279. Voodoo Black Exorcist

279. Voodoo Black Exorcist aka Vudú sangriento (1974)
Director: Manuel Caño
Writer: Santiago Moncada
From: Cult Cinema, Drive-In

A voodoo priest sealed in a sarcophagus 1000 years prior awakens on a cruise ship bound for Jamaica.

I know I’m in for a hurting cause this was the third movie in a row that I kind of liked. The other shoe is going to fall and fall hard.

Open on Guedé rowing to shore to meet his lover. However, another man comes out, they fight, and the other man dies. That night, Guedé is standing in the center of a ritual. His lover is beheaded and he’s stabbed in the neck with an asp ring. His body is placed in a sarcophagus.

1000 years later, that sarcophagus is hauled onto a cruise ship that’s headed across the South Seas. What could possibly go wrong?!

Obviously Guedé wakes up. He steals some clothes, but upon seeing Sylvia, the secretary/lover of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus on board, he reverts to his mummy form. He sees her as the reincarnation of his lover from back then (who was, I think, played by the same woman in blackface. So, yeah).

These are the only characters you really need to know about. A few others are introduced who are either clearly deadmeats or intended to be comic relief. They, of course, aren’t funny, but the movie itself is. We’re in pure good-bad territory here with hilarious dubbing and just strange lines. When a detective comes on board to investigate a murder, he says, “When I don’t have a lead, I drink gin,” then raises his glass. When the mummy leaves a severed head in a woman’s bed, he runs from the scene with an “oh jeez, oh jeez” look on his face.

Unfortunately the energy peters out in the third act. The movie shifts from the mummy running amok on the ship to the mummy pretending to be an expert on Voodoo and then the detective leading the investigation. While the mummy does kill the expert whose identity he's stolen in a hilarious way, the story really should have stayed on the boat with a gradually increasing body count and passengers beginning to panic.

Still, the first hour is very funny and I’d give this movie a light recommend for that reason. Also, the concluding moments really lit me up and it’s worth sticking around for. The movie’s not hard to find so do yourself a favor, gather some friends and snacks and go to town.

278. The Headhunter

278. The Headhunter aka Lei tou (1982)
Director: Shing Hon Lau
Writers: Shing Hon Lau and Cheuk-Hon Szeto
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A Vietnamese soldier works as a mob hitman in Hong Kong. He wants out, but problems arise when a reporter starts investigating his boss and a comrade from Vietnam arrives seeking revenge.

Much like Messiah of Evil, I don’t want to say too much about this movie because I liked it and don’t want to spoil anything. Also like Messiah of Evil, you kind of know what’s going to happen as soon as each part gets introduced.

Chow Yun-Fat plays…

Oh yeah, the movie stars Chow Yun-Fat. The “watch” link is right up there ↑↑↑.

Anyway, Chow Yun-Fat is Andy, a Vietnamese vet who now works as a hitman for the Hong Kong mafia. He’s haunted by flashbacks of the atrocities he committed there. He wants to stop being a killer, but his boss has promised to bring Andy’s family to Hong Kong from Vietnam if he just does a few more jobs.

Meanwhile, a female reporter is covering the various murders committed by Andy, but really starts catching the mob’s attention when she starts investigating a gas leak that poisoned an entire elementary school. The leak involved sarin and she starts to find a connection between the chemical and the front company run by Andy’s boss.

On top of all this, a man who had been Andy’s comrade in the war, but was abandoned to the enemy when he fell into a trap, is in Hong Kong trying to get revenge on Andy.

The various plot elements come together the way you’d expect, but they’re handled well. This doesn’t feel like an 80’s action cheapie, it looks like a real movie. Plus Chow Yun-Fat, even when dubbed, is a great actor and just brings charisma to the whole enterprise.

One criticism I do have is that the pacing is very strange. The first third is mostly just Andy performing hits (one done with real visual style), so it wasn’t clear what the plot would be. Then the reporter stops being just a background character, but that’s the moment Andy disappears from the film for 15-20 minutes. Now it’s all about her and her investigating this gas leak. The guy chasing Andy doesn’t show up until about halfway through if not later, so it’s hard to feel like there’s a developing tension or inevitability to these storylines coming together.

One other warning: there is a scene of gendered violence. Andy smacks his girlfriend (who’s only present in one scene earlier in the movie) and his friend tells her she was asking for it. Then she goes home and is raped and murdered. The assault isn’t shown in this cut of the film, but it’s still there and strikes a real sour note.

If you’re still into it, though, the film, at least the English dub, is in the public domain in the United States. Even better, my copy was in widescreen. I’ve uploaded it to the Internet Archive here. The print’s a little muddy, but it’s still pretty good. I’d say give it a watch.

277. Messiah of Evil

277. Messiah of Evil (1973)
Directors: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz
Writers: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org

A young woman travels to a small coastal town in search of her father, but finds a horrible mystery instead.

We open with a man having his throat slashed poolside. Then credits, then a long shot of a woman in silhouette, stumbling down a hallway. She’s offering a disjointed paranoid rant about being institutionalized. We then flashback to her driving to the small town of Point Dunes to find her father. She hasn’t seen him in years and has only been communicating via letter. However, his letters have recently become strange and she’s worried about him.

Seaside town, strange correspondence, a storyteller we’ve been told from the start is institutionalized? I smell Lovecraft!

She stops for gas and finds the clerk shooting a gun into a nearby field. Howling can be heard. He says they’re dogs, but she says they don’t sound like dogs. He says there’s nothing out there but squirrels and rabbits. It has to be strays.

A truck pulls up and an albino gets out, standing rigid and staring into the distance. As the clerk’s filling the truck, he looks under a tarp in the back and sees the body of the man killed before the credits. The woman tries to pay via credit card, but the clerk tells her to leave. Later, while working in the garage, the clerk is killed by someone jumping out of a car.

In town, the woman finds her father’s house abandoned. No one in town claims to know him, but a trio—a man and two women—had stopped by an art gallery to inquire about his work. When the woman goes to talk to them, she finds them recording a story being told by a wino about how the town went mad fifty years ago under the blood moon. The wino leaves and the trio don’t have any info for the woman. Outside, the wino stops her and says if she sees her father, she’ll have to burn him. He won’t stay dead otherwise.

The trio ends up at the father’s house because the wino is found dead and dismembered outside their motel and no one else will offer them a room. Gradually, they each go off on their own and witness strange things in town or in the house. In the end, we get the final details of what put the woman in the institution to begin with.

I’m avoiding a full rundown of this movie because, well, I don’t think anything’s gained by longform summary in general unless it’s to highlight particularly ridiculous parts of a film (which, yes, means I think most of these posts in the Misery Mill are a failure), and because I kinda dig this movie and don’t want to spoil any of the surprises.

Only there really aren’t any surprises. As I noted above, you get echos of Lovecraft very quickly and tonally the film feels very influenced by Argento. A dreamlike energy suffuses the whole production. My notes even say, “Lovecraft by way of Argento.” On top of that, there’s a palpable influence from Carnival of Souls at play. So the tonal cues kind of tell you what's going to happen, but that doesn't dilute the pleasure of seeing these scenes carried out. One sequence in a movie theater is done particularly well.

Initially I was finding a bit of ironic enjoyment in the film because the speech the woman gives in voice over at the beginning is so overwrought and ridiculous. However, it’s also done without background music so you can cut it directly from the film and drop it into a Halloween mixtape or broadcast on a radio show. Likewise, the scream they dub in when the clerk dies is hilarious.

However, the tone of the film took over after that, and rather quickly. For instance, when the woman is asking about her father at the art gallery, she initially is asking questions of a blind mute. A blind person selling art sounds like it’s going to be played up for a gag, but it instead serves as a means of heightening the strangeness of the whole situation.

And I’ll leave it there. We do get an instance of a man on fire, which is always a way of improving a movie from my point of view, but I was going to recommend it even before it arrived at burning man. As an added bonus, the movie’s in the public domain. I’ve added an MPEG-2 copy to archive.org here, but I’d only recommend that if you need an uncompressed version for editing purposes. If you want to watch the movie, get this remastered widescreen cut from archive.org. The colors are better and it’s the full image.

Because of its dreamy logic, you can watch this both as something you give your full attention to as well as something that’s just on in the background. It doesn’t have a plot so much as escalating incidents. Definitely bookmark it for future Halloween plans.

276. The Sister In Law

276. The Sister In Law (1974)
Director: Joseph Ruben
Writer: Joseph Ruben
From: Cult Cinema

Robert returns home after traveling the US to find his brother Edward’s life falling apart. As the situation becomes clearer, Robert may end up suffering for all of Edward’s mistakes.

Robert has been bumming around the US but has now returned to his parents’ house in West Chester. His sister-in-law Joanna is there to inform him of how life has progressed in his absence. His brother Edward, after selling a novel to great success, has had his next book rejected. He’s lost all his money gambling and now he and Joanna are getting a divorce since he’s living with a new, younger, girlfriend, Deborah. Shortly after Edward comes by the house to meet up with Robert, Robert and Joanna hook up.

Edward is a bagman for the mob and is supposed to pick up and deliver $300,000 worth of heroin from Canada. Unfortunately, the weekend he’s supposed to make the delivery, he has a meeting in LA. He asks Robert to make the trip for him, but tells him he’ll just be smuggling jewels. Robert is reluctant, but finally agrees when Edward says Deborah can go too.

Robert picks up the package, checks it, and finds out it’s heroin. Deborah has noticed they’re being followed. They ditch the tail and then Robert dumps the heroin into a stream. He hooks up with Deborah and then calls Edward in LA to say, “I’ve had your wife, your mistress, and I threw your heroin into a mountain stream.”

Edward comes home and now has 48 hours to come up with the money. He doesn’t and gets told by the mob boss that there’s a contract out for him. He gives Robert the keys to his Jaguar and watches from his apartment as some mob guys follow Robert and Deborah. Edward and Joanna grab a cab and head to the airport. Finally the mob forces Robert off the road, drags him from the car, and, because one of the mobsters is the guy who handed the heroin off to Robert in Canada, kills him thinking he’s Edward. Meanwhile, Edward and Joanna catch a plane to France, not looking back once. THE END.

For being called The Sister In Law, the titular sister-in-law isn’t in the movie much nor is she much of the plot. The title should have been, The Deadbeat Brother. Everything stems from Edward being an irresponsible prick and ruining everything around him.

Granted, this is better than what the movie initially seemed to be. With that title and then the first act of the movie being Joanna trying to seduce Robert, I thought this was going to be much closer to The Teacher in terms of lazing in sexual taboo. That impression wasn’t helped when Deborah is introduced to the movie. Edward brings her by the house to meet Robert and Joanna, and there’s immediate jealousy between everyone. Joanna thinks Deborah is pursuing Robert, Edward suspects Robert is trying to hook up with Deborah, and small fights break out. That the movie switched over to the mob plot was kind of a relief.

Unfortunately, it was still kind of boring. The movie’s not made with the perfunctory banality of a Marimark Production, but it lacks any sort of umph. Characters don’t seem to have any qualms about their moral choices nor are they really forced into any compromises. There’s no lead-up to Robert being seduced by Joanna, no period in the film for you or him to wonder if this is really happening. The third scene he’s in, which reads as the day after he returns, Joanna asks him to bring her a drink and is just naked. He doesn’t offer any resistance either, never noting that this is kind of weird.

The movie has one interesting moment. When Edward is in LA for the meeting, it seems like he’s pitching a script. The producers ask him if he expects the audience to care about this “selfish son-of-a-bitch” and it’s seems like the film is trying to be a bit self-aware. Only, is the “selfish son-of-a-bitch” Edward who’s writing a thinly-veiled story about his life but trying to cast himself as the victim, or is it Robert, the, I guess, hero of this film? While he’s more sympathetic than Edward, he’s still a bit off—sleeping with his sister-in-law and then his brother’s mistress. In between those moments, he says he can’t do anything bad, even if he tries, and throws a wine bottle out of a 16th-storey window. No one gets hit which is supposed to prove his point, but it’s a moment that moves him from being an innocent dropped into the weird head games of Edward and Joanna to being just a different shade of bastard when compared to Edward.

The weird family relations could have worked as a novel. Likewise, if they’d instead focused on the poor financial decisions of Edward throughout and made the consequences of that the center of the film, it’d have been a lot better. As it is, the movie’s not particularly interesting, not too inventive, and kind of dull. To it’s credit, it’s only 80 minutes, but that’s not enough to make it a recommend.

275. Scream Bloody Murder

275. Scream Bloody Murder (1973)
Director: Marc B. Ray
Writers: Larry Alexander and Marc B. Ray
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org

A young man comes home from an asylum to find his mother remarried. He murders the couple and then starts hitchhiking, murdering couples who offend his sexual morality.

We open on young Matthew using a tractor to run over and murder his father. No prelude; this is where the movie begins. Matthew loses control, though, and, after jumping off, has his hand run over by the tractor. Matthew gets a hook as a replacement and is sent to live in an institution. Years later, he leaves (escapes, is released?) and comes home the day his mother has remarried. Matthew objects to the marriage and murders his new step-father. When mom finds out, Matthew tells her the man won’t come between them anymore and she won’t have to let him touch her. She tells him she wanted him to touch her and Matthew throws her to the ground. She hits her head on a rock and dies.

From here, Matthew meets couples, hallucinates the ghosts of his parents, and murders the couple whenever something sexual starts happening. I expected the movie to keep doing this for ninety minutes, but he quickly meets Vera, a sex worker who he becomes infatuated with.

I had little doubt of how things would go from there, only the movie switched it up some.

Matthew tells her he’s rich and picks out a mansion to claim is his. He social engineers his way into the house and murders the maid, the old woman who lives there, and her dog. Then he takes Vera over and holds her captive. The rest of the movie is Vera trying to escape.

Various attempts are made only to be thwarted at the last minute. Vera finally realizes Matthew has some weird sex hangup and uses that to her advantage. She stabs him a few times with a towel hook she’s stolen from the bathroom and runs to the front door only to find Matthew has somehow magicked himself there before her. He kills her, starts seeing the ghosts again, and runs across town into a church. The ghosts of everyone he’s killed surround him, he stabs himself in the stomach with his hook hand, and dies on the altar. THE END.

Bit of an odd duck in that it feels like two partial movies stitched into an incomplete whole. Like I said, I initially thought it was going to be a repetition of Matthew getting picked up by nameless characters only for him to murder them—the violent drifter story but told from the drifter’s point of view. Instead, the movie turns its focus onto Vera and how she’s going to survive. In fact, the movie kind of contorts itself to have her escape attempts be thwarted by Matthew. She’s pretty competent. That she dies the way she does is really unsatisfying.

As for Matthew, he’s a real Nice Guy™/Incel type, very Ross Douthat in his disgust with female sexuality and demands that he be loved on his terms because he’s doing the right things (regardless of what the woman says she wants). On that level, the movie’s kind of interesting. I’m sure it wasn’t thinking in terms of toxic masculinity, but it gives a pretty solid representation of it. Matthew is enraged by women controlling their own sexuality, even within the context of marriage. Once he starts seeing them in a sexual context, he sees them replaced with the mocking ghost of his mother. The visual effects during those scenes are kind of interesting as well. The effects aren’t complicated, but there’s an effort made to make the situation strange and discomfiting.

Which is maybe the key thing to note about this movie—an effort was made. So many of these flicks feel lazy and perfunctory, and, yes, this is another exploitation proto-slasher, but the people involved are putting that little extra in to make it more particular. It’s not great, but it’s alright, and I’d recommend it on that level. It drags a little, but if you have friend with you, there’s a lot of riffing fun to be had. Plus, it’s in the public domain. There’s a copy on archive.org here.

274. The Teacher

274. The Teacher (1974)
Director: Howard Avedis
Writer: Howard Avedis
From: Cult Cinema

A high school kid starts dating his teacher, but is menaced by the man stalking her.

Read that capsule description again if you have any doubt about this being a whole heaping helping of “WTF?”

The movie starts promisingly. A man is examining something in a red coffin that he keeps in an abandoned warehouse. The music and visual tone is suitably forboding. He gets into his hearse and starts driving around town, eventually parking just out of sight of the local high school. Up to this point, I thought this would be a pretty solid thriller, something along the lines of Funeral Home in that I wouldn’t turn it off if it popped up on a Saturday afternoon.

Then the title card and theme popped up and I was done.

The theme song is all wispy cheerful with lyrics about how everyone needs “a teacher” “to show them the way” in love. All this while the titular teacher is eye-fucking one of her students. That’s right, just like Coach, this is another paean to pedophilia. So let’s not spend too much time on it.

The man, Ralph, follows the teacher home and then to the dock where she goes out on her boat to sunbathe topless (nudity just shy of ten minutes in. Thanks for showing us your priorities movie). Ralph is watching from the warehouse through binoculars. Ralph’s brother, Lou, and the student from earlier, Sean, show up because Lou knows about the peeping place. Ralph hides while they take his binoculars and lech at their teacher. Ralph pops out, Lou gets scared and falls to his death. Ralph blames Sean and threatens him into silence.

Does the death matter? No, not at all. Cause we gotta get down to fucking!

The teacher, Diane, starts hooking up with Sean. His parents know, but let it go on, and Ralph keeps stalking Diane, getting ever angrier. Finally Ralph tries to attack Sean, Sean tells the truth about Lou’s death, and his parents leave him home alone to talk to a lawyer. Someone who’s mentally unbalanced and knows where you live is trying to kill you, so why don’t you hang out home alone? Of course Diane comes over and they go back to her place.

Her not-yet-ex husband calls and this is treated as a bigger problem or threat than the stalker. Sean leaves, gets kidnapped by Ralph, and Diane figures out they went to the warehouse. Ralph murders Sean, Ralph sexually assaults Diane, and she kills him. She cradles Sean’s body and weeps. THE END.

I will say up front that I don’t know why I’m not as angry about this movie as I am about Cavegirl or Going Steady. Part of it may be that, while this film has a really grotesque sexual ideology, it doesn’t center on and glorify sexual assault the way those other two do. Still, the movie’s gross and boring.

There are so many ways you could make this plot work: students trying to protect their teacher from a stalker, frankly, sounds like a pretty good one. There doesn’t have to be a sexual element here at all. But this movie doesn’t just have a pedophilic theme, it takes the opportunity to double-down on it twice! First, Sean’s mother asks him to invite the teacher over for lunch. Another teacher joins them and starts flirting with Sean in front of his mother and her friends. And it’s not playful, it’s in earnest. The second time is Later in the movie when the mother and father have a conversation revealing that they know about the relationship, and the mother approves. The only reason the father disapproves is that he seems jealous.

The movie also lacks drama. There should be some tension with the stalker in the background—someone Sean knows is stalking Diane (but that he doesn’t warn her about). There isn’t, though. Likewise no big concern about the relationship being found out and what consequences might arise from that. There isn’t even any significant importance from Lou dying except angering Ralph. It’s all pointless. Skip it.

273. Rocket Attack U.S.A.

273. Rocket Attack U.S.A. (1961)
Director: Barry Mahon
From: Sci-Fi Invasion (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

An American spy tries to get details on the Soviet missile program while a general back in the States works with an industrialist to develop an ICBM.

This movie might be best summed up by the riff from Mystery Science Theater 3000: “Wow. This is really dull.” The movie’s so dull, in fact, that despite being only 64 minutes long, MST3k cut whole sequences because they were too boring. The show that featured Manos: The Hands of Fate edited an already whisper thin movie down further because there was too much padding.

So, the movie. The USSR has put a satellite into space. US intelligence fears the satellite may be collecting scientific data for the purposes of developing an ICBM. A spy is sent to Moscow to meet an asset who’s sleeping with a minister of something. The spy moves into her apartment to monitor her and the minister when they have their *ahem* liaisons and get information about the missile program. Eventually they learn that the program has a working missile and there are plans to launch it against the US. The pair try to sabotage the missile, but get killed instead. The launch happens and New York is hit, killing upwards of 3 million people. A voice-over comes in demanding that we not let this be THE END.

Painfully dull Cold War propaganda. Even though the basic plot allows for some drama and tension, the movie instead just has characters chat about plot developments that happen off-screen. The funniest part is the spy has to hide in the asset’s closet while the Soviet minister is meeting up with her. It’s like a cuckolded James Bond: instead of Bond bedding the villain’s love, he watches the villain bed his.

None of that matters, though, because the real heroes of the piece are the industrialists taking US tax dollars to develop the technology that will help us win the missile race (which we lose). When we’re not watching the spy talk to the asset, we’re watching the General talk to the industrialist about how missile development is going, constantly apologizing for not putting more public money into his pockets. How dare the government spend its citizens’ tax dollars on food subsidies and price stabilization—real complaints the film makes, by the way. We wouldn’t have to worry about this Soviet threat if we didn’t waste all that money on feeding people.

In fact, it’s curious (meaning, “not curious at all”) that this propaganda picture is so focused on valorizing industry and waggling its finger at individuals and civil society. Our tax dollars being directed to our immediate needs is a sin that leads to us being hit with a nuclear weapon. Our press reporting on the failure of our ICBM experiments is a sin that leads to the Soviets being emboldened to launch a first strike. Our citizens’ dismissal of air raids and their civic responsibility to take them seriously is a sin that leads to them getting nuked. Why oh why didn’t we just give the military and Northrup Grummun a blank check?

Coincidentally, I’m currently reading Gore Vidal’s essay collection, The Last Empire, where he makes the argument that Truman, post-WWII, kept the country on a permanent war footing in hopes of maintaining a certain level of economic prosperity. To do that, though, the citizens had to be convinced of a threat since a permanent war economy meant permanent war-level taxes. The threat, then, was the Soviets. I was familiar with that argument, but it was surprising to see it so nakedly embodied by a movie. The thesis of Rocket Attack U.S.A. is that efforts toward civil society, in fact any economic effort that’s not directed at expanding the military-industrial complex will get us killed.

I could go on, but I’ve already gone on too long about this garbage fire. While it’s in the public domain and I’ve added my (very muddy) copy to archive.org, I’d recommend against watching it. Find something by Ed Wood instead. It’ll have both more integrity and quality.

272. Road to Nashville

272. Road to Nashville (1967)
Director: Will Zens
From: Cult Cinema

A film featuring various country music stars of the time performing their hits.

I have little to add beyond the capsule description there. The movie is 110 minutes of country stars singing their hits broken up by a frame narrative about a producer, "Feetlebaum," looking for country acts to be in his movie. The running gag is no one signs. His failure to get contracts as the start of shooting approaches is the only source of drama, but it’s resolved off-screen without explanation. Essentially, Road to Nashville is a fictional film about the making of… Road to Nashville. It’s a little strange.

I put “Feetlebaum” in quoatation marks because the IMDB page for the actor, Doodles Weaver, notes that he had a similar character on the Spike Jones Radio Show who was constantly making spoonerisms called “Feitlebaum.” It’s basically the same shtick here. Sometimes it’s clever, like his rapid mistaken lyrics “Home on the Range,” but it generally just adds to the curiosity of the film.

To be fair, the music is good, and I say that as someone who doesn’t like country. The performers and songs had far more variety than I thought there was in country and the “performances” were solid. I have to use quotation marks there because the singers are just lip syncing to their records. Sometimes this can be hilariously obvious like when a man alone on stage with his guitar somehow has violins and piano backing him up. Even with that, I dug the music. I was also reminded of just how good Johnny Cash and the Carter Family were. Both perform in the movie and, wow, just head and shoulders above everyone else.

The film operates as a variety show without much variety, but why? We already had musician-fronted television shows at the time. In fact, several of the spaces where Feetlebaum watches performances is people filming their shows. So why do we have a movie that’s essentially a two-hour version of The Grand Ole Opry, but less? Why have a movie of what people already have access to in their homes?

So I’ll admit to being perplexed by this film after watching, which is a better space than I expected to be. I didn’t want to watch it at all. As I said above, I’m not a country fan, plus it’s from the director of Hell on Wheels, a film I hadn’t enjoyed. So an hour and fifty minutes of country performances from a non-director sounded more like a chore than a choice. As I said, though, the music’s solid. On that level, it’s a recommend, but I recommend just having it on in the background. You might expand your musical palate while also hearing some performances by people who are legends of the genre. You won’t miss anything by just listening to it, though, because there’s nothing visual happening at all.