341. Point of Terror

341. Point of Terror (1971)
Director: Alex Nicol
Writers: Ernest A. Charles and Tony Crechales from a story by Peter Carpenter and Chris Marconi
From: Pure Terror (the last Pure Terror; only 3 remain overall!)

A lounge singer begins an affair with a record executive’s wife, but things spiral out of control into a nightmare of murder.

While laying on the beach one day, Tony is approached by Andrea, the woman who owns that stretch of beach. They flirt a bit and he invites her to see his act at a local nightclub. She shows up that night, goes back to his place, and listens to the record he’d released and seen tank. Andrea is the wife of the owner of the largest record label in the country and says she’s going to sign Tony and make him a star.

They work on the record and start having an affair. Her husband, disabled after a car accident from when he was chasing her in a jealous rage, sees them. He confronts Andrea and, in the ensuing struggle, falls in the pool. Andrea stands by and watches him drown. At his funeral, his daughter from a previous marriage, Helayne shows up and catches Tony’s eye.

Tony asks Andrea to marry him, but she laughs him off. He then threatens to turn her in to the police since he saw her husband’s death. She calls his bluff, though, and tells him she’s in control of what he does and what happens to him. She leaves for a long trip and Tony starts seducing Helayne. Helayne has inherited half of her father’s fortune.

Tony’s girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant, but he tells her to get rid of it. Helayne agrees to marry him, and, the night after the wedding, Andrea comes back. Tony tells her he married Helayne and that he doesn’t need Andrea anymore. Andrea says there was a clause in the will that said Helayne gets nothing if she gets married before she turns 25, ie. Andrea’s still in control. Tony says he doesn’t care, Andrea starts attacking him, and he accidentally (?) throws her over a cliff. Police rule it an accident. As Helayne and Tony are about to leave, Tony gets a phone call from his girlfriend. He goes to see her and she shoots him to death on her front porch. As he’s dying, he wakes up on the beach at the beginning of the movie with Andrea saying hello to him. It was all a dream.

Or was it?

Yes, it was. THE END

Let’s get the “It was all a dream” trope out of the way first. The trope is garbage because it means everything that happened, everything you’d spent time paying attention to, didn’t matter. Yes, it’s all made up anyway, but even in the context of being something made up, it didn’t matter. It’s like the movie is laughing at you for taking it seriously. Also, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid move to try to impose a twist upon your film.

This movie, though, was begging for anything to make it interesting. Fitting that we’d close out the Pure Terror set with Padding: The Motion Picture. I had the damnedest time even figuring out what the movie was supposed to be about while I was watching it.

We spend a lot of time watching Tony sing, see that he’s not very good, and be told by other characters how great a singer he is. A quick glance to the top tells me that, yes, the actor playing Tony was one of the story writers. None of that tells us what the plot is or is supposed to be. There is one flash to a woman being murdered by a home invader and I started to wonder if that was going to be the picture—that Tony was a serial killer, or the disabled husband was faking his disability, or there’s a killer running loose in the town and these people are going to get tied up in that drama. Nope, it was a falshback to Andrea taking out a hit on her husband’s previous wife. That information comes much later. You’d think that would be the plot, then, Andrea threatening the people around her or actively ordering hits on women getting too close to Tony. Naw, she just goes on vacation so Tony can hook up with her step-daughter.

I could not tell you what the point of Point of Terror was (alternate pun: Truly, this was a Disappoint of Terror). It’s neither titillating nor terrifying, just meandering along for 90 minutes until the end where he wakes up and it’s all been bullshit. Skip it.

340. Unsane

340. Unsane aka Tenebre (1982)
Director: Dario Argento
Writer: Dario Argento
From: Drive-In (the last Drive-In; only 4 remain overall!)

An author arrives in Rome just as women start being murdered in ways described in his novel.

A film by Dario Argento. THE END. Highly recommend. See you next time!

Okay, I am going to say more than that, but not much more. The movie has a variety of twists so going through the entire plot would 1: take a bit of time since there are many incidents throughout the film and 2: ruin the end. In terms of content, this is a murder mystery so revealing the end reveals the killer, and that’s no fun. However, in terms of presentation, this is a slasher movie. I think one of the reasons Argento was able to segue into doing horror so easily is that his giallo films, his murder/thrillers, generally have the logic of a slasher pic.

In this movie, an American author is coming to Rome to promote his new novel Tenebre. Before he boards the plane, someone steals his carry-on and destroys all the items inside it. While he’s airborne, a woman who was caught stealing his novel from a store is murdered in her apartment, pages of the novel being shoved in her mouth. The killer leaves a note under the door of the author’s place in Rome.

And things move from there. The killer is harrying the author while continuing to murder in ways that echo the novel, the police are trying to investigate despite things not adding up, and we get visions from the killer of a woman in white wearing red high heel shoes.

In the end, the movie doesn’t make sense, which adds to the slasher tone of it. If you think of Halloween or Friday the 13th, we don’t begrudge the film hand-waving questions of how the killer would have done that, we’re there to see the results of what the killer has done. The same happens here. If you start to think about the events of the movie, holes emerge, questions arise, and you’re left feeling like an explanation was added after the fact, not arrived at logically from the story’s content.

However, I found it difficult to care about those holes. Argento is the writer/director of one of my favorite horror movies, Suspiria (recently remade though I haven’t seen that version), and what’s appealing about that movie is the nightmare logic that infuses everything. Even though this piece is aiming to be more realistic, the same tone is present. A junkyard dog climbs a fence and chases a woman into the killer’s evidence dungeon. In a sense, the movie is positing a nightmarish world of violence surrounding all of us and that tone then decides the logic of the piece.

I enjoyed it and highly recommend it. It’s weird, compelling, and done well. I’m glad this is one of the final films I’m watching for the Misery Mill because it makes me feel like I’m ending on a high note.

339. Weekend With the Babysitter

339. Weekend With the Babysitter (1970)
Director: Don Henderson
Writers: James E. McLarty from a story by George E. Carey and Don Henderson
From: Cult Cinema (only 3 Cult Cinema remain; only 5 overall!)

A man hooks up with his kid's babysitter while his wife gets entangled in a drug-smuggling run.

From the makers of The Babysitter comes the same plot again. The titular babysitter shows up on a night when she hasn’t been called (“night” despite all the establishing shots clearly being in the middle of the day) and the husband suggests to his wife that they take advantage of the mix-up and go out to dinner. Wife immediately gets angry because she has to be unreasonable and shrewish to justify everything the husband’s going to do for the rest of the movie and we can’t blame him for the choices he makes.

Sorry, that’s the practical reason. The narrative reason is that the wife is going to take the kids to spend time with their grandmother and they’ve been planning this for a while. She resents the husband asking her to change everyone’s plans to accommodate his passing whim.

What then transpires is the husband spending the weekend with the babysitter while the wife gets entangled in a drug-smuggling plot because she’s a junkie. Yeah, while the husband is fooling around with a teenager, the wife goes through b-grade Requiem for a Dream crap. She has to take her dealer and his team onto the husband’s boat so he can bring in a drug shipment from Mexico. We’re about 50 minutes into the movie when both of these stories really pick up steam, by the way. Until then we’re watching the husband, a director about to make a movie about youth culture, get introduced to the “real” youth culture, ie. he gets high once and screws a teenager.

The husband finds out the wife took the boat instead of going to see her family and then gets word that the authorities are searching every boat that comes into harbor. He gets into his private plane (fuck this guy and this movie) and finds his boat en route to the harbor. The man piloting the boat decides to dock at an abandoned pier, but the dealer kills him. Then the wife pilots the boat to the abandoned pier. That’s essential for the morality of the ending, which I’ll get to later.

Husband calls up the babysitter’s biker friends and they all head down to the pier where the dealer is getting off. The gang corners the dealer, chains him up, and dumps all his heroin. The husband swims to the boat and sails off with the wife. The babysitter watches from a cliff and says, “Ciao.” THE END

My big complaint with The Babysitter was that it’s was the writer/producer/lead’s sexual fantasy put on screen. In other words, he made us pay to watch his kink and that movie had the expected leering, exploitation tone such a project would have. Weekend With the Babysitter is an attempt to do the same thing but as a legitimate movie. The production is better and it eschews a lot of the exploitation elements. The reason that’s a problem is the movie hasn’t changed its central purpose: old man creeping on young girls. I mean, we get a shower scene where he’s soaping up her ass. You’re not fooling anyone George.

To compensate for the exploitation roots of the picture, the movie tries to include some moralizing and self-awareness. The former is not that surprising. Only a fine line separates exploitation films and morality plays in general—think of scare-mongering propaganda films like Reefer Madness or Sex Madness. The purpose of these movies was to profit from salacious and taboo material but to get around censors and local outrage groups by presenting them as warnings or cautionary tales: you get to see some titty, and that dirty titty gets punished for showing itself therefore you’re absolved. Likewise, I can’t find the quote now, but there’s that old adage that you can have as much sex and violence in your picture as long as its a religious epic. I mean, Passion of the Christ is straight-up torture porn, but it’s about Jesus so take the kids.

Anyway, the moralizing comes through the wife’s story. She’s a junkie forced into withdrawal by her dealer, has to steal the husband’s boat, and, while there, is forced into a three-way with the dealer and his girlfriend. This final moment is contrasted with the husband hooking up with the babysitter. Literally. The two scenes are intercut with the scores for both being different so you really feel the effect: the husband, who is good, gets to have fun fulfilling sex while the wife, who is bad, has to suffer through a lesbian experience for her next fix.

Let’s not unpack lesbianism as punishment trope nor the dealer shouting racial slurs at one of his underlings. Hopefully what’s wrong with all that is obvious.

The morality part climaxes with the dealer murdering the ships pilot. He has to for the ending to carry the proper moral weight. Like I said, the biker gang chains up the dealer and dumps out his stash. What I left out is his underling, who’s a junkie, is there as well and left sitting in all the spilled and spoiled heroin. He’s not physically restrained like the dealer, but he’s metaphorically chained to the junk and just as undone. The man piloting the ship had been a junkie, but is currently clean and, more importantly, kind to the wife. He’s morally tainted, though, by having been a junkie and being involved in the smuggling. We’re getting kind of Old Testament here, but as I’ve said in other reviews, exploitation movies tend to do that. Having sinned, he has to be punished so he’s thrown overboard and killed by the dealer even though, in terms of plot, his death doesn’t mean anything. They still pilot the boat to the place he was planning to take it. All it does is clean up the final punishments. If he were still alive he couldn’t justifiably be punished by the gang, he couldn’t remain on the boat because the husband has to come and save that, and he couldn’t just walk away. So he’s killed because you can’t even flirt with the underground.

So, here’s a shock: I hated it. I did laugh out loud a few times at how ham-fisted and awkward the movie was, like when one of the hippies is explaining weed to the husband. Those moments were too few and far between, though, and what is there is, as I note throughout this review, pretty awful on every level. On top of that, like The Babysitter, this is boring while also trying to be salacious. What it has over that film is a lighter touch, a less leery tone. The Babysitter felt like it could turn into a snuff film at any time; Weekend With the Babysitter feels like corporate remake of that exploitation content. Unfortunately, once you remove the exploitation edge, you lose a lot of the narrative energy. Since the movie’s not willing to push boundaries or break taboos, nothing seems to carry that much weight. I hope I don’t have to say this, but don’t see this movie about an elderly man hooking up with a teenager.

338. Star Knight

338. Star Knight aka El caballero del dragón (1985)
Director: Fernando Colomo
Writers: Fernando Colomo and Andreu Martín from a story by Andreu Martín and Miguel Ángel Nieto
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (the last one!)

An alien spaceship visits a medieval land and is mistaken for a dragon.

The movie stars Klaus Kinski and Harvey Keitel. It’s everything I can do to not write this whole post in a Werner Herzog voice.

Opens with a scroll invoking alchemy and the pursuit of “The Secret of Secrets.” Then we cut to Kinski, the alchemist, calling for an angel to arrive and show him said Secret of Secrets. What luck, an alien spaceship passes overhead right at that moment! Many people see it and the story of its passing evolves into that of a dragon harrying the countryside. The people refuse to pay their taxes unless the count and his knights (led by Keitel) do something about the dragon.

Within the castle, there’s a powerplay being orchestrated by the priest who resents Kinski’s presence and closeness to the Count. Likewise, Keitel is angling to be made a knight and marry the Count’s daughter. The princess is chafing against her father’s overprotectiveness and keeps trying to sneak out to experience the world. Now you have all the background.

The princess sneaks out, is captured by the spaceship, and then returns in a catatonic state. Kinski brings her out of it and gets her story about being inside the vessel and falling in love with the man piloting it. Kinski goes to where the ship is and is given a crystal ball (a computer for all intents and purposes) that has instructions on how to make the elixir of immortality.

The alien comes to the castle, leaves with the princess, and the Count promises her hand and half his land to whoever saves her. Kinski manufactures the elixir, but the priest and Keitel have organized a coup inside the castle and kidnap him. They all go to the ship where Keitel challenges the alien to a duel for the princess’ hand. She wants the alien to accept to prove his love, but he instead lets her leave. The ship flies off and the group head back to the castle.

On the way, the alien arrives with a horse and weapons to face Keitel. They fight, but Keitel removes the alien’s spacesuit by using a code he learned from the crystal. The suit transports onto Keitel’s body and the alien dies. Keitel and the priest return to the ship hoping to seize control of it, but it closes up once they board and flies into space. Kinski gives the little of the elixir that he has to the alien which resurrects him and allows him to breathe Earth air. The three return to the castle, the alien periodically manifests a halo causing him to be seen as a saint, and he’s given the princess’ hand and half the country. Meanwhile, Keitel and the priest are flying through space headed to parts unknown. THE END

So everything in the movie is said in Ye Olde English which gives the piece a strange, goofy tone. This isn’t helped by the fact that, in terms of content, it feels like the movie is trying to be a comedy, like it’s aping Monty Python and the Holy Grail except with one central plot. Even worse, Keitel can’t pull off the accent. He sounds like he’s trying to cover up a Brooklyn accent, like Stallone moonlighting at Medieval Times.

The comic effect is problematic because, in terms of production, the movie feels like it’s trying to be serious, like it wants to be a good, sincere fantasy movie that’s maybe even making a political statement. The priest is mean-spirited and conniving, ranting to Keitel at the end about how difficult it will be to convince a whole new group of people to give up part of their income for no reason whatsoever. I have no beef with religious criticism, but I don’t quite see how it factors into your alien and dragon movie.

Beyond the religious angle, I had the sense that the movie was trying to satirize chivalry and medieval governance, which, so? Golly, you really stuck it to those 14th-century monarchists. Since I could never put my finger on what the movie was trying to do, I never really got engaged by it.

None of this, by the way, was helped by the fact that the alien communicated telepathically so he never speaks. He only gives goggling, fish-eyed stares at everyone. Imagine Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, except mute. It wasn’t fun.

Which is unfortunate. I was excited when I saw the cast list and the basic plot synopsis. I think it’s a neat idea, a particularly good one for a D&D game. People in the region start spreading stories about a dragon and a strange magician menacing their lands, but it turns out to be an alien here for its own inscrutable purposes. Is it exploring, taking samples, planning an invasion? How do the characters find out about it, encounter it, react to it? What are the alien’s powers—does it have its own magic, psychic abilities, high technology? You can do a lot with the idea. This movie, I think, wanted to, but didn’t pull it off. I’d recommend skipping it. There is some fun to be had riffing it, but because it seems to be trying to be funny on its own, you’d be spending a lot of time noting how jokes fall flat.

337. Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory

337. Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory aka Lycanthropus (1961)
Director: Paolo Heusch
Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi
From: Chilling (the last one!)
Watch: archive.org

Girls at a reform school are being brutally murdered. Could it be the philandering professor, the creeping caretaker, or the new doctor with a disturbing past?

WARNING: The title and blurb are more exciting than anything in this dull-as-dirt movie, a movie I’ve watched far too many times for how much I don’t enjoy it. I’ll get to my history with this flick in a moment, first, the plot.

The setting is a girls’ dormitory/reform school. Julian, a new professor has just arrived and is told the girls there (all played by women so check off “elderly teens” on your bad movie trope list) would otherwise be in a reform school, but are being given a second chance. Julian, likewise is getting a second chance. He and the headmaster have a mutual friend so he’s being hired despite having previously been a doctor and stripped of his license for “reasons better left unsaid.”

The reasons, by the way, are that he was fired from his previous job for killing a patient he’d taken as a lover. White guys: can’t be wrong, only fail up. (mark that trope too).

That night, Mary, a student at the school runs off to meet up with a philandering professor. (mark “pedophile”) She wants him to get her out of the school or she’ll reveal their relationship. He wants the letters he’s sent her. One her way back to the dorm, she’s killed by a werewolf.

Priscilla, Mary’s friend, starts investigating the death. Priscilla is in the school for attempted murder because she nearly killed a sailor that was attacking Mary when they lived together. It’s not clear from how it’s told if the sailor was Mary’s lover or a John or if the movie wants us to see Priscilla as a victim of circumstance or as someone who’s not as noble as she acts. I’d chalk that up to the translation (oh yeah, mark “dubbing”). Anyway, Priscilla starts uncovering all the details: Mary’s liason’s, Julian’s past, and even encounters the werewolf. She’s threatened by the philanderer’s wife, but then the wife is murdered.

Yada yada, the woman who died under Julian’s care was a werewolf and she died as he was perfecting her treatment. The philanderer orders the caretaker to find Mary’s letters, but the caretaker is caught in the dorm, flees, and falls from a tower to his death. The headmaster finds the letters on the body, confronts the philanderer, and hands the letters over. Julian and Priscilla visit the philanderer that night as he’s packing to flee the area, confront him with what they know, and he commits suicide.

Meanwhile, we see the headmistress doing experiments on a wolf. The werewolf comes in, she injects him, and he turns into the headmaster. Before she can deliver the second injection and cure him, the wolf she was working on attacks and kills her. The next night, the headmaster turns into a werewolf, tries to attack Priscilla, but Julian shoots him. They get the full story from the headmaster before he dies and Julian and Priscilla leave together. THE END

As I said, I’ve watched this movie a lot, and never on any horror host show. It’s just too boring. The most compelling part is the incongruous opening song, “The Ghoul in School,” which is missing from my print. I think that may be due to some copyright trick/workaround, but the song is a hoot and you should check it out.

I first saw this movie almost twenty years ago on a different cheapo movie box set with some roommates who went on to tell me to kill my dog. They sucked, but it turns out I’m not the guy you cross. We were all riffing it and having a good time when, about twenty minutes before the end, we all passed out. We weren’t drinking, weren’t using any substances, weren’t even flagging in the run-up to passing out, we just all went like someone had thrown a switch. I watched it a few times since then just to see the end and in previous attempts to go through these sets. Most recently, I sat down to write a riff script for the movie as part of a horror host show I was putting together with a friend. I tell ya, if the movie is boring to watch straight through, it’s excruciating to watch in 15-second chunks, constantly pausing to write gags and annotations.

To put it another way, the movie is highly riffable and I recommend it in that context. On its own, it’s really dull and I’m not 100% sure why. Part of the problem is it commits to the white guy as the hero (mark your list). Priscilla is the hero for the first third to half of the movie and then the attention and narrative agency switches to Julian. He’s not the hero, he’s one of the red herrings. When we move away from Priscilla, who’s pretty awesome as a hero, we lose a lot of the investment in solving the mystery. Yes, she wants to reveal the werewolf to protect herself, but she’s also trying to avenge her friend and root out the corruption at the core of this school. When you shift the burden of the investigation to Julian, you lose the personal investment in previous victims as well as the impetus to clean up the organization. In fact, he’s part of the corruption (although he’s actually been hired to share his research on a cure for lycanthropy, but, again, that becomes a new motivation arriving pretty late in the film).

Also, the movie’s called Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory. As Nelson says of Naked Lunch, “I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.” I know I bag on a lot of these movies for gratuitous nudity so I sound like a hypocrite when I ding a flick for not being more salacious, and I’ll try to avoid that here. My complaint is that there’s a level of gleeful absurdity promised by the title that isn’t followed through. Also, the werewolf is never in the dormitory. The werewolf isn’t in the movie much at all. A werewolf movie needs more werewolf attacks, especially if it has one within the first five minutes.

I will say I enjoyed the movie more this time compared to the other times I’d watched it. That may be due to context—I’m grateful that it’s not another Marimark production—or may be due to familiarity—I could watch it with nostalgia. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still boring, but I wouldn’t tell you to stay way. I would say make sure you’re ready to rip into it and have friends with you to keep you awake.

This movie is in the public domain and available from archive.org here.

336. The Thirsty Dead

336. The Thirsty Dead (1974)
Director: Terry Becker
Writers: Charles Dennis from a story by Terry Becker and Lou Whitehill
From: Pure Terror (only 1 remains!)
Watch: archive.org

A death cult uses the blood of kidnapped women as an ingredient in their immortality serum.

A cult is kidnapping women in Manila and yet no one thinks to call Black Cobra to save the day. Consider my suspension of disbelief gone! Although we hear that many women are being taken, we follow a specific group of four. They’re taken into the jungle where they meet a cult whose goals are unclear at first. Eventually, our main character Laura learns that they’ve had visions of her coming. Who she’s supposed to be or why she’s important isn’t clear, but the cult wants her to join them.

The cult is an immortality cult that bleeds its victims and mixes the blood with special herbs to remain eternally young. Laura is going to be inducted, but watches the cultist drain one of her fellow captives which makes her refuse. She gathers the other women she was kidnapped with and escapes, but they’re captured and sent back to the cult. The high priest, though, has had a change of heart and decides to help her and her friends escape. One woman refuses, slightly misunderstanding the situation. She thinks if Laura refuses the offer to live forever, one of them can take it instead. She tries to tell the high priestess that she’ll join the cult, but falls into a pit and dies.

The other three women, with the help of the high priest, escape, but he starts aging rapidly once he crosses the magical barrier surrounding the cult’s land. He stays behind and dies as the women flag down a passing motorist and return to the city. Laura comes back with the authorities, but they can’t find any trace of the cult. The high priestess watches through a telescope as Laura says, “I was there.” THE END

Another movie without much going on. While there are two escape attempts and the horrific revelation of what the cult’s doing as well as what awaits those who refuse to be inducted, the moments all stand apart. It’s not that there’s no connective tissue, it’s that there isn’t much lead-up or foreshadowing of anything. The movie has an ambling tone to it, if that makes sense. We don’t jump from scene to scene nor do we gallop through events, we move at a nice casual pace through each essential plot point, never revealing too much or putting much weight on any revelation. What’s lacking from the movie is any sort of tone—either perilous or strange. The nature of the threat the women are facing isn’t particularly clear to the characters and it’s not made clear to us. Likewise, the surrealism of being offered membership of a cult that dreamed of you before your arrival isn’t played with at all. It’s all just kind of bland.

I feel like I’ve had a string of these lately, the movies that I recommend neither for watching nor avoiding. This ones feels a little slighter than the others, a little more nothing, but not so much as, say your typical Marimark film. I feel like everyone involved in this movie did the work, but only the bare minimum, like it was something they worked on between gigs in commercials.

While I’m not recommending it, I will note that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. I don’t know that it has much riffing potential, but it might be fun to use a b-roll in an editing project or for a music video.

335. Van Nuys Blvd.

335. Van Nuys Blvd. (1979)
Director: William Sachs
Writer: William Sachs
From: Cult Cinema (only 4 remain!)

A group of people meet each other around Van Nuys Blvd. and form relationships.

The final entry in the “Vansploitation” trilogy that includes The Van and Malibu Beach and, I think, the final Marimark production. I haven’t watched it yet, but I can tell you it sucks and you should skip it.

Now I’ve watched it and I can say… I didn’t hate it. The two previous entries in this sort-of trilogy, frankly, were pretty rapey and encouraged you to root for the creepiest characters in the picture. This one still makes the mistake of rooting for the creep, but sidesteps rape by having *shock* consent!, those ignoring consent being coded as the villains, and the creep being called a creep. If anything holds the movie back, it’s that there’s no plot. We just watch these people hang out for a few days.

Anyway, here’s what happens. Bobby likes drag racing his van, but there’s no competition in his town so he heads out to Van Nuys Blvd. to live it up there. As soon as he arrives, he hooks up with Wanda, a waitress at a drive-in. Moon pulls up next to Bobby in her van and challenges him to a drag race. Unfortunately, they’re stopped by the cops before they can figure out who won. Camille is riding with Moon and also gets arrested.

In the jail cell, they meet Chooch, an older guy who drives his hot rod up and down the strip. He’s been arrested by the primary asshole cop, Zass, who he grew up with. Also arrested is Greg, the creep. He saw Camille earlier and told her he’d dreamt of her. This leads to a fight between him and the guy she’s with that ends with them destroying each other’s cars. Greg continues to be a creep in the jail cell, suggesting they all go to the amusement park the next day once they get out since that was part of his dream too.

To be fair, Greg is not as much of a creep as some of the other guys in these Marimark productions. It’s just that his inciting incident of having dreamed of Camille and feeling entitled to tell her this and expect that she’ll throw over the guy she’s with to be with him feels like a not-great variation on the “nice guy” trope. “He dreamed of her so he doesn’t have to do the work of actually appealing to or attracting her.”

The five of them do go to the amusement park the next day, though, and generally start pairing off—Greg with Camille, Bobby with Moon. Greg keeps giving Chooch grief because he’s not a fan of roller coasters and that leads to Camille and Moon calling him a creep.

Meanwhile, Officer Zass has picked up Wanda, driven her to an isolated stretch of beach, and is trying to rape her in the back of the cop car. She suddenly starts being into it and I was about to say, “Fuck this movie,” but it’s a ploy to screw over Zass. She ends up handcuffing him to his car wearing just his boxer shorts and abandons him. He’s there for the rest of the movie begin tormented by various passers-by.

Wanda is picked up by Chooch and they fall in love. When he introduces her to the other four, there’s a hint that there may be trouble since Bobby hooked up with her, but everyone keeps their mouths shut and just giggles about it to themselves. At the end of the movie, Chooch and Wanda announce they’re going to get married and move to his dad’s ranch in Tennessee.

Greg and Camille hook up, but there are “hilarious” shenanigans in the process. He’s supposed to sneak in through her bedroom window, but goes into her parents’ instead and starts making out with her mom. Later, Camille smuggles him in dressed in drag claiming he’s one of her friends. The dad gets excited and sneaks into the guest room while Greg and Camille are both there, and starts molesting Greg. The characters are acting like they think it’s hilarious even though the idea is that Camille’s dad would try to molest one of her friends.

Finally, Bobby and Moon hook up, but still need to resolve the drag race from earlier. They race, Bobby wins, but Moon is mad that he took the race seriously, that, implicitly, he cares about his van more than her. So he pushes it off a cliff. Everyone leaves together and we close with a montage of Van Nuys Blvd. that we saw earlier in the movie, except Zass has bought Chooch’s hot rod and is now being pulled over by the cops. THE END.

So, yeah, not terrible, but not much of a point to any of it either. The movie was written and directed by the guy behind Galaxina which likewise felt like it had some promising ideas but just didn’t do anything. Also, like Galaxina, this had lots of pointless nudity right from the start. In a way it was nice because it’s the movie giving you its raison d'être. Why does this movie exist? Titties. If you’re going, “Titties and…?” this is not the movie for you.

And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. While it was better than I expected, I expected something really awful. To put it in perspective, when I sat down to watch this, I planned to see the re-release of Schindler’s List immediately afterwards to wash the horror of this movie out of my head. In other words, I expected this to be so bad that I’d need a Holocaust film as a pick-me-up. I was wrong (although it was nice to see Schindler’s List again, a movie that’s legitimately good and done well). Van Nuys Blvd. isn’t good, but it’s neither terrible nor particularly offensive either. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but, unlike a lot of Marimark productions, it didn’t make me angry. That’s the highest note I’m going to end on for those bastards.

Oh Fuck You!

334. Las Vegas Lady

334. Las Vegas Lady (1975)
Director: Noel Nosseck
Writer: Walter Dallenbach
From: Cult Cinema (only 5 remain!)

A trio of women plan a heist in the Circus Circus Casino.

Three women plan to rob Eversull, the manager of the Circus Circus Casino, who’s running guns and girls through the place (girls that he apparently assaults). The women are Lucky-the ringleader in a relationship with one of the guards; Carol-the magician’s assistant who owes $15,000 to bookies; Lisa-the trapeze artist who’s going to be sneaked into the office. The whole enterprise is being organized by a shadowy figure.

Not quite enough happens in the run-up to the heist. Carol is attacked by her bookie who then breaks into her place and finds the floorplan for the office they’re going to rob. You’d expect that to result in him betraying Carol to the guy she’s going to rob, but he instead threatens her on the night of the heist by accusing her of planning to skip town. Lisa is there, though, and incapacitates him.

The heist itself is relatively simple: during a special high-rollers’ night on the upper floor of the casino, Lucky will lower a rope from the bathroom window that will allow Lisa to scale the casino and climb into Eversull’s office. Eversull has just received a down payment on some automatic weapons, money that’s hidden in a secret drawer in his office. Once Lisa has the money, she’ll climb into a modified buffet cart being pushed by Carol who’s picked up the shift from one of her friends in the kitchen.

The plan generally works. Lisa slips a bit climbing the rope, but doesn’t fall. A sniper on a billboard across from the casino shoots out a car’s tire causing an accident and then a fight in front of the place to serve as a distraction. Carol, though, gets groped by one of the high-rollers. When she tells him “no,” he accuses her of stealing from him and she gets grabbed by security. Lucky has to run to the office and get the cart out which she manages to do just before Eversull arrives with her boyfriend.

Eversull realizes he’s been robbed and guesses Carol was part of it. While Lucky and Lisa go to the rendezvous point, an Old West amusement park, Eversull beats the details out of Carol. He has her take him to the park where he ambushes the other two, but he gets ambushed by the boyfriend—the mastermind of the heist. A minor shoot-out ensues that ends when Eversull takes Lucky hostage. The boyfriend says to shoot her, but, if Eversull does, there’s nothing to protect him from the boyfriend. Lucky goes free and they let Eversull go even though he’ll have to answer to all the crime syndicates that are being ripped off right now. Lucky and her boyfriend embrace and leave together for Montana. THE END

The movie’s not bad, it’s just a bit thin. We start with Lucky being told she has two days to pull off the heist and then gradually meet the rest of her team and learn about their situations and motivations. Only her team is two people and their situations and motivations are pretty straightforward: Carol is a gambler who owes a lot of money to violent bookies and Lisa is a trapeze artist who’s becoming afraid of heights. If anyone’s role and motivation is unclear, it’s Lucky’s, but we never get much about her. Her job is to be the good-luck girl for high-rollers at the casino--essentially a professional gambler who gambles with other people’s money. I think. I don’t know much about Vegas or gambling. That’s what it looked like from the movie.

I wanted more character, more incident. The modern touchstones for heist movies is the Oceans franchise, and with those you not only have teams of 8, 11, 12, and 13, respectively, you also have the failure of the heist getting flipped into having been part of the plan all along. In other words, the movies have twists. This movie is just a straight line.

Also, the movie had the opportunity to be bigger, to do more. As I noted in the description, Eversull is hiring sex workers and then assaulting them. This happens off-screen (thank you movie), but is a moment that isn’t followed up on. I guess it’s supposed to establish him as violent toward women so we aren’t surprised when he beats Carol at the end, but I wanted some payoff from the sex workers themselves—that they’re part of the plot, or their madame organizes some sort of revenge for him, something. Instead, the role of the sex worker in the plot is her same role within the world of the movie: to be an object that communicates another character’s identity, not a character herself.

I’m just saying, if this guy is victimizing people, have the victims be part of the plot to ruin him. That’s a really satisfying thing to have in stories.

Anyway, the movie’s all right, neither great nor terrible. I wouldn’t recommend seeking it out, but if you stumble across it somehow, I wouldn’t recommend turning it off either.

333. Lena's Holiday

333. Lena’s Holiday (1991)
Director: Michael Keusch
Writers: Deborah Tilton and Michael Keusch
From: Cult Cinema

Lena, on holiday from Germany, has her luggage switched with someone being hunted by criminals and has to sort out what’s happened before the thugs catch up with her.

WHY?

A Marimark production. The second-to-last one I believe. This one’s from the director of Night Club which I described as “A dull, dull film that imagines you’ll endure its endless white boy whining for the thoroughly un-tittilating repetition of nudity. It’s not offensive, merely interminable.” Clearly, I had very high expectations going into this one, expectations that were not met.

The movie opens with archival footage of the Berlin Wall going up and being torn down over a hilariously bad song about the Wall coming down. I found the song on YouTube. The official video is pretty close to the opening of the movie and, honestly, more campy fun than anything the next 95 minutes of movie have to offer. You want a recommend, watch the video, laugh at them, and never look back.

The rest of the movie, by the way, has nothing to do with the Berlin Wall. Way to go guys! You added another standard by which to fail.

Anyway, Lena has just gotten off her plane in LA and is waiting for a cab. Julie walks up next to her with an identical bag, sees some men coming after her, and switches her bag for Lena’s. “Hilarious” hijinks ensue with Lena trying to get to her hotel without her reservation letter (one of the thugs has picked it up). Nothing matters because nothing happens. How have I managed to avoid nihilism after watching all these pointless movies?

She ends up at a photographer’s place, realizes she has the wrong bag (28 minutes into the movie), and stashes a box of condoms from the bag in the photographer’s house. For no reason except to make it narratively necessary for her to return later. She orders a cab which happens to be driven by the same cabbie that took her to the photographer’s place. They figure out where Julie lives, go there, and Lena finds her body. When she brings the cabbie in, the body is gone and he doesn’t believe her.

Then it’s her and the cabbie hanging out until the hour and 12 minute mark when they hook up and the cabbie finds a diamond in one of the two condoms that had remained in the bag. The next day Lena sees the cabbie handing over the diamond and other material to an armed man and getting a videotape in return. When she plays it, it’s surveillance footage of her from the moment of her arrival in LA. The thugs break in, take her to the photographer’s place, and have her hand over the condoms. As they’re leaving, the cabbie shows up, reveals he’s a cop, and arrests the villain. At the station, she’s angry with him for using her and he tries to apologize when they’re interrupted by a representative from the condom company. The bust has given them such great press that they want to reward the two of them with a lifetime supply of condoms and a vacation package. Lena takes the money instead, and then drives off to spend the rest of her Hollywood vacation with the cabbie/cop. THE END

Pat Morita’s in this movie. It’s a nothing part, but I was at once excited and disappointed to see him. Cause he’s fantastic and this is garbage.

This is such a simple plot, a very 80’s plot in fact. Swapped luggage gets our hero enmeshed in a diamond smuggling operation. The hero realizes something’s up, the villains have several near misses before realizing that the hero has the goods, and you have various set pieces that ramp up the risk. Adventures in Babysitting is an example. It’s a very simple formula.

Lena’s Holiday instead decides to eschew all of that and just have Lena hanging out in Hollywood at a cabbie’s place talking about how much she likes James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause. They go to the observatory from that movie. It’s bad enough taking time out of your bad movie to remind me of a better movie, don’t go to locations from that movie and have whole sequences dedicated to saying, “Remember that movie? That was a good movie. I really like that movie.”

The movie wants to be a comedy, but often fails to have jokes. Stuff just doesn’t happen. For 100 minutes. There isn’t even any music. Yes, there’s the opening song and a godawful amount of montages with music over them, but no general background music. Whenever there’s a scene with characters talking, it’s silent. So, as an audience, we’re not getting any cues of what the emotional tenor of the situation is supposed to be. I’ve mentioned other movies getting the tone wrong with their musical cues, but this one doesn’t use any at all. The effect is every scene is imbued with an accidental tension, especially the light and frivolous ones. All the silence made me worry that something was about to happen, that some grim revelation was about to come forth, and then nothing happens. Because it’s not a tense scene, it’s a comic scene.

Like so many Marimark productions, they took something promising and just ground it into nothing through a tireless dedication to mediocrity. Diamond smuggling in condoms is a good plot hook that you could do so much with—and not even just bawdy comedy. Instead, the plot isn’t used until the final half hour of the movie. That’s when we get all the stuff about smuggling and the villains coming for Lena. This felt like one of the longest movies I’ve watched for this project, and I watched the two-and-a-half hour cut of Virus. I had high hopes for this one, thinking that Marimark might have another Hunk within them. IMDB has this rated 5.5/10. I thought it might be an actual movie. I was wrong. Don’t make the mistake I did; don’t watch this movie.

332. Future Women

332. Future Women aka Rio 70 aka Die sieben Männer der Sumuru (1969)
Director: Jesús Franco
Writers: Harry Alan Towers based on characters created by Sax Rohmer
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 1 remains!)

A spy has to infiltrate the matriarchal Femina to rescue a kidnapped girl, but finds himself becoming the center of an even larger plot.

In some undefined future period, the battle of the sexes has been won in one nation, Femina, by women who have turned it into a fascist matriarchy. In writing that sentence, I’ve gained 100,000 YouTube subscribers and many generous Patreon backers even though I have neither a YouTube nor Patreon.

A spy is on the run after having stolen $10 million dollars. However, as the manicurist he hooks up with reminds him, the easiest thing to steal is stolen money, so he decides to leave town. They flee to the airport, but are pursued by agents of a crime lord who wants the money. At the airport, the manicurist is kidnapped by the crime lord’s agents and the spy is kidnapped on the plane by Feminians, Feminines, Feministaniskis… obvious plants. He’s kidnapped by obvious plants since everyone on the plane except him is a woman wearing thigh-highs and black rubber bibs that don’t cover their tits.

Not gonna lie, folks, this one’s pretty strange.

So he’s taken to Femina, a place, as its leader Sumitra says was built with the labor and money of men. 1969 and it’s the same talking points MRA’s are trotting out today. Why won’t anyone debate you? Because your shit is 50 years old and tired. It ain’t convinced anyone in half-a-century and it ain’t gonna.

Anyway, he’s been kidnapped because Sumitra wants his $10 million. Only he doesn’t have the money. It’s all a front so he can rescue the daughter of a rich man who’s being held for ransom. Sumitra’s agents use torture to try to extract the information from him, and when I say “torture,” I mean “orgy,” but, curiously, it doesn’t work. When they threaten the girl, he spills the beans.

Inevitably, he escapes with the girl and gets captured by the crime lord. The crime lord wants the spy’s help invading Femina since the spy is the only person to ever escape the country and Femina has all sorts of money. Sumitra comes to the mainland, kidnaps the spy, the girl, and someone else, takes them back to Femina, which is then invaded by the crime lord. The spy and the women with him escape again, meet the manicurist (who was working for Femina), and she joins them as well. The crime lord confronts Sumitra, but she decides to blow up the country instead of letting men control it. Heroes escape, villains die, and Femina explodes.

Cut to a cruise liner being boarded by a line of women all in black. The woman at the head of the line lifts her veil revealing, I think, Sumitra? I’m not sure. This is one of those flicks where all the women intentionally all look alike, but that seems like the kind of twist this movie would have. Right? Oh yeah, and THE END. The closing credits end with a title card with “Mothers of America” in big letters underneath something I can’t read.

Wait, what? I... what? Is this a bit?

I don’t get this movie. I can try offering some background, but I’m not sure it would help. Sumitra is actually the character Sumuru created by Sax Rohmer, a pulp novelist most famous for his character Fu Manchu. Sumuru is the kind of villain you’d expect from cranked-out pulp novels of the early to mid-twentieth century: megalomaniac with globe-spanning plans that always end up thwarted in the end. Her plan is to have a world ruled by women. This movie is a sequel to The Million Eyes of Sumuru (which was riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 on local station KTMA) where Sumuru’s plan was to have her women infiltrate various governments, kill their heads of state, and take over. In this movie, her plan is to kidnap wealthy people and steal all their money.

Honestly, that’s fine for a plot. Our hero has to infiltrate the city to rescue someone being held for ransom and you have a criminal force trying to rob Femina as well. These all sound like the right ingredients for a campy 60’s spy thriller. The movie should just be silly.

Instead, it feels like it’s a hair’s breadth away from being a surrealistic sci-fi piece. The movie has a lot of downtime, strange shots and angles, and the pieces never come together. To make matters worse, my copy had a strange rising and falling buzz throughout most of it, and I don’t know if that was intentional. The movie is that kind of strange.

So I don’t recommend it. I feel like I should be saying something more, but this movie, as a final product, just leaves me confused. I’ve given you all the plot points, I’ve made reference to the strange costumes (think Barbarella meets latex-fetish), I haven’t mentioned the torture scenes. I mean, I mentioned one that’s just an orgy. All the others involve people laying on black plastic platforms and writhing. Yeah. It’s a movie that makes you say, on more than one occasion, “Am I watching someone’s fetish? I think I’m watching someone’s fetish.” While I did laugh out loud at several points in the movie, it was not, overall, funny or fun.

It’s a weird, boring flick, folks. Give it a pass.

331. Little Laura and Big John

331. Little Laura and Big John (1973)
Director: Luke Moberly
Writers: Luke Moberly and Bob Woodburn from a story by Philip Weidling
From:Cult Cinema

The story of John Ashley, a rum runner in 1920’s Florida.

Um… actually, that’s it. The blurb is the whole movie. We have a voiceover describing Prohibition and then the details of John Ashley’s birth and upbringing (which we don’t need). Then we cut to Laura’s mother who then tells us the story of John and Laura’s relationship, only it’s not. Instead, it’s the story of John’s career as a gangster. Only it’s not. Most crime movies focus either on one big score (think The Sting) or on the rise and fall of a criminal (think Scarface). Little Laura and Big John is trying to be the latter, but just doesn’t.

The story, what there is of it, is that John shoots his Seminole business partner in the stomach. The movie portrays this as an accident, although who knows? This is told, rather than shown, by the way. He and Laura go on the lamb to avoid getting arrested for the murder, but he finally turns himself in. His defense keeps vacillating between “I didn’t do nothin’” and “Who cares about a damn Indian?” which is really charming, and he’s convicted of the murder. Or of the bank robbery he pulls after he breaks out of jail before the trial. It’s not clear what the sentence is for. Anyway, he breaks out of jail again and starts running liquor in the Everglades.

Things escalate—the gang gets big enough that they start robbing the other bootleggers—and a rivalry is established between John and Sheriff Baker, the sheriff of somewhere that has a personal grudge against John I guess. It’s reciprocated and John decides he’s going to murder the sheriff. A snitch rats him out, though, and we have a big but undramatic shoot-out where the Ashley gang all get killed. Laura is left alone in a hotel room, drunk on whiskey, singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” We return to her mother telling the story and end on a shot of John and Laura as children playing together. THE END.

The movie has no throughline and no rising action. All the plot and connective tissue is told by Laura’s mother, and even she vanishes from the final third/half. So little is going on that the middle of the movie stops for a music video of “Player Pianna Man.” This flick is deep in “is this a movie?” territory.

While this is trying to be a Scarface or Bonnie and Clyde-style crime flick, you never get a sense of risk, consequence, or time. The gang robs a bank and… so… what? We don’t know why they rob it except that they want to rob it, the job goes off without any particular planning or problems, and we don’t see what they do with the money. They don’t go crazy with it or invest in material for the next job or seem to have the money at all. Not only do we not see them spend it, we don’t see them counting or reveling in it. Now that I think about it, while there are several bank robbery scenes in the movie, I don’t think I ever saw cash at all.

I don’t have much to say about this movie because, like so many others in these sets, there’s nothing here. The one point of interest is that the sheriff is played by Paul Gleason, the principal from The Breakfast Club as well as many other films. You should watch his other films. He was awesome. This movie sucks. Skip it.

330. Four Robbers

330. Four Robbers aka Si da tian wang (1987)
Director: Chin-Lai Sung
Writers: Kuo Chiang Li and Chin-Lai Sung
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A gang of four robbers work their way up the ranks of the Hong Kong criminal world.

Four robbers interrupt a drug deal stealing both the money and the drugs. This brings them to the attention of one of the Hong Kong kingpins. Initially, he wants them killed. However, when they not only manage to survive a setup that was put together to kill them, but actually kill a bunch of the kingpin’s men, he’s interested in bringing them in to work for him.

And what follows doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of the four, the gang leader is the responsible one with the other three making short-sighted choices that lead to trouble. That is until the leader gets caught in a police sting because he’s offered slightly more money for stolen watches than the kingpin is offering. He escapes, but needs to accept the kingpin’s help hiding out in Thailand.

Once in Thailand, they keep seemingly ingratiating themselves to the crime lords only to have those crime lords betray them, but have the betrayal thwarted by how badass the four robbers are. In the end, the four robbers end up in a shootout with the cops. They all get shot up pretty bad, but the leader says, “we’ll all die together,” and they go out in a blaze of glory. THE END

Just as it appears apropos of nothing in the movie, let me note here that the movie has nipple licking.

Ew.

Moving on, as I’ve said of other movies in these sets, if your characters don’t have motivations, you don’t have a movie. I was never clear on what these characters wanted. The only one of the four robbers that stands out is the leader, and that’s because he’s making decisions and reacting to things. He had a junkie brother who killed himself (in a hilarious flashback), and that’s about all we know about him. He has some principles—he won’t accept money until he’s handing over the goods—and seems to have a preternatural ability to stay one step ahead of the people plotting against him, but there’s no sense of what his endgame is. Does he want to be a crimelord? Does he want revenge on the syndicates for what happened to his brother? The only motivation I can glean for any of the characters is they want to be criminals. That’s not a lot.

So we have various setpieces with unclear stakes where the characters aren’t clearly differentiated. There are a series of betrayals, but because the leader is so smart, the betrayals fail. Instead of an escalation on the parts of the antagonists, every failure leads to them liking the titular robbers more which mitigates any sense of tension. As the movie went on, I found myself asking more and more often, “Does this even matter?” A lot of the time the answer was, “no.”

The movie does offer some entertainment. The voices for the dub are terrible, just hilariously awful, and there is more than a bit of a Poochie element to the heroes: they’re on screen all the time, and when they’re not, everyone’s asking, “Where’s Poochie?” I don’t know if that’s enough to make it a recommendation, though, even for riffing. It just never grabbed me on any level.

The movie is in the public domain so you can see if it meets your standards. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here so you can judge for yourself.

329. Santee

329. Santee (1973)
Director: Gary Nelson
Writer: Brand Bell
From: Cult Cinema

A bounty hunter takes in the son of one of his targets and raises him as his own.

Holy crow, Glenn Ford! I’ve seen some big names in some of these movies, but none quite as big as that. How did a Glenn Ford movie end up on one of these cheapie sets?

Oh. Well. That would do it.

We open on Jody, a young man waiting in a small town for word from his father. Meanwhile, his father and his small gang are riding toward the town. After six minutes, they finally meet and the opening credits begin.

Just to reiterate, the first six minutes of the movie are a guy’s dad picks him up. Now you have the movie in miniature as every part of it moves with that same lack of alacrity.

The titular Santee is Glenn Ford, a bounty hunter on the trail of the father and his gang for unspecified crimes. Santee kills all of them except Jody who, having promised to kill Santee, follows him neither secretly nor at any special distance. Eventually Santee heads back to his ranch, the Three Arrows Ranch, and hires Jody as a ranch hand. The only rule is no one talks about Santee’s bounty hunter work at the ranch and Jody agrees to those terms, although he's still promising to kill Santee.

Over the next eight months (eight months!), Jody learns that Santee used to be the local sheriff until the Banner Gang came to town, shot him up, and killed his son. That’s why the Three Arrows Ranch only has two arrows on its brand. During those months, Jody loses his taste for revenge. He tells Santee as much and asks to be trained as a bounty hunter. Santee agrees since he and his wife see Jody as a sort of surrogate son.

The current sheriff, on the cusp of handing the badge over to another man and retiring (uh oh, we got a Sheriff Dead Meat) comes to the ranch with news that the Banner Gang is coming through town on their way to the border. Santee decides to leave it be and promises his wife he won’t go out bounty hunting again. Of course, two scenes later after the Banner Gang has shot up the town and killed the sheriff, Jody and Santee leave to kill the gang.

We end up with a shootout in a brothel where only Jody, Santee, and the gang leader are left. All three shoot at the same time and we freeze frame on a triple-split-screen of each of them firing. At night, a carriage comes to the Three Arrows Ranch (whose symbol now has three arrows!) carrying a coffin. Who’s in the coffin and who’s driving the carriage? The movie drags out the reveal until we see Santee sitting on the carriage. The coffin contains Jody. THE END

The movie just drags everything out. This plot of a young man seeking revenge against someone who wasn’t quite in the wrong and ending up, depending on your interpretation, either with Stockholm Syndrome or with a better understanding of the moral order of the world they lived in would have worked as a novel. You have time to let this nuanced change happen. I mean, this movie hand waves eight months away and just tells us that Jody has let go of his revenge fantasy. There’s so little going on in this movie that you’d be forgiven for thinking he gave up on vengeance the moment he got to the ranch.

The movie’s not actively bad—it looks nice enough and the acting is all right—there’s just nothing going on. You get no sense of tension or even an idea of what the plot is going to be. Who, precisely, is the protagonist and what, exactly, is their goal? If you don’t have that sense of who the focal character is and what they want, then your movie doesn’t have an engine, doesn’t have a motive force, and we’re left with people just dressing up like cowboys and hanging out on a ranch. It’s just a whole lot of nothing. I wouldn't tell anyone to skip it, but I can't imagine anyone making the effort to find it.

328. Star Pilot

328. Star Pilot aka 2+5: Missione Hydra (1966)
Director: Pietro Francisci
Writers: Pietro Francisci, English version by Ian Danby, from a story by Fernando Paolo Girolami
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 2 remain!)

A scientist and his team discover an alien ship beneath a strange piece of ground. The team is shanghaied by the aliens and set off on an intergalactic adventure.

Oh, Italy. This is going to be delicious hot garbage. And only 80 minutes long! For further background on what to expect from this movie, Wikipedia says, “In the fall of 1977, to quickly capitalize on the public's fervor for sci-fi movies following the unexpected success of Star Wars, the film was dubbed in English and released in the United States under a new title.” So it’s going to be cheesy and deceptive!

The scientist is asked to examine a curious geologic event—an area of ground that shows the same effects land over radioactive deposits shows, but the effect is growing. He gathers his team and his moviestar daughter and heads to the site. However, they’re followed by spies. The daughter notices this, but is mocked and ignored. Get used to that trope of her being right and being ignored.

They examine the ground, dig a tunnel, and discover the spaceship. Even though it’s obviously a spaceship and the daughter says it’s obviously a spaceship, they don’t realize it’s a spaceship until they’re taken back down to it by not-quite Chinese spies who insist the doctor is working on a new super weapon and, while down there, encounter the aliens.

No, look, if I stop to explain all the bits that don’t make sense we’ll be here all day. It’s going to take me long enough just to describe this everything-in-a-blender sci-fi smoothie as it is.

The aliens need their help to repair the ship, kidnap everyone once the ship is repaired because they need the help to take off, and start heading for home—the star system Hydra. Are they taking the humans to be guinea pigs as one of the spies overheard or will they be returned safely once the aliens are back home? That’s one of the arguments on the ship as they’re being pursued by the spaceforce (aka stock footage from Toho and The Doomsday Machine) that the world, somehow, suddenly has. One spy pulls a gun, shoots two of the aliens, and part of the ship is damaged.

There’s no going anywhere unless they all work together so they table the discussion of where they’re going and focus on healing the wounded aliens and fixing the ship. They land on a planet where the movie switches over into being about intergalactic romance. Only the flirting is interrupted by an attack of ape men who run off with the two spies as the ship takes off, leaving them to their fate.

They find an abandoned Russian craft with two corpses in it. After reviewing recordings on the craft, they realize that, due to the theory of relativity, an incalculable amount of time has passed on Earth and it’s been destroyed in a nuclear war. The ship’s captain doses everyone with knockout gas, heads home to Hydra, but finds the planet abandoned and in ruins. They find a monolith that reveals the fate of their star system: increased radiation from other sources (Earth and its nuclear weapons which is what led the ship to investigate the planet in the first place) has driven all the inhabitants away to colonize other planets THE END. “THE END” literally comes up while the explanation is still being offered, like even the movie couldn’t wait to get the hell away from itself.

So, yeah. That’s a whole lot of movie without a lick of sense. As I referenced above, it’s just a bunch of plots all tossed together without anything that actually links them. You have The Day The Earth Stood Still with aliens visiting to judge our militarism and the effects that might have on them, Star Trek language with warp drives and whatnot, a vaguely Flash Gordon look to a lot of the costumes, and on and on.

That said, all that chaos just ups the goofy factor and makes the movie kind of fun. It’s not good. In fact it’s a little draggy since nothing’s ever moving forward or resolved. All of that just adds to how very, very silly it all is. This is a highly riffable movie and I’d recommend it on that level. It’s just so silly in all the right ways.

327. The Stepmother

327. The Stepmother (1972)
Director: Howard Avedis
Writer: Howard Avedis
From: Cult Cinema

A man’s life spirals out of control after he murders a client he catches raping his wife.

Back to Howard Avedis, director of Separate Ways, The Teacher and The Specialist. This is the final film of his that I have on these sets so just going to pull the band-aid off here quick as I can. And I will admit here that it took two hours to start watching this after writing that sentence. And then another day to finish it after writing that sentence.

So the movie starts with marital rape. Oh, it’s not marital, it’s someone who’s having an affair with her. Wait, no, we learn later in the movie that it was rape, but the movie’s both brushing it off as nothing and playing it as an infidelity. It’s… strange. Big surprise I took so long to finish this.

Her husband comes home, sees the naked silhouettes in the window, and murders the guy as he leaves. As the husband leaves to bury the body, an upbeat salsa-inflected song starts up over the credits. Yeah, cause we need to set a peppy tone for this movie. Also, as he finishes burying the body, a couple shows up, she tells her partner she doesn’t want to have sex, so he starts beating her. The husband drives away. What a cheery piece. The woman gets strangled, just like the husband’s victim, and the cops find both bodies the next day and are trying to figure out the case.

Despite being called The Stepmother, we don’t even learn that the wife is a stepmother until about 45, 50 minutes into the movie. The movie poster says, “She forced her husband’s son to commit the ultimate sin!!” giving the impression that the movie is about step-cest (and why I was so disinclined to watch it). Instead, it’s a variation on Crime and Punishment with the husband being hounded by both the police and his own guilt.

As the movie goes on, he suspects his business partner of having an affair with his wife and accidentally kills him. The partner’s widow, against the husband’s wishes, joins him on a trip to Mexico where they hook up. Meanwhile, back in the house, the wife rapes the stepson.

When the husband comes home, the cop confronts him with the shovel that was used to bury the body. The husband heads up to the cabin where he catches his wife in bed with his son. He gets a gun from the glove compartment of the car, his son asks for forgiveness, and the husband admits to murdering the rapist from the start. He’s decided to turn himself in and, as he’s handing the gun to his son, the cops show up, see him with a gun, and shoot him to death. THE END

The high point of the film for me was the husband accidentally killing his friend by shoving him off a roof. I laughed out loud at that. Also, earlier in the film, the husband is haunted by visions of his first murder victim constantly approaching from behind sand dunes and the ocean. If I made GIFs, I’d make a GIF of that sequence to share as, “Whenever a woman posts to the Internet,” and have “Well actually” hovering over the guy.

I will admit to not giving this movie a fair shake. The plot is fine, even interesting in its own way, and the movie handles it well enough. Except for raping the stepson, all the characters’ actions make sense. You can see they’re making mistakes, but it’s clear who’s lacking which bits of information. They aren’t making poor choices, they’re being undone by the situation. Also, the problem can’t be solved by talking it out. All the issues are difficult and fraught and there’s really no way that this won’t end in disaster.

However, that movie poster (and Avedis’ previous films) had me in a preparatory cringe the entire movie waiting for that, “Yeah, nope!” moment that does eventually arrive. Only it’s not what the movie’s about or even that major an incident within the film. Much like Separate Ways, this is being presented as an exploitation film when it’s just a straightforward drama.

The sexual politics are pretty frustrating. I mean, the inciting incident is a rape and that’s never quite taken seriously. Even when the husband is told that, yes, she had sex with his murder victim but that it was rape, he still says she killed his pride. Given that the murder victim is killed before he has any real lines, we don’t get a sense of who he was as a character and the movie never tells us how to feel. The murder victims are neither mourned nor condemned, they just vanish. If there’d been just one moment of characters talking about the rapist and saying, “that prick,” we’d know the movie wasn’t on his side. Instead it’d be clear that the morality of the movie is focused on the tragedy being inflicted on this couple by this rapist.

Instead the mom rapes her stepson and the husband is shot by the cops so… justice? Skip it.

326. Idaho Transfer

326. Idaho Transfer (1973)
Director: Peter Fonda
Writer: Thomas Matthiesen
From: Cult Cinema

A group of scientists secretly develop a way to travel through time and start sending young people to a post-disaster future to start a new world.

Yes, directed by the Peter Fonda. I think the only reason the movie is on this set is that some people think it’s in the public domain. I don’t believe it is. Instead, the movie is a curiously low-key sci-fi time travel story.

Isa returns from a trip to the future to lead her sister Karen through orientation. Their dad is running the project so they’re both going to be involved with transferring to the post-disaster world. No one knows what the nature of the disaster was, only that 56 years in the future, everyone is gone. On Karen’s first trip, Isa slips and hits her head. They go home and Isa dies while Karen is looking for help.

Some time later, Karen is just living at the camp site in the future, ignoring all correspondence from her dad. Government agents raid the facility and the teens involved in the project load what they can into the machines and transfer to the future. Shortly thereafter, the transfer machines on the future side stop working, implying that they’ve been disconnected in the past. They’s stuck.

The teens split into groups and head to a common point, encountering various things along the way. When they meet back up, Karen announces that she’s pregnant, but the others tell her that’s impossible since using the transfer devices renders them all sterile. This begs the question, why send young people, or anyone, at all? The plan seems to be to start a new civilization post-apocalypse, but they won’t, in any way, be able to perpetuate the species. So what is the end goal here?

Karen gets up early, heads back to the original camp on her own, and finds the people their dead. One of their number went nuts, murdered them, and then attacks Karen. Karen manages to hide in the transfer station which starts to power up. She returns to the present, finds the guards, and flees back to the future after changing the settings on the machine. She walks around a bit, grows faint, and then is picked up by people driving a futuristic car. They load her into the trunk where she’s consumed as fuel for the vehicle. A little girl riding inside asks how long before they, the people arriving from the past, run out and how long before they start using each other to run their cars.

Final text at the end of the credits: “Esto Perpetua” which, roughly translated, means “Let it be perpetual" or "It is forever." THE END

So, yeah, that’s a flick. Content aside, the movie has a strange tone. The acting is all naturalistic to the point of seemingly being done by non-actors. The result is most of the movie is communicated in a low monotone. Until Isa dies, it’s difficult to tell her voice from Karen’s. Also the nature of the future world and the horror that the characters are encountering is alluded to more than shown. One of the groups finds a tribe of humans who survived whatever disaster, but they’re all mentally impaired, living short lives like dumb beasts. We don’t see this group. Instead we’re told about it after all the travelers meet up to explain the new person they’ve found. Another character finds an abandoned train filled with people in body bags. We don’t see the body bags, we just see him opening the door to the boxcar and then returning to Karen.

Normally a movie dealing with a post-apocalypse, when not concerned with the apocalypse, leans on the “post” part, showing us the world the characters find, face, or try to create. Idaho Transfer doesn’t do that either, though. Instead it’s a lot of the characters just walking across the badlands and not seeing anyone. In other words, I don’t really get it.

I did kind of like it, though. Except for the very final end point (which is a cheap way of trying to make this a message movie), it’s quietly meditative in an interesting way. Everyone on the expedition, except Karen, is really excited about it and about how they’ll set things up to create the new world. They tend to treat Karen as naive if not a bit of a whiner, but Karen is the only one that seems to have a clear understanding of what’s going on and what’s at stake. Because her sister dies during Karen’s introduction to the situation, she’s the only one that sees how much everything they’re doing is tied to death—the death of the world and the attempt to counteract that. Only the project is futile. A group of a dozen or so kids can’t recreate society or the population. It’s just not possible. And once Karen learns about all of them being sterile, she sees how futile it’s been on every level. She’s treated as immature, but she’s the only one that recognizes that this is all a kids’ game.

And then she gets eaten by a car.

I think this would make for an interesting double feature with Virus, another post-apocalyptic movie that focuses on there just not being any people left. Virus is a little more focused on the world ending, but both do a good job of telling a different kind of apocalypse story than I’m used to seeing. With that in mind, I’d give this a recommend. The ending is just garbage, but the whole low-key approach to everything kind of works and lets the movie follow some interesting character choices.

And then she gets eaten by a car.

325. The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane

325. The Snake, The Tiger, The Crane aka Emperor of Shaolin Kung Fu aka Chuang wang li zi cheng (1980)
Directors: Hsi-Chieh Lai and Sung Pe Liu
Writers: Liang Chin and Sung Pe Liu
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A one-armed princess searches for patriots to help her kill the bandit king that has murdered the Emperor and spuriously claimed the throne.

Opens with text on screen and a voice over telling the same story but clearly reading a different text. Could we be on the cusp of watching my most beloved movie ever?

A bandit leader has gathered a personal army and is finally assaulting the walls of the Ming Emperor’s castle. Rather than be captured and humiliated, the Emperor orders all the castle residents to kill themselves as he himself is about to. His daughter, the third princess, refuses, saying they can flee into the countryside and rally an army of loyalists. He says there’s no honor in this and personally tries to cut her down, but only cutting her arm off in the process. The bandits raid the castle, find everyone dead, and the princess escaped. The bandit leader orders a search for her since she can challenge the legitimacy of his claim.

The rest of the movie is the princess trying to rally loyalists to her cause, taking them to challenge the bandit leader, and failing, usually at the cost of the loyalist who joined her. There are a variety of double-crosses and double-crosses of double-crossers and the hilarious repetition of the people who’ve aligned themselves with the princess realizing the cause is lost, telling her to flee, and her refusing as the loyalist gets pincushioned trying to protect her.

The pattern continues until the very end where things do and do not go as you’d expect from this kind of movie and the princess retires to a Buddhist monastery to become a nun. THE END

I very slightly loved this movie, and I’m not sure it that’s due to an error on my part. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a comedy or if it becomes comedy through the act of translation. I mean, I’m not even sure if the voices aren’t all dubbed by one person trying to sound like different people throughout. So the movie’s hilarious on just a technical level, but I’m not sure if the original film itself wasn’t meant to be a comedy.

As I said in the synopsis, the movie repeats the pattern of “Let’s slay the bandit king! Oh, we’re no match for the bandit king! Flee, princess! I won’t leave you! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! Flee princess! *Stab* Ow! I won’t leave you! GTFO princess! I flee! *Dead*” Even the final confrontation follows that model. There are also scenes like the princess’ first encounter with a loyalist where she thinks he’s an agent of the bandit leader following her. She hides in a field, he approaches and shouts, “Show yourselves!,” and a bunch of ninja jump out and fight him. Once he defeats them, he again shouts, “Show yourself!,” and another samurai emerges. They fight, he wins, and, again, shouts, “Show yourself!” The movie cuts to the princess hiding in the weeds wondering if anyone else is there until he says he means her and there’s nobody else hiding in the weeds.

That had to be a joke in the original Chinese, right? That can’t be something added in the translation process, right? Part of the final battle involves the bandit king using his carriage as a weapon by shifting in his seat. This has to be a joke.

So, yes, I highly recommend this movie. I was not eager to watch it because, as I’ve said in other reviews, I don’t know kung-fu films well enough to say what makes one good or bad, but this one surprised and delighted me throughout. I believe it’s in the public domain so have added a copy to archive.org here. Give it a watch. It’s silly fun.