Hey, bud... sheltering in place? Living in cabin fever isolation? Talking only by phone, Zoom, and Google Hangouts? But mostly.... mostly... watching movies online? Got Amazon Prime? Why not g'head and dig these three gonzo drive-in greats, from Mexico, Italy, and godforsaken Utah:
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
"El Triangulo Diaboloico de las Bermudas"
(1978) Dir. Rene Cardona
*** / Amazon Image - B+
Everything that was once cool about the 70s but became waterlogged by overkill waits for us in the depths of this Mexican-Italian co-production from hack supremo Rene Cardona. Part of a cornucopia of late-70s films--including recently-reviewed and loved by this site, Bermuda Depths (also 1978), triggered by the immensely popular Leonard Nimoy-hosted TV show In Search Of...,(which covered the Triangle a year prior), we get a recreation (via stock footage) of the infamous case of five vanished torpedo bombers on a training flight out of Fort Lauderdale, counterbalanced by a litany of 70s-style terrors aboard a medium-sized vintage yacht out in.... the Triangle! Atlantis-seeking great white hunter John Huston and his extended family are aboard on a five-week cruise... to terror! With the ever-bearded Hugo Stiglitz as the humorless captain, Claudine Thunderball Auger as the bitter wife of a dickish drunken doctor (Carlos East), and sexy Gloria Guidais as Huston's older daughter (her gorgeous legs wind up crushed underneath an Atlantean pillar). The problems begin when a bonnet-wearing 18th-century doll-- scooped out of the ocean and passed undried and unexamined (!) to Huston's daughter--eviscerates a swarm of attack parrots with her teeth. Weird radio signals ('borrowed' from Forbidden Planet), mysterious accidents, ghost ships, and sea monster... etchings... floating face down in the waves... are some of the horrors headed their way. The doll tells the kid the order in which everyone on the boat will die, and drinks the blood of the ship's cook, whose jagged death is blamed on falling ketchup bottles. The captain refuses to believe it's the doll's fault, but then confesses "I don't know, Alan... I don't know." Twice!
With a memorably spooky-- albeit eerily familiar--Stevio Cipriani synth score, this Triangle is a never- dull (or very good) mix of: spooky 70s folklore; terribly flat dubbing (Huston lends his own voice though no one else seems to); bitchy histrionics (including indulgently gloomy drunken rambling); a former Bond girl hiding in a terrible orange and tie-dyed caftan (was she pregnant?); creative boat-related deaths (so the kids would have something to describe to each other next day at school); and strange-but-true events (there really was a Black Whale III that disappeared in the Triangle!) Cue the theremin and howling ocean winds.
A big perk is that this clearly was filmed on an actual boat (we never see a speck of land, aside from the Fort Lauderdale air traffic control flashback), which adds to the film's eerie, trapped in a wall-less prison space unease. There are some nice underwater sequences amidst the tumbling Atlantean ruins (though could have done without all the harpooning of sharks and their actual dying close-ups). The whole thing never quite gels, but--in a way that's not dissimilar to other 70s catch-all horror affairs like The Visitor-- it triumphs in sheer abundance of ocean riches: hurricanes, fog, mysterious crashing of Atlantis, the sea changing colors, Mr. Marvin falling overboard; and a mysterious magnetic force that almost capsizes the boat while they try to answer the SOS from a ship lost at sea for over a decade. What else do you need? The doll's close-ups are occasionally those of a Linda Blair-alike stand-in (Nailea Norvind) just to sweep the category. If not for the shark killing and a moment of alcohol abuse (Auger throws away a half-full drink), and the flat, terrible dialogue and acting, I'd watch it every day. When dubbing is this bad it becomes a kind of high art and Cipriano's mismatch hack-o-matic score is its own sort of boomy sublime.
EYE IN THE LABYRINTH
"L'occhio nel labirinto"
(1972) Dir. Mario Caiano
*** / Amazon Image - B
Julie (Rosemary Dexter), the devoted secretary of a missing scoundrel Luca (the silver-eyed krimi star Horst Frank) has a weird dream in which she's being chased through a white labyrinth. She's now convinced she has to track down her boss! So she drives out to the coastal town druggie artist colony where he was last spotted. Soon she's set and setting with the resident bunch of languid hedonists, tanning, quipping, and eyeing jealously or hungrily each other's swim-suited forms by day, lunging at each other's throats and/or zippers at night, and/or dying by morning. Alida Vialli's terrifying/sexy-gruff Teutonic rasp of a voice is in full flower as the villa's owner, and her Satanic eyes are alight with rage when her handsome younger lover (Gigi Rizzi) starts taking Julie for long boat rides. One languid afternoon someone fires a harpoon at them - but from where? And why is Thunderball villain Adolfo Celli always around to rescue her, aside from his obvious sexual interest?

HIGHWAY TO HELL
(1991) Dir Ate de Jong
***/ Amazon Image - A
Thanks to a surplus of over-the-top action-- towheads driving dusty vehicles, and long straight desert highways---you'd be forgiven for thinking Highway to Hell is Australian. Actually it's one of the last big American medium-budgeted cult-designated pics (ala Buckaroo Banzai), a relic of a time when big studios shared drive-in screens with indie distributors and wildly unhinged 80s drive-in ready gonzo classics actually made money. The golden era of 80s cult films, man! Know what I'm talking about? Course you do. You wouldn't, by any chance, be hiding one of your buddies in the trunk to save a ticket price, would you?
Good use is made of the alien-looking deserts of Utah and Arizona, with wild pit stops such as a dead cop-filled diner, a wild strip club gambling den inside a giant Jimmy Hoffa slot machine, the surreal Hellraiser 2-style confines of the foreboding Hell City. There's even a scene where zombie bodies are ground up to make asphalt for highway reconstruction! Carousing evil figures from history are played by dimly familiar faces: Jerry Stiller is a cop forever unable to get a refill, his son Derek Z. is Attila the Hun, daughter Amy is Cleopatra; Gilbert Gottfried is Hitler! Rock star Lita Ford is a sexy hitchhiker! Swanson, never more fetching, has a super foxy scene where she plays a demon in disguise coming onto Chad while wearing a billowing black dress in a sultry 80s style MTV boudoir, licking the blood from his nose. Poor slack-jawed towheaded Chad, all scuffed up in his strappy white T-shirt like some safety first clod: we start out hating him for obviously getting lucky way outside his bumpkin league but eventually come to respect his can-do gumption. On the other hand, we'd crawl across cut glass to be with her, too. So what's the rumpus?
So, if it's not too much trouble: surrender to this loud action-horror-comedy's quirky mix of thrills, insight and dumb sight gags (whizzing by too fast to elicit any groans) and crazy car chase and brawling action and you're bound to wind up exhilarated.
The post-end title "where are they now" crawl seems tacked on by producers after some test screening audience cards asked too many questions so feel free to ignore it.
Man, some folks just can't let shit hang.
PS - Turns out HIGHWAY TO HELL isn't available on Prime at the time of this posting. Well, you could check out a few choice recommendations instead, like the 1982 SHE starring Sandahl Bergman! or RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS (1982) They're good too, and so few have heard of them. Respect! Respect them NOW!
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More Recommendations and Review of Available-on-Prime Hidden Gems:
12 Weird/Cool Italian Films
and so much more.... somewhere
Highway To Hell also on Blu-ray from Kino-Lorber.
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ReplyDeleteOne of the lesser giallis has a good cast but wastes them and the location with a weak plot and a 'heroine' who's beautiful but stupid and repulsive. The real mystery is why everyone in a giallo only drinks J&B scotch.
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