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.

302. Prime Time

302. Prime Time aka American Raspberry (1977)
Director: Bradley R. Swirnoff
Writers: John Baskin, Stephen Feinberg, Roger Shulman, and Bradley R. Swirnoff
From: Drive-In (only 1 remains!)

A mysterious force has taken over American airwaves and is broadcasting subversive material.

There’s not much plot to summarize here as the movie is, like Kentucky Fried Movie, more a collection of sketches as opposed to something with a plot. Unlike Kentucky Fried Movie, this does have a hint of a frame narrative.

Someone has taken over American television—it’s never revealed who—and is broadcasting material that’s all one or two steps away from traditional media: a hunting show where the host and celebrity guest climb the clock tower at the University of Texas and start shooting students, menacing ads from the Catholic Church saying they’re taking over the world, a Charlie’s Angels parody where everyone—literally everyone—is fat.

The President calls his war council together, but they can’t figure out a way to respond to the situation apart from turning off the TV. The Russians and Chinese deny involvement. Something needs to be done, though. People are rioting in the street. As the President sees more and more ads mocking the military and mainstream products, he snaps and pushes the button, nuking the United States. THE END.

Obviously it’s not a movie that you judge on the plot. It’s a bunch of sketches strung together with no connective tissue whatsoever. And, yes, since its from 1977 it has some of the racist, homophobic, and religiously problematic jokes you’d expect, but I’d say fewer than I thought there would be. I was rolling my eyes less than I was going, “Is that crossing a line?” in response to the problematic jokes. In other words, it wasn’t always clear if the joke was racist or making fun of racist jokes.

And I’ll admit that I laughed a lot—much more than I expected to. Considering how the movie is put together, that makes sense. There’s no build-up and payoff here, it’s just gag after gag after gag. It’s very close to being if a joke doesn’t make you laugh, just a wait a minute, they’ll have something from a completely different genre soon. My favorite line was a throwaway moment of, I think, the General of the Salvation Army walking down the street chanting, “Repent now and Christ and the Pentagon will forgive you.”

My thoughts were that this was pure Subgenius Bulldada, and I’d say that’s good. Not all the gags have aged well, especially the parodies of “Travel to [BLANK]” ads which were all kind of racist, but enough of them landed well enough that I enjoyed the movie and would even go so far as to give it a lukewarm recommendation. There’s nothing groundbreaking or brilliant about it and some bits are parodies of specific things that I didn’t have the context for, but it passed the time well enough. If you just want some mindless gags for 75 minutes, you could do a lot worse.

301. Twister's Revenge

301. Twister’s Revenge! (1988)
Director: Bill Rebane
Writers: William Arthur, Larry Dreyfus, and Bill Rebane
From: Drive-In (only 2 remain!)

A trio of idiots plot to kidnap and ransom the programmer of a monster truck with advanced computer technology, but the truck starts to outthink them.

I started tearing up with giddy joy after reading the IMDB summary of this movie: “Three bumbling criminals have been trying to get their hands on the computerized control system of Mr. Twister, a talking monster truck with a mind of its own.” Oh God, yes please. It will not live up to my anticipated joy, but I do not care. Bless you Bill Rebane for making stupid, stupid movies. Oh so stupid.

For those unfamiliar, Rebane also directed Monster A-Go-Go and The Giant Spider Invasion (featured on MST3k) as well as The Demons of Ludlow, The Cold, and The Alpha Incident featured earlier on this blog. This movie is not as good as those.

We have a trio of criminals who learn about Mr. Twister, a monster truck with approximately $200,000 worth of computer technology in it. The trio is initially planning to steal the computer equipment, but end up, somehow, deciding to kidnap the woman who designed the tech. This takes about half-an-hour, by the way.

The designer is married to Twister’s driver and, as the husband is planning on getting a shotgun and hunting the kidnappers down, Twister starts talking to him. Twister offers an alternate plan that fails. Then they team up and start hunting down the trio one-by-one. Only, when they track one of the guys down, the pair doesn’t try to kill or capture them. Instead we get monster truck antics of cars and houses being run over/through and then the kidnapper runs away. What’s the plan exactly?

This all climaxes in a fight in a junkyard. The husband manages to defeat, in some way, each of the kidnappers until one of them gets a tank and starts chasing the truck. The truck and tank get stuck in a parade (with a weird Donald Duck float in the middle) and then, inevitably, end up at the cave where the victim is tied up. The husband saves her and the couple hides behind the tires of Twister and watch the kidnappers run into the cave just before it explodes. The kidnappers turn on their leader while the couple and Twister laugh. THE END

It’s a comedy that’s not funny. The gags never land because the timing and tone is just off. The movie is a cartoon with all the explosions and people getting run over by a monster truck but no one ever getting hurt, but it never feels like a cartoon. This feels like a movie that’s supposed to be set in the real world, just populated by idiots.

The movie is at its best when it tends to drop any pretense. The producers rented a monster truck and monster truck gonna monster truck. Cars get smashed, buildings get run over, even a swimming pool gets laid flat. And then they up the ante by adding a tank in the final twenty minutes. Those moments are fun and there should have been more of that in the movie. They’re using stunt vehicles so why isn’t the movie wall-to-wall stunts?

The answer is that would have cost money and they had to make sure the truck was returned unharmed.

I don’t have any other place in the post to mention this, but there’s a scene in a bar with a man in a bat mask. Look at that picture. That’s a fully-articulated mask. The mouth even moves. I have no idea what it’s doing in this movie. It’s not referenced before, it’s never brought up again, but the camera lingers on it for a few seconds so you get a good look.

Movie. Are you trying to send us a message? Are you trapped somewhere? Should we call for help?

As I said at the top, this was never going to live up to my expectations. The movie’s dull with a sense of humor that just doesn’t work. The humor didn’t offend me or fail to age well like a lot of these movies, the jokes just never landed. I had fun watching things get run over, knocked down, and blown up and I would have appreciated more of that kind of silliness. The movie’s not a recommend, but if you can find the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode for The Giant Spider Invasion, I highly recommend that. Go Packers!

300. Vengeance of the Zombies

300. Vengeance of the Zombies aka La rebelión de las muertas (1973)
Director: León Klimovsky
Writer: Paul Naschy
From: Drive-In (only 3 remain!)

A woman comes under the spell of an Eastern mystic while voodoo-related murders occur in London.

More Paul Naschy! Always welcome.

We open with grave robbers violating the tomb of the dead daughter of a rich family. Someone locks them in and summons the corpse as a zombie that kills them both.

Cut to Paul Naschy as an Indian mystic, Krishna, leading a small religious group in London. A skeptical psychiatrist is investigating him while Elvira, cousin of the zombie from the beginning, is a believer. Zombies break into Elvira’s, killing everyone there except Elvira. She decides to flee London for a bit and stay with Krishna in the town where her cousin was murdered. He’s bought an abandoned house, known as “the Devil House” because of the supposedly Satanic rituals performed by the family that owned it before.

Meanwhile, back in London, the psychiatrist is researching voodoo while the police investigate the ever-multiplying number of mysterious deaths. At the Devil House, Elvira continues to fall under the spell of Krishna as those who try to warn her get murdered.

Turns out Krishna has a twin brother who’s been doing everything. He raped a girl, leading to her death, so several families tried to burn him to death, but didn’t know that they’d failed. He’s spent the intervening years becoming a powerful voodoo priest and has hunted the families down to turn their daughters into zombies for revenge (the titular Vengeance). The brother has power over Krishna as well and seizes control to kidnap Elvira to make her his voodoo bride. Krishna’s love for Elvira ultimately helps him refuse to kill her, but then he gets mobbed by zombies.

As the brother is about to kill Elvira, he’s stabbed in the back by, I think, the maid (?). She was making out with the psychiatrist in the scene before and was someone I, honestly, kept mistaking for Elvira. Turns out she’s the witness sent to make sure the brother doesn’t betray the voodoo cult the way he has been. He dies, then the maid prepares to kill Elvira and is shot by the cops. The psychiatrist unties Elvira and police goggle over all the corpses. Everyone drives away leaving the house abandoned once again. THE END

What I love about Paul Naschy films is they way they seem to delight in horror tropes and ghost stories. Everything is played straight, but there’s a sense of giddiness underlying it all, like Naschy’s enjoyment of these kinds of stories suffuses the production from conception to script to production. This particular one, though, doesn’t hang together as well as other Naschy films. While the drama moves to country town with Elvira, the action—including deaths and zombies—remains in London. I really wanted to be in the isolated town where Elvira’s nightmares grow more prophetic and her situation becomes eerier and eerier.

In other words, if I’m watching a ghost story, I want to be in the house with all the ghosts. Instead, the haunting is happening in London, but our focal character has gone to the country.

Plus the revelation of a secret brother being responsible for all the carnage feels like a cheap twist. True, there’s a long history in Gothic literature of the deformed relative being locked away somewhere escaping and being the source of all the evil, but it doesn’t feel like a nod to Gothic tradition here. It’s also strange to have a seeming dichotomy set up between the good mysticism of Krishna and the bad mysticism of voodoo—it’s not just that the brother’s evil, it’s voodoo itself that’s evil. The brother kills an assistant who chastises him for using the power for vengeance instead of making voodoo dominant over the world and the maid hasn’t saved Elvira, she’s also planning on sacrificing her to further the goals of the cult.

On top of that, the Devil House and some of the voodoo ritual invoke Satanism which means the movie has three different magics operating at the same time. It’s just too busy.

Also, the music is tonally wrong. This is ending on a nitpick, but whoever did the dubbing dropped in a lot of bad, upbeat 70’s music that almost never matches the tone of what’s happening on screen. The ending has super upbeat stuff while we get “scary” stings when nothing bad or suggestive is happening.

I think this may be the least of the Naschy films I’ve seen in these sets. While it has him living it up in three different roles and the standard of committing as much as possible to the sets and setting, it just never gels and gets kind of boring. If the story had stayed in one place, either London or the countryside, it would have been a lot stronger.

299. Death By Dialogue

299. Death By Dialogue (1988)
Director: Thomas Dewier
Writers: Thomas Dewier and Susan Trabue
From: Drive-In (only 4 remain!)
Watch: YouTube (via Troma)

Five friends find a haunted script that starts inflicting bizarre and inexplicable deaths.

Do you need more than that capsule review to know whether you want to watch this movie? That’s fair. Movies like this can veer from Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe gloriousness to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats levels of dull. This movie manages to do both, which, credit where due, is an achievement in itself.

This is the movie earning 2 points.

So, Death By Dialogue opens with some guy rooting around in a basement. He opens a trunk that explodes, sending him flying across the room, but apparently not injuring him at all. He steals a script from the trunk, reads it outside, and finds references to himself being “fired.” He thinks it’s a prank by his boss and, when he goes to confront her, a woman in fishnets walks out holding a flame thrower and sets him on fire. He got fired, get it?

My notes at this point read, “Man on fire before open credits. What are the odds that it never rises to that level again?” Place your bets now.

Are you ready to wonder why we're here?!

After the credits, the quintet of main characters/deadmeats show up, find the script, and start dying in ridiculous ways. One person is blown through a wall, seemingly by an orgasm. Another is murdered by a heavy metal band that appears out of nowhere performing a song in a field. I was feeling echos of Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and Hack-O-Lantern at this point.

Then the remaining kids figure out the script is haunted, get told the backstory by an uncle who owns the ranch, and realize they’re all trapped there until the script is done with them. Settle in because we’re in the doldrums of this flick, waiting around watching people do nothing while they wait for something to happen. However, this portion of the movie does include the sequence of the characters trying to add scenes to the script to change their fate. This sequence is a riot because it’s literally the characters pitching and shooting down ideas that the movie doesn’t have the budget for.

The man, the myth, minus motorcycles.

After a lot of thumb-twiddling, the script’s evil manifests as a bald, sword-wielding, dark knight of metal who, standing before a wall of flame summons motorcycles from explosions that flank him

MOTORCYCLES JUMP OUT OF A FIERY EXPLOSION! MOVIE, I APOLOGIZE FOR DOUBTING YOUR COMMITMENT TO AWESOME!

Things move from there to an anti-climatic ending, (THE END) but I didn’t care by that point. This movie is dumb and it is awesome, particularly because it’s so dumb. There’s no sense of pacing, the acting sucks, the story underlying the threat makes no sense, but I do not care. Someone orgasms through a barn wall into oblivion! This is so stupid!

The sluggish parts of the movie are bad, and you feel them. They’re so slow that it’s hard to even riff on them and, to be honest, they run just a little too long for the ridiculous parts to compensate. While I spent the final twenty minutes of the film giddy with laughter, the middle third was achingly slow. I’d still recommend it: it’s a movie about an evil script that seems to be smart enough to use that as an excuse to make decisions that belong in a bad script. That it’s not smart enough to do anything competently really doesn’t matter.

My copy was not the Troma version, but Troma is a distributor of this film and have uploaded a copy to YouTube here. It’s worth a watch. Just start fast-forwarding when you get bored. You won’t miss any plot and you’ll be able to tell when you’re back at a point worth watching.

296. The Lazarus Syndrome

296. The Lazarus Syndrome (1978)
Director: Jerry Thorpe
Writer: William Blinn
From: Drive-In (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

A cardiologist finds his life changed due to his interactions with a patient.

A made-for-TV movie from the writer of Brian’s Song, adapter of Roots, and co-writer of Purple Rain. Purple Rain! Surely this will be good!

It’s whatever.

Louis Gossett Jr. plays Dr. St. Clair, a cardiologist whose marriage is on the rocks. He’s contacted by Joe Hamill, an adulterous reporter who’s just suffered a cardiac event. St. Clair becomes Hamill’s doctor and the two go back and forth antagonizing each other.

Hamill convinces his hospital roommate to consult with Dr. St. Clair about the upcoming triple-bypass that the roommate’s doctor, the hospital’s head doctor, Mendel, has recommended. When Mendel hears the request, he confronts St. Clair and gives him the patient’s records. All the records, though, support Mendel’s recommendation.

Oh, meanwhile St. Clair’s marriage has fixed itself and Hamill has asked his wife for a divorce so he can be with his mistress. You’d think these would be bigger plot points since the doctor and patient’s relationships are established early on as mirrors of each other, but they’re sorted with little-to-no-fuss if they’re not sorted off-screen.

The surgery date approaches, but something keeps bothering St. Clair about the video and x-rays he looked at. He overhears the patient tell Hamill that he’d been in a car accident as a child and had some ribs removed. St. Clair realizes the materials he looked at had all the ribs present. He confronts Mendel about the records being tampered with and the patient not needing the surgery. Mendel pushes back essentially with “so what,” arguing that the business end of running the hospital can’t be ignored. Without the money generated through surgeries and donations based on the successes of the hospital, they can’t do any good for any patients. The surgery, though, is called off.

Later, St. Clair finds Hamill running laps around a track. St. Clair says Mendel has resigned and St. Clair has been offered his job. St. Clair is willing to be head doctor, but he doesn’t want anything to do with the business end saying the multiple hats Mendel had to wear was part of the problem. He’s recommended Hamill for the administrative position, which Hamill accepts. They run together and start laughing. THE END

I wish the movie was better. It’s not actively bad, just kind of flat throughout. As I noted in the summary, the doctor is trying to save his marriage while the reporter is in the midst of trying to end his own. Gossett Jr. explicitly says this during the movie so you think it’s going to be the heart of the story, that this will be a drama about these two characters helping each other learn how to address their respective relationship challenges. And then it’s just not.

Instead it’s about the consequences of the hospital becoming increasingly depersonalized and focused on money. Only all that story happens in the background. To be fair, how would you go about dramatizing systemic bureaucratic creep? To complicate matters even further, Mendel isn’t really a villain. Sure, he seems monstrous when, in response to being accused of submitting his patient to a risky and unnecessary surgery, he says, “medicine is a business,” but the rest of his monologue is about the challenges of keeping the hospital afloat so that St. Clair and the other doctors can do the work of saving lives. In other words, he’s not wrong. In fact, he’s another victim of this system.

Granted, this movie is from 1978 so its insistence on medicine being a calling instead of a business is depressingly quaint. Forty years later the perspective is that there’s good money in saving lives because people will pay a lot to not die. So soak em for every dime you can. Also hilarious is the conceit at the end that Hamill, a reporter, will be making less money as a hospital administrator. Oh how things have changed.

In that respect, I guess the movie is a recommend since it seems to be ruminating on the beginning of the issues that we’re now living with. In other words, there’s an archaeological/sociological value to the piece. Dramatically though, it falls flat. There’s no energy and it’s never clear what the plot is supposed to be so, as a viewing experience, I’d have to suggest giving it a pass. It’s not bad, but it’s not anything really.

However, it is, somehow, in the public domain. Unfortunately my copy has Mill Creek graffiti all over it, but you can find a copy on archive.org here.

292. The Devil With Seven Faces

292. The Devil With Seven Faces aka Il diavolo a sette facce (1971)
Director: Osvaldo Civirani
Writers: Tito Carpi and Osvaldo Civirani
From: Drive-In

A woman is mistaken for her twin sister by gangsters trying to recover a stolen diamond.

Julie Harrison, after a party, is stalked by someone who takes pictures of her face. The next day, she visits the lawyer she met that night, Dave Barton, who’s being visited by his friend Tony. After leaving the office, Julie is assaulted on the sidewalk only to be saved by Tony and Dave. She starts a relationship with Tony while Dave starts pursuing an independent investigation into her.

What we learn is that Julie has a twin sister, Mary, who was married to a gangster. She was involved in a diamond heist and ripped her husband off. Now she’s calling Julie, trying to line up safe passage while sundry criminal forces mistake Julie for Mary.

After a fairly lengthy series of crosses and double-crosses, it’s revealed that Tony is Mary’s gangster husband. He and the other gang hunting the diamond cross paths, everyone dies, and Julie leaves safely. As she rushes to catch a plane, the police inspector tells his assistant that Julie died two years prior. The “Julie” we’d been watching was Mary and the diamond she’s carrying is a fake—the real one was never stolen. Dave meets her on the plane revealing that he knows the truth as well, minus the fake diamond, and the pair fly off assuming they’ll live off the sale of the diamond that neither knows is fake. THE END.

There’s very little tension in the film considering there’s an armed gang stalking the lead and the police never trust the principle characters. The sense of a closing net is never present. Instead, the film’s about the various figures crossing and double-crossing each other, but you can only recognize that if you know how the movie ends. Otherwise the moves are too subtle. Since the movie doesn’t spend much time on characters openly distrusting each other or escaping ever-closer moments of peril, the majority of the film is spent with them all just hanging out. The movie doesn’t offend in any particular way, but that’s less to do with the content than it is to do with the fact that it doesn’t move at all. While it’s not painfully boring, it’s just not that interesting, so it’s not a recommend.

287. Night Train to Terror

287. Night Train to Terror (1985)
Directors: John Carr, Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas
Writer: Phillip Yordan
From: Drive-In

A horror anthology where God and Satan haggle over the souls whose various stories make up the anthology.

Anthology films are generally hard to do because you’re trying to grab the audience’s attention, hold it, and bring a narrative to a satisfying conclusion. Then you have to do that at least twice more. However, horror kind of lends itself to the anthology format. I think I’ve said it elsewhere on the blog, but horror is much more about tone than character or plot. With a short piece, you can excel at relating a tone and idea and then getting out before anyone starts to ask questions.

None of which applies to this movie which is just silly when it’s not boring.

Night Train to Terror is an anthology, but it’s not comprised of shorts. Instead, it’s comprised of edited and shortened versions of three other films. Rather than have a short film that has its own beginning, middle, and end, you get three summaries of films, often with extended voice-overs to explain what’s going on.

The frame narrative is God and Satan riding a train and examining cases of individual souls. The “cases” are the three movies that make up this movie. Meanwhile, the train is going to crash at dawn, killing the rock band performing in the next car. They just sing one song, over and over, and, by the end, you’re begging for that crash.

The first story is about a guy who’s kidnapped by evil scientists. They inject him with some mind-control drug and send him out to roofie and kidnap women. This is not only to give the movie lots of context-free nudity, it’s also so the scientists can torture, murder, and then sell the women’s bodies to medical schools. One doctor turns on the other, the guy slips from their control, and all the bad guys get killed. There’s no sense of character or even any sense of what’s going on, so the whole sequence is pretty dull.

The second story is about a man who falls in love with a porno actress. He hunts her down, they get together, but her boss doesn’t want to give her up. So he invites them into the “Death Club” where members subject themselves to Rube Goldberg-ian forms of Russian Roulette: releasing a lethal bug to sting someone in the room, strapping themselves into electric chairs while a computer decides which one get the shock, and laying in sleeping bags under a swinging wrecking ball whose cord is being cut.

This story has more voice-over than the other two because so much of the original movie is glossed. The man bows out of the club after the insect incident, but the boss has him kidnapped at gun point twice to endure the other two. Which don’t kill the guy. Or the boss. So what was the point?

The final story is a movie I already reviewed on the Misery Mill, The Nightmare Never Ends. While this condensed version adds stop-motion monsters that are not in the original, it strips what little sense there was from the original. You still have this demon/Satan surrogate living his immortal life on Earth. A Holocaust survivor tries to kill him and dies instead. This leads Detective Cameron Mitchell (may his name be praised) to investigate and figure out who the demon is. Meanwhile Richard Moll has written a book arguing that God is Dead and his wife is told she must do the work of ridding the world of Satan. Everyone dies except the wife who tries to kill the demon, but butchers someone else instead.

I said at the end of that review that, “With the right perspective and group of friends, this could all be entertainingly bad,” and I’d double-down on that for this movie. The whole approach and sense of gravitas throughout is pretty silly and the stop-motion monsters look deliciously bad. This version, altogether, is much funnier than The Nightmare Never Ends, although it’s still a bad movie. With some chips and beer, though, it’d be great for some Halloween fun.

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.

269. Legacy of Blood

269. Legacy of Blood aka Will to Die (1971)
Director: Carl Monson
Writers: Eric Norden from a story by Carl Monson
From: Drive-In
Watch: Elvira’s Movie Macabre (via ShoutFactoryTV)

A hate-filled patriarch dies, leaving his substantial fortune to his servants and children, with one condition: the money will be evenly split among the survivors. As bodies start piling up, it’s clear someone doesn’t want to share.

We open on the solicitor playing a reel-to-reel recording of John Carradine reciting his will. To each of his three servants he leaves a million dollars to be paid out at the rate of $500/week as long as they continue to work at the house. To each of his four children, who he notes how much he hates, he leaves the rest of his fortune to be evenly divided among them. The reason he doesn’t leave them nothing is we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.

He chose poorly.

The only stipulation is they have to live in the house for a week and anyone who leaves (or dies) will have their share split among the survivors. If all the children leave/die, the servants split the inheritance.

With a set-up like that, we should be off to the races with the siblings being wary of each other and of the staff. Instead, there’s a shrugging sense of “Whatta prick!” and everyone generally hangs out.

Even though the will stipulated that they all stay there for a week, things start happening that night because why develop suspense in a horror flick? First, a couple’s dog is killed. The sheriff is called to investigate and then gets murdered himself. The siblings find his severed head in the fridge, freak out, then discover that the phone lines have been cut and all the cars have been disabled. The eldest brother says, “It’s getting to be like some kind of horror film.”

Yes. A boring one.

The rest of the movie is people get killed one-by-one. They should all start getting suspicious of each other, but they never really do. We get some backstory involving incest and BDSM and thwarted romances that’s all supposed to be very sordid but is all played off with a shrugging nonchalance.

Anyway, bodies pile up, the killer is revealed in a twist, the killer is betrayed in a further twist, and we end with yet another twist and a character making a joke while directly addressing the audience and winking. THE END.

The whole work is just dull. Fortunately, it’s hilariously dull. One brother looks alternately like a fit Joe Don Baker or a bloated Arch Hall Jr. and Igor, the butler (named “Igor” for Chrissakes!), looks like a roided out Mel Brooks. One sister is hamming it up when her character’s not catatonic and her psychologist husband is generally being a smarmy prick. On top of that, there are a few hilarious deaths. A couple is electrocuted in bed looking like they’re pretending to be sex dolls and someone else is killed by bees.

I want to linger on the bee death for a moment. The character is suspected of being the killer and so gets tied up and locked in a room. The real killer arrives, throws a beehive in, and closes the door again. Other people in the house hear the victim screaming, open the door, and find the victim horribly stung, covered in bees, and not dead. Then they close the door! The victim isn’t dead, but they do nothing to try to save them or get rid of the bees. They literally look at the victim, go, “Oh,. Oh dear,” and seal them back up with the bees. Hilarious.

This film had echos of The Ghost in terms of a seemingly haunted house and a killer scheming for an inheritance as well as a Bela Lugosi murder-comedy I watched during the second part of the PD Project, One Body Too Many. Lugosi plays a butler who’s always trying to get people to eat some cookies. It’s just a running gag in the background, but part of this movie reminded me of One Body Too Many. That is, also, a better movie and I recommend that over Legacy of Blood.

To Legacy’s credit, the film is in the public domain. Unfortunately, my copy has Mill Creek graffiti on it so I can’t upload it to archive.org. On top of that, there doesn’t seem to be a copy on the Internet Archive at all. However, the movie was featured on Elvira’s Movie Macabre and, as of this writing, is streaming via ShoutFactoryTV. The movie was also featured as an episode of Cinematic Titanic.

On its own, the movie is too dull to recommend. Nothing particularly dramatic happens, but also nothing particularly gory. It’s best enjoyed with sarcastic friends eager to riff something. The dullness of the film has a way of highlighting the absurdity of everything, and that’s always helpful when trying to laugh.

236. Trauma

236. Trauma aka Rings of Fear aka Enigma rosso (1978)
Director: Alberto Negrin
Writers: Marcello Coscia, Massimo Dallamano, Franco Ferrini, Stefano Ubezio, Alberto Negrin, and Peter Berling
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

A young girl’s body is found brutally violated. The investigation into her death uncovers a sordid situation at a nearby private school.

I’ve read a few descriptions of this movie and it seems like there are a variety of versions with events in different orders. I’m not wholly surprised by that since this was a Spanish/Italian/German co-production which means there are potentially translations to English from each version. Also, with six credited screenwriters (IMDB offers a further two for the German version), I’m not surprised that there’s confusion over what the movie’s about or what happens. I’m going to describe the version I watched, although it sounds like “sordid” is a fitting description no matter what version you stumble across.

The movie opens with the girl’s body being dumped from a car. Then the car and a motorcycle leave the scene. Since the movie is trying to keep the identity of the killers a secret the entire time, it constantly cuts back to this motorcycle and car pair to indicate “something is up.” Police arrive at the scene and call in our hero, Inspector Di Salvo, played by Fabio Testi. Since “Testi” is more fun to say, that’s what I’m going to call him.

The girl has deep abdominal wounds caused by a blunt object and the autopsy reveals that she might have been pregnant. I say “might” because the audio wasn’t great and I couldn’t tell if Testi was saying that she was, had been, or at least wasn’t. “This point wasn’t made clear” is the leitmotif of the movie.

The girl went to an elite private school where she was part of a group called “The Inseparables.” The girl’s little sister gives Testi a satchel from the girl’s locker that’s filled with money. Meanwhile, in a shower scene involving several young women in full-frontal nudity, one of the Inseparables starts feeling sick.

Things start moving forward: Testi is abrupt and rude to all his potential subjects, moving the investigation forward more due to accident than through active investigation. The little sister continues to provide him with evidence and information from within the school. As this is happening, someone keeps attacking the surviving Inseparables.

I’m not going to go into more plot details because it is as mystery/thriller and part of the pleasure is seeing that plot unfold, even if it makes no sense in the context of this movie. Obviously the Inseparables are having sex for money—the sick girl is pregnant and has to get an abortion—but the nature of the situation and who’s involved unfolds in an interesting way. I’d almost recommend this as a companion piece to The Silencer since that movie also dealt with moving through a child sex ring member-by-member. The difference here is Trauma actually focuses on the victims and perpetrators as characters instead of the weird drama of their hunter.

On the one hand, I feel like I’m giving the movie short shrift. I was pretty tired when I was watching it and had to rewind several times to catch parts I’d drifted off through. That said, I set my alarm to wake me up because I assumed I’d be falling asleep constantly and largely didn’t need it. The movie is visually interesting enough, establishes questions and ramps up tension largely through the cinematography. Plus it’s over-the-top in a way that borders on camp, but not so much so that you can only take campy pleasure in it. You can watch this as a serious thriller, although with a bit of the surreal logic giallo films tend to have, or you can watch this ironically to riff on and laugh at. The line, I think, is between if you want to be shocked at the attempts at titillation or laugh at the idea that this is titillating.

I’ll admit that I was surprised by the ultimate villain, but most of that was due to the fact that there was no way for you to know that this character was behind everything. Then it turns out there’s a twist, which I’d called early in the movie, only I had the motivation wrong. So I have to give the movie credit for that: it surprised me, although not for the reasons it meant to. Ultimately I’d give this a light recommend. It’s not a movie I’d encourage anyone to seek out, but it’s one of the better ones from these sets. As a flick, it’s watchable, riffable, and executed with more than a minimum of competence. It’s just not anything remarkable.

228. The Guy From Harlem

228. The Guy From Harlem (1977)
Director: Rene Martinez Jr.
Writer: Gardenia Martinez
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In
Watch: archive.org, Rifftrax

Al Connors, Miami private eye, is hired to thwart two kidnappings by local crime lord Big Daddy.

Open on a shack, a black woman asleep on a couch while a white man sits in a chair. While it could be the start of a Beckett play, it’s something far more depressing. The man walks over to the couch and starts feeling up the woman. She wakes up, objects, and then he tells her she’s going to have a friend to spend time with her soon.

Cut to the opening credits! Which should really be the end credits because they cover every position in the crew. Also, as you can see from the title card still at the top, you can’t actually read them because they’re not on top of a black background.

Behold Al, the titular Guy From Harlem, driving into work. Since I mentioned that the shot is of him driving, you can probably guess that a good chunk of this movie is spent watching people go from point to point. The innovation The Guy From Harlem adds is, instead of just watching people driving and parking, we get to see them move from one part of the room to the other, thoroughly. Nary a step is overlooked. And the cameraman is always very far away so you can watch each actor move from one part of the room… all the way over… to… the other part… where the scene… might… be about… to continue… maybe.

Anyway, nothing much happens in the movie so I’ll speed through things. The CIA contacts Al to guard the wife of an African President. They don’t say which country, just that “she’s the wife of an African head of state.” She reveals that it’s a president although she also never says which country. The CIA is hiring Al because they’re afraid there’s a leak in their organization. Al takes her to a hotel, starts hitting on her, thwarts a kidnapping attempt by Big Daddy, and then takes her to his white girlfriend’s place. He asks the girlfriend to stay at a hotel and then hooks up with the president’s wife.

Next day (maybe?), he’s back in the office, job well done. Harry De Bauld, a former gambling magnate that’s moved into the drug trade, wants Al to save his daughter Wanda who’s been kidnapped by Big Daddy. Turns out she’s the woman we saw at the beginning. Harry wants Al to deliver $500,000 worth of cocaine and a $250,000 ransom to Big Daddy to get Wanda back. He’s hiring Al because he’s afraid of betrayal within his organization. Al manages to rescue Wanda without doing the handoff, kills all the henchmen, and then takes her to his white girlfriend’s place. He asks the girlfriend to stay at a hotel and then hooks up with Wanda.

Next day, he hands Wanda over to her dad, tells him he’s disposed of the cocaine to convince him to get out of the drug business. Then Big Daddy calls Al, they agree to meet, and Al and Big Daddy have a fight. Al kills Big Daddy and walks off with Wanda, laughing. THE END

The movie sucks, y’all. It has the aesthetics of a porno but, thankfully, never goes all the way down that road. Not to say this isn’t an exploitation flick and that it doesn’t have gratuitous nudity (hope you enjoy seeing a woman take her top off… from across the room… in a mirror), but it’s pretty fleeting. The Rifftrax version I watched actually cut all of it out and the only reason I knew it’d been cut was that I’d scanned through my copy of the movie to see if there were any Mill Creek bugs in it.

Nothing about the movie is interesting. The few fight scenes it has are plodding and poorly choreographed, there really aren’t any characters, and the whole “facing off against Big Daddy” feels contrived just to have a final showdown with a villain. Big Daddy isn’t even present or a character much in the movie. On top of that, with Wanda being tied up in a shack for a good portion of the movie, things get kind of rapey. She’s never assaulted, but it’s not for lack of trying on the part of the goons. Since the movie has that porno aesthetic, it always felt like the only thing keeping the movie from going down that road was that it would take too much effort.

Obviously, not a recommend, not even the Rifftrax version. They can’t work against how little is going on in this film and even their jokes start to fall into that leery space that the movie seems to invite. They constantly refer to the white girlfriend as “Jessica Simpson with smaller boobs” which just isn’t the Rifftrax tone.

While I suggest giving this one a pass, it is in the public domain. I’ve uploaded an MPEG2 copy to archive.org here, but I’d say the only use you could get from it would be to do a complete redubbing for comic effect. It’s pretty bad.

204. Throw Out the Anchor!

204. Throw Out the Anchor! (1974)
Director: John Hugh
Writer: John Hugh
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

A man travels to Florida with his children to rent a boat for two months, but learns that the only boat available is a rotting tub. He, along with the ragtag group that lives in the surrounding swamp, makes the boat seaworthy and joins the group in an effort to save their homes from developers.

Johnathon visits a marina asking if it’s Cuppler’s Corner and is turned away. The man running the marina calls our eventual kind-of villain on a nearby boat to alert him to Johnathon’s question. That night, Johnathon arrives at Cuppler’s Corner where he meets Cap, a drunk that took the deposit for a boat via mail. Johnathon has traveled all the way from New York with his two children to rent the boat for two months. Unfortunately, Cap has drunk away the deposit and there are no boats available. All the boats are homes for the people living in the swamp—the black priest who’s initially shirtless, the maybe Indian foreign exchange student, and Cap’s housedress-and-curler-wearing wife that’s always berating him over his drinking. Johnathon threatens legal action, but Cap responds, “I got just one thing to say: I got a Jewish lawyer.”

Head::desk.

Before anyone calls on Mr. Katz the lawyer, Stevie, Johnathon’s daughter (and initiator of every dues ex machina), finds him and tells him their sob story. She says, basically, that her dad is always screwing up, but this time it’s not his fault. The lawyer tells her a story about how he got screwed over as a kid, but someone stood up for him. He then engineers a plan to get the family a boat and keep them from suing.

I want to linger on this moment because it’s pretty odd. Mr. Katz’s story is kind of affecting and undercuts any sense of this being a comedy. Instead, it makes it feel like a bit of a Hallmark movie-style feelgood family film. It draws attention to his late wife and his feelings about the area and lays out his moral compass in that he sees the opportunity to do right by someone as an obligation to do so. At the same time, it establishes Johnathon as a bumbler and screw-up which nothing else in the movie speaks to. He comes off as an angry, entitled white guy—the sheriff yelling at the hotel clerk in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He’s not the goofball Stevie’s plea implies that he is. At this point in the film, he reads as the villain, the guy the ragtag group has to convince not to seize their homes to turn into a parking lot.

They find him a boat, but it needs extensive repairs. In the course of repairing it, the ragtag group wins him over and he starts to fall in love with Lindy, a woman who won’t discuss her life outside of the swamp. As this is happening, the deputy sheriff keeps trying to serve Cap with papers and Cap keeps dodging him. The boat is finally finished and Johnathon strikes out to show his family all the beautiful nature, only there’s too much pollution and everything’s dead.

Yeah. Suddenly it’s an environmental film. The guy from the beginning pops back up here because he’s trying to get a highway built through the Corner and the county commissioner is running a scheme to buy up the land surrounding the forthcoming highway so his buddies can build condos. We find this out because Lindy is married to the head schemer.

Cap gets served, everyone has 30 days to clear out, and Johnathon comes back ready to fight. There’s a dredge sitting in the swamp so they come up with a plan to seize it. They take the dredge hostage, the Lt. Gov. comes down to talk with them, and there’s a bunch of attention on the situation because Stevie wrote a letter to the editor about how sad her daddy was that he couldn’t show her the nature. All the shady deals get revealed, the planned road is canceled saving everyone’s homes, and the dredge is accidentally blown up. Lindy goes home to divorce her husband and everyone has a happy ending. THE END.

I think I can sum up how misjudged this movie is with one phrase: unnecessary blackface. Blackface is, outside of stories about blackface, always unnecessary, but some movies that use it at least provide a narrative reason for it to happen. Here, in the (limp, unimpressive, unaffecting) climax, the son has his face blacked so that he “can act as the scout,” and then doesn’t scout anything. And doesn’t wash the makeup off for the rest of the movie. So, yeah.

Oh, oh no. Did you think you were funny?

That sums up the entire thing—it’s a comedy that’s wholly unaware of what it’s about or what’s funny. I wasn’t initially, and still am not 100%, convinced that it was even supposed to be a comedy despite the parody of the MGM logo at the start.

The movie never settles down into one plot. I mean, it takes twenty minutes for Johnathan to see the boat for the first time. Everything is a lead-up to him starting to work on the boat and getting to know everyone. And, really, that should be the plot. It should be this calm, Mary Poppins-esque story about a job-obsessed guy trying to hold his family together learning that a simpler life in the bayou is what they need. Instead it tries to be an environmental drama, a screwball comedy, and a “kids saving the rec center” plot, each in turn. And none of them are done well. The movie has the feel of Gilligan’s Island with an exploitation movie look, and that should be more fun than it is.

In the end, it’s just a bad movie—not funny-bad or good-bad, but just a boring, uninspired lump. The one thing to say in its favor is that it’s in the public domain, but there’s no real point in hunting it down—it’s not entertaining, it doesn’t invite much riffing, and doesn’t have good enough visuals to use in other projects. On top of that, both my copies have Mill Creek bugs on them so I can’t upload them to the Internet Archive. No big loss.

202. Slave of the Cannibal God

202. Slave of the Cannibal God aka La montagna del dio cannibale (1978)
Director: Sergio Martino
Writers: Cesare Frugoni and Sergio Martino
From: Drive-In

A woman and her brother set out to find her missing explorer husband. It’s believed that he’s set off for the mountain of the cannibal God, but everyone on the trip is harboring secrets.

This one’s pretty grim, though competently produced. I initially expected it to be Cannibal Holocaust meets Heart of Darkness with the group finding the lost explorer leading the tribe as their mad king. I was half right. It’s closer to the film adaptation of Louise Linton’s memoirs, but less tone deaf.

Shut up. Gawd.

Susan (Ursula Andress) flies to New Guinea to meet her brother, Arthur, and go in search of her missing husband, Henry. They recruit Dr. Foster (Stacy Keach), the man who’d been working with Henry, but was kept in the dark about the final journey. Foster suspects Henry went to the mountain on the forbidden island of Roka because it’s the only place that Henry didn’t know by heart and the only destination he’d feel the need to keep a secret.

No one is allowed on the island, but the group sneaks their way on with a small crew that gets picked off one by one by natural and unnatural means—one’s eaten by an alligator, one’s caught in a trap, etc. Arthur’s behavior grows more erratic and a local that’s been by Foster’s side the whole time acts more and more suspiciously. Eventually, the group is attacked by people covered in white make-up wearing masks. The group escapes the masked attackers and ends up at a mission camp on the island.

Foster says the people they saw were "the Pooka," a cannibal tribe that had captured him six years prior. He’d only survived because he was able to cure a sick child and didn’t escape until another tribe attacked the Pooka, seemingly destroying them. After he tells this to Manolo, an explorer they meet at the mission, he and Manolo see a Pooka and Keach delivers the best terrible line of the movie, “That’s right! You don’t forget the taste of human flesh!” Horrible delivery, horrible smash cut after it, horrible music cue—it’s got everything!

So a Pooka attacks the mission the next night, kills a woman that’s hooking up with Arthur, and manages to stab Foster in the leg before Foster shoots and kills him. Turns out the Pooka was the local traveling with Foster and was the kid Foster had saved all those years ago. Because the group has brought this violence to the mission, the priest kicks them out and the quartet—Susan, Arthur, Foster, and, now, Manolo, seduced by Susan—set off to climb the mountain. Foster’s leg is injured and infected, but he wants to see that the tribe is dead. Susan admits she doesn’t believe her husband went to the mountain with any humanitarian purpose, he knew there was something there to make him rich.

On the way, Foster has trouble climbing a waterfall and Arthur lets him fall and die rather than help. Susan and Manolo find a cave with ritualistic markings and fresh corpses, meaning the tribe is still present and active, but when they try to tell Arthur, they find him running into a different cave. He’s found uranium and he and Susan threaten Manolo at gunpoint to help them sell the mineral rights to the “great powers.” Only the Pooka attack at that moment, kill Arthur, and take the other two prisoner.

In the tribe’s home, Susan and Manolo find Henry mummified and venerated as a god because the tribe thinks his Geiger counter is his heart. Since Henry had a picture of Susan with him, they think she’s a god too and ritualistically feed her part of her brother. Eventually, Manolo breaks free, releases Susan, and they, after some struggles, escape the tribe and the mountain. THE END.

This was one of the video nasties in Britain, a selection of movies so brutal and foul that they not only couldn’t be released at all, but led to an intensification of the censorship laws. Other films on the list included, of course, Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, and Faces of Death. You know, the films all of us of a certain age heard about growing up for featuring "real death." Curiously, the list also included the Clint Howard vehicle Evilspeak, Don’t Look in the Basement, and The Evil Dead.

Scholarship about the moral panic around video nasties is pretty interesting, especially since some of the movies, like The Driller Killer, ended up on the list just for their advertising, not due to any content in the film. Looking back at many of the films on the list, yes, there are disturbing themes (anything cannibal related or set in a Nazi prison camp seemed to automatically make the list, which, fair enough), but most of the movies are simply bad when they’re not just silly. And there are several that, not in spite of, but because of their outré content, do something interesting and are substantial films because of it. Cannibal Holocaust is grim, but it arguably has a moral purpose underlying its story.

Slave of the Cannibal God can’t make the same claim. It’s a cheap, but competent, exploitation flick trying to jump on the cannibal-film bandwagon. It’s ripping off Cannibal Holocaust to the degree that it even features real on-screen deaths of animals, and that’s never acceptable. Apparently the scenes of animal torture and death weren’t in the original movie, but the distributors told the director Martino to put them in. Various sources make reference to a monkey being flung into the mouth of a snake, which I didn’t see in my cut. Mine did contain the eviscerating and skinning of a live lizard, though, so it’s not like this version is more palatable.

And that’s what sinks this movie. It moves okay, it’s competently done on every level, but you gotta watch animals getting tortured and killed. That’s my line, that’s my limit, and it’s not, in any way, a difficult stance to take. You gotta give this one a pass.

201. Women of Devil's Island

Image from IMDB

201. Women of Devil’s Island aka Le prigioniere dell’isola del diavolo (1962)
Director: Domenico Paolella
Writer: Domenico Paolella
From: Drive-In

Women exiled to a French prison island and forced to mine for gold try to both survive and escape their venal captors. Salvation seems to come with the arrival of a compassionate captain, but his motives are unsure.

This movie’s curious just on a physical level, before we even get to any of the content of the movie. The version I have is from American International Pictures’ television distributors so this is the TV cut. That’s fine, but this not only clearly a bad VHS rip—tracking errors are still present—it’s taken from an original print so old and worn that all the color has been leeched away. This movie isn’t in black and white, it’s all in sun-bleached sepia tones, which was not the intention. On top of all that, there isn’t even a title card. There’s never a moment on my copy where the actual title of the movie appears. I have other movies from these sets where that happens, but I’ve never had the distributor’s logo pop up and then cut directly to the movie. The opening credits were actively removed at some point which is just strange.

We open with a group of women being taken to the titular Devi’s Island to serve out prison sentences for various crimes—thievery, sex work, etc. Among them is Martine Foucher who’s been sentenced to live on the island, seemingly for political reasons. Her father was a bureaucrat who fell out of favor, he sister was previously exiled to this island, and now it’s her turn.

They arrive and are introduced to the evil Lt. Lefèvre who’s intent on working them to death. Martine finds her sister posing as Jeanette, a woman sentenced for sex work but who died on the way over. Jeanette is working on a plan to escape with several other women and brings Martine in. However, they don’t invite another prisoner to join them and she rats them out. All the escapees are captured and Jeanette is shot in the back.

The “Old Testament logic” I’ve mentioned before on this blog is kind of in play here. Jeanette sleeps with Lefèvre to facilitate the escape and get access to the island’s gold. Despite being one of the good guys, in terms of movies as moral spaces, she dies for having sinned. Likewise, at the end of the movie, the rat dies as well. It’s a noble death, but she’s sinned so the movie has to punish her.

Anyway, a French ship arrives early and Captain Vallière arrives, taking control of operations from Lefèvre. The captain’s first orders are that the escapees be released from torture and that the women not be abused or sexually assaulted by the guards. He starts falling in love with Martine, but it turns out he’s a pirate posing as a French officer and steals all the gold.

He’s not a bad pirate, though. He’s stealing to fund the revolution and so goes back to the island to save Martine and one of his comrades that got left behind. His boat crashes on the island, he’s found by the rat who protects his secret, and Martine accidentally leads the guards to his hiding space. As he’s about to be hung, the rat grabs a torch, admits to what she’s done, and sets fire to several barrels of gunpowder.

The captain arms the women, they start fighting the French guards, and the pirates arrive on the shore. Martine kills Lefèvre, the guards are all killed by the women and pirates, and the survivors all leave on the ship to join the revolution. THE END.

The movie’s a little odd structurally. The plot of a woman being exiled to a prison island, finding her sister there, and then participating in an escape plan should be enough to carry a movie on its own, but that’s just the first thirty minutes here. The sister’s dead a little under halfway through (the TV cut is very short, by the way. IMDB says this is 86 minutes long. My copy was 73) and then Martine kind of becomes a supporting character. The movie becomes the captain’s story, and even that runs through several iterations before the movie ends.

In the end, the whole thing’s just kind of weird. I don’t know what they were aiming for story-wise, the print is really messed up, and it’s never really that interesting. It’s not bad, but that means it’s not funny-bad either. As a whole, it’s pretty mediocre and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

196. Savage Journey

196. Savage Journey (1983)
Director: Tom McGowan
Writer: Philip Yordan
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

The story of the rise of the Mormon church and it’s eventual settlement in Utah.

We open with a scene of Joseph Smith being kidnapped from his home. He’s about to be lynched when a local preacher stops the mob, noting there are too many of them present to get away with it. So they tar and feather him instead, leaving him tied up. The preacher’s wife shows up and cuts him loose because what’s been done to him is wrong, and the movie is off and running!

Or generally limping along.

I’m not going to go through the plot of this movie because there isn’t one. It’s about Joseph Smith meeting Brigham Young and how the latter ends up developing the church into what it is today. Only it doesn’t communicate that story. There’s no sense of drama, tension, or focus. Rather than focus on a particularly dramatic moment in the development of the Mormon church, it tends to gloss the entire history, never focusing much on any one thing.

If there’s a narrative throughline, it’s the story of Samuel. Brigham Young, during his first mission trip, encounters Samuel and his wife Claire. They’ve immigrated from Europe and Samuel has become an atheist or at least an agnostic due to his rejection of aristocratic corruption. His position is, “How can God be good when He allows such suffering?” Basically it’s the question of theodicy which has never been satisfactorily answered. Claire, though, becomes a member of the church and the couple follow Smith and Young across the country as the church is routinely driven from their homes.

Samuel, narratively, is supposed to be the point-of-view character, the outsider who’s eventually won over to the faith thereby communicating the righteousness of Mormonism. The movie doesn’t spend enough time with him to do that, though, only checking in with him in each town for him to say, “I ain’t a Mormon yet,” and, “What? We’re moving again? Oh, c’mon!” At the end, of course, he converts. If that’s the story you want to tell, fine, even my unbelieving heart likes stories of faith journeys, but actually tell it.

Instead, we generally follow Young (Smith is killed by a mob halfway through) and there’s no real character there. He’s deeply dedicated to the faith and that’s about it. Various things happen, but I’m not Mormon so their importance or significance don’t register, and the movie is counting on you having that context. This isn’t a dramatization of the early Mormon church, it’s an illustration. You have to plug in the details yourself. “Oh, this is that moment. So that’s what it looked like. Oh, the Governor is lying to Smith right now! This is tense.” You have to come with that knowledge. The movie doesn’t give you any of these cues itself.

Initially, I thought this was going to be propaganda or a proselytizing work, but it doesn’t even reach those levels. It’s very much addressing an audience with a shared context and not making a great effort to talk to anyone else. There are nods to outsiders—the church’s stance on race (officially anti-slavery, but fails to mention their belief that non-white people are marked as cursed by God) and polygamy—but they feel incidental, like literal asterisks. Regarding polygamy, Young finds out about Smith’s declaration of it, tells his wife he’s not interested in having a second wife, then she picks a young widow for him to marry. The way it’s played up is, instead of having a harem, it fills Young’s house with a gaggle of gossiping women. Later, when representatives from the government ask Young about the church’s stance on polygamy, he plays it up as a mercy, as widows and spinsters being taken in and given a home—it’s not some creepy sex thing, it’s like an animal shelter, for women!

The movie’s kind of just nothing. If it focused in more on a specific moment, it’d be more interesting, but that’s not its goal. This is a movie for Mormons, part of that genre of Christian media whose primary purpose is to fill time to prevent secular media from having a space. It’s not being held to the standard of being good, it’s being held to the standard of being ideologically correct. As long as it reinforces the central message of “keep thinking about the church,” it passes. Unsurprisingly, the pair behind this movie did another one just called Brigham. I imagine it’s a very similar script.

McGowan and Yordan themselves are an interesting pair, though. Yordan wrote the script for the hallucinogenically bad Cry Wilderness, episode 2 of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return and the two of them did Night Train to Terror (forthcoming on this blog) and Cataclysm aka The Nightmare Never Ends. In other words, they’re exploitation hacks. Here they’re just exploiting an audience that’s willing to be pandered to. It’s neither offensive nor dramatic and just kind of meanders along. I don’t particularly recommend it, but it’s not hard to find if you’re curious.

194. Rattlers

194. Rattlers (1976)
Director: John McCauley
Writers: Jerry Golding, John McCauley
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In
Watch: archive.org

A herpetologist investigating unusual rattlesnake attacks starts to uncover a military conspiracy.

We open with two shitty kids going to play in a canyon. They fall into a snake pit, get all kinds of bit, and die. Frankly, great start, really great start. Until the credits are done, I’m convinced this movie has its heart in the right place.

Then we get to the main character, Tom. His names important because it’s what distinguishes him from Dick and Harry, you know, the trio of uninteresting, indistinguishable men. Tom is a herpetologist and a college professor—think Indiana Jones, but without the charisma, charm, or excitement. He’s asked by the local sheriff to come down and inspect the bodies in case there’s anything unusual. He looks, says, “Them’s snakebites,” and collects his check.

Only more people start dying from snake attacks. A kid is attacked in a barn and his mom is overwhelmed by snakes in her house. A plumber gets bit and the snakes attack the woman in the house by crawling through the pipes. I think there are others, but I can’t remember or care. The deaths aren’t given any weight whatsoever in the movie so each scene of a new character just becomes a dull countdown to their inevitable death by snake.

Tom returns at the sheriff’s request and is paired with a photographer, Ann. Tom is very upset that Ann’s a woman since there’s no way she can handle the work ahead—some light hiking and overnight camping. She’s just back from two years in the Vietnam press pool, by the way, but, yeah, sure, this will be too much for her delicate feminine sensibilities.

This isn’t me being PC, the movie makes a special point, several times, to complain about “women’s lib” and Ann not being willing to know her place. All this despite her being more than capable of doing the work. And the movie actively takes a stand against her. She calls Tom out for there not being enough women in various fields and says he has the power to change that. He brushes her off, but this is literally right after he’s fought with the sheriff over having her assigned as his partner—he’s actively preventing a woman from doing work she’s capable of, but she’s the crazy one.

Anyway, they eventually realize there’s a military base nearby all the attacks and go there. They learn from doctor in the lab who specializes in biological materials that a soldier died from particularly aggressive snakebites a few months prior. Then a helicopter pilot tells Tom about depositing a container of something in an abandoned mine.

Tom and Ann investigate the mine, find a massive nest of snakes, and go have a romantic weekend in Vegas. No, that’s literally how the story progresses. They’re looking for the source of all these snake attacks, find it, then bounce to Vegas without telling anyone about the nest.

They return to their tent where they’re attacked by snakes but saved at the last minute by the military. Two soldiers have been killed by snakebite and the doctor isn’t willing to keep quiet anymore. Twist! They were working on chemical weapons at the base and disposed of a leaking canister of something that makes animals hyper-violent. The base Colonel was the mastermind, kills the doctor, and runs to the abandoned mine for one last standoff for reasons. The whys of any of this will constantly elude you. He shoots at some cops, cops shoot back, he trips while holding a grenade and falls into a snake pit where he blows up, sealing the mine once again. Tom and Ann drive off together to settle back down near the college. THE END.

The movie is just so much nothing. No tension, no mystery, no humor. It’s just stagnant from the word “go.” Even the riffing from the Cinematic Titanic version I watched couldn’t energize this sodden lump. The movie has plenty to make fun of and vast stretches of silence, but it seemed like even the riffers were drawn into the fetid languor of the whole thing and half-dozed through their jokes. And I say this as a fan of Cinematic Titanic. I was lucky enough to see them riff a total of six movies live. Rattlers sapped any energy they had.

So, obviously I’m not recommending it. The movie is, at least, in the public domain so you can find a copy at archive.org. I can’t add a new copy because Mill Creek wiped themselves on both copies I have. Not a great loss, though. Like I said, there’s not much here to watch.

184. Mama Dracula

184. Mama Dracula (1980)
Director: Boris Szulzinger
Writers: Pierre Sterckx, Boris Szulzinger, Marc-Henri Wajnberg, with English dialogue by Tony Hendra
From: Drive-In

Countess Dracula, a vampire who survives by bathing in the blood of virgins, becomes a patron of the scientist Professor Van Bloed in hopes of developing a synthetic blood that will protect her immortality.

We start with Van Bloed (pronounced “Blood” which indicates the caliber of comedy here) doing a mad scientist rant while petting a bunny. He’s trying to develop synthetic blood. His work must have caught someone’s attention because he’s been invited to the “Congress of Blood” to share his findings. He sets out immediately and we’re given a montage of boats coming into Ellis Island, punctuated by a shot of the Statue of Liberty growing fangs. That’s the only time we get animation like this so I don’t know why the moment is there.

Nor do I know why we’re being shown boats around New York when Van Bloed is going to Transylvania. That was my first point of confusion. The movie seemed to be set in modern day America, and then it’s in a seemingly medieval Eastern Europe. Turns out it was just sloppy editing. The movie takes place in modern Transylvania.

Van Bloed arrives at the castle of Countess Dracula where he’s immediately harried by twin vampires (the Wajnberg brothers who play it very broad and later do an extended Vaudeville-style mirror routine where they mimic each other’s actions) and is saved at the last minute by the Countess. She reveals that there is no Congress, but she wants to support his work to the tune of $1,000,000. He accepts.

And from here the movie should be him growing suspicious of what’s going on and who his patrons are, but it doesn’t. Instead we see the Countess and her two vampire servants running a high-fashion shop called Vamp from which they kidnap virgins. The virgins are kidnapped from the changing room which gives the movie many opportunities for cheap nudity, which it takes advantage of. They finally reveal to Van Bloed that they’re vampires and he’s completely on board, growing into more of a Renfield character. He gets frustrated in his work and demands ten virgins to complete the project. The twins get to work on gathering them.

Halfway through the movie, the Inspector shows up, but he’s a buffoon and it’s really his female assistant who’s doing all the work. These, I guess, are supposed to be our heroes, but it’s still not clear. Whose story are we following? Whose goals do we want to see fulfilled?

The assistant inspector catches the attention of the vampires and Van Bloed so they kidnap her. While she’s confined, the Countess visits her and seemingly convinces her to become a vampire. I think. This whole part is unclear.

The Inspector apologizes to the Countess for all the unrest and suspicion around her and she tells him to invite all the townspeople to the castle for the twin’s fashion show where they’ll be unveiling their new designs. The mob arrives and… is really impressed by the fashion. While the show’s going on, the assistant inspector starts chasing one of the twins because she’s been turned, I think (?), and Van Bloed perfects his synthetic blood formula. The assistant inspector chases one twin across the stage, Van Bloed comes forward to announce his success, and the vampires announce to everyone that they are vampires and now, thanks to the blood, everyone can be vampires and live forever. The townspeople erupt in applause.

The coda is the assistant inspector as the new Countess marries both the twins and they have a brood of baby vampires. The final shot is Van Bloed, gray and old, taking their picture while the original Countess says the picture is, as always with him, too red. THE END.

This is a strange film. It’s trying to be a farce, but it’s never clear what it’s a farce of. It also doesn’t have a traditional protagonist/antagonist situation. In fact, there’s never really a hero or main character. It’s just a muddle of stuff. It’s obviously trying to be a comedy on one level, but the kind of jokes it’s trying to tell is never clear. The movie ranges from being cartoonishly slapstick with the Inspector constantly falling over and shouting “Sabotage!” to weirdly bawdy with a woman who keeps trying to lose her virginity to be protected from the Countess. When she finally does, an orgy breaks out causing the building she’s in to literally explode. Then the investigation starts halfway through, but it’s not clear if that’s just supposed to be another opportunity for comedy or is part of a rising threat to Van Bloed’s work or the Countess.

It is, admittedly, kind of fun to see Van Bloed when he’s investigating or getting deep into his experiments. The actor looks like a cross between Buster Keaton and Annie Lennox, and the movie’s at its best when he’s being androgynous and New Wave-y. When he gets into his more slapsticky bits, including a scene where he’s essentially doing a silly walk, the Keaton resemblance is clearer and the movie’s weaker. That tends to be true for the movie as a whole: When it’s aiming for style, atmosphere, or strangeness, it’s approaching something interesting. It so often isn’t in that space, though, which diminishes the fun.

This movie is apparently in the public domain, but, unfortunately my copy has the Mill Creek logo graffitied onto it so I can’t upload it. Furthermore, there are no copies currently available on the Internet Archive, which is unusual for a movie like this. You can find copies with a simple Google search, though. I wouldn’t really recommend it, but it’s not offensive either. It just never rises to be much of anything.