV’s Dennis the Menace, shagging the actress who critic Paul Mavis accurately described as “freakishly gorgeous” (his italics), Angel Tompkins, as the lad’s lusty, accommodating schoolteacher. Plus, it came from Crown International Pictures, a key player in America’s lowbrow nouvelle vague, threadbare pictures seemingly made on the fly, often in prematurely faded color with actors on their way up or down but rarely ‘in.’ Crown’s small, dodgy archetypes of ingenuity — The Virgin Queen of St. Francis High, Weekend With the Babysitter, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, the miraculous They Saved Hitler’s Brain — bridged the rocky road that once separated urban grindhouses from lucrative rural and suburban markets hungry for adolescent sexual hi-jinx and cheap thrills. As film historian Richard Nowell notes (perhaps a tad too gushingly) in the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: American Independent (Vol.2):

“Crown International Pictures is a significant casualty of the selective traditions of film historiography and the emphasis that is placed on the distinctions, rather than the connections, between American independent cinema, in its many guises, and the shifting contours of ‘mainstream’ Hollywood and its output. Although [American International Pictures] and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures usually are provided as exemplars of 1970s exploitation, Crown International was an equally visible presence in independent production and distribution by virtue of being, for a while at least, America’s youth-market leader; and, whereas much has been said of the influence of the period’s independently released bikerpics and car-crash movies, it was in fact Crown’s long-forgotten date-movies, particularly The Pom Pom Girls (1976), that left an indelible mark on movie-making, industrially and aesthetically. The box-office achievements of Crown’s upbeat teenpics led Hollywood belatedly to embrace films made exclusively for young people and adopt the marketing-friendly approach to filmmaking known simply as ‘high-concept’. For better or worse, without Crown, there would likely have been no Grease (1978) or Porky’s (1981), and films like Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986) would probably have looked very different indeed.”

    We could debate that last sentence — Grease came from Broadway, Porkys evolved out of Universal’s American Graffiti, and Flashdance owes more to New World’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School than anything else — but there’s no denying the presence of Crown from the late 60s until the early 80s, when home video snuffed out most of the second-run theatres playing their wares. The Teacher arrived a year after New World’s The Student Teachers (“They can teach you a lot…enter their course!”), but we shouldn’t overlook Summer of ‘42, a hugely successful Warners hit (made for $1 million, it grossed $25 million in the States alone) which sent low budget entrepreneurs looking into quasi-Oedipal scenarios with slow-witted pubescent guys popping their cherries to hot older women. (I’d add The Graduate to the fray, but Benjamin Braddock was in his twenties and should’ve known better.)

    In The Teacher, twenty-three-year-old Mr. North — gangly, awkward, topped by a unruly mane of oversize cowlicks — plays seventeen-year-old Sean Roberts, whose hot mom (former Miss Universe — and wife of the director — Marlene Schmidt) struts her bikinied bod around the house and harbors a barely concealed interest in boinking her own son. Taking the high ground, she presses him to date their neighbor, thirty-something high school teacher Diane Marshall (Ms. Tompkins), who’s all into topless sunbathing and getting it on with Sean. Unfortunately for her, and tortuous for us, the boy’s got the IQ of a grape, leaving Mrs. Marshall (her husband’s off ‘somewhere’) begging him for some action. To widen the breadth of these shenanigans, Avedis’s script incorporates a feverish subplot concerning the accidental death of Sean’s friend, Joe (Med Florey), and the retaliation of Joe’s village idiot brother, Ralph. For the latter, they cast Anthony James, all wide-eyed and over-the-top, whose chipped beef cranium is centered by a facial hybrid of Henry Silva and Vladek Sheybal, with enough pockmarks to make Robert Davi wince. (So impressed by his look and deportment, Avedis used him again in two other pictures.) When not cruising the bucolic suburban streets in his hearse (a dose of sledgehammer symbolism), Ralph hurls a stream of empty threats at Sean (he has the opportunity to kill him several times but doesn’t), leading to an unexpectedly gloomy conclusion wherein The Teacher falls back on two of the decade’s prominent clichés, a downbeat denouement and freeze-frame fade-out.

    It takes a seasoned craftsman to string all of this heated nonsense together, and, despite the absurd situations and thespic limitations of some of the actors, Hikmet Avedis appears genuinely invested in every scene. Made a few short years before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas exiled popular American film to a state of calculated irony, The Teacher is played ‘straight’ — which, ironically, makes it seem all the more ironic. He piles on the nudity wherever applicable (and Angel looks splendid in the buff) while simultaneously correlating sex with death, opening the picture for psychological analysis to anyone willing to read into these Ken & Barbie personas and their myopic universe. Which, incidentally, is a location shoot in a pre-1990 blue collar suburbia yet to be overhauled by McMansions, big-box stores and fast food chains, looking virtually pastoral in its post-WWII simplicity.

    The Teacher is quintessential 70s teen sexploitation, but also serves as a model of Avedis’s adherence to the old school approach to form and content. While the majority of genre product then being distributed by Crown, New World, AIP and Cannon Films was hackneyed and insubstantial, Avedis made an effort to shape his screenplays with small, colorful plot digressions and secondary characters, suggesting a talent that could have flourished a decade or so earlier in the kind of tight, meaty pictures once made by Don Siegel and Hugo Fregonese. Instead, he anglicized his first name to Howard, toiled in the campy schlock of Edy Williams as Dr. Minx and Connie Stevens as Scorchy, and reworked the basic theme of The Teacher into the noirish They’re Playing with Fire, which is notable for showcasing Sybil Danning’s spectacular physique in its prime. After making just eleven films together, Avedis and Ms. Schmidt ended their fifteen-year career in 1987 with Kidnapped, about young girls shanghaied into the porn industry… making us wonder if that’s where the filmmaker ended up as well.

The movie that everyone’s talking about… this week

Editor’s note: the following was an email I dashed off to a friend. In an effort to grant this blog a little fresh written content, it’s reproduced here for your pleasure. This Thanksgiving, the film in question seems to be on the lips of my relatives who managed to nab their apparently highly-sought-after rental copies for the long holiday weekend:

    I had no idea what Super 8 was about until I put it in the machine. I rented it because of J.J. Abrams — Cloverfield is ridiculous but amusing; Mission Impossible III is an inventive action picture, the best in the series; and Star Trek is an excellent rethinking of the original TV program, superbly cast and superior to most of the other films in the franchise. At first Super 8 surprised me because I realized, some five minutes in, that it was not only a paean to 1980s, Spielberg-influenced science fiction, but of The Goonies in particular — tapping into that audience of misguided unfortunates who look back at that dim decade with unwarranted nostalgic reverence. Then, when the monster was introduced (I wasn’t expecting a monster), it felt like the picture could go to great lengths to simply entertain; I was, for a time, somewhat enthralled. It was approximately an hour in when the script decided to take a critical wrong turn — characters begin discussing their past and private lives. Back in the 1970s, Siskel and Ebert became directly responsible for teaching middlebrow America to look for “character development” (a term rarely heard before then), the meat of a persona, something wholly unnecessary in a monster movie. At the hour mark, when these people start blubbering about their problems and dissatisfactions, Super 8 dies, leaving it the unenviable task of restarting its engine, thus making the last act seem slower and less interesting than the first. (Imagine this at a crisp, tight 87 minutes instead of its current 112.) By the end, I didn’t care one way or the other about the monster going home (“ET go home”?) and found myself yawning over the Close Encounters-style spaceship. Today, as it was in the 80s, the only person who could do a good Spielberg-style science fiction movie is... well, Steven Spielberg. Who, surprise surprise, produced Super 8.

    As for the monster: I'm counting the days when we go back to actually seeing a creature instead of having to squint to make out its appearance.

Hello Kitty!

Marisa Mell in Perversion Story; photo via Scrawl Club, click to enlarge.

You look like an angel... but I got wise

The hottest woman ever in films? Shots of Brigitte Bardot set to Elvis!

Yo, goombah...

Sophia Loren and the “Mambo Italiano”

The Movie Game (1969-1971)

Shown in the New York tristate area on WOR-TV (usually late Saturday afternoons, right before Gerry Anderson’s UFO), The Movie Game was a movie trivia game show hosted by actor Larry Blyden (replacing first season emcee Sonny ‘Christmas That Almost Wasn’t’ Fox) with assist from Hollywood columnist Army Archerd. I kept up with it fairly regularly in the late 1960s and early 70s — long after the show’s initial run, WOR would use episodes as filler for rained-out ballgames. Panelists in this clip are Shelly Winters, Roscoe Lee Browne, Richard Crenna, Fernando Lamas, Della Reese and Kurt Kasznar. Pinky swear! Meanwhile, you might remember Larry for playing Babs’ boyfriend in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Jack & Angelica

…but mostly Angelica, here. (Click above images to enlarge.)

Halloweenies

Click image to enlarge

Two years before they produced Jaws (1975), Richard Zanuck and David Brown dabbled with the mad scientist genre in Sssssss (“Don’t say it: hiss it!”), a 1973 reboot of 50s schlock. They hired Bernard L. Kowalski to direct, an odd choice considering his l’age d’or transpired some fifteen years earlier with such Tin Age Psychotronica as the man-impregnated-by-hideous-space-aliens in Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and the self-explanatory Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)… and whose regard for simple, old school linear narrative may cause today’s squirrelly Ritalin Generation to fidget. An unusually restrained Strother Martin handles black mambas, pythons and king cobras (for real!), mutating their venom to create an über race of snake men out of a rapidly dwindling supply of unsuspecting lab assistants. The distressed damsel is played by Heather Menzies, whose plum role as ‘Louisa’ in The Sound of Music surely must’ve had her dreaming of better days than this, only now bespectacled and somewhat naked in a blurry skinny dip scene. I hadn’t seen Sssssss since it came out; I thought it was entertaining back then, and find now that it makes for a fairly amusing evening. It’s on a two-disc set, “4 Movie Marathon: Cult Horror Collection”, which yours truly fished out of a five-dollar bin at the local convenience store.
    Also in the set is The Funhouse (1981), the kind of movie custom cut for that decade’s spurt-‘n’-gurgle crowd and gooey Fangoria promo pieces. It was directed by Tobe Hooper who, just seven years earlier, reshaped modern horror with the remarkable Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Did any other filmmaker who came to attention during that period fall so swiftly or so permanently? There’s no denying The Funhouse has two or three creative moments, but the sense of urgency and craftsmanship permeating Texas Chainsaw is all but gone. Its wafer-thin scenario is hungry for horrific crescendos, but momentum is in short supply and suspense is miles out of reach. (Kudos to Sylvia Miles, however, for her brief bit as a back alley fortune teller.) The film’s ‘monster’ is a multi-clefted head pinched together from inbred flesh, bulging eyes and nightmare dentistry — the ugly, low income, mentally retarded neighbor as the monster of the id. As in Texas Chainsaw, the sole survivor of Funhouse’s mass slaughter is driven mad and tossed back to normalcy, but the effect is no longer poignant nor harrowing. It’s merely there to tell us that the movie’s over… and that no one really cares.

A name once synonymous with lowbrow horror and exploitation, Jerry Gross had his moment as the poor man’s Roger Corman, producing and distributing barebones product for the drive-in and grindhouse trade throughout the 1970s and early 80s. I first became aware of him sometime in the mid-70s at an abstract-dementia double bill of I Drink Your Blood (1970) with I Eat Your Skin (1964/71). The combination was toxic, a balls-to-the-walls gore fest in blood-splattered color paired with a black and white relic that had been sitting on the shelf for seven years, a crazy, ill-conceived zombie reconfiguration of Dr. No initially filmed under the way-cooler title, Voodoo Blood Bath.
    But I Drink Your Blood is an entirely different kettle of fish. You could read sociopolitical subtext in its portrayal of the 60s counterculture as corrupted by the violence it abhorred, the influence of the Manson Family killings or as a prediction of Altamont; or regard it as a steppingstone figuring somewhere in the bumpy trail blazed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and George Romero.
    Written and directed by the comparatively unknown David Durston, I Drink Your Blood is, for the first twenty minutes, utterly grotesque in both content and execution. There’s little sense of reality in its setting (a dying rural town held together by a folksy little bakery specializing in “meat pies”) or the awkward cue card readings emoted by a cast of bewildered thespians and amateurs. Before tumbling thoroughly into Ed Wood territory, however, Durston bulldozes through the remaining hour with fierce conviction and a sense of humor that’s cynical and surreal. He follows a band of devil-worshipping acidheads infected with rabies, watching them run amok with swords and knives, foaming at the mouth while passing the disease onto townsfolk and a construction crew (hardhats vs. longhairs in the age of Joe), the scenario swirling into an apocalyptic frenzy that’s totally outrageous and ridiculously funny. When the dust settles and the dismembered body parts are no longer used as billy clubs, you may think you’ve imagined the whole thing.