Allergy season's deft poisoning of the senses undercuts spring's 'missing the orgy' angst-euphoria like honeymoon strychnine. The indoor child wheezing in the dark with comic books and old movies while the tanned kids cavort in the pollen - ask him what having every bad movie ever made at your fingertips means. He'll tell you. He, who spent a week writing about what was wrong with Shape of Water, he knows. Only in the 70s, on Amazon Prime, in a darkened room, with air purify and a de-humidifier and a fan and endless diet coke can escape velocity be reversed.
Thanks to Prime's inexhaustible trove of forgotten gems from time amoral, we can go back to groovy 70s monster movie childhood, before the rise of VHS, spandex-and-butcher knife SOV hair metal despair. The truth is in the 70s and its crazes - especially the 'nature' craze- the return to the hills and mountains popularized by the Waltons, Grizzly Addams, Apple's Way, Little House on the Prairie, (TV); Ranger Rick Magazine; The Wilderness Family, and Bigfoot (movies). He's still out there, in the past (3), and on Prime. And I'm bringing a small coterie of students with me to capture him. Will you be foolish enough to be one of them? Amazon Prime has given us all the fertile muck one might ever wish to trudge through. We could easily get lost in the thicket. Bring your Claritin.
 |
| my bible at nine |
Special Note: As usual, I've provided screenshots and letter grades for image presentability. Whenever possible I've avoided showing the monsters in these films- the better to enable the Val Lewton unseen factor as long as possible, of course that doesn't apply to our first item. When possible I've also kept to the spirit of the typical drive-in triple feature, breaking this list into three parts, the G or PG-rated feature attraction, the evening teenager make-out R, concluding with the late night grindhouse locally-sourced 'resident' weirdness.
It may not be that good, but everything great about the 70s (spaceships, sexy adults, dinosaurs, analog lasers) and nothing bad (no kids, cops, buzzkill parents, Walter Matthau) is to be found on THE PLANET OF THE DINOSAURS. The plot finds a crashed spaceship discharging a very hairy male and foxy female crew who proceed to climb around a desert hill and valley, bickering, dying and fighting an impressive series of stop motion dinosaurs.
Whether or not you fall under the mellow 70s spell of Planet of the Dinosaurs will depend on your age and taste. The stop motion animation is somewhere between Ray Harryhausen and Land of the Lost. Considering the budget, it's damned impressive. The foxy uniforms make the humans resemble some fusion of Josie and the Pussycats and a spirit-of-76 gymnastic team. The men have open shirted jumpsuits and mustaches; the women rock an array of styles, the most indelible of which is Derna Wylde's sexy yellow midriff and flared orange hiphuggers. They compliment perfectly her willowy, bronzed form and long straight black Cher-style hair. There's also sexy Mary Appelspeth (eaten far too soon during a Jaws-style swim), and fan favorite Pamela Bottaro as co-pilot Nylah, who comes onto nearly every man in the crew sooner or later, sweeping up the devotion of all insecure young male viewers along her way.
As for the men, a real macho boldness vs. cowardly caution dichotomy eventually coheres, reminding us of how the emerging women's lib movement found more affinity with the Burt Reynolds macho men (ala James Whitworth's bearded alpha Jim: "On this world you have two choices - be cruel or die!") than the passive-aggressive liberals (here embodied by Louie Lawless's Capt. Lee "I'm in charge, here!") Planet helps us remember why; the assertive alpha male makes us--children and women--feel safer; the liberals don't take life as it comes. Jim would guard you by fighting - not by pacifying and reasoning. As a kid in the 70s, life was exciting, we had enough freedom to be terrified; it was this theme that made TV series like Danger Island episodes on Banana Splits, and The Land of the Lost so compelling. We needed someone like Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, or Charlie Bronson. Of course this need help the 70s pave the way for the 80s conservative backlash. Luckily, this being the 70s, there's still a chance for male bonding, once Lee proves his mettle.
Alas, the Amazon Prime transfer of Planet of the Dinosaurs is taken from what looks like a public domain dupe. Nonetheless it looks no worse than it would if you caught on UHF TV back some Saturday morning in 1978. An eerie synthesizer score by Lamers and O'Verlin seethes, burbles and groans in a way that merges the music and diegetic nature sounds to create an almost Forbidden Planet-style sense of eerie sci-fi dislocation. Great use is made of the desert cliff formations in which the group takes shelter (Nylah's hair-raising near fall over a ledge is clearly done without a stunt person). And a fairly frequent ratio of dinosaur attacks vs. in-camp bicker-and-bond stretches makes up for any pictorial inconvenience. As for the latter, Derna Wylde does a lascivious dance during a welcome drinking scene and when it comes to seduction, the girls make all the moves, which is Hawksian, very 70s; and there's a moment of Duel-style savage triumph!
Still terrible? Sure, but good enough I actually tried to find a decent DVD version after seeing it the second time. Retromedia's 20th anniversary release is supposed to be good but is OOP - available for $300. I don't like it that well. But I'll be seeing it again on Prime, where it's dingy, frayed, but free, like the 70s itself!
From its opening montage of woodsy twilight shots set to low-pitched, distorted swamp noises, there's a compelling low-key tick-tock inexorability to this influential mix of local witness interviews, nature-travelogue and (the best part) legitimately re-enactments. It all happened in Fouke, Arkansas in the 1950s-60s when a certain Sasquatch-style monster showed up and began to be smelled, seen, heard, shot at, run from, and most of all talked about around campfires and country stoves at night and in the mornings while looking at damage done to screen doors and big footprints left in the swampy loam under the windows and all along and down the creeks of Fouke, Texarkana. Fouke, where the nearest neighbor was a mile away and you grew up knowing every sound and smell of the swampy land, so that a noise, a cry, comes you can't recognize, it's plenty terrifying.
1. PLANET OF THE DINOSAURS
(1977) Dir. James K. Shea
*** / Amazon Image - C
It may not be that good, but everything great about the 70s (spaceships, sexy adults, dinosaurs, analog lasers) and nothing bad (no kids, cops, buzzkill parents, Walter Matthau) is to be found on THE PLANET OF THE DINOSAURS. The plot finds a crashed spaceship discharging a very hairy male and foxy female crew who proceed to climb around a desert hill and valley, bickering, dying and fighting an impressive series of stop motion dinosaurs.Whether or not you fall under the mellow 70s spell of Planet of the Dinosaurs will depend on your age and taste. The stop motion animation is somewhere between Ray Harryhausen and Land of the Lost. Considering the budget, it's damned impressive. The foxy uniforms make the humans resemble some fusion of Josie and the Pussycats and a spirit-of-76 gymnastic team. The men have open shirted jumpsuits and mustaches; the women rock an array of styles, the most indelible of which is Derna Wylde's sexy yellow midriff and flared orange hiphuggers. They compliment perfectly her willowy, bronzed form and long straight black Cher-style hair. There's also sexy Mary Appelspeth (eaten far too soon during a Jaws-style swim), and fan favorite Pamela Bottaro as co-pilot Nylah, who comes onto nearly every man in the crew sooner or later, sweeping up the devotion of all insecure young male viewers along her way.
As for the men, a real macho boldness vs. cowardly caution dichotomy eventually coheres, reminding us of how the emerging women's lib movement found more affinity with the Burt Reynolds macho men (ala James Whitworth's bearded alpha Jim: "On this world you have two choices - be cruel or die!") than the passive-aggressive liberals (here embodied by Louie Lawless's Capt. Lee "I'm in charge, here!") Planet helps us remember why; the assertive alpha male makes us--children and women--feel safer; the liberals don't take life as it comes. Jim would guard you by fighting - not by pacifying and reasoning. As a kid in the 70s, life was exciting, we had enough freedom to be terrified; it was this theme that made TV series like Danger Island episodes on Banana Splits, and The Land of the Lost so compelling. We needed someone like Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, or Charlie Bronson. Of course this need help the 70s pave the way for the 80s conservative backlash. Luckily, this being the 70s, there's still a chance for male bonding, once Lee proves his mettle.
Still terrible? Sure, but good enough I actually tried to find a decent DVD version after seeing it the second time. Retromedia's 20th anniversary release is supposed to be good but is OOP - available for $300. I don't like it that well. But I'll be seeing it again on Prime, where it's dingy, frayed, but free, like the 70s itself!
2. LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK
(1972) Dir Charles B. Pierce
*** / Amazon Image - D
From its opening montage of woodsy twilight shots set to low-pitched, distorted swamp noises, there's a compelling low-key tick-tock inexorability to this influential mix of local witness interviews, nature-travelogue and (the best part) legitimately re-enactments. It all happened in Fouke, Arkansas in the 1950s-60s when a certain Sasquatch-style monster showed up and began to be smelled, seen, heard, shot at, run from, and most of all talked about around campfires and country stoves at night and in the mornings while looking at damage done to screen doors and big footprints left in the swampy loam under the windows and all along and down the creeks of Fouke, Texarkana. Fouke, where the nearest neighbor was a mile away and you grew up knowing every sound and smell of the swampy land, so that a noise, a cry, comes you can't recognize, it's plenty terrifying.
Acted out by the actual witnesses themselves in their own homes in the same areas it happened, so it says, there's a real immediacy to it all as if the film itself is some mimetic charm to keep the beast away. Told with a vivid urgency balanced out with a low key modesty natural to the region (but without any excess or labored folksiness, a few original folk ballads about the monster aside), it's a very very 70s naturalist mix of the best elements of documentary and re-enactment that manages to be double scary rather than half and a whole lot of other things besides.
To that end, the old analog fullscreen (cropped) TV VHS dupe quality of the Amazon image I saw may actually make it more effective, adding to the authentic rusticity by evoking old nature shows like they'd have on back in the 70s during the grassroots boom (re: Ranger Rick, Waltons, Little House and Wilderness Family). Director Charles Pierce always keeps one eye on the natural world--the swamps and empty fields, enabling--rare in a semi-documentary-- an eerie sense of ever-mounting twilight and onrushing darkness (2). There's more bucolic, ominously natural magic hour shot heres than in almost the entirety of the decade's horror. The crappy dupe quality enables a Blair Witch sense of helplessness in the face of what the camera can't see. Here's a place where there's no light pollution or street lamps, and if the moon is hidden under clouds that nights it's so dark that a monster could be five feet from your door and you wouldn't know it unless it hollered. Especially memorable are the scenes of isolation young wives and kids at night, nervously sewing while the hound dog whines and mysterious howls echo outside and the men are all gone on ranching jobs.
The huge success of this still-effective G-rated film led to two sequels, a remake and a mini-genre explosion of bigfoot-themed movies and TV shows, all either fiction with a dash of doc or doc with a dash of fiction, or (the worst of them) just plain fiction. Many of these are on Prime --all but one or two are far too dull to waste time with except as background while you clean your guns or pluck the chickens. Check out another Charles Pierce film that follows the same overall style, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, and a film with much of the same folksy local-color charm also on Prime, Bootleggers, starring Slim Pickens, a riveting James Dean-meets-Bo Hopkins charmer named Paul Koslo and the inescapable Dennis Fimple. Good old Fimple also co-stars in one near-'must' of the post-Boggy slew, and it's next on our list.
The success of Boggy was such that four years later, they were still coming out with these semi-true "expedition / flashback" bigfoot movies, and of all those that followed, this is probably the best, which doesn't say much,. Chicago University anthropology majors Rives (John David Empire of the Ants Carson) and his 'Nam vet buddy Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) head down to the Bayou for spring break on a Sasquatch research project, where they are soon intertwined with various locals, cute girls, a disproving but tolerant sheriff and, of course, the creature itself. There's not much of the creature but the scenery is all actual bayou and the locals are a nice mix, so there's that vibe, so strong in the 70s, that a blue state college boy could go down south and talk to locals and not run into cliche'd hostility and pre-judgment nor instant homespun friendliness, but both, in endless ebb and flow.
DP Dean Cundey utilizes plenty of picaresque magic hour establishing shots that would clean up real nice if the powers that be added some color correction (he'd go on to work at length with John Carpenter). With all the splices and scratches and fades (blacks washed to a fine greenish fog), emulsion scratches, pocks, etc. it looks like it could be part of Rodriguez and Tarantino's Grindhouse (Amazon gives us a nice HD transfer, ad odds with the source material is terrible state) but, in the words of Bleeding Skull's Joseph Ziemba, "imperfection only adds to the backwoods whiff. The Black Lake setting wouldn’t feel the same without it. "
And speaking of whiffs, the stole is showlened by ole Jack Elam's local 'edge of town' drunk (he loses his buddy to the creature in the prologue). Everyone who's 'been there' knows how hard it is to describe being attacked a giant hairy monster to the local sheriff whilst so trashed you can barely turn off the ignition and stagger into the holding cell.
Still --the climax with the boys running headlong into the monster, their scattershot response, and the weirdly open ending all add up to something very unique. The strangely intimate bond between Fimple and Carson as they drink around the campfire is truly original. They're not quite at the level of improv drunken bonding that Fonda and Oates had in Race with the Devil, but their heads are in the right low-key place (Carson makes great low-key use of lines like "What's with you and hamburgers, man?"). A refreshing change too is the way the build up involves the meeting and interviewing of so many character actors, The film meanders for little bits of business like a back porch country song between bigfoot witness Dub Taylor on harmonica and the writer of the film Jim McCulloch Jr. on guitar, and a gag with a "Keep off the Grass" sign outside the jail, that any sane editor would have snipped off. That it stays in is typical of the more relaxed pace of 70s nature-set movies and helps to make the sudden violent action more resonant (Tarantino was going for that a bit, I think, with those draggy talking stretches in Death-Proof.)
Other films in this post-Boggy subgenre (like 1976's super-boring Sasquatch, also on Prime) err too much on the side of rusticity, presuming a drawled field journal note-based voiceover and languid shots of bearded guys unpacking sound equipment around the campfire will make up for the lack of actual thrills. Black Lake gets the mixture just right, and I like that the monster is never humanized or earning of sympathy, nor even fully seen. It's simply an unknowable crafty thing that protects its territory in the most direct and brutal ways. So add it up: eerie noises, Fimple (if you're a newly-minted Fimple-holic after this, let me steer you onwards to Truck Stop Women - also on Prime), low-simmering suspense, and a good 'in-the-moment' actorly rapport that gives every moment a chance to land. What's to strongly dislike, asides the library cue-cut score and that it's so boring?
5. DAY OF THE ANIMALS
(from: "Leslie of the Heretics") Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors and real animals--especially vultures, hawks, a cougar, a crazy dog pack, and a tarantula--the scene where the hawks and vultures maul the bitchy girl is terrifying because those birds are real, and they're right there in the shot, and her unease is palpable.
So let's talk. I know you may think this list has low standards but here's some examples of those that did not make the cut: SASQUATCH, ISLAND CLAWS, BIGFOOT, MONSTER and BOG were all films I wanted to review next, but hell, they were were either too boring (BIGFOOT and its mellow semi-documentary vibe) or murky (ISLAND CLAWS - images above) or just too half-assed (BOG) to finish. Enter their dubious confines at your own risk, or proceed along with me on this safe guided tour, where image is reasonably vivid and crisp or at the very least the content (as with Boggy) suits the form.
--
Luckily these next two films look and are divino.
Up to now we've been hanging out in the USA, in local areas like Bouke Arkansas or Crater Lake, but we mustn't forget all the imports from Italy that rounded out our 70s drive-in and grindhouse triple bills. Here's one from the always endurable Sergio Martino. An undiscovered gem, Great Alligator blends the tropes of the Jaws ripoff with the then super-popular Italian cannibal genre and the Irwin Allen disaster film, telling the tale of a giant alligator god, long sleeping, on a remote tropical island, who wakes up and starts eating tourists when capitalist Mel Ferrer opens a resort and starts dynamiting trees. Filmed in Sri Lanka but meant to evoke a kind of near-Africa, the locals are notably diverse. Having already sunk a few million into the venture, Mel tries to keep the gator attacks quiet and avoid a panic, but handsome photographer Claudio Cassinelli demands he tell the tourists and local authorities, if there are any. Sexy Barbara Bach--rocking the same wet 70s bathing suit white shirt combination Jacqueline Bissett indelibly sported in The Deep two years earlier--agrees with hunky Claudio but she works for Mel, so is torn. That night, well, hell breaks loose, thanks to both gator and angry natives (the white man woke up their big scaly god with their interloping).
Amazon used to have a much worse print of this streaming - it seems to have been quietly upgraded. It's still not HD, but we can now better appreciate the pretty waterfalls and the well-lit climactic outdoor night scenes of nonstop carnage. Over a dusk-to-dawn massacre, everyone in the hotel either tries to escape the lagoon--since the giant alligator is devouring everyone--and I mean everyone-- or the land, where the natives stabbing and shooting the survivors with flaming arrows (and if they try to go in-between are impaled on the spikes of the gator-proof fence). I love this movie because Martino never resorts to day-for-night, or stock nature footage inserts. The big gator itself might by only marginally convincing (its legs don't move; its eyes don't blink) but the jaws go up and down atop screaming extras splashing gamely, and Martino knows how to film the melee so it's clear to follow and scary-fun crazy rather than traumatic, confusing, shrill and/or dull like... well, most of its ilk.
It's a kind of Jaws from the Black Lagoon as horny mutant salmon men infiltrate a Northwestern salmon fishing town to propagate with human women. It's all the result of a shady corporation's escaped experiment in fish hormones. Resident bigot Vic Morrow blames the local Native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), who's been trying to prevent the installation of a fish cannery on his native river. "Good" fisherman Doug McLure and his liberal son stick up for Johnny Eagle. Meanwhile, this is New World so chop chop, the monsters keep a-striking (Denise Galick, Cindy Weintraub and Lynn Theel are some of the unfortunate human women) and a cannery-sponsored genetic scientist (Ann Turkel) shows up to investigate (they're her 'children', so to speak). Directed by a woman, the monster rape scenes don't pack any kind of misogynistic undertone, so they don't traumatize innocent me like most such scenes do (they're so pre-cognitive deep id impulse they transcend morality, especially at the beach where feminine curves are so prominently displayed against the surging tides). Here, bathing suit tops may fly off but the girls never lose their dignity or resourcefulness -- even the scantily clad Miss Salmon (Linda Shayne) stops screaming long enough to bash her attacker's brains out with a rock.
To me, the most objectionable thing in the film is that a smirky toe-headed ventriloquist (David Strassman) almost gets it on with a naked fan in a tent, his puppet poking suggestively through the zipper of his bag. Yikes! Objection!
Whatever, a fast hour in, and boom all hell breaks loose in one of the best monster attacks on a local waterfront salmon festival in cinematic history. The monsters themselves are good enough to not be bad, but not bad enough to be genuinely scary- with their long arm extensions and habit of swaying back and forth like bad Igor impressionists who just fell in a vat of sea weed, their incessant sexual aggression is almost refreshing in its innocence. James Horner's subtle but familiar score of eerie strings and harp glissando stabs hurries things along and the moody Daniel Lacambra cinematogrpahy captures the Pacific Northwest's swirling mist and the deep reds of Cindy Weintraub's undershirt (above left).
Terrible pacing, incredible acting, inept framing, confusing reaction shots, and a stop-start classical music library (Berlioz?) score all combine to make a truly Wagnerian chronicle of four dimwitted college students and their professor Dr. Karl (Tawm Ellis) spending a weekend on the hunt for the infamous Yeti at the prof's remote island upstate NY island (don't ask). The "beast" got away from him the last trip (not before killing all but one of his students). This year, Karl is Ahab-level obsessed at getting another shot. The sole survivor of the last expedition raves and rants at a nearby college party attended by cute girl Jennifer Stock [above] while her towheaded idiot boyfriend is being taken by Karl to eat at an "exclusive" restaurant, where he drops some creepy hints. Is Karl a Count Zaroff or just gay and creepy? I won't tell you! It's best you go into it as I did, cluelessly, just agog at the mix of home movie roughness, odd bits of beauty (cheap as the film stock is, the transfer is clearly in HD with deep lovely blacks) and a general level of awfulness that passes the sublime mark and just keeps on going.
Along with wife Roberta (she was the DP, under the nickname 'Wings' in the credits), Shriek's director Mike Findlay is one of those legendary figures of the Times Square triple bill era, straddling the line between underground avant garde and home movie Adults-only (pre-XXX) marquee-fillers. Times Square denizens would flock to see these because Times Square denizens were in them. Shriek may not have images of the Deuce but it captures an uneasy de ja vu about paranoid nightmares and psychotic breakdowns, moments where you honestly aren't sure if the inconsistencies going on around you are because they're all out to get you, you're just tired and paranoid, or the film you're in is so disjointed it becomes like a nightmare from which you are actually awakening as your character.
In the words of Rosemary Woodhouse, "this is no dream! This is really happening!"
But Rosemary's dreams never had a character like the Tim Carey-esque Ivan Agar as Dr. Karl's mute body building "Indian," Laughing Crow. Chopping wood in the yard, never speaking, he seems like the inspiration for the guy in Jordan Peele's Get Out. As the Marilyn Burns / Rosemary character, Jennifer Stock plays only sane one on the hunt, but Dr. Karl convinces the others to think she's just paranoid and needs to lie down. As for Stock herself, her super long straight auburn hair, black cape, and terrible acting skills combine to startling final girl effect. As the only 'human' in the cast, the only one with any sense of what's happening, the only one with great 70s hair, we're right along with her.
Shoddy as it may be, the film works because when the acting is really bad it brings out a whole extra nightmare level to duplicitous characters: you don't trust them but is it because the actor is inept or the character is genuinely evil? As for the yeti, though it looks like a homeless guy in a sheepdog costume, to see it leaping around the woods is to laugh with delight, and just when you're expecting a Scooby Doo- denouement it goes way darker, and then brings in a HAM radio!
Apparently this is the restored version, so there's finally previously edited out random bits like a dying wife crawling along with a toaster across the bathroom floor to hurl it into her husband's bath, and a head-scratching decapitation prologue that will leave you wondering whether the the coconut with a Halloween mask on falling into the swimming pool was meant to be ceremonial (like some effigy) or a human sacrifice that's just really really badly done? Then it hit me - that's what this kind of shit's all about - film is itself ceremonial. That cocoanut scene looks so familiar I feel like I shot it myself for a super 8mm Conan-inspired film Alan and I did in 1981 (ours just rolled onto the grass - we didn't have a pool). That's 'uncanny' all right. It even looks like the same mask! Maybe it's even the same cocoanut (though our film was made some 8 years later and I don't think they last that long).
As we can never be sure if the movie is intentionally bad--as in things aren't matching up for a reason that will be revealed later, etc.--or just good at depicting the interiority of a woman losing her mind (ala Repulsion), or we're just losing our mind (ala Dementia), the film rests in uneasy limbo rare for even a well-made production. When key things seem to be missing in a scene we can't tell if it's red herring, danger signals, or directorial incompetence --is this not the root of childhood nightmares? Adults can always make us think it's our fault, that we're wrong, when we're kids - that we're just missing a piece of the big picture. It's their reality after all - we're just forced to live in it. That feeling never goes away altogether, even into adulthood, and a really good (or really, really bad) director can tap into it. Nothing is scarier than being dependent on an incompetent adult caregiver. Thus we're squarely with poor Karen, at the mercy of one of the stupidest most passive and gullible boyfriends in the history of stupid gullible boyfriends, a guy who lets the professor convince him that cutting up her friend to use as bait in yeti traps is perfectly natural- that she's hysterical for even complaining.
And the final act, with all the round robin dingus dialogue, and the hilariously chilling round of 'forking', is straight up from the pages of my own childhood nightmares.
Here his timbers shivered, unsoundly!
There's nothing quite as matter-of-taste as Andy Milligan. The off-off Broadway theater geek's Ed Wood, this Long Island misanthropist was a master of conjuring Victorian era mise-en-scene from NYC storefronts and old mansions, then filling the halls with long staid dialogue scenes and sudden punches of unconvincing gore. He had a connection with the Times Square distributors and his rough films went up at back-end fillers on all-night marquees mere minutes after being printed. For this oddly-named 1972 gem, the acting is surprisingly good, or at the very least, spirited, with something of the flavor of Rocky Horror Picture Show if it had no music or sense of spirit (yes - I realize that makes no sense) or if John Waters' company tried to do a straight Dark Shadows soap opera version of House of Usher while coming down off a solvent-huffing bender. Jackie Scarvelis stars, wearing a punishingly un-Victorian amount of white eye shadow and heavy black eyelash mascara as Diana Mooney, a doctor who's returned home to her cursed ancestral estate. (Those eyelashes are the scariest thing in the movie - you keep waiting for them to stick shut ... forever) Her new, urbane British husband Gerald (Ian Innes)--an unemployed 'painter'-- soon learns the family is all afflicted with lycanthropy and Diana is supposed to be busy working on a cure (it's why she was sent to med school on the patriarch's dime). The family is a real mixed bag of decaying nutcases that make the Merryes seem bright: the youngest is kept chained in his room and fed live chickens; the bedridden old father (Douglas Phair) drinks his every line like its Chatet Moulingon Blanc instead of Four Roses; Joan Ogden is the older sister who's sort of stepped in as the mother, and--my new favorite actress-- Hope Stansbury as the homicidal sister, Monica Mooney (below right).
A sexy willowy morass of Virginia Merrye and Mary Woronov (tall, assertive, and unafraid to project badass crazy without quotes), Stansbury's Monica is a homicidally-amped young woman eager to own a horde of man-eating rats so she can name one Ben and later shout "Tear 'em up!" as was the big catch phrase from the year before, in case you forgot (see intro). The rats element (she buys a bunch to eat up her perceived rival Diana) seems like it's coming -- we see some rats at the 'rat store'--but they don't really arrive or 'tear' anyone up - at least not that we see (there's a part where she shouts her version of the line and the screen goes red, but that's it). Anyway, the lack of rat attacks onscreen is hardly false advertising (the movie title never promises they'd arrive, only that they're coming). Supposedly the producer wanted some rats added in re-shoots to capitalize on Ben, the Willard sequel released the same year, but the rat craze abruptly ended, Ben bombed, and the Exorcist-fueled devil craze began. Oh well, that's show biz! (1) If Rats are Coming! sat on the shelf another year before William Mishkin released it, it would probably be called The Exorcist vs. the Werewolves or something - and scenes of a priest trying to exorcise Monica would be added and the scenes of her buying rats from a guy with half his face and one arm eaten off would be cut. In other words, this film is versatile!
Getting back to Stansbury, though. With her pale skin, long straight black hair, willowy physique and habit of darting around all amped up and giddy with hammy homicidal rage, teasing her deranged brother, chopping up her neighbor friend after she tries to blackmail her, or lunging out at her sister from the wardrobe closet with a knife, she's a perfect embodiment of the Victorian era devil girl - moving so fast the camera has a hard time keeping up with her. Does Melora Cregar or Dame Darcy know about this movie? They must. If not, they must be told! Where's my teletype?
Alas, Stansbury's scenes are strictly supporting compared to the 'good' sister Diana and her hunky mellow husband - both of whom do a surprisingly fine job with the material, those lashes aside. Most scenes are single shot set ups between two hammy actors trying to make a short theater piece out of every exchange, no matter how slight to the story or meandering and repetitive the lines (or improv cues). No one can ever just buy silver bullets (a rare glimpse of Milligan as the gunsmith), they have to endure pages of Victorian shopkeep small talk as if Milligan thinks he is going to stumble on becoming Dickens or Todd Browning through sheer disconcerted effort.
When enough of such scenes accrue, there's a rushed, gory, poorly edited (censored, with gore restored?) climax of gore and blood that happens so fast after all the endless two-person talking shots, your head spins. Frankly, it's awesome. Milligan's habit of shooting on 16mm and 35mm as his film stock 'ends' arrive, coupled to his Kuchar-style ability to mask lack of budget with colored plastic sheets (which also show up as costume accoutrements), the way his whites assume a death green pallor from blowing up 16mm to 35mm, I don't know - it just works. Unlike all the other crap in the crap bins, it's never boring, and you either want to keep hunting more down, or never want to read his name again. Show Rats alongside a typical Derek Jarman from the same period and art critics would have to be awake to tell them apart. Don't even bother wondering why or how this managed to be art, just dig the underground vibe, the way the camera spins and falls over when gore scenes come, as if the only time Milligan's camera can face gore is in passing by as he's running past it in the opposite direction. (except for a gruesome scene of Monica actually killing an innocent little mouse. Unforgivable? Perhaps, but it's the kind of thing underground films had to have, shocks!)
That's the trick maybe to all these films. Imagine seeing Rats on some late afternoon in the old 42nd St. grindhouse district back in 1972, nodding off on cheap smack in the back row and keeping your hand on your switch blade in case someone sits behind you and tries to lift your stash. Floating there in space, the whirr of the projector audible along with the sound of rain coming in from various leaks in the roof, is that not the best seat in the house to watch the worst movie in the world? Watching Werewolves today I keep wondering, why is this not a musical by now? The book writes itself, and having written, runs to America to shoot extra rat footage. Maybe it's because Milligan is already dead of AIDS (would he were alive in the age of director commentaries), a fact that once again makes us all grateful to John Waters for his years of relative monogamy (and/or caution). Milligan is gone but Waters' longevity has led to his deserved status as one of American independent cinema's true national treasures. His Female Trouble is coming soon on Criterion!! Milligan's Werewolves, on the other hand is here!
Run.
Also check out these old Prime Lists, don't miss a one! Some won't be around for long. Some are gone! New ones come!
3/17: International Hallucinosis Pt. 1 - 12 Weird/Cool Italian Films streaming free on Prime
12/16: I never said it wasn't terrible: 10 Sci-Fi Curiosities on Amazon Prime
10/16: 13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
10/16: Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime: 12 Psychotronic Vampire Films on Amazon Prime
1. You can still find rat and vermin (tarantulas) swarms devouring people in an array of post-Willard movies, from Italy (Rats; Night of Terror, Inferno, The Beyond). Italy always held onto trends a bit longer than us.
2. See Halloween, Darkness and Tick-Tockality; Phantasm
3. See my bigfoot time traveller hypothesis posited to Joe Rogan Bigfoot is Real but Isn't Here.
To that end, the old analog fullscreen (cropped) TV VHS dupe quality of the Amazon image I saw may actually make it more effective, adding to the authentic rusticity by evoking old nature shows like they'd have on back in the 70s during the grassroots boom (re: Ranger Rick, Waltons, Little House and Wilderness Family). Director Charles Pierce always keeps one eye on the natural world--the swamps and empty fields, enabling--rare in a semi-documentary-- an eerie sense of ever-mounting twilight and onrushing darkness (2). There's more bucolic, ominously natural magic hour shot heres than in almost the entirety of the decade's horror. The crappy dupe quality enables a Blair Witch sense of helplessness in the face of what the camera can't see. Here's a place where there's no light pollution or street lamps, and if the moon is hidden under clouds that nights it's so dark that a monster could be five feet from your door and you wouldn't know it unless it hollered. Especially memorable are the scenes of isolation young wives and kids at night, nervously sewing while the hound dog whines and mysterious howls echo outside and the men are all gone on ranching jobs.
The huge success of this still-effective G-rated film led to two sequels, a remake and a mini-genre explosion of bigfoot-themed movies and TV shows, all either fiction with a dash of doc or doc with a dash of fiction, or (the worst of them) just plain fiction. Many of these are on Prime --all but one or two are far too dull to waste time with except as background while you clean your guns or pluck the chickens. Check out another Charles Pierce film that follows the same overall style, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, and a film with much of the same folksy local-color charm also on Prime, Bootleggers, starring Slim Pickens, a riveting James Dean-meets-Bo Hopkins charmer named Paul Koslo and the inescapable Dennis Fimple. Good old Fimple also co-stars in one near-'must' of the post-Boggy slew, and it's next on our list.
3. CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE
(1976) Dir. Joy N Houck (written by Jim McCullough)
** / Amazon Image - B-
The success of Boggy was such that four years later, they were still coming out with these semi-true "expedition / flashback" bigfoot movies, and of all those that followed, this is probably the best, which doesn't say much,. Chicago University anthropology majors Rives (John David Empire of the Ants Carson) and his 'Nam vet buddy Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) head down to the Bayou for spring break on a Sasquatch research project, where they are soon intertwined with various locals, cute girls, a disproving but tolerant sheriff and, of course, the creature itself. There's not much of the creature but the scenery is all actual bayou and the locals are a nice mix, so there's that vibe, so strong in the 70s, that a blue state college boy could go down south and talk to locals and not run into cliche'd hostility and pre-judgment nor instant homespun friendliness, but both, in endless ebb and flow.
DP Dean Cundey utilizes plenty of picaresque magic hour establishing shots that would clean up real nice if the powers that be added some color correction (he'd go on to work at length with John Carpenter). With all the splices and scratches and fades (blacks washed to a fine greenish fog), emulsion scratches, pocks, etc. it looks like it could be part of Rodriguez and Tarantino's Grindhouse (Amazon gives us a nice HD transfer, ad odds with the source material is terrible state) but, in the words of Bleeding Skull's Joseph Ziemba, "imperfection only adds to the backwoods whiff. The Black Lake setting wouldn’t feel the same without it. "
And speaking of whiffs, the stole is showlened by ole Jack Elam's local 'edge of town' drunk (he loses his buddy to the creature in the prologue). Everyone who's 'been there' knows how hard it is to describe being attacked a giant hairy monster to the local sheriff whilst so trashed you can barely turn off the ignition and stagger into the holding cell.
Still --the climax with the boys running headlong into the monster, their scattershot response, and the weirdly open ending all add up to something very unique. The strangely intimate bond between Fimple and Carson as they drink around the campfire is truly original. They're not quite at the level of improv drunken bonding that Fonda and Oates had in Race with the Devil, but their heads are in the right low-key place (Carson makes great low-key use of lines like "What's with you and hamburgers, man?"). A refreshing change too is the way the build up involves the meeting and interviewing of so many character actors, The film meanders for little bits of business like a back porch country song between bigfoot witness Dub Taylor on harmonica and the writer of the film Jim McCulloch Jr. on guitar, and a gag with a "Keep off the Grass" sign outside the jail, that any sane editor would have snipped off. That it stays in is typical of the more relaxed pace of 70s nature-set movies and helps to make the sudden violent action more resonant (Tarantino was going for that a bit, I think, with those draggy talking stretches in Death-Proof.)Other films in this post-Boggy subgenre (like 1976's super-boring Sasquatch, also on Prime) err too much on the side of rusticity, presuming a drawled field journal note-based voiceover and languid shots of bearded guys unpacking sound equipment around the campfire will make up for the lack of actual thrills. Black Lake gets the mixture just right, and I like that the monster is never humanized or earning of sympathy, nor even fully seen. It's simply an unknowable crafty thing that protects its territory in the most direct and brutal ways. So add it up: eerie noises, Fimple (if you're a newly-minted Fimple-holic after this, let me steer you onwards to Truck Stop Women - also on Prime), low-simmering suspense, and a good 'in-the-moment' actorly rapport that gives every moment a chance to land. What's to strongly dislike, asides the library cue-cut score and that it's so boring?
4. THE CRATER LAKE MONSTER
(1977) Dir. William R. Stromberg
** / Amazon Image: A+
The gorgeous HD luster of the Crater Lake print on Amazon makes you wonder - would all these look that good if there was a decent negative and color graded transfer? Is there a good Boggy Creek or Planet of the Dinosaurs I should know about? Look at that shimmery lime green sparkle on the water surface in the top image. It doesn't even matter if the film is bad when you've got that crisp transfer and you know the monster is stop motion, even though it looks like the clay it's made out of is ever in the process of drying up, and when we see it underwater we see what looks like a plastic dragon head floating in a sun-dappled swimming pool.
There's other things to recommend about this homegrown monster film, but not too many. There's too much time spent on the the lame faux-hick antics of a pair boat renting locals who get drink a lot and bicker in a kind Mr. Wind and Mr. Kipp kind of way; some genuinely terrible acting by the local sheriff as he laments honestly not knowing what to do as everyone drops like flies around him. To pad the time, a guy in the city shoots the owner of a liquor store to get a free pint of booze (which makes sense to me, but a real alcoholic would take a bigger bottle!), and winds up being chased through the trees and down to the lake to feed the monster. There's another side story of a stranded magician and his cute assistant on their way to Vegas, who decide to rent one of the boats and, through magic, pretend their middle of the day fishing trip is occurring at night (the post-production team forgot to do day-for-night filtering). There's the usual meetings of the bewildered, incredulous sheriff, the intrigued local doctor and called-in expert, having drinks by the fire, looking at maps, sketches of dinosaurs, and wondering why their small town of all places has their very own plesiosaur. Did the meteor that struck the lake the other week heat up a dormant egg in the silt? We must try to capture it - for science! And money!
There's other things to recommend about this homegrown monster film, but not too many. There's too much time spent on the the lame faux-hick antics of a pair boat renting locals who get drink a lot and bicker in a kind Mr. Wind and Mr. Kipp kind of way; some genuinely terrible acting by the local sheriff as he laments honestly not knowing what to do as everyone drops like flies around him. To pad the time, a guy in the city shoots the owner of a liquor store to get a free pint of booze (which makes sense to me, but a real alcoholic would take a bigger bottle!), and winds up being chased through the trees and down to the lake to feed the monster. There's another side story of a stranded magician and his cute assistant on their way to Vegas, who decide to rent one of the boats and, through magic, pretend their middle of the day fishing trip is occurring at night (the post-production team forgot to do day-for-night filtering). There's the usual meetings of the bewildered, incredulous sheriff, the intrigued local doctor and called-in expert, having drinks by the fire, looking at maps, sketches of dinosaurs, and wondering why their small town of all places has their very own plesiosaur. Did the meteor that struck the lake the other week heat up a dormant egg in the silt? We must try to capture it - for science! And money!
Thanks to the color-saturated restoration and HD transfer, the mountain lake location glistens gorgeously, so that all the tired bits of local color melt into the morning mist. As with the last film, the soundtrack seems lifted straight from the library, but in the end... who cares, that lustrous new HD transfer gets the mist rising off the morning lake so completely you can see the rainbow in the shimmer.
(1977) Dir. William Girdler
**1/2 / AI - B
(from: "Leslie of the Heretics") Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors and real animals--especially vultures, hawks, a cougar, a crazy dog pack, and a tarantula--the scene where the hawks and vultures maul the bitchy girl is terrifying because those birds are real, and they're right there in the shot, and her unease is palpable.
The key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals. Girdler doesn't do such things, I presume, and that's where the comfortable cult pleasure is for we sensitive types. Quick edits between what is clearly just well staged play wrestling with tame animals, close-ups of baring teeth, pink foamy blood, actors and stunt men yelling and running, an animal's teeth resting on someone's arm, and then the hawk looking down signals an end to the scrimmage with his cry like a gym coach's whistle. You put it together in your mind, Sergei! Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for sick freaks in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions and snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise.
It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. There may be nothing else at all to recommend it, scenery and Georges aside, but I love Day of the Animals, because even very young kids can tell when animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, no matter how many bared fangs, snarls and screams may come. Somehow, that's very reassuring, we can still be scared and intrigued but when we go to bed we don't feel sick to our stomach, we feel alive...(Full)
It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. There may be nothing else at all to recommend it, scenery and Georges aside, but I love Day of the Animals, because even very young kids can tell when animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, no matter how many bared fangs, snarls and screams may come. Somehow, that's very reassuring, we can still be scared and intrigued but when we go to bed we don't feel sick to our stomach, we feel alive...(Full)
The Amazon Print is good except the color grading it a little intense - the result being that everyone looks magenta/red. but so what? Maybe that's the Ozone up there! (see also on Prime- Grizzly)
-------
INTERMISSION
This is the point in the list where the children go to bed. Are they gone? Are you sure? Did you check under the couch? Are they hiding deep within? Get them up to bed, thermodynamically speaking!
 |
| The images above are from Island Claws |
--
Luckily these next two films look and are divino.
6. THE GREAT ALLIGATOR
(1979) Dir Sergio Martino
*** / Amazon Image: B
Up to now we've been hanging out in the USA, in local areas like Bouke Arkansas or Crater Lake, but we mustn't forget all the imports from Italy that rounded out our 70s drive-in and grindhouse triple bills. Here's one from the always endurable Sergio Martino. An undiscovered gem, Great Alligator blends the tropes of the Jaws ripoff with the then super-popular Italian cannibal genre and the Irwin Allen disaster film, telling the tale of a giant alligator god, long sleeping, on a remote tropical island, who wakes up and starts eating tourists when capitalist Mel Ferrer opens a resort and starts dynamiting trees. Filmed in Sri Lanka but meant to evoke a kind of near-Africa, the locals are notably diverse. Having already sunk a few million into the venture, Mel tries to keep the gator attacks quiet and avoid a panic, but handsome photographer Claudio Cassinelli demands he tell the tourists and local authorities, if there are any. Sexy Barbara Bach--rocking the same wet 70s bathing suit white shirt combination Jacqueline Bissett indelibly sported in The Deep two years earlier--agrees with hunky Claudio but she works for Mel, so is torn. That night, well, hell breaks loose, thanks to both gator and angry natives (the white man woke up their big scaly god with their interloping).
Rounding things out: well-crafted if obvious miniatures; a sprawling, well-directed cast (including go-to ginger moppet Silvia Collatina, Lory del Santo, Anny Pappa); plenty of stunts; immacultate gator-themed wicker headgear and breast plates for the natives; and a rich sound design which weaves Stevio Cipriani funky electric guitar and swirling cocktail jazz score gamely into a tapestry of thumping diegetic jungle drums, chanting, birdcalls, screaming that might or might not be human... and then ---suddenly -- a tiny splash along the water surface that quiets humans, birds, drums, on a dime- and sends the audience and natives alike jerking in its direction. Was that something? Or nothing... whatever you want to call The Giant Alligator, it ain't nothing!
7. HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP
(1980) Dir. Barbara Peeters
*** (Amazon Image - A-)
It's a kind of Jaws from the Black Lagoon as horny mutant salmon men infiltrate a Northwestern salmon fishing town to propagate with human women. It's all the result of a shady corporation's escaped experiment in fish hormones. Resident bigot Vic Morrow blames the local Native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), who's been trying to prevent the installation of a fish cannery on his native river. "Good" fisherman Doug McLure and his liberal son stick up for Johnny Eagle. Meanwhile, this is New World so chop chop, the monsters keep a-striking (Denise Galick, Cindy Weintraub and Lynn Theel are some of the unfortunate human women) and a cannery-sponsored genetic scientist (Ann Turkel) shows up to investigate (they're her 'children', so to speak). Directed by a woman, the monster rape scenes don't pack any kind of misogynistic undertone, so they don't traumatize innocent me like most such scenes do (they're so pre-cognitive deep id impulse they transcend morality, especially at the beach where feminine curves are so prominently displayed against the surging tides). Here, bathing suit tops may fly off but the girls never lose their dignity or resourcefulness -- even the scantily clad Miss Salmon (Linda Shayne) stops screaming long enough to bash her attacker's brains out with a rock.
Whatever, a fast hour in, and boom all hell breaks loose in one of the best monster attacks on a local waterfront salmon festival in cinematic history. The monsters themselves are good enough to not be bad, but not bad enough to be genuinely scary- with their long arm extensions and habit of swaying back and forth like bad Igor impressionists who just fell in a vat of sea weed, their incessant sexual aggression is almost refreshing in its innocence. James Horner's subtle but familiar score of eerie strings and harp glissando stabs hurries things along and the moody Daniel Lacambra cinematogrpahy captures the Pacific Northwest's swirling mist and the deep reds of Cindy Weintraub's undershirt (above left).
----
8. THE TWILIGHT PEOPLE
(1972) Dir. Eddie Romero
**1/2 - Amazon Image - A-
A Philippines jungle-filmed combination The Most Dangerous Game and Island of Dr. Moreau this is one of the better in a series of John Ashley-starring, Eddie Romero-directed Filipino horror movies from the early 70s (another Beast of the Yellow Night is also on Prime). This time Ashley's a gentleman adventurer abducted off his yacht by the mysterious Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay) so he can use transfer parts of Ashely's personality into wild animal people he keeps locked up in an underground cave below his heavily-guarded mansion. His daughter/assistant Neva (Pat Woodell) examines him in several sexy scenes, falls for his weird ersatz Elvis/James Dean/Ricky Nelson hybrid looks, groovy sideburns, and Steve McQueeny coiled cobra stillness; soon he's coming and going as he pleases, following Neva on her chores, looking askance at the poor caged animal creatures, including most famously, Pam Grier as the leggy panther woman (a highlight). The Bat Man, too, is awesome, especially once he gets the hang of flying with so much extra weight. Other animal-hunan hybrids are less successful, especially the unfortunate 'Antelope Man' whose mask paint is still wet.
Soon Neva and our hero are in love, then leading an escape through the caves, animal people armed with M-1 rifles, while Matt takes Dr. Gordon hostage at gunpoint in a separate direction to throw the grinning towheaded homosexual security guard Steinman (Jan Merlin in a great, slithery, teeth-clenched performance) off the scent. The all-night into the next day chase to the coast through the thick green jungle is on, with Grier's panther woman leaping down from trees upon hapless Filipino henchmen and ripping their throats out, and other less amazing but still worthwhile sights. Woodell gets one of her weirdest scenes as she tries to keep order with the animal coterie while alone with them deep in the jungle, trying to teach Grier's panther woman to share lunch with the dog woman, and to stop the monkey man from trying to rape her while she sleeps (all under a yellowish-green day-for-night filter). Meanwhile Ashley putters along in another part of the jungle, watching from behind rocks in a flutter of poor judgement and inactivity.
The last two are straight up local-boy Times Square bill-filler grindhouse...
one flight up from home movies... so it makes sense they're last, and least,
but in their lousiness... a lumbering lordly luminescence.
(1972) Dir. Eddie Romero
**1/2 - Amazon Image - A-
A Philippines jungle-filmed combination The Most Dangerous Game and Island of Dr. Moreau this is one of the better in a series of John Ashley-starring, Eddie Romero-directed Filipino horror movies from the early 70s (another Beast of the Yellow Night is also on Prime). This time Ashley's a gentleman adventurer abducted off his yacht by the mysterious Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay) so he can use transfer parts of Ashely's personality into wild animal people he keeps locked up in an underground cave below his heavily-guarded mansion. His daughter/assistant Neva (Pat Woodell) examines him in several sexy scenes, falls for his weird ersatz Elvis/James Dean/Ricky Nelson hybrid looks, groovy sideburns, and Steve McQueeny coiled cobra stillness; soon he's coming and going as he pleases, following Neva on her chores, looking askance at the poor caged animal creatures, including most famously, Pam Grier as the leggy panther woman (a highlight). The Bat Man, too, is awesome, especially once he gets the hang of flying with so much extra weight. Other animal-hunan hybrids are less successful, especially the unfortunate 'Antelope Man' whose mask paint is still wet.
Soon Neva and our hero are in love, then leading an escape through the caves, animal people armed with M-1 rifles, while Matt takes Dr. Gordon hostage at gunpoint in a separate direction to throw the grinning towheaded homosexual security guard Steinman (Jan Merlin in a great, slithery, teeth-clenched performance) off the scent. The all-night into the next day chase to the coast through the thick green jungle is on, with Grier's panther woman leaping down from trees upon hapless Filipino henchmen and ripping their throats out, and other less amazing but still worthwhile sights. Woodell gets one of her weirdest scenes as she tries to keep order with the animal coterie while alone with them deep in the jungle, trying to teach Grier's panther woman to share lunch with the dog woman, and to stop the monkey man from trying to rape her while she sleeps (all under a yellowish-green day-for-night filter). Meanwhile Ashley putters along in another part of the jungle, watching from behind rocks in a flutter of poor judgement and inactivity.
I admit it, in the past I've found these Filipino movies claustrophobic and oppressive-- I could feel the humidity and bugs, the sheen of moisture on every surface-- but here the colors are all popping and the air is fresh and clean. The image, which is surely from the recent Twilight Time Blu-ray, is delectable: the color correction cranked to eleven so everything glows with a deep ochre patina inside and a deep jade green outside, the overwhelming jungle at dawn. Traversed via cross-island chase, Steinman clearly relishing the chance to stretch his hunter muscles as he lopes off in pursuit and a nicely offbeat score pulses with pizzicato strings, bongos, rolling high-hats and jazz bass. There may be a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but who cares? The sight of sexy Woodell leading her armed animal coterie through the moodily-lit tunnels and out into the lush green jungle evokes both Yeux sans Visage and and--with her gorgeous long legs and game for whatever attitude--the sight of sexy Panther Woman Grier leaping from the guard's throat to the next is most reassuring, as are the startlingly impressive tracking shots of effect of the bat man flying through the trees and around the mansion, striking terror into the hearts of everyone but us, who may be too busy laughing and/or snoring by then. Life isn't always this good - better grab it whilst ye may.
The last two, the real dregs of the marquee, passeth next - beware!
9. SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED
(1974) Dir. Michael Findlay
*1/2 / Amazon Image - B
Along with wife Roberta (she was the DP, under the nickname 'Wings' in the credits), Shriek's director Mike Findlay is one of those legendary figures of the Times Square triple bill era, straddling the line between underground avant garde and home movie Adults-only (pre-XXX) marquee-fillers. Times Square denizens would flock to see these because Times Square denizens were in them. Shriek may not have images of the Deuce but it captures an uneasy de ja vu about paranoid nightmares and psychotic breakdowns, moments where you honestly aren't sure if the inconsistencies going on around you are because they're all out to get you, you're just tired and paranoid, or the film you're in is so disjointed it becomes like a nightmare from which you are actually awakening as your character.
In the words of Rosemary Woodhouse, "this is no dream! This is really happening!"
But Rosemary's dreams never had a character like the Tim Carey-esque Ivan Agar as Dr. Karl's mute body building "Indian," Laughing Crow. Chopping wood in the yard, never speaking, he seems like the inspiration for the guy in Jordan Peele's Get Out. As the Marilyn Burns / Rosemary character, Jennifer Stock plays only sane one on the hunt, but Dr. Karl convinces the others to think she's just paranoid and needs to lie down. As for Stock herself, her super long straight auburn hair, black cape, and terrible acting skills combine to startling final girl effect. As the only 'human' in the cast, the only one with any sense of what's happening, the only one with great 70s hair, we're right along with her.
Apparently this is the restored version, so there's finally previously edited out random bits like a dying wife crawling along with a toaster across the bathroom floor to hurl it into her husband's bath, and a head-scratching decapitation prologue that will leave you wondering whether the the coconut with a Halloween mask on falling into the swimming pool was meant to be ceremonial (like some effigy) or a human sacrifice that's just really really badly done? Then it hit me - that's what this kind of shit's all about - film is itself ceremonial. That cocoanut scene looks so familiar I feel like I shot it myself for a super 8mm Conan-inspired film Alan and I did in 1981 (ours just rolled onto the grass - we didn't have a pool). That's 'uncanny' all right. It even looks like the same mask! Maybe it's even the same cocoanut (though our film was made some 8 years later and I don't think they last that long).
As we can never be sure if the movie is intentionally bad--as in things aren't matching up for a reason that will be revealed later, etc.--or just good at depicting the interiority of a woman losing her mind (ala Repulsion), or we're just losing our mind (ala Dementia), the film rests in uneasy limbo rare for even a well-made production. When key things seem to be missing in a scene we can't tell if it's red herring, danger signals, or directorial incompetence --is this not the root of childhood nightmares? Adults can always make us think it's our fault, that we're wrong, when we're kids - that we're just missing a piece of the big picture. It's their reality after all - we're just forced to live in it. That feeling never goes away altogether, even into adulthood, and a really good (or really, really bad) director can tap into it. Nothing is scarier than being dependent on an incompetent adult caregiver. Thus we're squarely with poor Karen, at the mercy of one of the stupidest most passive and gullible boyfriends in the history of stupid gullible boyfriends, a guy who lets the professor convince him that cutting up her friend to use as bait in yeti traps is perfectly natural- that she's hysterical for even complaining.
And the final act, with all the round robin dingus dialogue, and the hilariously chilling round of 'forking', is straight up from the pages of my own childhood nightmares.
Here his timbers shivered, unsoundly!
10. THE RATS ARE COMING!
THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE!
(1972) Dir. Andy Milligan
* / Amazon Image - A
A sexy willowy morass of Virginia Merrye and Mary Woronov (tall, assertive, and unafraid to project badass crazy without quotes), Stansbury's Monica is a homicidally-amped young woman eager to own a horde of man-eating rats so she can name one Ben and later shout "Tear 'em up!" as was the big catch phrase from the year before, in case you forgot (see intro). The rats element (she buys a bunch to eat up her perceived rival Diana) seems like it's coming -- we see some rats at the 'rat store'--but they don't really arrive or 'tear' anyone up - at least not that we see (there's a part where she shouts her version of the line and the screen goes red, but that's it). Anyway, the lack of rat attacks onscreen is hardly false advertising (the movie title never promises they'd arrive, only that they're coming). Supposedly the producer wanted some rats added in re-shoots to capitalize on Ben, the Willard sequel released the same year, but the rat craze abruptly ended, Ben bombed, and the Exorcist-fueled devil craze began. Oh well, that's show biz! (1) If Rats are Coming! sat on the shelf another year before William Mishkin released it, it would probably be called The Exorcist vs. the Werewolves or something - and scenes of a priest trying to exorcise Monica would be added and the scenes of her buying rats from a guy with half his face and one arm eaten off would be cut. In other words, this film is versatile!
Getting back to Stansbury, though. With her pale skin, long straight black hair, willowy physique and habit of darting around all amped up and giddy with hammy homicidal rage, teasing her deranged brother, chopping up her neighbor friend after she tries to blackmail her, or lunging out at her sister from the wardrobe closet with a knife, she's a perfect embodiment of the Victorian era devil girl - moving so fast the camera has a hard time keeping up with her. Does Melora Cregar or Dame Darcy know about this movie? They must. If not, they must be told! Where's my teletype?Alas, Stansbury's scenes are strictly supporting compared to the 'good' sister Diana and her hunky mellow husband - both of whom do a surprisingly fine job with the material, those lashes aside. Most scenes are single shot set ups between two hammy actors trying to make a short theater piece out of every exchange, no matter how slight to the story or meandering and repetitive the lines (or improv cues). No one can ever just buy silver bullets (a rare glimpse of Milligan as the gunsmith), they have to endure pages of Victorian shopkeep small talk as if Milligan thinks he is going to stumble on becoming Dickens or Todd Browning through sheer disconcerted effort.
When enough of such scenes accrue, there's a rushed, gory, poorly edited (censored, with gore restored?) climax of gore and blood that happens so fast after all the endless two-person talking shots, your head spins. Frankly, it's awesome. Milligan's habit of shooting on 16mm and 35mm as his film stock 'ends' arrive, coupled to his Kuchar-style ability to mask lack of budget with colored plastic sheets (which also show up as costume accoutrements), the way his whites assume a death green pallor from blowing up 16mm to 35mm, I don't know - it just works. Unlike all the other crap in the crap bins, it's never boring, and you either want to keep hunting more down, or never want to read his name again. Show Rats alongside a typical Derek Jarman from the same period and art critics would have to be awake to tell them apart. Don't even bother wondering why or how this managed to be art, just dig the underground vibe, the way the camera spins and falls over when gore scenes come, as if the only time Milligan's camera can face gore is in passing by as he's running past it in the opposite direction. (except for a gruesome scene of Monica actually killing an innocent little mouse. Unforgivable? Perhaps, but it's the kind of thing underground films had to have, shocks!)
Run.
Also check out these old Prime Lists, don't miss a one! Some won't be around for long. Some are gone! New ones come!
12/16: I never said it wasn't terrible: 10 Sci-Fi Curiosities on Amazon Prime
10/16: 13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
10/16: Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime: 12 Psychotronic Vampire Films on Amazon Prime
1. You can still find rat and vermin (tarantulas) swarms devouring people in an array of post-Willard movies, from Italy (Rats; Night of Terror, Inferno, The Beyond). Italy always held onto trends a bit longer than us.
2. See Halloween, Darkness and Tick-Tockality; Phantasm
3. See my bigfoot time traveller hypothesis posited to Joe Rogan Bigfoot is Real but Isn't Here.
