315. Lady Frankenstein

315. Lady Frankenstein aka La figlia di Frankenstein(1971)
Directors: Mel Welles and Aureliano Luppi
Writers: Edward Di Lorenzo from a story by Dick Randall
From: Chilling (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter returns home after completing her training as a surgeon. Once the monster kills Dr. Frankenstein, his daughter continues his work by trying to build a man for her own pleasure.

A public domain “classic” that I’ve seen several times due to having multiple copies of it. This is the basic story of Frankenstein--Frankenstein creates his monster, his hubris leads him to making several fatal mistakes, and both the creation and creator are killed at the end—with a twist: titties!

Werewolf Ambulance would get a lot of use out of their titty bell for this movie.

The titular “Lady” is Frankenstein’s daughter. She’s recently returned from university where she’s completed her training as a surgeon and is eager to join her father in his research. While she suspects, she does not know that he’s working on reanimating the dead until she goes down to the lab while he’s working on the creature. Frankenstein refuses her help mostly because he doesn’t want her to be held liable should the truth of his experiments be revealed before he’s ready.

Then the creature wakes up and kills him.

As the creature wanders the village massacring people and working its way through the gravediggers who worked for Frankenstein, Lady Frankenstein convinces her father’s assistant to continue the work. They come up with a plan to murder the handsome but mentally-challenged stableboy and put the assistant’s brain in the body. The assistant agrees because he’s an aging man in love with the young Lady Frankenstein.

The transplant is a success, but now the creature is working its way back to the castle to take revenge upon the assistant. Also, the local police captain has started piecing everything together and knows Frankenstein was responsible for the creature. When the creature arrives at the castle, it faces off with the assistant who realizes Lady Frankenstein doesn’t love him, she just wants the glory of having completed the process. As long as either the assistant or the creature lives, she achieves her ambition.

The two monsters battle, the assistant wins, and, while having sex with Lady Frankenstein, chokes her to death. Meanwhile the townspeople have descended upon the castle and set it aflame, destroying the creatures and any evidence of Frankenstein’s work. THE END

As I jokingly implied at the top, there’s a lot of gratuitous nudity here, even beyond the expected nude scenes of Lady Frankenstein. The movie’s entire conceit is that it’s Frankenstein, but with the creature being made to satisfy sexual desires. What’s unexpected is the creature, during its rampage, just stumbling across a couple having sex in the middle of a field during the day and carrying off the naked woman. Or the random instances of toplessness here and there. These moments clarify exactly what kind of movie this is, but also provide a certain dissonance because the movie doesn’t look or feel like a cheap, perfunctory exploitation film. The sets are expansive, the colors lush, and the creature satisfyingly grotesque. In other words, this feels like a gothic film done in earnest that had Martin Skinemax come in to do a final pass.

Also, the movie’s kind of boring. There isn’t much drama or tension around the creature, the murder plot, or the police captain getting closer to the truth. The characters largely state their intentions and then act upon them without much struggle or challenge. As I said at the top, I’ve seen this a bunch so I watched the Elvira version just to have something going on to keep my interest. As she notes in one of her riffs, the monster walks around the castle like he owns the place, like he’s just going down to the kitchen for a snack, which maybe tells you all you need to decide if you’d like this flick.

While the movie isn’t good enough on its own, it does have a certain good-bad quality to it that would make it a lot of fun for a bad movie night or a bunch of riffing. To that purpose, we’re lucky that it’s in the public domain and available for download on archive.org here. I’d recommend it in that context. Outside of that, this doesn’t really strike me. To clarify, I’ve seen this several times and I remembered the host segments from Elvira more than I did any part of the movie.

314. Trapped By Television

314. Trapped By Television (1936)
Director: Del Lord
Writers: Lee Loeb and Harold Buchman from a story by Sherman L. Lowe and Al Martin
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

An inventor seeking investment for a new form of television has to deal with saboteurs trying to undermine him.

For something called Trapped By Television on the Sci-Fi Invasion set, you’d expect something more, well, sci-fi. Instead this is a pretty low-key studio one-off. The movie doesn’t have much drama or plot and is just a hair over an hour long so it feels like it was made to fill time at movie theaters.

Rocky is a bill collector with an interest in science. He’s sent to collect a debt from Fred, an inventor working on a new form of broadcast camera and television. Rocky is so enamored with the idea of Fred being an inventor that he doesn’t collect the debt and instead gets Fred a job as a bill collector himself. Fred then goes to collect a debt from Ms. Bobby Blake, a, for lack of a better term, venture capitalist. He accidentally hands her a schematic for his invention and she decides to become an investor. She takes the proposal over to Mr. Curtis at the Paragon Broadcasting Corporation to get him to invest in finishing costs. Mr. Curtis is in a bad way because the engineers he’s been paying to develop broadcasting equipment for him have gone missing. One has kidnapped (then murdered) the other and is working with two people inside the company to make sure Curtis buys their equipment instead.

It sounds more complicated than it is and more complicated than how it plays out on-screen. Basically, Fred is the honest man at the root of a series of grifts.

I’m inclined to leave the description there because I enjoyed this movie—I found it charmingly ridiculous—but I’m not sure if it’s possible to spoil something like this. It’s a movie from 1936. The villains interfere with the inventor, he has a falling out with Blake who he’s started to fall in love with, and he’s both materially and romantically triumphant by THE END.

As I noted, the movie’s only just over an hour and there’s not a lot of drama. You’d expect the villains to play a larger role in the piece, but they really only show up for two scenes: one to explain and enact their plan and one to try to sabotage and assault our leads. Otherwise, it’s just the protagonists working toward their goal and worrying about whether they’ve placed their faith in the right people.

And I found the movie charming. It’s a simple bit of fluff with actors who know what they’re doing. Everything has the look of a cheap noir, the actors even sound like parodies of those kinds of figures, but everyone’s tongue is firmly in their cheek, no one more so than Rocky. He’s the tough bill collector who keeps repeating, “Science is my hobby.” He’s the tough guy easily distracted by a shiny bauble, always toeing the line of being cartoonish without ever crossing it. I mean, the movie has a scene where he’s in a cab demanding the cabbie drive faster. The cabbie responds, “If you think you can do better, you drive.” Next shot, Rocky’s driving.

It’s such a simple, stupid moment and the movie included it because that moment is precisely the tone and ethic of the film. I don’t say this about a lot of movies, but it charmed me, I was legitimately charmed by this movie. So I recommend it. It just makes things feel a little nicer.

To make things even better, the movie is in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. You should give it a peek.

313. Prehistoric Women

313. Prehistoric Women (1950)
Director: Gregg G. Tallas
Writers: Sam X. Abarbanel and Gregg G. Tallas
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A narrated tale of prehistoric women finding husbands.

I also watched this just over ten years ago as part of the Sci-Fi set and, frankly, didn’t like it any better back then. The entire movie is narrated including having the narrator describe action occurring on-screen. When the narrator isn’t talking, we instead get dialogue in prehistoric gibberish. It’s all a bit much. I mean, the first ten minutes are the narrator telling us about the wise woman of the tribe telling the story of how the tribe was founded. So it’s someone telling us a story of someone telling a story.

It’s not meta if it’s stupid.

So, very briefly, because there’s nothing to say about this movie, we start with a tribe of prehistoric women—only women. Their tribe was founded when their former leader attacked the chief of their tribe that was using all the women as slave labor. The new matriarchal tribe thrived, but was attacked by the monstrous caveman Guadi who stole a few members and killed the leader. Now, fifteen years later, all the children have grown up and are ready to get married.

What follows is what you’d expect: The women capture men, fight over one of them, then the men escape using fire and kidnap all the women. Proper order is restored of women doing back-breaking labor in service of men. On the way back to the men’s tribe, Guadi attacks. The men burn Guadi to death and agree to return to the women’s tribe and marry them. THE END

Another one of those flicks you can’t even get mad at. I spent the whole time knitting, checkng Twitter, and wondering if it was done yet. I could go into plot holes like somehow the women are stymied by these men even though their tribe was founded by women overpowering men and their tribe has thrived by collectively acting against the men. Then the men are all isolated and yet the women don’t organize against them. And if I wanted to get snarky-political, I’d say this is a film that dares to ask what the world would be like if you don’t take the red pill, but it doesn’t even warrant that kind of effort, not that kind of scorn.

I mean the narration gets a little obnoxious talking about the “weaker sex” even though the women here are consistently kicking the men’s asses, but I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully ironic. I’m not willing to say the flick was being willfully anything. Plus it’s hard to imagine it’s saying anything about men and women at all, that it’s interested in women at all. Like all those sword & sandal pics, this is about having buff young men run around shirtless and oiled up. I don’t think the intended audience was too interested in anything “between” sexes, let alone battle.

Unless you’re into the idea of femdommed cavemen (and I’m sure somebody is), there’s just not much in this movie to recommend it. Even if you want beefcake, the print is too washed out to really provide any visuals. Let me emphasize any. This movie made the bold choice to forego day-for-night shots and just shoot at night without any lighting. The women are doing an ecstatic ritual dance, but good luck making any of it out in that inky black frame.

The movie is in the public domain and I’ve added a copy to archive.org here, just be warned that there’s not much to it. The movie is easily riffable, but just becomes a bit of a slog because there’s nothing going on.

312. The Blancheville Monster

312. The Blancheville Monster aka Horror (1963)
Director: Alberto De Martino
Writers: Giovanni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org

A young woman is hounded by a curse saying her ancestral home will fall if she lives to see her 21st birthday.

Title suggests Creeping Terror silliness, but this is instead a b&w gothic drawing from Poe for inspiration. Emilie, on the cusp of her 21st birthday, is returning to her ancestral castle with her fiancé John and her best friend (and John’s sister) Alice. At the castle, they meet Rodéric, Emilie’s brother and the last surviving man in the family after their father passed. All the servants are new and unrecognizable to Emilie. Even a new doctor, LaRouche, arrives.

The first night, Alice wakes up when she hears someone screaming. She goes exploring and finds the housekeeper injecting a severely burned man who’s bound in the tower. She flees and faints when she encounters Rodéric. Later, Rodéric tells everyone that the man was his father, not dead, but driven mad and convinced that a prophecy inscribed on the family tomb saying the family line will end once a daughter turns 21 will come true unless he takes action. The father is intent on killing Emilie.

Emilie is hypnotized and led into the cemetery to stare at her own grave several times and there appears to be a conspiracy between the staff and the doctor. Alice keeps investigating as Emilie’s condition deteriorates until she’s eventually found in a hypnotic state indistinguishable from death. She’s entombed alive and the doctor reveals what he knows to Alice.

And I’ll leave it there. The movie’s pretty all right, even though it doesn’t give you much of a chance to figure out the mystery, instead telling you all the details at the end. However, it’s nice seeing things develop and having your assumptions challenged throughout. The question of who’s working with whom is never explicitly laid out so the final twist doesn’t feel cheap, it only feels like the movie dragged its feet getting there.

Pacing does hamper the movie, as does having largely interchangeable actors. I kept getting Alice and Emilie confused until around the second act and the men, except for cut-rate Vincent Price, didn’t stand out much either.

The titular Blancheville monster doesn’t have much screentime, which is a disappointment, but since it’s just a person who’s supposed to be a burn victim (re: a mask made of dried oatmeal), it’s not much of a disappointment. The sound on my copy was a bit scratchy and fuzzed out, but it worked well enough. In the end, it’s a cheap gothic piece, not on the scale of a Paul Naschy or Hammer Horror flick, but satisfying enough. Since it’s in the public domain, I added my copy to archive.org here. It’s fine as a standalone recommend, moreso if you’re interested in riffing it. It’s perfectly watchable, but had enough breathing room for lots of joke.

311. Separate Ways

311. Separate Ways (1981)
Director: Howard Avedis
Writers: Leah Appet from a story by Leah Appet, Howard Avedis, and Marlene Schmidt
From: Cult Cinema

A drama about a couple facing the disintegration of their marriage and their business.

From the director of the pedophilic The Teacher and the tonally inconsistent The Specialist comes a domestic drama handled with all the subtlety and care you’d expect. Honestly, it’s not so bad as that, nor is it as good either.

Ken and Valentine Colby are in a bit of a rut in their marriage. Their first child is starting school and Valentine wants to get out of the house and become more active, either through joining Ken at the car dealership he inherited or by going back to school. Ken is trying to keep the dealership afloat through a new ad campaign and by giving the bank the runaround about a loan he’s been mismanaging.

Valentine catches Ken having an affair and then hooks up with someone herself. She confronts Ken with what she knows and tells him about her indiscretion as well, and leaves him to prove she can fend for herself. She picks up a job as a cocktail waitress at a burlesque bar and finds that she can manage it. Meanwhile, Ken loses the shop.

Valentine quits her job around the same time and comes back home. The couple try to work it out and the whole family goes to the race track that weekend to see Ken race in a car he built with his friend. Ken wins the race and the family walks off together, happy. THE END

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so down on this movie, and certainly part of it is because so very little happens. There’s very little struggle or sense of weight to anything. Ken is straight-up lying to the bank about how many cars he has on the lot, but the fact that this action could lead to the business being foreclosed upon never comes up. Likewise Valentine’s job at the cocktail bar is, I think, supposed to be read as sordid or degrading, but it comes across as a job in an environment that she, despite herself, kind of enjoys. The bouncer flirts with her a little bit, but the moment she tells him “no,” he leaves her alone with no animosity.

She enters a sordid world with a thorough and nonchalant respect for consent. I mean, I was really happy to see that, but also disappointed because it sidestepped any opportunity for drama. Which is when I realized the issue I take with this movie:

Separate Ways has an exploitation film sensibility while not being an exploitation film. The movie is a domestic drama but has the leering tone of impending titillation. “Hey, she’s working at a burlesque bar. You know what that means!” “What’s this have to do with her husband lying to their son about where she is?” “Oh, yeah, we did foreground that as an issue, didn’t we?”

That’s an issue as well: the husband isn’t that villainous, or at least isn’t played up as being villainous. Losing the business is a concern and something to explore in a dramatic narrative, but the movie keeps him and his issues in the background. Then he has the affair, is never fully communicative with Valentine, and lies to the kid about where mom is—a move, of which she accuses him, that turns the kid into a pawn in the argument between them. Only he’s not trying to make any abusive moves, he’s someone muddling his way through a bad situation.

And that’s fine. You can have a movie without villains that doesn’t try to make every decision life-or-death or carry some moral weight, but you do need to fully realize and expand upon these characters and their situation. I spent a good chunk of the movie just wandering what it was supposed to be about. Once the separation finally came, there wasn’t much time left in the movie to resolve it in any meaningful way.

So I wouldn’t recommend the movie. It didn’t offend me the way some of these others have. In fact, I was surprised at how much the movie showed characters respecting consent. I even started to wonder if I don’t want to see movies that respect consent because, if this movie’s an example, it seems to strip all of the drama. It doesn’t, though. You just need to make sure the drama of your piece is in the foreground. This movie didn’t do that. You should let it remain in the background as well.

310. The Pom Pom Girls

310. The Pom Pom Girls (1976)
Director: Joseph Ruben
Writers: Joseph Ruben from a story by Joseph Ruben and Robert J. Rosenthal
From: Cult Cinema

Two high school football players chase girls and pull pranks.

This movie is on the same disc as The Van and I think that’s more than coincidence. Just like The Van, we follow two boys that are supposed to be our heroes who attempt to sexually assault women, try to murder someone they don’t like, and pitch mini tantrums whenever they are told anything remotely close to “no.”

There is no plot. I’m hard-pressed to say there are characters. Two football players, the quarterback and another one, pull pranks on the rival high school’s team and bully and belittle the movie’s villain, Duane, because he’s not on the football team or interested in their pranks. Finally, at the end of the movie, Duane challenges the not-quarterback to a game of suicde chicken—they trade cars and drive at 40 mph toward a cliff. First to brake loses. Duaye hits the brakes, other kid drives over the cliff. Car crashes and explodes, but, sadly, kid jumped out at the last minute. He and the quaterback (who’s quit the team after punching the coach) huddle up with their girlfriends and walk away laughing. THE END.

It sucks, obviously, but what’s interesting is that it sucks on every level. As I said, there’s no plot. The characters don’t want anything and there’s no situation arising that they have to address. The movie’s very slice-of-life, only they’re not interesting lives. Then you have the issue that it’s supposed to be a comedy—the pranks are supposed to be funny. Only they’re not. Instead we’re just witness to the destructive sadism of two entitled pricks who think they’re too clever or special for everyone else. Only we don’t see them be special in any way. They’re just dicks.

I mean, there’s one sequence where the gang steals a fire engine, hoses down the rival team, and then is chased by the cops. To get away, they turn the hose on the cop car, driving it off the road, and escaping. No one faces any consequences for it, just or unjust. Later, the coach, who for whatever reason wants to take the quarterback down a peg, tells the quarterback to hit him. QB doesn’t then follows the coach into the parking lot and decks him. The coach tells him he won’t pursue charges, won’t even have him suspended from school, but that he’s going to ride herd on him during the season. So the QB quits, but the scene is played as though he’s gotten something over on the coach. No, you’re just as much of a prick as the coach.

Regarding the villain, Duane, he’s literally singled out because he’s doing his own thing instead of kowtowing to the football players. On top of that, he’s dating a girl that the not-QB wants to date. So not-QB tries to murder him in the first ten minutes of the movie.

No, he literally tries to murder him. The football players have kidnapped a girl who ends up dating the QB later (cause consent’s the biggest joke of all, amirite?) when not-QB sees Duane walking down the sidewalk. He whips the car around, drives onto the sidewalk, and bears down on Duane, only narrowly not running him over. These are our heroes in a comedy.

It’s bullshit. Avoid it.

309. The Undertaker and His Pals

309. The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
Director: T.L.P. Swicegood
Writer: T.L.P. Swicegood
From: Pure Terror

An undertaker and two men who run a diner murder people to serve as food.

Insert obligatory joke about a cartoon spin-off of the WWE wrestler here. Done? Done.

I have very little to say about this movie, partly because it’s just a hair over an hour long. It opens in stunning brown & white where we watch a trio of bikers murder a woman. Once she dies, the film switches to lurid color as one biker starts cutting off her legs and the trio leaves with the severed limbs. In case the tone of the movie isn’t clear, during the murder a picture of the woman’s boyfriend keeps changing in reaction to what’s going on. The flick’s a dark comedy that can be a bit hit or miss.

The trio, as I note in the super quick summary at the top is the undertaker, the owner of a diner, and the chef, although the movie sits on the reveal for a little bit for no particular purpose or payoff. The undertaker tries to weasel the grieving relatives out of money for the funeral while the pair from the diner cook and serve the limbs they steal from the bodies, usually offering them as the special of the day with a pun. For instance, the first victim’s name is “Lamb” so they’re serving Leg of Lamb.

The trio murder various people until a clue points to the undertaker as being involved. He and the chef kill the diner owner, go after more people resulting in the death of the chef, and then the undertaker dies when the head detective accidentally stabs him in the face. THE END.

The movie’s sort of whatever: it’s just not enough of any one thing. That may be unsurprising considering the run time. When it’s aiming to be comic, it’s pretty good. The first scene in the funeral parlor is played broad and hits a lot of quick absurd notes. If they’d maintained that throughout, it’d be a better movie.

Part of the problem may be the PI. He’s the boyfriend/boss of the second victim and, for lack of any competition, our hero. Only the actor is really flat. I don’t know if he’s supposed to be funny or if they wrote his part straight despite the rest of the movie being a comedy, but the movie comes to a dead stop when he’s present. The trio playing the killers seem to have the right idea—the Three Stooges as psycho killers. That’s a great idea, right? The movie doesn’t quite manage it, though, never quite reaches that far.

Another issue is that the movie starts with the trio murdering and cooking people. Where do you go from there? If you think of thematically similar pieces like Sweeny Todd or Little Shop of Horrors, you arrive at cannibalism somewhere in the second act instead of long before the story started. The movie starts at its narrative peak and then can’t maintain that energy for an hour.

The movie is legitimately funny, though, and I wish they’d written up more comic sequences. The deaths are whatever, except for one vivisection which was a line I did not expect them to cross, so you’re really waiting for the absurd sensibility of the humor to come back whenever you’re watching a death scene. I’m pretty lukewarm about the whole thing. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t steer anyone away from it either.

308. Virus

308. Virus aka Day of Resurrection aka Fukkatsu no hi (1980)
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Writers: Kôji Takada, Kinji Fukasaku, and Gregory Knapp from a novel by Sakyo Komatsu
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org

Nearly all life on Earth is wiped out by a manufactured virus. Now the final 863 living people have to find a way to survive on Antarctica.

The movie doesn’t have a plot in the way a lot of these genre pictures do, ie. no main character facing off against a specific challenge in hopes of achieving their goal. Instead, when the movie begins in 1983, the world has ended, wiped out by a virus that’s still infecting the air. We flashback to a year before and learn the origin of the virus. All the nations of the world had agreed to stop developing biological weapons, but the United States, fearing that it no longer had first-strike capabilities against the Soviet Union, was working on one: MM-88.

MM-88, we’re told, is a mimic. It can graft itself to other viruses heightening their lethality and contagion. You can’t develop a vaccine because it grows too quickly. A scientist has smuggled MM-88 out of the US in hopes of getting it to the foremost virologist in the world, but the smugglers transporting it end up crashing and releasing the virus. What follows for the next hour is the intractable decay of the world.

The only survivors are 863 people who had been working in Antarctica—855 men and 8 women. They have to figure out how they’re going to survive now that they’re the only people left and the rest of the world is uninhabitable.

Then the main-ish character, Dr. Yoshizumi, a seismologist, reveals that a major earthquake is about to hit Washington DC. Since the US activated their Automatic Response System before the end of the world, the earthquake will be read as a Soviet missile strike. The ARS will then launch all the nuclear warheads at targets in the USSR which will then activate the Soviet ARS, launching all their missiles—including one at the Antarctic base where the last of humanity lives. Dr. Yoshizumi accompanies a former soldier in hopes of getting into the bunker under the White House and disarming the ARS before the earthquake hits.

And the movie actually goes on from there, but I won’t say what happens. As far as plot goes, those are the basic events of the movie, but it’s not a movie that’s very focused on events. Instead it’s exploring the various ways the world would fall apart and how people would react to it. So in some ways it’s a zombie movie without the zombies. In others it’s a deep psychological drama about various characters coming to terms with loss and moving on from that.

So it’s interesting, and I’d even say it’s pretty good, but it’s also very strange as a film. It feels like a TV miniseries cut into one long feature and the earthquake twist at the end comes across as being thrown in to both justify which characters have been getting the most attention as well as all the implicit criticism of the military that’s present in the first half. “Why so much discussion of the ARS while this disease is consuming the globe? And why are we following a seismologist in Antarctica?” Gotta bring them both together.

Another aspect holding the film back a bit is how televisual it feels. Not until the last 10-15 minutes do we get shots that are really cinematic and visually striking. Everything looks like it was made-for-TV. Granted, having George Kennedy play a major role through the second half amplifies that sense. However, this was, at the time, the most expensive Japanese movie ever made and it runs just over two-and-a-half hours long. That something so epic in scope would look so flat on screen is a disappointment.

One content issue I had was with there only be eight women. One of them is sexually assaulted, which isn’t shown, but the new ruling council has to figure out a way to deal with it. Their solution seems to be tasking the women with being the breeding stock of the community, having scheduled sexual encounters with all the men. The details, like many of the details in the movie, are glossed, but the implication is that since men can’t be expected to not have sex, the women will have to find a way to manage things.

I think it’d be more likely that the men would have to queer the fuck up or just get along with not having sex. Even making repopulation a priority, which would have to be a consideration, a person can’t be pregnant with more than one person’s child at a time. The population, even in this desperate situation, could still practice consent. It’s a very small part of the movie and doesn’t really derail things, but it provides a pretty big bump, especially since the conversation is introduced through a woman having been sexually assaulted. Of all the ways the movie could have handled it (and, at over two-and-a-half hours, could have just cut it), this felt like a particularly poor choice.

All that said, I kind of recommend this. It’s not edge-of-your-seat stuff, but it’s not boring either. The acting is usually very good—subtle and evocative—when it’s not hilariously shouty as it is whenever the US military is on-screen. Also, you get to hear a five-year-old (who’s so not five) shoot himself over ham radio. The moment is supposed to be emotionally destructive but it’s just hilarious.

Also, unique among the Misery Mill flicks, I didn’t watch the Mill Creek version of this. The movie is in the public domain in the United States and the full uncut version is on archive.org, so I watched that one. I don’t know if the version on the Chilling set was the shorter US cut or the shorter still TV cut (though I’m betting the latter), but I didn’t even think twice about it. The archive.org copy is a great print, has every scene, and benefits from being long.

The movie is a meditation on extinction, and thus life, and so needs to run in an extended and deliberate way. So I recommend it, cause it’s a good flick, but make sure you have an afternoon free for it.

307. The Van

307. The Van (1977)
Director: Sam Grossman
Writers: Robert J. Rosenthal and Celia Susan Cotelo
From: Cult Cinema

A young man gets the custom van of his dreams, but will it win him the heart of the girl of his dreams?

A Marimark Production. I knew from the start that this was going to hurt, but, as always with Marimark, I failed to anticipate just how the film would disappoint and enrage me.

When I looked this flick up before, I learned that it was the start of the “Vansploitation” movement of films which also include the semi-unofficial sequels to this flick, Malibu Beach and Van Nuys Blvd. (both also part of this set). Remember vansploitation? Me neither. I’d also forgotten Malibu Beach which, after a quick skim of my review, turns out to be a sequel with the same characters doing the same being really fucking horrible. My comment on that movie was:

I’d go through the plot, but there’s no plot. No goals, no struggles, no thwarted desires. No structure, no callbacks, no throughline. There’s just stuff that keeps happening without any weight or consequence.

and I’d say the same largely applies here.

Our horrible hero from Malibu Beach, Bobby, starts off here. He’s a scumbag who’s just graduated high school and his ambition is to have a tricked-out custom van. So he buys one with his graduation money.

That’s it, by the way. He wanted this special van and he bought it. No struggle, no effort, no getting a basic van and building it up himself, he just buys it already tricked out and customized.

So he drives it around, tries to pick up girls with it to screw in the back, always being thwarted and always with “hilarious” consequences. Like the first girl who agrees to hang out in his van and smoke a joint. He tries to get gropey, she says no, so he jumps on her trying to force her to make out with him, eventually tearing her shirt off and pulling out part of her bra.

Comedy, by the way. Main character is a rapist and this is a comedy.

So Bobby is infatuated with Tina, a girl with no patience for his bullshit so you know he’s not going to change or do anything to demonstrate that he’s worthy of her attention or time and she’s going to end up in love with him. Unfortunately for Tina, her best friend is dating Bobby’s best friend so she ends up stranded on the beach with Bobby and his van. Again, he tries to rape the girl he’s with, but fails. Later, after she’s told him to fuck off in no uncertain terms (after warming to him, having to tell him to piss off after he tries assaulting her again, and then learning, after forgiving him, that he’d hooked up with someone else the night before), he kidnaps her, threatens to drive the van off a cliff unless she agrees to listen to him, and then tells her he loves her. She says she feels the same and it’s so happy, isn’t it? Psychological torture? “Say you love me or I’ll kill us both. You can stop this any time so it’s all your fault.”

While all this is going on, Bobby’s boss, Danny DeVito, who is almost unrecognizable in this movie because it’s so bad you’re thinking, “That can’t possibly be Danny DeVito,” runs a sideline as a bookie. He took a bet that he can’t pay off so Bobby gives him the difference. Unfortunately, that money was Bobby’s next payment on the van. To cover the costs, Bobby agrees to race Duggan, the villain of the movie who’s not really in the movie or talking to Bobby at all ever. Duggan has already caught Bobby at Duggan’s girlfriend’s place (the girl he hooked up with while trying to make up with Tina) and so wants revenge. They race with a $200 pot. Cops who’ve been chasing Bobby the entire movie because he keeps drag racing his van show up, end up crashing Duggan’s van, which makes Bobby the winner. He rolls his van, though, so I don’t see how anyone makes out well here. DeVito shows up with the money he owes Bobby and Tina drives away with him, laughing over Duggan’s girlfriend having told Bobby his dick was bigger than Duggan’s. THE END.

Unlike a lot of Marimark movies that have the occasional spark and then fail to live up to that moment again, this is just plodding and pointless. On top of that, the hero is an entitled smirking shitfuck rapist. His character can be summed up by a whiny, “But I want it!” He rolls the van that’s meant so much to him, but doesn’t seem to care at all. After all, he got the girl by doing nothing so why worry?

Regarding him being a rapist, the movie has this strange ideology that a lot of these 70’s and 80’s movies had, specifically that there’s something wrong with consent. Bobby’s always trying to get girls to hook up with him in the back of his van, and when one is not only willing but eager to, then Bobby’s turned off and doesn’t want it to happen. And this happens a lot. In that movie I always trot out when I’m talking about how much I hate a movie, Cavegirl, the same situation arises. The hero keeps trying to trick one woman into sex while actively fleeing another woman who wants to have sex with him. It’s like the movies understand consent functioning in only one direction.

I said of Malibu Beach that it filled out the trifecta of awfulness with Cavegirl and Going Steady and was hands-down the worst Marimark movie I’d seen. This one’s worse, not so much for its content. That’s on par with these others. Instead it’s for what Marimark movies generally do—show a hint of something interesting and then fail, on every level, to deliver upon it. Here, it’s custom van culture.

Yeah, I’m saying it, I wanted an actual vansploitation flick. I remember those days of airbrushed wizards on the side of panel vans. There was something stupid amazing about those things and a movie about people in that scene that dramatized what was going on with these folks and what they were trying to do would have been pretty awesome. Well, it’d at least have been something.

There’s one sequence here where Bobby drives his van to the beach and it’s just lined with custom vans and all the custom van people walking up and down looking at what everyone else has done with their rides. What is that community? What do they find impressive? Why are they impressed by Bobby’s van? How is it special? We don’t get that, though. Instead, it’s just the trials and tribulations of the walking rape whistle Bobby.

Missed the subtext: Fuck this movie. Skip it.

306. Extra Terrestrial Visitors

306. Extra Terrestrial Visitors aka Los nuevos extraterrestres (1983)
Director: Juan Piquer Simón
Writers: Joaquín Grau and Juan Piquer Simón
From: Sci-Fi Invastion (only 4 remain!)

A meteor carrying alien eggs crashes on Earth. Two aliens emerge—one befriends a young boy while the other starts killing everyone it meets.

So it’s Pod People. You ever see that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? “It stinks!” That’s this movie. And for that reason it holds a special place in my heart.

Even though I’m on the border of being a Millennial (the start time keeps sliding backwards. I think the official definition now is, “Have you been fucked over by the Baby Boomers’?”), I do remember a time before the Internet. When I was growing up in Northern Indiana, I lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have access to cable. Even if we had had access, we wouldn’t have had access to Comedy Central, the then home of Mystery Science Theater 3000. All we had was over-the-air TV and Entertainment Weekly talking about all this brilliant television that we couldn’t see.

Then came the Mystery Science Theater Hour, a syndicated version of MST3k that broke each episode into two one-hour parts (hence the name). That show was picked up by one of our local networks, but it didn’t air until, I think, 3 AM on Saturday night. On top of that, the network only seemed to show four episodes (so two complete MST3k episodes) over and over. One was Cave Dwellers (“Miles and miles O’Keefe!”) and the other was Pod People. I still remember and constantly go back to the jokes “Little wing-ed potatoes” and “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!” In other words, my introduction to MST3k, a show that’s been pretty important to me in terms of introducing me to paracinema, horror hosts, camp culture, and copyright theory, began with a weird little kid raising a gross puppet that hatched from an egg. What can I say about it?

“It stinks!”

The movie opens with an explosion in space that drives a meteor to Earth. It crashes and is eventually found by one of a trio of poachers looking for rare birds eggs. Upon finding the stash of alien eggs, the egg poacher, curiously, just starts smashing all of them. An alien emerges and kills him. His partners are now left stranded in the woods with a bad storm coming in.

Meanwhile, a band is recording an album. The lead singer is a dick. They all leave to go camping for the weekend, but a groupie the singer had been schmoozing with earlier invites herself along. The singer can’t tell her no because she’s related to one of the label execs. Her coming, though, really pisses off the singer’s girlfriend.

While stopping to cook some food over a fire, the groupie gets offended and bullied to the point that she runs away. She finds the two poachers who threaten her, leading her to run and fall off a cliff. The alien comes by and marks her. Her friends find her, take her back to the RV, and start looking for help.

They arrive at a cabin where a family, the third part of the movie is living. It’s a man, his sister, and her son. The man used to work with the poachers and the son collects animals—including one of the alien eggs! The band arrives, takes shelter hoping the phone will start working the next day, and the groupie dies. Meanwhile, the kid’s egg has hatched and he starts raising the alien as his friend Trumpy.

Things proceed. Two people leave the house to try to call for help, end up at a ranger station where they find the corpse of one of the poachers, and get attacked by the alien themselves. Back at the house, the alien somehow arrives before the survivor of the ranger station attack and kills another of the people. The kid thinks Trumpy did it, then realizes there’s a second monster. Folks find Trumpy, kid prevents them from killing it, asshole singer sees both aliens together with the kid and realizes they’re not a threat. Uncle opens fire, killing the evil alien but getting killed in the process, and the singer takes the kid home, lying so Trumpy can live on. THE END.

The movie was supposed to be a generic alien invasion monster movie, but then ET happened so they had to rewrite the script to insert Trumpy and the lovable kid. It was a mistake. One of the most memorable riffs is, “Trumpy! You can do stupid things!” for a reason. I don’t know what the movie would have been if it was just the straight-up monster thriller, but shoehorning the ET angle in just kills any kind of tension and makes a lot of things strange. I already mentioned the alien somehow getting to the cabin on foot before the people at the ranger station can drive back, but there’s also the disappearance of the poachers. One is just found dead in the ranger station, but we don’t see him die. The other is just no longer in the film.

I don’t have much to say about the movie beyond its MST3k connection. That’s a classic episode and I recommend watching that. The uncut version of the movie though begs you to give it a pass no matter how catchy the song.