R.I.P. Maria Rohm, Part IV: 1976 – 2007

October 13, 2018, 6:25 am

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13 August 1945 – 18 June 2018

Vienna-born Maria Rohm (nee Helga Grohmann), talented cult actress and wife of British independent film producer and screenwriter Harry Alan Towers (19 Oct 1920 – 31 July 2009), has gone the way of the wind at the age of 72 in Toronto, Canada, the home of Bruce McArthur. Rohm, who began her acting career on stage as a child actress, seems to have begun her film career at the age of twenty playing a prostitute in a 1964 film. Soon after she married producer Towers, also in 1964, he began putting her in many of his projects, including nine different movies directed by Jess Franco (12 May 1930 – 2 April 2013). She retired from acting in 1976, but like her husband remained active as a producer.

In a German-language interview published online in 2002 by Terrorverlag, it is claimed that Marie Rohm produced up to five films a year with her husband Harry Alan Towers. That may have been true, but the list of movies in which she is credited onscreen for production is much shorter, at least going by what we found online. We do not claim this list to be complete.

Go here for Part I: 1964–67
Go here for Part II: 1968–69
Go here forPart III: 1970–75

Blue Belle

(1976, dir. Massimo Dallamano)

Massimo Dallamano (17 April 1917 – 4 Nov 1976), director of Dorian Gray (1970, see Part III), tries to cook up his own Emmanuelle-style franchise with this relatively uninteresting sex drama aka (in English) as Teenage Emanuelleand Annie; the original Italian title is La fine dell'innocenza("The End of Innocence"). Maria Rhom supposedly shows up somewhere in the movie playing "Marie".

Linda Lee (Rossana Barbieri) sings the title track to
Blue Belle / La fine dell'innocenza:

The by-the-numbers script tells the tale of, basically, the "sexual adventures of a seventeen-year-old who has just left convent school." To add some details: her "daddy" Michael (Charles Fawcett) takes her to Hong Kong where, after he is arrested for smuggling, she is left penniless and to her own devices and the soon former virgin ends up proving that "have vagina, will survive". Luckily, she met Linda (Felicity Devonshire) on the flight over, and Linda has a good-looking husband named Angelo (Ciro Ippolito, aka "Sam Cromwell", the writer, producer and director of Alien 2: On Earth [1980 / trailer])…

Blue Belle /La fine dell'innocenza was very much an attempt to convert Annie Bell — the person, the actress, the body — into a personality and franchise. As the text of a magazine of the time parroted: "Petite, blonde, blue-eyed and stunningly attractive, Annie makes her film debut in a starring role — a film, incidentally, that is largely based on her own personality and experiences. […] It was producer Harry Alan Towers who dreamed up the idea when he met the young actress in Paris — a film based on her experiences in the Far East and her romantic adventures in search of true happiness."

Annie Belle Theme:

Annie Belle was the last film of Charles Fernley Fawcett (2 Dec 1915 – 3 Feb 2008), a real-life adventurer whose life sounds like fiction. He "was a wrestler, resistance worker, soldier, airman, film star, film maker, and co-founder of the International Medical Corps. He was a recipient of the French Croix de Guerre and the American Eisenhower Medal." That's him below with the titular Annie, in a film that surely would not, could not, be made today.

Among the films Fawcett appeared in that we here at a wasted life find "fun": Lust of the Vampire (1957 / German trailer), The Witch's Curse (1962 / trailer), The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964 / scene), the infamously racist version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1965 / full German film), and Target Frankie (1967, starring Joachim Fuchsberger).

Felicity Devonshire, seen above from Adam magazine (March 1975), who as Linda goes all scissor sisters with Annie Belle, is a former Page 3 Girl of the British newspaper The Sun who enjoyed a mild film career between 1971 & 1978; her most noteworthy film credit is undoubtedly Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975), in which she plays the Governess.

Penis, anyone?
Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975):

"[Felicity Devonshire] is ranked 1794 on The Times' 2008 rich list and estimated to be worth in the region of 40 million." Why? Because: "Devonshire Investment Holdings Ltd. operates, manages, and leases properties in the United Kingdom. It manages retail, office, mixed, leisure, residential, and industrial properties. The company was founded in 2003 and is based in London, the United Kingdom. [Bloomberg]"

Full film,

in Italian:

The Black Arrow

(1985, dir John Hough)

Marie Rohm moved into production ("associate producer" to Towers's "producer") with this television movie, never again appearing as an actor onscreen, big or small. British director John Rough had, some 13 years earlier, directed her in Treasure Island(1972, see Part III); like that feature film, the TV film Black Arrow is an adaptation of a public domain novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson. (Namely: The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, which was first published in 1888 after initially appearing as a magazine serial.) A swashbuckler, it is also the only Harry Alan Towers production to be released by Disney, initially for broadcast on the Disney Channel and then on Disney Home Video. "Peter Welbeck" wrote the script with David Pursall (19 Aug 1917 – 7 Sept 1986), a man perhaps best known for his work on the Margret Rutherford Mrs. Marple films, Murder She Said(1961 / trailer), Murder Ahoy(1964 / trailer) and Murder Most Foul(1964 / trailer). Set in England during the Wars of the Roses (roughly 1455 to 1487), it was filmed in Spain.

Trailer to
The Black Arrow:

Disney reduces the plot to "A wealthy lord in medieval England plans to murder one ward, marry another, and take over the property of both, but he is outwitted by the notorious Black Arrow."

Over at the imdb, however, nufs68 offers more detail: "In England, during the 15th century, […] two of the most powerful nobles fight a bitter war among one another. Sir Daniel (Oliver Reed [13 Feb 1938 – 2 May 1999]) is the head of the House of York, while Sir Henry is the head of the House of Lancaster. Among all the English nobles, they stand the best chance of becoming the next king of England […]. But there can only be one monarch. The two Houses go to war. […] The Earl of Warwick (Fernando Rey [10 Sept 1917 – 9 March 1994] of Eyes Behind the Wall [1977 / let's dance]) is the sitting monarch's advisor but he already starts to plot against the king in a secret alliance with Sir Daniel. The only party not having anything to gain from either House acceding to the throne is the English populace facing ever increasing royal taxes. However, a mysterious champion of the poor and the oppressed [the Black Arrow, played by Stephan Chase of José Ramón Larraz's Golden Lady (1979)] has appeared on the scene, attacking and killing any tax collecting officials and their armed escort. The mysterious stranger is clad in black and uses a black bow and black arrows that can penetrate chain mail. Annoyed by this impertinent avenger, Sir Daniel sends his retinues to hunt him down. Sir Daniel has two wards in his care, Joanna (Georgia Slowe of The Company of Wolves [1984 / trailer]) and Richard (Benedict Taylor of Perfect Life [2010 / trailer]). These teenage wards have inherited much wealth, lands and titles but cannot touch their inheritances until they come of age. A greedy Sir Daniel is scheming to marry beautiful Joanna in order to take her wealth and he plans to have young Richard killed for the same reason. But the avenger known as The Black Arrow keeps upsetting Sir Daniel's plans."

In 2015, Jeremy Hodges, author and former Scottish arts and features editor of The Sunday Times, rated the film as one of the top ten Stevenson stories adapted for the screen, saying: "The brooding presence of Oliver Reed as the wicked Sir Daniel, coupled with the sinister Donald Pleasence as the murderous priest Sir Oliver, gives this 1985 made-for-television movie more dramatic power than you might expect from a story written to order for a children's magazine. Despite numerous exciting action sequences that could have been written for Hollywood, Stevenson knew The Black Arrow fell short of the mark as a great work of literature — and dedicated it to his wife as a joke, because she refused to read it. [Edinburgh City of Literature]"

Split — Edge of Sanity

(1989, dir. Gérard Kikoïne)

"Tasteless, pointless, and unpleasant."
Leonard Maltin

French director Gérard Kikoïne began his career as an editor for Jess Franco before directing his first soft-core sex comedy Mannequin (1974), whence he quickly moved into hardcore and even directed a minor Golden Age "classic", The Tale of Tiffany Lust (1979). Around 1985, with Lady Libertine aka Frank & I (film in French), which Towers produced and "Pierre Wellbeck" co-wrote, Kikoïne put away his raincoat and began making more mainstream, low-budget fare, including this horror film on which Maria Rohm is an "associate producer".

Like The Black Arrow (1985) above and Treasure Island (1972, see Part III), Split is based on a public domain classic by Robert Lewis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The source material, however, is spliced with aspects of Jack the Ripper. Split is very much an exploitation film filled with violence and nudity.

Trailer to
Edge of Sanity:

On their list of "Borderline Extreme Movies", the Worldwide Celluloid Massacre lists Split as being "Of Some Interest", saying, "Anthony Perkins (4 April 1932 – 12 Sept 1992) had more than his fair share of twisted roles, but this is by far his most demented performance in a surprisingly uber-sleazy movie. […] Perkins portrays a doctor with a repressed fear of women, boosted by nightmares involving an over-the-top sleazy and humiliating encounter as a kid. I bet the director knew exactly what he was doing, given Perkins's real-life fear of women. So after an accident with some chemicals, Hyde roams the streets and terrorizes a bizarre whorehouse straight out of a Ken Russell movie, and lets loose in some really warped scenes of frenzied perversions and unpredictable turn-ons and turn-offs, terrorizing both men and women before forcing them to perform sex, masturbating a whore with his cane, and then slicing them up of course. Altogether a surprisingly unpleasant and disturbing one from Perkins."

"This retelling of a classic tale of good versus evil unfortunately doesn't have a very high opinion of its main characters; it goes straight for tawdry erotic and gory thrills. Even Anthony Perkins' memorable performance of Mr. Hyde can't salvage this inarticulate film. It is a fun movie, but not recommended for anyone looking for a serious exploration of the duality of human nature. […] One of the better aspects of the film is the performance of Anthony Perkins. I can think of no other actor who better portrays twitchy nervousness. Perkins plays Hyde with a remarkable panache. [Classic Horror]"

"What makes this movie even more a weird watch is the fact that it can also definitely been seen as a soft-core-porn flick. There is really quite a lot of nudity in it and lots of different sexual acts get explicitly implied. [Boba Fett]"

"[Edge of Sanity]'s a loose Dr. Jekyll adaptation that feels like a lost early work of Paul Verhoeven. Its period setting and moody lighting give the movie far more class that one might expect. In this version of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale, Dr. Jekyll (Anthony Perkins) is experimenting with cocaine as an anesthetic for use on patients. After a monkey knocks over some ether onto some of his cocaine supply, the fumes turn Dr. Jekyll in to Mr. Hyde (this scene is less funny than it sounds). After killing several prostitutes, his wife Elisabeth (Glynis Barber of Horror Safari [1982 / trailer] and The Terror [1978 / trailer]) starts to catch on that something not right is going on with her husband. […] The murder scenes combine horror and eroticism in surprising, surreal ways. There are plenty of bodices to be ripped, but the decent acting and set design put this movie in a higher caliber that one might suspect. An abrupt ending hurts the picture, but it's still worth a watch. [Battleship Pretension]"

Call Him Jess
(2000, writ. & dir. Manel Mayol& Carles Prats)

We took a look at this documentary in R.I.P. Janine Reynaud Part II. Original title: Llámale Jess. A documentary on the great Jess Franco (12 May 1930 – 2 April 2013) written by Mayol & Prats and Joan Ferré. To say that Maria Rhom participated in this documentary is an overstatement: she is merely one of the many actresses and actors — alongside Janine Reynaud (13 Aug 1930 – 30 Jan 2018), Adrian Hoven (18 May 1922 – 28 April 1981), Klaus Kinski (18 Oct 1926 – 23 Nov 1991), Christopher Lee (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015), Soledad Miranda (9 July 1943 – 18 Aug 1970), Ewa Strömberg (13 Jan 1940 – 24 Jan 2013), and so many more — found in the various clips taken from Franco's films that are edited into the film. The real talking heads of the project are Franco himself and Lina Romay (25 June 1954 – 15 Feb 2012).

"Jesus (or Jess) Franco is one of the great names in B movies. With a number of pseudonyms (Clifford Brown, David Khunne, etc...) and a filmography including over 170 titles, it is extremely difficult to catalogue and categorize his work, despite the existence of many retrospectives and studies in both Europe and the United States. Jess began his career as an assistant director, the high point of which was working with Orson Welles (6 May 1915 – 10 Oct 1985), whom he admired greatly. Jess himself became well known in 1961 with The Awful Doctor Orloff (1962 / trailer), a horror film which instantly became a classic. […] From that moment his international career took off, his credits include The Diabolical Dr Z (1966 / trailer), Lucky the Inscrutable (1967 / opening credits), Count Dracula (1970 / subtitled trailer— see: R.I.P. Herbert Lom), Vampyros Lesbos (1971 / trailer) and Succubus(see Janine Reynaud Part I). […] In this documentary, arguably the most significant work about this director, Jess Franco speaks openly about his films, himself and his understanding of the world of cinema. He is, essentially, a director who defies conventional categorization […]. [FFC]"

The documentary has since been re-released as Llámale JessRedux: "Jesus Franco, also known as Jess Franco, was one of the biggest names in 'B' cinema wordwide. With more than 200 films and a large and peculiar use of pseudonyms, his work remains difficult to categorize, which makes it more exciting if possible. Through a series of interviews with Franco, Call him Jess Redux dissects the sadist, esoteric and erotic world of the director, as refined as rogue. This new version [...] incorporates new scenes and pays homage to his muse and companion, Lina Romay. [Amazon]"

Manfred Hübler & Siegfried Schwab's great music
is of course also found in Call Him Jess:

Queen's Messenger

(2001, dir. Mark Roper)

Depending on which online source you prefer to believe, this is either first or the second in a series of two low-budget action movies, both made in 2001 and produced by Harry Alan Towers, featuring Gary Daniels (of Fist of the North Star [1995 / trailer], Knights / Cyborg Warriors [1993 / trailer], Astro [2018 / trailer] and so much more) as Captain Anthony Strong. The other Strong movie is entitled Witness to a Kill (2001 / trailer).

Regardless of the actual order they were filmed — we tend to think this one is the first one — Maria Rohm is listed as a co-producer only for this one. The screenplay was by Harry Alan Towers and Peter Jobin (1 Feb 1944 - 10 Aug 2018), the latter of whom had, some twenty years previously, helped script the Golden Age slasher classic Happy Birthday to Me (1981 / trailer).

The plot description as found @ Impact Video: "By order of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Captain Strong (Gary Daniels), senior officer of the elite Queen's Messenger Corps, is given the dangerous assignment of delivering a delicate communication to the British Ambassador of Kazakhstan (John Standing of The Psychopath [1966 / trailer], Torture Garden [1967 / trailer], The Legacy [1978 / trailer] and Nightflyers [1987 / trailer]). If intercepted, the document will compromise secret agreements. Now Captain Strong's commitment gets put to the test. Ben Samm (Christoph Waltz), the ruthless leader of the country's most powerful rebel force, knows that whoever holds the documents holds the key to controlling the region's untold oil wealth. In a daring move to assume control, he captures the Ambassador, Strong and Alexi Jones (Theresa Sherer-Donovan), an attractive but stubborn news reporter. Against all odds, Captain Strong leads the trio in a daring escape with impassioned rebels in hot pursuit. In an age of Internet, fax and e-mail, some messages are just too dangerous to be delivered by any means other than the Messenger of the Queen."

Trailer to
Queen's Messenger:

Over at Letterboxd, After Movie Diner moans that Queen's Messenger is "sadly not one of Gary Daniels' better efforts, but not for want of trying on our Gary's part. Sadly he is hampered by having an atrocious director. Something which seems to plague his career. A good B director given the same script and budget could've knocked this playful Bond rip-off out of the park. Sadly, the pacing and the TV-movie-style camerawork bogs this down and makes it almost unwatchable. It doesn't help matters that this guy is incompetent when it comes to filming fight scenes. Christoph Waltz shows up for 3 minutes to be... well... Christoph Waltz, but nothing much more can be said about this laughable entry into Daniels ever growing resume."

Over at the imdb, way back in 2003 Peter Forster was also not impressed: "Imagine a sandwich of gun fight, car chase, fist fight, gun fight, sex, car chase, gun fight, etc. with thin slivers of dialogue in between to explain why the protagonists are fighting or chasing each other. Our hero, Captain Strong, is diverted from his day job in the Special Air Service to take on a diplomatic mission to one of the former Soviet republics. With steely eyes and firm chin he manages to avoid several million rounds of ammunition fired in his direction by some very bad men and still finds time to engage in unprotected sex with attractive women who can scream very loudly when necessary. Nice to see that Brits can still save the world and avoid STDs."

Dunno, but going by what Daniels looks like above, we would be willing to bend over and scream very loudly when necessary. Talk about a total DILF! Yummy.

She

(2001, dir. Timothy Bond)

Maria Rohm is associate producer to Harry Allan Tower's credited producer status in yet another direct-to-DVD cinematic version of a public domain classic novel, in this case H. Rider Haggard's popular adventure yarn, She, which "Is generally considered to be one of the classics of imaginative literature and, with 83 million copies sold by 1965, it is one of the best-selling books of all time." The cover below is to a 1968 British softcover.

Trailer to

She Who Must Be Obeyed:

Now primarily a television director, Timothy Bond's directorial debut was the mildly entertaining and totally forgotten end of the world flick, Deadly Harvest (1977 / full movie). Some twenty years prior to She, Bond also helped write the classic slasher, Happy Birthday to Me (1981 / trailer), with She's scriptwriter Peter Jobin; here, however, Bond only directed and Jobin shares his scriptwriting credit with "Peter Welbeck".

We've never seen the movie, but have always liked the German actress Marie Bäumer (of Der Schuh des Manitu[2001 / German trailer] and Sieben Monde[1998 / trailer]). Over at the imdb, wellsangel puts the film down by saying that the "Filming is somewhat reminiscent of campy 1970's schlock sci-fi"— which, to us, sounds like a recommendation.

To date, no one seems to have seen the film and bothered to write about it. But that's what the imdb is there for — "Artemis-9" wrote a decent plot synopsis: "Leo Vincey (Ian Duncan) receives a map from his late father (Christoph Waltz), leading him to the legendary city of Kor in search of an explanation for his mysterious ancestry. He is accompanied by his girlfriend Roxanne (Marie Bäumer). He discovers that he is the only descendant of an Egyptian priest who had been executed for the crime of falling in love with the Egyptian Princess. The ruling queen Ayesha (Ophélie Winter), or rather She, is the same Egyptian Princess of centuries ago, her beauty and youth look being preserved by magic. She becomes convinced that Leo is the reincarnation of her former lover, and wants to kill him. Leo and Roxanne will have to fight against surprise attacks on them, but survival in that foreign land with strange customs, is difficult. Leo is terribly attracted to She's beauty, but at the same time he fears for her obscure spirit, and finally he must take a decision — to run away from her, or to love her and die."

"She largely serves as an obscure vanity vehicle for French singer and actress Ophélie Winter (2001: A Space Travesty [2000 / trailer], with Leslie Nielson). [Weird Flix]" That's her directly above, not from the movie, looking oddly uncomfortable.

Ophélie Winter & Coolio —
Keep It on the Red Light:

Death, Deceit and Destiny aboard the Orient Express

(2001, dir. Mark Roper)

What a title! Now you have absolutely no doubts regarding what the film is about. But then, despite the Aylum-like mockbuster title, the movie has very little to do with any version of Murder on the Orient Express, book or film (1974 / trailer) and (2017 / trailer). This Canadian-Bulgarian co-production — Maria Rohm, "co-producer: UK"; Harry "Daddy" Towers, "executive producer / producer"— is not a train-bound detective film, it's a kill-dem-terrorists action movie. Die Hard (1988 / trailer) on a train and with no budget, you could say.

"Let's start with the obvious: Death, Deceit and Destiny aboard the Orient Express is a miserable excuse for a title. Off the top of my head, I can drum up a handful of perfectly serviceable alternatives: Terror on the Orient Express, say, or Millennial Terror, or, my personal pick, the spoilery yet evocative Throw Sendhil from the Train.[Preppies of the Apocalypse]"

Unlike the previous two Tower/Rohm productions from 2001 we looked, some English-speaking people actually seem to have seen this train-wreck of a movie, perhaps drawn by the non-drawing power of Richard Grieco's name. (The irony of having him play an action movie star... hell, the irony of having him play a star.) The general sense conveyed is, at best, that if this movie is to be enjoyed at all, then only in a bad movie kind of way — the scene below holds great promise.

This guy went on
to a big career:

As the Preppy of ApocalypseMorgen Richter says, "I'm sorry — I know it's a pile of crap, but I'm incapable of hating any film that draws inspiration from Scooby-Doo episodes."

On the other hand, it could be that the movie is just bad: "What this all boils down to is that I can't even come up with a reason why you should watch Death, Deceit & Destiny Aboard the Orient Express as it has absolutely nothing going for it. Even those who might be fans of one of the cast should seriously question whether they really need to sacrifice 90 minutes of their time on this. [Movie Scene]"

Joe Scaramanga's House of Trash, which says "this is bottom of the barrel stuff", has the plot: "Anyway, events take place on the eve of the millennium, despite being made in 2000, when everyone with a grain of taste had realised that movies set then would out of date as precisely a minute past midnight. A group of wealthy individuals (and partners/business associates/whatever) gather for a New Year jamboree through Europe to Istanbul. Oddly no one seems to know who invited them. […] Obviously the lure of a posh train, and copious free booze and food is too much to refuse and they all duly turn up. And a motley bunch they are too: there's a mobile phone salesman, a mobile phone manufacturer, a gymnast, the son of an Indian industrialist, a couple of women who could be con artists (I'm not really sure we ever find out) and an action movie star, Jack Chase (Richard Grieco, of Webs [2003] and Raiders of the Damned [2005])! Seriously. About two minutes after leaving the never-identified station a bunch of bad guys shoot all the staff and, luckily all their uniforms fit them perfectly, and they take over the train, with one staying behind to prepare eight-course dinners for everyone. Turns out this is our bad guy, Tarik (Christoph Waltz), who tells everyone via a chunky widescreen TV that he has taken control of the train and wants everyone to pay him $50 million or he'll blow it up. Well, action star doesn't take kindly to this and assisted by the gymnast (Klara Romina Mondello of Wax Mask [1997 / trailer]), who he's decided will be his love interest for this evening, he disarms all the bombs, saving one to blow up the train and the bad guy. Hooray!"

Keep your eyes open for Gotz Otto, German bad film character actor/heavy found in, among many movies, the hilariously great Iron Sky (2012 / trailer below) and the hilariously bad Beowulf(1999). He must have signed a multi-picture deal with Towers, 'cause he's found in the background of this movie, of She, and of the next movie we look at, High Adventure.

Trailer to

Iron Sky (2012):

Quatermain — High Adventure

(2001, dir. Mark Roper)

Aka Chris Quatermain and the Lost Treasure, Quatermain — The King's Treasure, Quatermain— The Treasure of Alexander the Great, and Raiders of the Lost Treasure. Currently, it doesn't seem available outside of Europe. Sad.

Maria Rohm is the associate producer (and Harry "Daddy" Towers the executive producer / producer) of another already forgotten direct-to-video movie distantly inspired by the public domain character Allan Quatermain, a popular character introduced by H. Rider Haggard (22 June 1856 – 14 May 1925) in his 1885 novel, King Solomon's Mines. (Among the numerous subsequent books Haggard wrote, Quatermain even met up with She's beautiful queen Ayesha in She and Allan[1920].)

The adventurer of High Adventure, however, is ChrisQuatermain, the grandson of Allan Quatermain — a bit of an impossibility, one would think, seeing that in the Haggard books Allan Quatermain's son, Harry Quatermain, dies of smallpox as an unmarried medical student. (No son, especially one that was childless, usually means no grandson.) In the end, the film has less to do with Haggard and Quartermain than it does with the desire to produce an extremely low budget Indiana Jones mockbuster — see: aka Raiders of the Lost Treasure. Script: "Peter Welbeck" and Peter Jobin (again). For a plot description, we once again look to the imdb, where 15 years ago the big movie guy griped that the movie was "quite long even though it only lasts 94 minutes and [has] no cool scenes", supplied the following pot description: "Thomas Ian Griffith (of Vampires [1998] and Hollow Point[1996]) as gambler and adventurer Chris Quatermain. […] Griffith travels to Africa to recover Alexander the Great's treasure hidden somewhere in cave. His trusty assistant Johnny Ford (Harry Peacock) and his love interest Hope Gruner (Anja Kling) have to join forces to find the treasure before ruthless gangster Lorenzo (Kendra Torgan) gets her hands on it."

Scenes from

Quatermain — High Adventure:

Video Junkie saw the flick and came away thinking, "I was having such a hard time wrapping my head around just what the hell this was supposed to be that at the 60 minute mark I finally came to the conclusion that it must be a children's film! Only kids would be this forgiving."

Sumuru

(2003, dir. Darrell Roodt)

Maria Rohm is the "co-producer: United Kingdom" (and Harry "Daddy" Towers, the executive producer) of another already forgotten direct-to-video movie distantly inspired by the Su Muru tales by Sax Rohmer — the image below of a nicely pulpy Gold Medal printing — the source of the late-60s Towers movies (in which Maria Rohm acted), The Million Eyes of Su Muru (1967, see Part I) and The Girl from Rio (1969, see Part II).

For whatever reason, in this version of the tale, Sumuru is now no longer the antagonist and/or antihero, but rather the good girl of the movie — and, perhaps in even a bigger break from the source, the events now take place in the future and on another planet.

As normal, "Peter Welbeck" worked on the screenplay, this time alongside Peter Jobin and some guy named Torsten Dewi. Dewi has since gone on to develop and write to hilariously bad ecological end-of-day flicks, Post Impact(2004 / trailer) and Lost City Raiders (2008 / trailer).

Trailer to

Sumuru:

Wikipedia has the serviceable plot description: "Earth's outermost colony was forgotten for 900 years — until now. Cut off from the rest of the universe, men have become beasts of labor — and women rule. Arriving on planet Antares, Adam Wade (Michael Shanks of Ice Twister 2 - Arctic Blast [2010 / trailer] and 13 Eerie [2013 / trailer]) and Jake Carpenter (Terence Bridgett of From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter [1999] and Kite [2014 / trailer]) come with a mission and a secret. Humanity has suffered from a deadly virus that has left the women barren, and the two are to seek out the last fertile members of the human race and relocate them. When the small spaceship crashes, the two find the planet run by women and the men slaving in primitive mines, used occasionally for procreation purposes. The two astronauts have to overcome anti-male prejudice as well as earthquakes, a giant snake and opposition from snake-cult priestess Taxan (Simona Williams of Spiders [2000 / trailer] and Raging Sharks [2005 / trailer]), but find support in relatively rational-minded queen Sumuru (Alexandra Kamp) as well as her personal guard Dove (Casey B. Dolan of Lost Boys: The Thirst [2010 / trailer]) and her kid brother Will (David Lazarus)."

Director Darrell Roodt, while probably unknown outside of South Africa, is a film-farting force to be reckoned with: he's almost as productive as, say, David DeCocteau, and his projects are almost as invariably embarrassing. Past projects of variable note: The Lullaby (2017 / trailer), Prey(2007 / trailer), City of Blood (1987 / trailer), and Cryptid (2006 / trailer).

The true star of the show is, of course, the German model and actress and total MILF Alexandra Kamp (born 29 December 1966), seen above not from the film. (If we looked that good in the skin, we would eschew clothing totally.) Primarily active in German TV movies, her name is well known there but hardly a sign of quality. That said, she has been in a few fun B-flicks of varying quality — e.g., Deep Freeze (2002 / trailer), Shadow Fury(2001 / trailer),Vampires(2010 / trailer) and Dracula 3000(2004 / trailer) — and wereshe only more active in that field, we here at a wasted life can't help but feel that she would one possibly achieve cult popularity as a genre Eurobabe of the 21^st century.

In any event, when it comes to Sumuru, the German website Home of Fantastic Cinema more or less says: "The science fiction film Sumuru beams motifs of the English writer Sax Rohmer into outer space. If you overlook the absurdity of the premise, this trivial film manages to establish an occasionally plausible and interesting story despite the sometimes crass deficit of logic, simplistic dialogue and in part weak acting. The South African director Darrell James Roodt is, usually, a reliable producer of cinematic slag, but despite the problems mentioned above Sumuru is better than its (miserable) reputation and counts as one of the director's better works. The film is a rare example of a science-fiction from the African continent, even if was made with the massive support of German, Canadian, and British co producers. It makes good use of exotic desert landscapes, and the funding of the production is solid enough for it to pass as a 'real' movie — only some of the dialogue and the computer-generated special effects are really embarrassing."

Dorian — Pact with the Devil

(2004, dir. Allan A. Goldstein)

Producers Rohm and Towers return to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray— yes, the classic novel is in the public domain. The cover below, typically 50s.

The script was written by Ron Raley (see: Split [1989]) and Peter Jobin — no "Peter Welback" found this time around. The adaptation is, let us say, extremely free. Director Allan A. Goldstein, whose greatest claim to fame is probably the flop that is Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994 / trailer), the only Death Wish film not to include a rape scene, was also one of the many producers.

Trailer to

Dorian:

Over at Film Affinity, they simply use the plot description supplied by Claudio Carvalho of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the imdb: "While temporarily working in a photographic studio with the famous photographer Bae (Jennifer Nitsch [10 Dec 1966 –13 June 2004], possible suicide), the simple and handsome worker Louis (Ethan Erickson of Jawbreaker [1999 / trailer] and John Dies in the End [2012 / trailer]) meets her manager Henry (Malcolm McDowell of Tank Girl [1995] and sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more), who is impressed with his beauty. He invites Louis for taking some pictures, gives the artistic name of Dorian to him as an homage to 'Dorian Gray' and a framed picture of him. Louis wishes to have the same fate of Dorian Gray, and from this moment on, he becomes very successful in the career of model. As years go by, he notes that only his picture ages, and he has the same face of years ago."

In the book Indie Horrors! The Not-To-Be-Missed, The Acceptable, and The Forgettable, author Barry Atkinson writes: "A flashy, trashy updating of Oscar Wilde's classic novel, fare for the MTV generation and virtually going straight to DVD, but any film featuring the mighty Malcolm McDowell (playing the devil) has to be worth a look, surely. Ethan Erickson (wooden in his role) is the preening pretty boy Louis, renamed Dorian by McDowell [...]. Each frame is filled with the beautiful wealthy set and their parties, highlighted by a semi-pop soundtrack. McDowell reinvents his Clockwork Orange (1975 / trailer) persona with undisguised glee, and the women are gorgeous. [...] Yes, it's a million miles away from Wilde's book and purists will balk at this particular rendition of his work, but it's reasonably entertaining for 90-odd minutes and McDowell makes it worth a look anyway."

Interestingly enough, and typical of critical writing, over at the imdb, zeppo-227 basically writes the same thing, but with a reverse opinion: "This is a modern updating of the classic, Picture of Dorian Grey. As if the Oscar Wilde story was rewritten by sex & shopping book hack, Jackie Collins. There's nothing new here except for the setting, in a photo model environment instead of Victorian London.

It starts off interesting enough but McDowell as a poor man's Devil, begins to chew the scenery before too long. And sadly, Ethan Erickson doesn't have the range of acting to successfully portray the slowly morally declining Dorian. For a study in debauchery, there's precious little shown, you would get the idea the height of decadence was dancing in a few discos on the continent. Surprising since the video I watched had an 18 certificate. The original film version was made under far more stringent censorship rules but still was able to imply the depths that Dorian sunk to in his pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. This is just fodder for the MTV generation, full of flash style and hip music but lacking in any real substance at all."

Our biggest complaint about the flick is that Ethan Erickson doesn't do a nude full frontal. In fact, no one does a nude full frontal, not even the gorgeous women. To use one of the favorite words of tha fat joke in the White House: Sad.

The Sea Wolf

(2005, dir. Mark Roper)

Aka: The Pirate's Curse. Maria Rhom is co-producer of this "Peter Welbeck"-written flick. After the massive success of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003 / trailer below), still the best film of the whole series, pirate movies once again became a thing. Hardly surprising that Towers did one, too. But, in the good ol' exploitation fashion, the advertising is a trick: the tale is set in the contemporary world — "Great movie for all the family, adventure and fun in the islands. Great scenery and car chases."— and is not a swashbuckler in yesteryear. Also: does the name sound familiar? It should: Jack London wrote a book entitled The Sea Wolf which, actually, has little in common with this film but surely inspired the name of the ship in this movie.

Trailer to Pirates of the Caribbean—
The first & the best one:

The back of an old VHS offers the following plot description: "Discharged from the US Navy for disobeying orders, Thorpe (Thomas Ian Griffith) sails the high seas as a mercenary for hire in his sleek ship called 'Sea Wolf'. Upon meeting the beautiful and mysterious Helene (Gerit Kling), she enlists Thorpe to find Moctezuma's Treasure, millions in jewels and artifacts, and return it to the government of Mexico. What he doesn't realize is that this will not only be his most dangerous mission ever, but also his most deadly."

On the website to Blue Rider Pictures, which did the "bridge financing" for The Sea Wolf (2005), they can't help reprint the (probably) singular good thing anyone has said about the movie: "What director Mark Roper has made is cheesy fun. It's nice to see an update of the swashbuckling genre, even if it is in jest. I enjoyed Sea Wolf in all it's [sic] campy splendour. [Ryan Cracknell @ Apollo Movie Guide]"

Blue Rider, in turn, also reveals: "Released on Hungarian TV in 2005 and on Spanish and Finnish DVD in Spring of 2006. It was also seen it the U.S., Canada, Italy and Denmark." But the TV release explains the decided lack of flesh in the film.

Trailer to

The Sea Wolf:

In any event, over at Amazon some guy named Michael Butts was slightly less impressed than Ryan Cracknell and wrote, "Sea Wolf — The Pirate's Curse is lame, ponderous, and dull. Any attempts at humor fall extremely flat, and the whole movie is limp and flaccid. Thomas Ian Griffith [...] is one of the most bland heroes we've seen in some time. Attempting to be a new Harrison Ford, Griffith only serves to remind us how great Indiana Jones was, and how any movies claiming to be 'like' it always fall flat. Add Gerit Kling, a lovely German actress, whose accident [sic] is almost indecipherable, Barry Flatman who lives up to his last name in his role as a villainous colonel, and assorted chases and you have one cheesy movie. The heroes actually use a coral-colored Volkswagen as their getaway car; the bad guys pursue an old Chevy Impala in Suzukis!!! There is little to recommend the film except for some lovely scenery of Cuba."

Speaking of Gerit Kling, pictured above from a German Playboy pictorial, her sister Anja King is found in Mark Roper's (Towers and Rhom-produced) High Adventure (2001, see somewhere above), which also starred Thomas Ian Griffith. Not a very important fact, but an excuse to include the picture. As for Barry Flatman, he's been part of better films, including The Returned (2013 / trailer), The Paperboy (1994 / trailer), and Patch Town (2014).

Trailer to

Patch Town (2014):

Maria Rohm — R.I.P.

↧

Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story (Canada, 2002)

October 20, 2018, 12:50 am

≫ Next: Misc. Film Fun (Faux Trailer) – Hell No: The Sensible Horror Film (2013)

≪ Previous: R.I.P. Maria Rohm, Part IV: 1976 – 2007

So, anyway, we were invited over to a friend's place to watch a flick entitled Torso. We went expecting the legendary Italian giallo from 1973, starring the great Suzy Kendall and directed by multi-genre specialist Sergio Martino — trailer directly below — but, no: instead, we were served some Canadian TV movie from 2002 entitled Torso - The Evelyn Dick Story. Our friend has a lot to make up for.

Trailer to
Sergio Martino's Torso (1973):

Not that we knew this Torso here to be a TV movie; indeed, we knew nothing about the movie at all. But what is it about so many TV movies, even well-made ones, that makes them feel like a TV movie even if you don't know it's one? Despite the beautiful classic cars and period clothing, enough of both that a budget must have been present, Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story still felt, looked, smelt like a Movie of the Week. Not that we don't like Movies of the Week; we just tend to like them a bit older, more in the direction of tacky TV GILF like Moon of the Wolf(1972 / full movie) or Bad Ronald (1974 / trailer) or Killdozer! (1974 / trailer) or Wes Craven's hilariously bad Invitation to Hell (1984 / great scene). Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story is just a tad too "good" to truly be our cup of tea.

Trailer to

Torso - The Evelyn Dick Story:

Outside of Canada, the story of Evelyn Dick is pretty much unknown; in terms of true-crime murders, hers are relatively mundane in comparison to, dunno, the Moors Murderersor Dorothea Puenteor even Caril Ann Fugate. Nevertheless: a husband murdered and reduced to a torso found in the woods by kids, a dead baby encased in cement in a suitcase, and a by-the-hour goodtime girl who slept with as many men as most men wish they had slept with women — no wonder the case was such a scandal back in '46-47, when Evelyn Dick sat at the dock. In the end, after a retrial, she was found not guilty of the murder of her husband, John Dick, but went to jail for the murder her baby son….

The real Evelyn Dick

As a TV docudrama of the case, Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story is worse than some and better than most. That isn't to say that it isn't well made and interesting, it's just that it is also annoying superficial at times and, as perhaps appropriate to the case, leaves as many questions open as it does semi-answer others. And not just the question of who actually murdered John Dick, a question that [officially, at least] has never truly been answered. In Torso, however, doubt is definitely cast upon the guilt of Evelyn, whether for the murder of her husband or child, as either instigator or perpetrator. In fact, if we are to believe the tale as told in the movie, she was probably innocent of the death she was convicted of: that of her baby son.

As directed by the well-employed TV director Alex Chapple, Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story adds a sheen of neo-noir for much of the film, complete with the hardnosed inspector, Inspector Wood (Callum Keith Rennie), a beautiful but [possibly] heartless killer, Evelyn Dick (Kathleen Robertson), and cheap blasts of stereotypical saxophone music in the background. (The saxophone is such a cliché that it almost induces involuntary laughter whenever it toots.) Wood stays hard-nosed throughout the movie, but Evelyn proves to move beyond her cigarette-enveloped face to become something more than just some fem fatale.

To what extent the movie follows the book it is based on — the last book written by Marjorie Freeman Campbell (1896-1975), likewise entitled Torso – The Evelyn Dick Story— we know not, but as the movie unfolds one definitely gets the impression that Evelyn Dick paid for either the crimes of others, or was the lone scapegoat for crimes committed in cohorts. (The "truth", needless to say, will never be known.) As the titular Evelyn Dick, the Canadian actress Kathleen Robertson (of Nowhere [1997 / trailer], Psycho Beach Party[2000 / trailer] and I Woke Up Early the Day I Died [1998 / opening scene]) is vacuous in a way that is almost aggravating, but on the other hand, as the film progresses her very emptiness does well at reflecting a damaged, slightly brainless girl-woman under the manipulative thumb of parents from hell.

In the end, however, Evelyn remains a cypher. If, indeed, her parents were so manipulatively evil; and if, indeed, she experienced the molestations of her father; and if, indeed, her parents killed her child son unbeknownst to herself; and if, indeed, she so loved her daughter; and if, indeed, her parents literally frame her for the death of her son, what sense loyalty, what sense of debt, what extent of manipulation could be so strong as to make Evelyn watch silently as her mother, Alexandra MacLean (an excellently duplicitous Brenda Fricker), walk free and easy out of the courthouse with Evelyn's daughter, Heather Dick (Hannah Lochner of Dawn of the Dead [2004 / trailer]), without finally opening her mouth?

And it is the discovery of the cement-encased dead son that outs Inspector Wood as possibly a man more interested in his record of success than in uncovering the truth, for the film makes it clear that although all the evidence found during the second search of the house was known not to have been there during the first search — ergo: it was planted, most likely by the parents — he never pursues the "why" and simply lets it paint Evelyn into the corner. Once again, what matters is not that justice gets served correctly, just that it gets served.

Now, decades after the fact, whether or not justice got served or shortchanged is probably irrelevant. And Evelyn, to some extent, was undoubtedly involved in her husband's death. But like all murders, you can take the "facts" and spin them in many different ways, especially so many years after the fact. (Cf.: Alex Jones, flat-worlders, Kavanaugh, and just about any conspiracy theorist you meet.) The spin of Torso - The Evelyn Dick Story is basically that not everyone who should have paid, did. But the movie fails to cast any light upon Evelyn's reasons for her action(s) or inaction(s), from the why of the marriage to the why of her silence.

Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story, a good-looking, tightly acted TV movie that feels like the TV movie it is, displays a convincing if clean sense of time and place, and is populated by a convincing cast with too little to do. Hardly the worst thing you can watch when bored, but a far cry from being exceptional, either as a conveyor of history or as a cinematic experience. You can watch this one with your grandparents.

John Dick (1906–46)

Like Lizzie Borden (19 July 1860 – 1 June 1927) in the US, Evelyn Dick was immortalized in verse in Canada, where children were once wont to sing:

You cut off his legs...

You cut off his arms...

You cut off his head...

How could you Mrs Dick?

Undoubtedly, were the crime one of today, the verse would instead surely be something like:

You cut off his legs...

You cut off his arms...

You cut off his head...

Tell us, Mrs Dick,

Why didn't you cut off his prick?

↧

Misc. Film Fun (Faux Trailer) – Hell No: The Sensible Horror Film (2013)

October 26, 2018, 7:25 am

≫ Next: Shock Waves (USA, 1977)

≪ Previous: Torso — The Evelyn Dick Story (Canada, 2002)

A few years older than that other faux horror movie trailer we so like, Handjob Cabin(2015), this Austin-lensed faux trailer, Hell No: The Sensible Horror Film, not only has as many bull's-eyes as that earlier off-color project, but almost garners as many laughs.
In his trailer for a non-existent horror movie, one which that would surely be 0% scary if it were ever made, director and scriptwriter Joe Nicolosi (with co-scripter John Freiler) takes pointed and funny jabs at the idiocies that have served as the plot catalysts for an untold number of horror movies since the dawn of film horror. (See, for example, Segundo de Chomó's The Haunted House[1908], our Short Film of the Month this month. Even therein, the trio seek shelter in a scary-looking deserted house...)

Hell No is a filmic ode in trailer form to the truly foolhardiness (if not sub-intelligence) displayed by too many characters in the average horror movie, and that drives so many of us — horror fan to horror hater — to distraction. Here, however, the interchangeable non-characters that are the fodder in so many films — characters that exist (like their actions) only to drive the movie forward and supply the uncreative lead-up to their demise — unexpectedly reveal themselves as undeserving of a Darwin Award. Watch it, as Hell No's three minutes are truly "balm for your cinematic irritation".

But let's face it, as Nicolosi himself kinda infers by some of the fake voiceover used in the trailer, if characters in horror movies weren't wont to make all those stupid decisions, horror movies would be pretty boring.
As an extra, check out Mike Castro's short Stay Indoors (2017).

↧

Shock Waves (USA, 1977)

November 2, 2018, 2:16 am

≫ Next: Freddy vs. Jason (USA, 2003)

≪ Previous: Misc. Film Fun (Faux Trailer) – Hell No: The Sensible Horror Film (2013)

(Meander with Spoilers.) Aka Almost Human and Death Corps. Here is an interesting if flawed low-budget semi-shocker from the seventies which, like so many cult favorites, is not quite as good as its reputation but way better than it ought to be.

Trailer to

Shock Waves:

Possibly inspired by Zombies of Mora Tau (1957 / trailer),*one of the better of the many pieces of (usually) laughable but enjoyable genre flotsam directed by the prolific and underappreciated B- and C-movie meistro Edward L. Cahn* (12 Feb 1899 – 25 Aug 1963), Shock Waves,the debut feature-film directorial effort of Ken Wiederhorn, morphs the earlier film's basic idea of waterlogged killer zombies protecting the diamonds on a sunken ship into a death corps of waterlogged killer Nazi zombies that escape (?) their sunken ship and proceed to decimate a group of shipwrecked tourists.

*Trivia twice over:

1.The phrasing of the prologue scroll of Zombies of Mora Tau brims with cultural precocity: "In the darkness of an ancient world — on a shore that time has forgotten — there is a twilight zone between life and death. Here dwell those nameless creatures who are condemned to prowl the land eternally — the walking dead."

2.Two years after Shock Waves, in 1979, another low budget feature directed by Edward L. Cahn, the sci-fi horror movieIt! The Terror from Beyond Space(1958 / trailer), went on to inspire the modern classic, Alien (1979 / trailer).

One of the Shock Waves' biggest mistakes is a structural one common to so many films, and one that is generally particularly detrimental to horror movies. (See, for example, The Prometheus Project[2010].) Shock Waves opens with a fisherman (Clarence Thomas) and his boy finding a floating dinghy and a parched and terrified woman we later learn is named Rose (Brooke Adams of Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978 / trailer] and The Unborn [1991 / trailer]). She is the sole survivor of the subsequent narrative, which, as it is told in flashback, totally loses all tension regarding the question of who will and who won't survive. Which is not to say the movie doesn't nevertheless often achieve a notable creepiness and even a decent scare or two (or three), it's just that all the shocks and scares and atmosphere would have been greatly served and enhanced if it hadn't been revealed to the viewer in advance that: everybody gonna die! (Indeed, without problem the film's narrative could easily have been structured and told in consecutive progression, without the flashback structure.)

Opening intro to

Shock Waves:

Shock Waves' slightly schizophrenic opening is indecisive regarding whether the zombie horrors that subsequently transpire are follow are unnatural or science-based. The intro (above) makes the zombies' origins relatively science-based, but their sudden return from the ocean floor in the movie is decidedly supernatural, preceded by unnatural and hazy daylight, a mysteriously dysfunctional compass and radio, and a ghostly death ship that almost rams the tourist boat.* Supernatural or not, the midnight near-miss results in a slowly sinking tourist boat, which in turns forces the all those aboard to take refuge on the nearby tropic island on which the rest of the tale commences.

*The extras of the German Ungekürzte Fassung("uncut version") DVD we watched, from Marketing Film, included photos and mention of later scenes onboard that death ship that never made it into the final film. Sad.

And it is on this island that our initial team of six boaters runs into the unnamed SS Commander (Peter Cushing of The Mummy[1959], The Curse of Frankenstein [1957], The Brides of Dracula [1960], Corruption[1968] and so much more), the man who long ago sank the boatload of Nazi zombies to the ocean's floor only to subsequently take residence in the long-deserted island hotel where the movie's fodder-six take initial refuge. Not too keen on having visitors, he grudgingly offers them a way off the island — a small sailboat — which they later lose due to basic incompetency.

Cushing's appearance, like that of fellow poster headliner John Carradine (as the tourist boat's ornery Captain Ben Morris), is much too brief, and though the two never share a scene together they are both, as almost always, a pleasure to watch on screen. Indeed, they more or less easily dominate any scene they are in, upstaging and stealing it from the rest of the cast without even trying. Cushing's German accent, however, so on-the-mark when speaking English, is completely lost and snigger-inducing whenever he barks out his few perfunctory (and very basic) German-language phrases. Not that the average English native speaker would notice….

The Nazi zombies, thank FSM's Noodly Appendages, bear little resemblance to the laughable dead of that other waterlogged killer Nazi zombie film that followed four years later, Zombie Lake(1981). The blonde, shrivel-skinned undead that rise from the waters in Shock Wavesare suitably unnerving, and do indeed convey a level of disturbing eeriness and deathly danger — that is, of course, unless you happen to watch the movie with a German, who will surely giggle and exclaim, "They all look just like Heino!" (See below video.) But even without such commentary, their sinister creepiness is lessened a bit by the repetitiveness in how Wiederhorn stages their emergence: seen it once, seen it twice, seen it thrice, seen it…

Heino covers

Die Ärtze's song, Junge:

Considering the decade it is from, Shock Waves is surprisingly goreless and not at all bloody, but then, death by drowning in seldom either. Still, drowning, or being drowned, is a horrible way to go — but Wiederhorn tends to negate the horror of the event by not dwelling upon the act when it occurs, preferring instead to have the victim simply pulled below the water and a dead body shown later. And since the viewer already knows that everyone is going to die, most of the revulsion and horror that any given death should instigate is already diminished, even during the final escape scene revealing how Rose ends up alone on the dinghy. (There is also absolutely no gratuitous nudity, generally a staple of the time, but then the film does have a low female character count, and neither is a horny college student, generally the only stereotype to get nekkid in this kind of movie.)

Rose (Brooke Adams) and the captain's mate Keith (Luke Halpin) are the film's nominal hero and heroine, if only because they were, at the time Shock Wave was released, the best-known faces in the movie (outside, of course, the extended cameos of the headlining stars Cushing and Carradine).* But while both are attractive, they, like all other survivors of the cruise boat, are cyphers without any true characterization. They — like everyone in the movie — are faces, but faceless, with virtually no past or personality. Rose is little more than an attractive brunette and Keith little more than a good-looking ship's mate, while fellow tourist Chuck (Fred Buch [26 Feb 1940 – 2 Dec 2012], also found in Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare Beach [1989 / trailer]), is just some tourist in nylon shorts. The ship's cook, Dobb (Don Stout [13 April 1923 – 16 June 2004]), fares better, as he is such a stereotype — hard-drinking and working aged cook — that the stereotype actually gives him personality. Oddly enough, the used-car salesman Norman (Jack Davidson) is given a surprising amount of character-building dialogue (and thus comes across a bit like the blustery Leslie Nielsen character of Day of the Animals[1977 / trailer] but without the alpha-personality traits) considering how ineffectual he is, but his wife Beverly (D.J. Sidney) is basically never anything more than simply a stock character: "the Doomed Wife".

*Adams was an up-and-coming actress, while Halpin was still familiar from his days as a teen heartthrob arising from his character in Flipper(1963 / trailer), Flipper's New Adventures (1964 / trailer), and the subsequent TV show, Flipper (1964-67). (We here at a wasted life, however, remember him primarily as one of the many Floridian faces in the fun regional atrocity that is Mr No Legs [1978 / trailer].)

Since they are all such non-entities, it is hardly surprising that they never try to become proactive and also work so dysfunctionally as a group. No sooner does their lack of organization cost them their escape boat, do they suddenly all go running different directions amidst the mangroves. And even after Rose accidentally discovers a way to disable the zombies — by pulling off their goggles — they never try to work together to take any Nazi zombies down. (We're not talking about mutating into master samurais and decapitations, we're talking about a simple joint effort to bait & distract and pull off them thar' goggles.*) The extent to which they are dysfunctional as a group is underscored later when, after Nylon-Shorts Chuck claustrophobia-induced freak-out** and Beverly's accidental blinding, everyone just runs off and leaves Beverly behind. Like: why is anyone surprised when she turns up dead the next day?

*In itself, also an inconsistency in the movie: although two zombies are noticeably felled by the removal of their goggles, Beverly the Doomed Wife is later killed by a zombie not wearing any.

**Are we the only ones to think that four people trying to hide all night in what is probably an air-tight, walk-in refrigerator is not a good idea?

(GIF found at Scare Me On Fridays)

In the end, Shock Waves is a movie that is more than easy to eviscerate — the preceding quibbles are but a few of the many that one can harp upon should one want to write ten or more pages. But for all its flaws, the movie remains captivating and exudes a fine and atmospheric sense of doom that one seldom finds amidst the palm trees of tropical locations (outside, that is, of the average Italian zombie flick — like Zombi / Zombie II[1979], Dr. Gore / Zombie Holocaust[1980], and so many others). Quirky and different, Shock Waves is a highly enjoyable horror film, perhaps even effective if one is of a forgiving nature or simply blind to its faults. It is not a classic in any way, despite often being touted as one, but it does make for easy viewing. Give it a chance… and then tell us what you think about it...

And speaking of zombies and Heino —

Zombie Heinos in

Otto der Fim (1985 / trailer):

↧

Freddy vs. Jason (USA, 2003)

November 9, 2018, 1:42 am

≫ Next: Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

≪ Previous: Shock Waves (USA, 1977)

Let us pay our respects to director Ronny Yu. He, like fellow Hong Kong master stylist John Woo, is a man who knows how to make a movie. Like Woo, he is a genre master, but unlike Woo he never truly made it to the A ranks in Hollyweird. (Woo, however, fell quickly, but before returning to the Western Bs and Eastern As, he did helm Face/Off [1997 / trailer], M:I-2[2000 / trailer], and the oh-so-serious Windtalkers [2002 / trailer].) But while Yu, like his Hong Kong colleague, did make it from Hong Kong to the sunny shores of California, his brief three-film, one-TV-movie foray remained strongly rooted in the mainstream production company Bs.

Trailer to

Freddy vs. Jason:

But Western B film or Hong Kong product, Ronny Yu has continually revealed himself as a solid genre film pro: a master of visuals, he's a director who usually knows the perfect angle, the perfect framing, the perfect dolly shot, the right place to edit quickly or to use long takes, to use neon/artificial lighting or natural, or what should happen onscreen and what should happen off — what's more, he generally also gets decent performances from his casts. He is, basically, a damn good director.

Indeed, his assured directorial style is often the best thing about the given movie project he is in charge of — see, for example, The 51^st State aka Formula 51 (2001 / trailer), a totally idiotic mess that'll keep you laughing and entertained from start to finish. In the hands of a less proficient and assured stylist, even the talented cast (led by Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Carlyle, and Emily Mortimer) probably couldn't have saved that brainless piece of fluff. (What's more, in that film Yu even gets a good performance out of Meat Loaf.)

Likewise noteworthy is Yu's blackly comic Western-world debut, Bride of Chucky (1998 / trailer), which is also greatly served by a relatively coherent and tight script. The last bit about a "relatively coherent and tight script" cannot, however, be said of Freddy vs. Jason, but a coherent and tight script has never truly been a prerequisite to having a hit movie. And Freddy vs. Jason was a hit: "It grossed $114 million, making it the highest-grossing film in the Friday the 13th series and the second-highest-grossing film in A Nightmare on Elm Street series. [Wikipedia, date: 04 Oct 2018]"

To give credit where credit is due, the scriptwriting duo of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who subsequently went on to pen the totally misfired and boring Friday the 13^th reboot (2009 / trailer) as well as the equally misfired but mildly entertaining Baywatch (2017 / trailer) movie adaptation, did a good job of working bits and pieces and references to the entire mythologies of both franchises into their script, even going so far as to strongly remind the audience at the start that everyone's favorite mass-murdering anti-hero Freddy is a child-killer and sexual deviant. (Hmm, sounds like Presidential material — or at least Senatorial.) But where in the name of Camp Crystal Lake did they come up with the idiotic idea of Jason's fear of water?

In any event, the script to Freddyvs. Jason is still a shallow fuckup and narrative mess lacking any true characterization, semblance of logic or basic realism, and with almost no true scares or real humor. More often than not — and totally unlike Bride of Chucky, for example — viewers finds themselves laughing atthe movie instead of with the movie. (Not that the producers probably cared, as they surely simply laughed their way to the bank.)

Within the timeline of the two persistent original franchises, Freddy vs. Jason occurs after the second-to-last Freddy film, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare(1991 / trailer), and between the final two Jason flicks, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday(1993 / trailer) and Jason X(2001 / trailer).* As Freddy's rather long opening preamble clarifies, Freddy's powerless and in limbo and Jason's dead, but Freddy wants to kill kill kill kill so he enters Dead Jason's dreams (yep, the dead dream) and tricks Jason into arising from the dead and go on a killing spree in Springwood, Ohio, so as to make the kids there scared again. Their fear should somehow bring Freddy back — a plan that ends up working only because of a policeman's slip of the lip and the extremely contrived escape of two Elm Street kids, Will Rollins (Jason Ritter) and Mark Davis (Brendan Fletcher of BloodRayne: The Third Reich [2011 / trailer]), from the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital (see: Nightmare onElm Street III: The Dream Warriors [1987 / trailer]), two things that suddenly bring the forgotten name of Freddy Krueger to the mouths and minds of the kids on Elm Street, most of whom must have failed a several grades to be still stuck in high school. (Dunno why they have to know of and fear Freddy for him to enter their dreams, actually, seeing that none of the kids in the first film, the classic Nightmare on Elm Street [1984 / trailer], knew anything about Freddy before he started killing them. In that film, he simply had the power.)

*The latter of which, in space, joined such illustrious company as Critters 4 (1992 / trailer), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996 / trailer), Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996 / trailer)... and Moonraker (1979 / trailer), for that matter.

Freddy vs. Jason opens in true, traditional exploitation film style with naked boobs, something sorely missing from most contemporary trash cinema. (One wonders, however, how any ditz who has to work as a summer camp counselor would be old enough, much less manage to scrape together the money, to afford a boob job, even a cheaper one for unmoving boobs.) Topping off the wonderfully hilarious gratuitous nudity of the bimbo's midnight swim, she even runs barefoot into the forest to escape Jason, so of course she dies at his hands. (An unused scene in the DVD extras reveals that the girl — "Heather" [Odessa Munroe] — does indeed first try to return to her cabin, but when unsuccessful doesn't have the brains to simply break the window and chooses instead to run through the woods because, well, that's what one does.) But wait! The kill isn't real: it is, one might say considering the midnight swim and naked half-melons, Jason's wet dream — from whence Freddy awakens him. From there on, it's " Hi, ho! Hi, ho! Off to kill, Jason does go!"

According to director Ronny Yu, the special effects team used three hundred gallons of fake blood in Freddyvs. Jason. The amount is believable: people — mostly over-aged high school students — die and blood flows, mostly due to Jason. His harvest in greatly simplified because, after the first bodies drop, the over-aged high school students all react in a totally realistic fashion by throwing a midnight cornfield rave that, realistically, no adult (i.e., figure of authority) finds out about. From thereon in, Freddy starts getting both more powerful and pissed at Jason for robbing him of all his kills…. All of which leads to the eventual big showdown of the movie's title.

As to be expected of a Ronny Yu movie, the flick looks good. But for the average Joe, it also makes absolutely no sense, though if you know the mythology you can probably convince yourself it does, as enough lip service is given to past conventions — including, for example, how the film's spunky Final Girl Lori (Monica Keena of Snow White: A Tale of Terror[1997 / trailer], seen below not from the movie) brings Freddy over to the real world — that rhythm and reason can be inferred. But there isn't any, really.

One or two scenes, like the one with the brain-dead kids in Westin Hills, are even mildly unnerving, while others are really stupid — again, like the one with the brain-dead kids in Westin Hills, whenever the crappy-looking CGI hookah-smoking caterpillar shows up. (Aside from the obvious literary reference, possibly also a faint reference to the much more effective non-CGI Freddy-snake found in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.) In general, however, and as is always the case with slasher films, it is less the chills than the kills that count, and in Freddyvs. Jason they quickly get relatively mundane: even the dream-world demise of Gibb (cult-fave babe Katharine Isabelle of Bones [2001 / trailer] and so much more) lacks the surreal terror of vintage Freddy.

But all the obvious flaws of Freddyvs. Jason are pretty much aside the point. There is basically only one reason to see the movie, and that reason is used as the movie's title. And the title will either make you hard/wet or leave you limp/dry, and that in turn is the decisive factor to whether or not the film is worth your precious time. We here at a wasted life, who went in only semi-tumescent, feel we wasted ours.

Freddy vs. Jason
Kill Count:

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Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

November 16, 2018, 3:33 am

≫ Next: Q (USA, 1982)

≪ Previous: Freddy vs. Jason (USA, 2003)

Babes of Yesteryear: Within the world of exploitation and cult film, there is an inordinate amount of women who had their 15 seconds in exploitation and, for whatever reason — no talent, terrible accent, bad luck, the films they took part in — never made the jump from C, D and Z films to B movies, let alone A movies. We don't mean the Scream Queens of today, like the talented Tiffany Shepis (see: Corpses [2004], The Hazing[2004], The Prometheus Project [2010] and so much more); we mean the women of the Golden Age of (Modern) Exploitation, the 60s and 70s, many of whom quickly left the business when softcore went hard and the willingness to do nudity was no longer enough to get you another rent-paying film shoot. Most simply disappeared: prior to the internet, it was relatively impossible to know whether they simply retired, died natural or unnatural deaths, or seriously vanished (as did Lorna Maitland — see: The Rialto Report).*

*Today, of course, it is a bit easier to find out that, for example, Rene Bond (11 Oct 1950 – 2 June 1996) died of liver cirrhosis and Bambi Allen (2 May 1938 – 21 Jan 1973) of cancer, Pat Barrington (16 Oct 1939 – 1 Sept 2014) eventually ended up in Florida and obscurity and lung cancer, Jeannie Bell married into riches and left the biz, Tamara Dobson (14 May 1947 – 2 Oct 2006) died of multiple sclerosis, or that Shari Eubank ended up teaching in Illinois and Monica Gayle ended up married with children and now lives in a section of the Valley that once belonged to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In Babes of Yesteryear, our new and irregular and PI feature, a wasted life takes a look at the filmography of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema. Our choice of whom we look at is idiosyncratic and entirely our own — but they are/were babes, one and all. (Though, being who we are, we might also take a look at some actor cum beefcake, if we feel like it.) Some may still be alive, others not.

In any event, herewith we give a nudity warning: naked babes and beefcake are highly likely to be found in our Babes of Yesteryear entries. If such sights offend thee, well, either go to another blog or pluck thy eyes from thee...

Today, Uschi Digard is still alive, happily married (for over 50 years), and retired in Palm Springs, CA. To learn everything you ever wanted to know about her, we would suggest listening to the great interview she gave The Rialto Report in 2013.

Over the next year, we will take an irregular, meandering, year-by-year look at the films she participated in from 1968 to 2008. (OK, she retired long before that, but people still find ways of working her into their movies.) For the most part, reels and shorts won't be looked at. As many of her films are given different release dates by different sites, we in no way claim 100% validity of the dates we supply.

Uschi Digard, Part One: 1968-69

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!

(1968, dir. Hy Averback)

"The saga of Harold...from dedicated lawyer to dedicated dropout."

Trailer to

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!

More than one website, but not the imdb or the Uschi website, claim that Uschi "began, oddly enough, in mainstream, with a cameo in I Love You Alice B. Toklas! with Peter Sellers (8 Sept 1925 – 24 July 1980). [Tales from the Kryptonian]"
I Love You Alice B. Toklas! — one of TV director Hy Averback's (21 Oct 1920 – 14 Oct 1997) rare forays into feature film — is one of the many decidedly poorly dated comedies from the sixties that saw mainstream Hollywood trying to be hip and failing miserably. Or at least the movie failed for us, as we remember walking out on the movie when we caught it years ago at a retro house. We much prefer Averback's feature film foray of the previous year, Chambers of Horrors (1966).*

*OK, so Chambers was originally filmed as a TV pilot — but it got released into theaters and never became a series.

Scene from

Chambers of Horrors (1966):

"The film's title is a tribute to Gertrude Stein's lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, who published a cookbook in 1954 that contained the first printed recipe for hash fudge. In one of the movie's most famous scenes Harold Fine unknowingly serves marijuana-laced brownies baked by Nancy to his parents and fiancée. [imdb]"
Believe us: if you follow Toklas's recipe as written, you'll love it! We say "it" and not "them" because the original recipe, as given to Toklas by Brion Gyson and referred to in the paragraph above, is for fudge, not brownies. Here's a scan of the original recipe as taken from Riverfront Times:

The Berkeley Library, where one reads books, mentions that "as Frank Thompson, in his article, Movies on Drugs, writes, 'marijuana is an entirely positive force in Toklas; everyone who uses it (even unwittingly Sellers' aging parents) emerges more thoughtful, aware, spontaneous — freer.' I was hard-pressed to find films in any of the other historical periods that portray pot in such a benevolent light. Even Cheech and Chong are shown to be at best dull-witted and slow."

In his three-star review of the movie from 1968, Roger Ebertexplains the basic plot: "Sellers […] plays a single man of about 35, a lawyer with a great respect for appearances, who finally agrees out of politeness to marry the girl he's been dating for several years (Joyce Van Patten of Monkey Shines [1988 / trailer]). She's the sort of girl who can't wait to leave her fiancé, once he's popped the question, so she can telephone her mother and tell her the news: Enough said. But Sellers gets rescued from the altar all the same, after his own mother (Jo Van Fleet [29 Dec 1915 – 10 June 1996] of The Tenant [1976 / trailer]) sends him on an expedition to find his brother (David Arkin [24 Dec 1941 – 14 Jan 1991 (suicide)]). The brother has become a hippie and attends the funeral of a family friend wearing the Hopi Indian burial costume. He also brings along a really good-looking chick (Leigh Taylor-Young ofSoylent Green[1973]) and Sellers falls for her and, by extension, for the hippie life. […]" Enough said.

Well, not really. Ebert at least also pointed out the obvious: "Unfortunately, the movie's general approach to hippiedom is what we've come to dread. Hippies wear funny clothes, sleep on the stove, don't wash, read the Los Angeles Free Press, bake pot brownies, put up posters everywhere and operate with a sort of mindless, directionless love ethic. So the movie becomes conventional after all."

Both David Arkin and Leigh Taylor-Young were making their first credited appearance in a feature film. Leigh Taylor Young, seen below, is actually rather good as the ditzy object of Sellers' affections. She has since become a minister for the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. At her website, Taylor Young says, "Although it was 1967, I felt very removed from the hippie phenomenon. I had been working non-stop for two years as a professional actress with a heavy schedule. My focus had been my career. I had never said 'groovy' in my life, or worn a short skirt, or smoked anything at all. In fact, I was still wearing little white gloves, stockings and long skirts. I loved only classical music, didn't drink or swear, and was still a virgin at 21." (She was 23 while filming.)

In any event, Uschi should be there somewhere in the background. Should anyone want to bother watching this movie and keep an eagle eye, let us know where she is if you see her.

Sappho, Darling

(1968, dir. Gunnar Steele)

The films that Uschi Digard may have appeared in prior to arriving in the US are, basically, unknown today, but prior to coming to Hollyweird, Uschi supposedly made some softcore erotic films in Sweden, of which some might think this is one. Sappho, Darling is, however, decidedly faux-Swedish, complete with stock footage. Though not currently (1 Nov 2018) listed in her credit list at the imdb, Uschi lists this film on her filmography at her website.

Sappho, Darling, supposedly produced by some guy named "Hal Senter", was written by an American, the great Albert Zugsmith (24 Apr 1910 – 26 Oct 1993), the producer of many a memorable movie, including Orson Welles'Touch of Evil (1958 / trailer), Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man(1957 / trailer), High School Confidential (1958 / trailer), Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill (1964 / trailer), one of Vincent Price's odder projects, Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962 / Trailer from Hell), and so much more. Director Gunnar Steele, assuming the name is real, never made another movie.

NSFW Trailer to

Sappho, Darling:

TCM has the plot: "Because of her strict upbringing, Sappho (Carol Young) refuses to become sexually intimate with her boyfriend, Sven (Alyn Darnay). Brigitte (Yvonne D'Angers), who suffered an unhappy sexual initiation in a gang rape, becomes Sappho's roommate. His desire frustrated, Sven attempts unsuccessfully to take Sappho by force; when he leaves, Luana (Sally Sanford) and her girl friend try, also unsuccessfully, to seduce the two girls. Arriving to apologize for his behavior, Sven discovers the women together and leaves, appalled at the thought that his lover is a lesbian. Brigitte visits his apartment to convince him that he is mistaken, that Sappho truly loves him but is unable to overcome her fear of sex. Returning home, she surprises her new boyfriend attempting to rape Sappho. The two lonely girls are drawn together, and their intimacy culminates in a single homosexual experience. Sappho wants only to live with Brigitte, but Brigitte is attracted to men, and refuses. When Sven calls and asks Sappho to meet him at the beach, the two girls make the trip together, torn by doubts. Sappho at last runs off alone, unable to choose between her two loves."

At Something Weird, Lisa calls the movie a "tender tale of lesbian loving" and "exploitation that tries to be 'art-house'— and, for that matter, even pretends to be Swedish — Sappho Darlingcombines male fantasies of rape and lesbianism with ridiculous dialogue, especially when uttered by Miss D'Angers, to make this marvelously schizoid experience. Adding to the fun are bits by exploitation veteran Gary Kent [and] the always welcome Uschi Digart."

Tehran-born Yvonne D'Angers (2 Sept 1944 – 10 June 2009) was a popular topless dancer in America who gained infamy in San Francisco along with other dancers such as Carol Doda (29 Aug 1937 –9 Nov 2015) during the third quarter of the 20^th century. Like Doda, D'Angers was involved in obscenity trials in San Francisco in the '60s. In 1966, she even chained herself to the Golden Gate Bridge as a protest against her ordered deportation to Iran, an order which was overturned in 1968. D'Angers was immortalized by Diane Arbus (14 Mar 1923 – 26 July 1971) in Arbus's famous photo, seen above, entitled Topless dancer in her dressing room, San Francisco, Cal. As for Gary Kent, among the many notable disasterpieces he participated in, special mention must be given to Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971).

The news advertisement shown above was for a showing at the Floridian Todd Theatre. The movie itself can currently be found online for free at Film Izle.

Another Sappho, Darling trailer
(with three other films):

The Big Snatch

(1968, dir. "Ronnie Runningboard")

Aka The Big Catch, as one too many newspaper found the intended implications of the title of this no-budget roughie a tad too racy for publication — something they would surely no longer think, seeing that it is fully presidential to grab women by their pussy.ThisBig Snatch, in any event, is not based on the even more-so forgotten 1958 crime novel of the same name, or even the vintage trash novel by Rod Gray (images below). "Rod Gray", by the way, is generally accepted as a pseudonym of no one less than Gardner Fox (20 May 1911 – 24 Dec 1986), the co-creator of DC Comics heroes the Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and the original Sandman.

The imdb and other sources list this David F. Friedman production as a 1971 release, but on her website Uschi claims it to be a 1968 production. While Uschi could be wrong — the reliability of her website filmography is often questionable — it is entirely possible that the more-common 1971 listing is due to the movie being confused with Mark Hunter's 1971 even more trashy "crime" movie of the same name, The Big Snatch, a sleazy hardcore one-daywonder so obscure we couldn't locate a poster online, assuming it had one (we could, however, find the film itself at Classic Porn).

The artwork of the above Lady from L.U.S.T book was supplied by yet another unjustly unknown artist, Issac Paul Rader. Go here for more examples of his cover art women.
The "direction" of this Big Snatch movie here, a David Friedman production, is credited to one "Ronnie Runningboard", a pseudonym usually used by the obscure Dan Martin, whose short (known) career in Z-films included roles in five Byron Mabe (10 April 1932 – 13 May 2001) movies from 1968 and the direction of one other movie, The Mermaid (1973). Byron Mabe is generally considered The Big Snatch's co-director, while numerous online sources lacking documentation claim that Dan Martin was, at the time of his sleaze-film career, a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles, thus his use of a fake name.

Trash Film Guru has the "plot": "The Big Snatch centers around the hare-brained scheme of two truck-driving yokels (ringleader Bart, played by a guy calling himself 'Harry Chest,' and dim-witted sidekick Momo, played by a guy calling himself — well, 'Momo') to kidnap five beautiful young co-eds and turn them into their own personal low-rent harem. The gals spend a pretty good chunk of the flick stuck inside a drained-out swimming pool, then they all get raped in turn […] and then the industrious gals actually do manage to effect an escape en masse, whereupon they immediately strangle Momo to death before twisting and crushing Bart's cock with a pliers and then tossing him down onto a dirty old mattress and 'gang raping' him for about the final 30 minutes of the film, although I have no idea how his 'junior member' was even supposed to be functioning by that point."

A Scene from

The Big Snatch:

If this no-budget film enjoys any fame at all, it is infamy. As the enjoyable sleazy blog Sleazy Pictures says, "There are trashy movies and then there are movies so trashy the sleaze goes right through the roof into the stratosphere. This is one of *those* movies. It looks extremely cheap (not surprising since the budget was just 11 thousand dollars), has awful acting and photography and much of the time the 'rapes' seem a little too enjoyable for the 'victim,' but this is amusing enough to pass the time, most of the females look good and there's a mean-spirited twist at the end that's kind of good. Everyone was so embarrassed by this they used fake names and the credits are hilarious. The cameraman is 'Otto Focus,' the sound was done by 'Less Noise' and the grip was 'Jim Nasium.' […] It's certainly worth a gander if you like this kind of stuff."
Expect a "twist" endingof the type only a man would think of (but then, the whole film is like that).Uschi, by the way, is credited as "Barbara Que"; former & forgotten Z-film nubile Peggy Church, of the fan-favorite The All-American Girl (1973 / spanky-spanky) and Bethel Buckalew's The Pig-Keeper's Daughter (1972 / trailer / full film), is credited as "Rita Book", and Jayne Tsentis as "Nancy Nice". Tracy Handfuss and one-shot Ginnie Kindall may have or may not have used their real names.

Peggy Church, as the movie's virgin, is the focus of the movie's most infamous scene. As Don the Deviate once asked at Something Weirdon a now-deleted page, "Steamed clams, anyone?": "Picture a pretty young virgin spread-eagled over your car's over-heated radiator. The radiator cap is removed, the engine revved, and boiling hot steam belches out of it creating one percolating pussy! This is an image to conjure with, folks. And this is the image that'll stay with you long after viewing The Big Snatch, a mean and nasty ultra-sexy roughie from the era that made political incorrectness an art form."
And from the era when ugly men also did limp, full frontal nudity… which is found in many a film throughout Uschi's career.

The Kill

(1968, dir. Gary Graver)

Aka Blood Hunger and, in a re-cut and shortened (from approx. 60 min to 45 min) version, Reservoir Cats. Written and directed by the once-omnipresent Gary Graver (20 July 1938 - 16 Nov 2006), a cinematographer cum scriptwriter cum director cum what-job-you-got? known for working with only the best: Orson Welles, Fred Olan Ray, Albert Pyun, Tobe Hooper, Jim Wynorski, Al Adamson, David DeCoteau, Curtis Harrington, Paul Hunt and way more. As "Robert McCallum", Graver also had a productive career as a director of hardcore porn.

The Kill was produced by "the elusive Ed De Priest", and somewhere in it Uschi shows up (un-credited) as a hitchhiker. The image below, however, taken from Boopedia, is not from the actual movie but is of the movie's actual "star", Antoinette Maynard (aka Bonnie Fisher, Anna Lopez, Ann Toinette & Jane Weinstein [no relation to Harvey]).

Women in Prison Films, which caught Reservoir Cats, says: "This is a strange movie. It appears someone took an old 70s porno, cut it into a tit flick, and added hilarious voiceovers every now and then. If you want an action movie avoid this. If you want to see a tit flick with dialog so ridiculous it's funny then watch this."

A scene from

The Kill:

Bleeding Skull, which watched Blood Hunger, would probably concur with WIP, as they say: "If Buster Keaton made a madcap sexploitation noir about horny broads and cars that never run out of gas, this might be it. Charlie Apple's voiceover is ripped straight out of an Ed Wood sleaze novel. […] My guess is that Graver didn't like the script and tried to salvage it with a voiceover. And we're all better for it. Graver clearly had fun while making this film, and maybe he was a little drunk, too. Blood Hunger makes little sense, but it doesn't matter. It's a solid piece of entertainment that delivers. But what's most incredible about Blood Hunger is the soundtrack. The sound effects used in the sex scenes include creaking doors, whirring wind, bugle calls, extremely loud crickets, ragtime piano, grinding metal gears, and the dreaded jazz flute. Pretty much every random sound effect is used in this movie. So while Blood Hunger is fun to watch, it's even more fun to listen to."

The plot of The Kill, as supplied by TCM: "Antoinette hires down-and-out Private Detective Charlie Apple (Walt Phillips of Erika's Hot Summer [1971 / Erika nude]) to find her brother Mickey after some of Mickey's associates, heroin smugglers, rape her for trying to persuade him to quit the racket. Antoinette gives Charlie a $100 retainer and seduces him. Charlie goes to Mickey's apartment and finds a dead woman there. Mickey arrives, and the two fight until Charlie is knocked out. He regains consciousness in the gangsters' warehouse and, discovering himself tied up, telephones Antoinette for help. She comes to the warehouse and frees Charlie; the gang returns; and they chase Charlie and Antoinette into a gravel pit. Antoinette is carried off while Charlie fights it out with one of the mob. Kruger, the gang leader, telephones Mickey and instructs him to kill Charlie. Mickey arranges to meet Kruger at a deserted beach where there will be a $1 million heroin delivery; he also sends Candy, his new mistress, to search Charlie's office. Charlie walks in while she is rifling his desk. He wins her confidence by making love to her, and she tells him of the beach rendezvous. Charlie goes to the beach, and there a violent showdown occurs."

Among his many projects, Gary Graver went on to also work on an occasional horror movie such as The Attic(1980 / trailer), Trick or Treats(1982 / trailer), and Evil Spirits (1990 / trailer).

Bedtime Surprise

(1968, dir. Unknown)

Numerous websites claim the elusive "Gunnar Steele" of Sappho, Darling directed this movie; some even claim that Bedtime Surprise is actually an AKA title for Steele's earlier feature-length flick — but DVD Drive-In reveals everything that is actually known about the stag short: "For anyone who wants even MORE Uschi […] Uschi Digart's Bedtime Surprise sees Uschi smothering a lucky bastard with her bombastic mammaries and giving him a handjob before jumping astride him! It's pretty graphic softcore stuff, with Uschi really doing a rough ride on the guy, screaming and flipping her hair around, looking fabulous with her breasts flopping out of her bustier! It's pretty damn funny, with great classical music cues!"

Since it's a short, we normally wouldn't include it in a career review of this ilk, but we figure it's as good of an excuse as any to present a photo of Uschi modeling questionable fashionwear. Fashionwear that, obviously enough, would be a perfect gift for your Trump-voting family member.Righteous!

The Madam

(1969, dir. Don Brown)

The book cover above and the movie at hand have nothing to do with each other, but we liked the cover art by Robert Bonfis so we thought we would use it, especially sincewe couldn't locate an "original" poster to this cheap and pointless softcore one-day wonder. Previously thought lost, The Madamhas been rediscovered and repackaged with two other non-Uschi movies, L'amour de femme (1969 / film) and Take Them As They Are (1970), for further exploitation. (See image below.) Uschi has relatively meaty if un-credited role in The Madam as "Sissy".

DVD Drive-In, which says that The Madam is "nothing special, but to see yet another obscure Uschi film is still cause for some celebration", has the "plot": "After her car breaks down, Sissy hitches a ride with hippie biker John (Garrett Lambert), who takes her to her mother's home. It turns out to be a very lavish whorehouse, where mom is the Madam and Sissy oversees the girls. John samples the wares of Sally, a buck-toothed cutie (Terri Johnson) with a huge bouffant wig, and since he can't pay for a room for the night, he acts as bartender and auditions a prospective prostitute in a very noisy and apparently drug-induced scene (!). Finally, Sissy takes John for a spin in the bedroom and when Mom discovers the two, the pair ride off into the sunset on his motorcycle. Ah, romance."

The iafd gushes, "Hot, stacked, and always ready, watch Uschi's perfect tits and ass wiggle their way through this action-packed feature!" But over at the imdb, lor of New York, that great connoisseur of porn, is less easily satisfied: "It's one of her least interesting titles. […] The simulated sex is desultory […] Resulting film is the typical mish-mash of fairly convincing cunnilingus scenes, very fake fellatio simulation, and the dirty feet on screen to prove they were in a big hurry to wrap this up. Both men and women display full frontal nudity, the sign of 'quality' for 1969."

In real life, the hippie biker "John", or Garrett Lambert, now hawks self-help stuff. Retired from smut by 1971, he resurfaced briefly in 2005 to appear in the truly terrible direct-to-video cheapie, The Horror Within.

Roughly 3 minutes of Garrett Lambert

in a terrible D2V flick:

The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood

(1969, dir. Richard Kanter & Erwin C. Dietrich)

Aka The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood. A David F. Friedman production that the great Erwin C. Dietrich (4 Oct 1930 – 15 March 2018) eventually brought to German-speaking Europe as Robin Hood und seine lüsternen Mädchen.

Watch the

Full Movie:

Though not [currently] listed on her list of credits at the imdb, Uschi has this movie in her filmography at her website. According to various sites, including Cinemorgue Wiki, she is indeed there: As Robin's mother, she is "strangled by one of Lawrence Adams' soldiers in the castle. (Nudity alert: Topless.)" According to the imdb, however, Robin's mom is played by "Barbara Sanders"— and, indeed, Robin's mom in the film does not look at all like Uschi.
The advertisement below, like so many ads used in this blog series, was found at Cinema Treasures.

In yet another typical case of online sources supplying conflicting info, emovieposter says Uschi Digard is billed as "Ingrid Young", whom the imdb claims is Robin's sister. But again, Robin's sister does not look at all like Uschi, either.

So, though we don't know where Uschi is, and in fact doubt that she is even there, we do know that Lynn Cartwright, the switchboard operator of The Wasp Woman (1959), is there as "Danielle Carver" playing Lady Sallyforth; Bambi Allen (of H.G. Lewis's Miss Nymphet's Zap-In [1970] and so much more) is also on hand as Polly. Noteworthy: as mentioned inJerry L. Schneider's book The True Story of Ray "Crash" Corrigan, Ray "Crash" Corrigan (14 Feb 1902 – 10 Aug 1976, of The Monster Maker [1944]) is there for his first appearance in an "X" movie playing Robin's Dad, billed as "Ray Benard". (Saying "first appearance", of course, implies he made more such movies, which we don't think he did — and, really, this softcore movie is not X-rated as we know it.)

As so often, TCM has the plot: "While King Richard is imprisoned by the Normans, his evil brother John (Lawrence Adams) usurps the throne and wreaks pillage, rape, and oppressive taxation on the populace. John and his men forcibly enter the castle of young Robin's father and kill the Earl (Ray "Benard" Corrigan) when he refuses to pledge allegiance. Young Robin (Scott Sizemore) watches the brutes rape and kill his mother, and he vows revenge against John and his band. Five years later young Robin is known as Robin Hood (Ralph Jenkins), champion of the common people, and he has cleverly resisted John's attempts to capture him. Lady Sallyforth, the sister of John and Richard who has allied herself with John, sends Maid Marion (Dee Lockwood), Robin Hood's childhood sweetheart, into Sherwood Forest to lure Robin Hood out of the forest. Robin Hood's men take Maid Marion to their leader, and the lovers are reunited. Marion relates to Robin Hood the evil king's efforts to capture him; and Robin allows himself to be captured. He confronts John and leads his men in a spirited battle in which John is killed and his allies subdued, thus restoring Richard to the throne. [Film may include scenes of nudity, sexual intercourse, fellatio, and torture.]"

At All Movie, Dan Pavlides points out that "Sherwood Forest in medieval times is the scene of the erotic and exotic story of Robin Hood and his merry men and women. The reason everyone is so merry is they spend the live-long day and night engaging in their favorite sexual experiences including sadism, lesbianism and homosexuality. Strictly an exploitation feature with crude jokes and nudity galore."

The Master Beater

(1969, writ & dir. Charles Carmello)

Aka Hot Sex Tramp, Masterbeaterand The Dirty Hawk, this is seemingly Charles Carmello's only directorial effort. He may or may not have gone on to become a playwright and novelist. This B&W artsploitation roughie is the feature-film debut of John Savage (of Alien Lockdown / Creature [2004] and American Strays [1996]), and also features Uschi somewhere (billed either as "Sherry" or "Ursula", we don't know) as a model, we assume nude.

One Sheet Index, which lists the movie as from 1965, has the plot: "[…] Known as the Master Beater he was a cold and brutal man. His only purpose in life was to inflict pain and degradation on his fellow man. The Master Beater was an expert exploiter of human weaknesses. The Master Beater could make a man sell his wife for a bag of powdered dreams. The Master Beater could inflict upon women the most unbelievable pain and they would ask for more. No woman could resist the overpowering evil of the Master Beater. The Master Beater would allow no woman to sleep with a man not even her husband unless her price was high and he received half. To the Master Beater life had no meaning without the joy of violence and the pleasure of pain mixed with beauty of pure depravity. To those the Master Beater loved he would take into his private world of love and pain. And to those the Master Beater hates he kills and kills and kills."

The newspaper advertisement above features Gerard Damiano's mostly forgotten early sex film Teenie Tulip (1970 / film), which, like The Master Beater, was produced distributed by Cinex Film Industries and distributed by Cinex International Film Distributors. It is relatively easy to assume that the unknown second feature in the advertisement, The Master, might well be The Master Beater.

The Game Is Sex

(1969, dir. Harry Wuest)

Aka The Game Is Set, The Game of Sex, and (in Germany) Im Bett der nackten Schwestern (i.e., "In the Bed of the Naked Sisters"). Released by William Mishkin Motion Pictures, which, along with some of the other names involved, would indicate that this seems to be a NYC exploiter. That makes Uschi's appearance somewhere in the movie somewhat odd, but she does have it listed on her website. She's billed as "H. Sohl".

In any event, the movie is not based on the sixties sleaze book of the same name, which we present below only because it has great cover art — and because one of the depicted guys looks just like William Shatner, whom some of you out there might know from the great Roger Corman message movie, The Intruder (1962).

Director Harry Wuest may not exactly have a common name, but we doubt that this Wuest is the same Wuest as the now deceased musician Harry Wuest. But, as they say, who knows.

To loosely translate what is written at the German website Kino, "Im Bett der nackten Schwestern ["In the Bed of the Naked Sisters"] is a (s)exploitation film about two different sisters who are destroyed by their respective relationships with the same man. Andre (Michael J. Canavan) writes for TV and seems to be an extremely imaginative guy. After a huge fight with his lover Irene ('Irene Rosetti'), who accuses him of not allowing her to have a life of her own, she splits for spontaneous vacation alone. Andre's secretary Nancy (Susana March), who is also Irene's sister, is more than willing to take Irene's place in Andre's bed in the meantime. Over the course of time, Andre continues to pursue a double relationship — until one of the sisters commits suicide." (A rather tame plot description in comparison to the one found at TCM.)

Rob Craig mentions in his book Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan, "Director Harry Wuest went on to make the fabulously deranged She Mob (1968 / poker scene), considered one of the most outré low-budget sexploitation films ever lensed." (Poster below.)

The actress "Irene Rosetti" is actually one Irene DeBari, a former Joseph W. Sarno film regular — she's found in Scarf of Mist Thigh of Satin (1967), The Sex Cycle (1967), Anything for Money (1967), Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse (1967), Bed of Violence (1967), Deep Inside (1968), The Wall of Flesh (1968), and Passion in Hot Hollows (1969 / scene / full film) — who's still active today as a character and stage actress.

The Scavengers

(1969, dir. Lee Frost)

Aka Ambush, The Grabbers& Rebel Vixens — and a few other names. Written by Bob Cresse (19 June 1936 – 6 April 1998). A mid-career disasterpiece of sleaze from two exploitation greats, Lee Frost (14 Aug 1935 - 25 May 2007) and Bob Cresse, who went on to regurgitate some truly influential movies, the most infamous of which is surely the woman-in-prison film, Love Camp 7 (1969 / trailer).

Two years after the initial release of The Scavengers, it was re-edited and, with new hardcore sex scenes added, re-released as The Grabbers.

In 1970, however, still as The Scavangers, it played second fiddle to Van Guylder's The Bang-Bang Gang (1970 / film) at the Michigan Theatre. And who can forget the Hues Corporation?

Rock the Boat:

Ushi Digart is there in The Scavangers playing Lucille. There used to be a trailer on YouTube, since deleted, and you could even see her smiling face (and cleavage) on it; also of slight note is the presence of Paul Hunt as Sgt. Ivers. You can still find the trailer at Something Weird.

TCM, as always, has the most comprehensive plot description: "Confederate Capt. Steven Harris (John Bliss) and 10 survivors from the Army of Tennessee who are assigned to rob a Union gold shipment being delivered to the Army of the Potomac and scheduled to pass through the town of Tazewell, proceed with their plans, unaware that the Civil War has ended. The men invade Tazewell, take over a saloon, shoot the bartender, and lock up the prostitutes. Harris tortures Union Lieutenant Nelson (Warren James) and learns that no gold will be shipped, the truce having been signed. Harris tries unsuccessfully to rape Faith (Maria Lease), Nelson's fiancée, and he gives Faith's Negro maid, Nancy (Roda Spain), to his men for their own sport. Nancy kills one of the men with a knitting needle and flees to nearby Everett, a Negro tent city founded by freed slaves. The liberated slaves attack the rebels with a vengeance…"

10K Bullets may lament that although "The brothel scene is one of the highlights, then the busty bar girls, including Uschi Digart, vanish away upstairs for the rest of the film", they nevertheless offer praise for the movie: "Despite prior output by the team of director Lee Frost and writer Bob Cresse, this is not sexploitation. The nudity is mostly obscured and the rape scenes are not meant to be titillating. Shootouts are well-staged, and though the fistfights obviously pull punches, the action is fast and furious (and therefore screen time is brief). The script is actually quite good and not only contains some delirious exchanges of dialog, but the conclusion is both memorable and thought-provoking."

Has nothing to do with the film —

The Scavengers play
But if You're Happy:

The actress playing Faith, Maria Lease, also found in Al Adamson's fun trash classic Dracula Vs. Frankenstein(1971), went on to a short career directing mostly porno films, but in 1991 she did toss out one non-porn horror flick, Dolly Dearest (trailer).

Trailer to
The Scavengers:

The Cut-Throats

(1969, writ. & dir. John Hayes)

Aka Cut-Throat KommandoSS. New York-born John Hayes (1 March 1930 - 21 Aug 2000), who wrote and directed The Cut-Throats, had a long and varied exploitation career (writer, director, editor, producer, and occasional actor). Long six feet under, he has yet to see his intriguing oeuvre be reappraised. One of his early projects, the short film The Kiss (1958, see further below), was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film (it lost out to Walt Disney's The Grand Canyon [full film]).

Full short —
The Kiss (1958):

In this, The Cut-Throats, one of his mid-career grindhouse projects, he turned to the ever-popular genre Nazisploitation and made a low-rate, five-guy version of The Dirty Dozen (1967 / trailer). Uschi, in an un-credited role, pops up to play the "German General's Secretary". (That's her below, proving that typing is not a necessity when it comes to being a good secretary.)

Fuckshit! — The Home Video Review says, "[…] It's time to talk about the ~~tit shots~~ (scratch that) ~~I mean plot~~ I mean tit shots. There really is no separation from the two at all so far as this film is concerned as we see tits and ass about every 8-10 minutes here (and that's an overly generous estimate, I think it's more like 4-6). It all takes place somewhere deep in the non-existent scrubland of Germany in 1945 near a super secret ~~somebody's grandparents ranch house~~ Nazi base camp. A pointless character introduction is used as an excuse for a sex scene within the first four minutes of the movie. Flash forward to later and a rogue US Army officer is setting up a dirty half dozen type mission to raid said ~~ranch house~~ secret base. Unbeknownst to our would-be badasses (except for the man behind the operation), there is a cache of jewels hidden somewhere on the base worth a million bucks. How does the audience find this out before anyone else? A sex scene of course! I'm not even sure it can be called a sex scene, it involves a topless woman giving a fat Nazi officer a massage in a sauna then fucking his left foot. NOT JOKING. There actually really is no specific plot to speak of. But there are lots of tits, ass, and even a brief burlesque show for good measure. Oh, and I nearly forgot the erotic massage involving heavy sprinklings of that all too sexy substance talcum powder. The rest of the film could easily be summed up in the following sentence: 'Ass and titties, ass ass and titties, shooting, death, ride into the sunset.' THE END."

Third Eye Cinema muses, "Are there really films with no purpose to exist? No plot, no characterization, nothing but a few naked and willing girls and a few uniforms from the prop department? Apparently so, as Hayes delivers a plotless, pointless, nearly dialogue-free waste of good celluloid […]. Nobody even tries to act, which is unsurprising given that there may be about a double-spaced page worth of lines in the film […]. Interestingly, Hayes makes the American soldiers ten times more unsympathetic than their Nazi opponents!"

Despite this, or maybe specifically because of it, Rock! Shock! Pop! still thinks that "[…] the movie remains an enjoyable slice of trashy drive-in style cinematic sex and violence. It's filled to the brim with potholes, historical inaccuracies and wonderful breasts. As such, it's worth seeing. Oh and if that weren't enough, Sandy Carey pops up here too."

"Pops up" is what she does indeed, as "Blonde selling a Painting", in what could be her feature-film debut. Carey (aka Sandee Carey, Alva Harris, Lois Klinger, Geri Sheraton, Sylvia Duval, Sandra Carey, Sandi Carey, Daisy Lay) had a roughly 10-year-long career in exploitation and sex films, and seems to have left the biz after a non-sex scene in Debbie Duz Dishes III (1987 / full NSFW film). Among her films of note are some oddities like the first fembot movie ever made, Too Much Loving aka Robot Love Slaves (1971 / full NSFW film), Eric Jeffrey Haims' softcore porn horror The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio (1971 / full film), the porn horror The Psychiatrist (1978), Perry Dell's comedy Deep Jaws (1976 / scene), William A. Levey's Wham! Bam! Thank You Spaceman! (1975 / trailer), Al Adamson's The Naughty Stewardesses (1974 / trailer), Stewart Malleon's inept The Curse of the Alpha Stone (1972), Gary Graver's And When She Was Bad... (1973 / scene), The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (1976, with Haji), Stu Segall's anti-classic Drive-In Massacre (1976 / t railer), Time Walker (1982 / trailer), and more.

6.10 Minutes of

The Cut-Throat KommandoSS:

The Marauders

(1969, dir. Cari Lutz)

Not to be confused with MGM's 1955 western of the same name — poster above — featuring everyone's favorite bad guy Dan Duryea (23 Jan 1907 - 7 June 1968, of The Burglar [1957]). Nor should it be confused with the even earlier Hopalong Cassidy movie (1947) of the same name, aka King of the Range, poster and film below.

Hopalong Cassidy in

The Marauders:

Both Uschi and the imdb list a movie entitled The Marauders in her filmogrpahy, but this obscure exploiter, apparently the only directorial credit of Cari Lutz, is equally apparently also a "lost" film (so check your attic). The Cari Lutz credited as the director by the imdb is probably not the film's director, as she would have been around seven years old when this movie was made.
The plot given everywhere is as follows: "Four Californian girls on holidays decide to travel south of the border. Mexican marauders capture them in a secluded hut, and the holiday develops in an unpleasant manner for the girls."

Coming next month:
Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I
(1970 was a busy year for her)

↧

Q (USA, 1982)

November 23, 2018, 2:49 am

≫ Next: Short Film: Closed Mondays (USA, 1974)

≪ Previous: Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

A.k.a. Q: The Winged Serpent. Larry Cohen's genre masterpiece about a city terrorized by a monster pigeon. Just kidding — about the monster pigeon, that is. In this prime slice of 1980s genre filmmaking, the terror of the New York City's skies is not some monster pigeon dropping birdshit on the Big Apple's denizens, but a huge carnivorous half-reptile and half-bird with a penchant for eating Big Applites. (No, despite the description, Q is not an early Donald Trump bio-flick.)

According to various online sources, including Trailers from Hell, the talented B-movie auteur Cohen (some of his better directorial efforts, all self-scripted, include Hell Up in Harlem [1973 / trailer], Black Caesar [1973 / trailer], It's Alive[1974 / trailer], the absolutely insane God Told Me To [1976 / trailer, with Richard Lynch], The Stuff[1985 / trailer], and The Ambulance [1990 / trailer]) rushed into producing this film after being unceremoniously fired from the far bigger budgeted (and far less successful) Mickey Spillane adaptation, I, the Jury (1982 / trailer).

If that is truly so, genre film fans should be thankful that he got fired from that gig, 'cause Q is superlative cinematic cheese. It is a prime example of what low-budget genre filmmaking should be: in no way boring, tightly scripted, well acted, funny, fun, and with a dash of obligatory (and exploitive) nudity.*Q is like a masterfully layered, multi-level Betty Crocker movie-cake of not only all that, but also an extra topping some truly low-brow stop-motion animation and third-rate greenscreen technology. What's more: the monster lives in the best office building in the world, the Chrysler Building! This film is the bee's knees in spades.

* The last supplied by a topless, sunbathing Bobbie Burns (born Barbara Kossoff, married name Barbara Feilen, aka Robbie Burns, Bobby Burns and Bobbi Burns), a minor bit-part actress long since retired to Southern California who was/is also found in an occasional Golden Age porn movie — she even turns up all of ten seconds as one of the only two females, the other being Charlotte O'Hara (aka Charlotte Lee & Charlotte Leigh) seen in the "classic" gay porn flick Centurians [sic] of Rome (1981 / trailer). In Q, she's around long enough to take off her bikini top and rub in tanning butter before she gets eaten by Q.

Interestingly enough, as obscure as the titular creature might be, Larry Cohen's movie is not the first to have been made featuring the Aztec deity Quetzlcoatl, the "Q" of the title. No, that honor goes to no one less than "Sherman Scott", otherwise known as Sam Newfield (6 Dec 1899 – 10 Nov 1964), a mostly forgotten poverty row hack director considered one of the most prolific in American film history. Among the well over 250 projects Newfield directed by his retirement (including The Monster Maker [1944]), he also helmed the cheap and idiotic prior Quetzlcoatl flick, The Flying Serpent (1946) — the first and possible only other movie featuring the winged Aztec deity. (At least one online source claims the film inspired Cohen's film, but we have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of this.)

Full movie — Sam Newfield's

The Flying Serpent (1946):

Q starts off with a bloody kick: the flirtations of a window washer (William Pilch) working high up on the Empire State Building are interrupted when he gets beheaded in front of the eyes of the secretary on the other side of the glass. Other mysterious deaths and disappearances follow, leaving Dt. Shepard (David Carradine [8 Dec 1936 – 3 June 2009] of Death Race 2000 [1975 / trailer], Evil Toons[1992 / trailer], Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat [1989 / trailer], Dead & Breakfast [2004 / trailer] and so much more) and Dt. Powell (Richard Roundtree of Shaft [1971 / trailer] and Maniac Cop [1988 / trailer]) tapping in the dark. At the same time, former junkie jailbird jazz musician Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty of Pale Rider 1985 / trailer] and Troll[1976 / trailer]) participates in diamond store robbery that goes wrong, and while on the run finds out that the tip of the Chrysler Building houses the nest (and egg) of the flying monster. Needless to say, the paths of the three protagonists meet.

Wow. Such a tacky plot and then such a tight, fun film. Moriarty is excellent as the weaselly Quinn, and neither Roundtree nor Carradine are too shabby, either. Candy Clark (of The Blob [1988 / trailer] and Cherry Falls [2000 / trailer]), as Quinn's girlfriend Joan, is ultimately lost in the shuffle of the movie, her part both underdeveloped and relatively unimportant. Savior syndrome or not, her relationship with Quinn is as unbelievable as the size of her New York City apartment — even back when New York was cheap[er], no waitress could throw an apartment the size of hers. Her passing mention of past occurrences of Quinn hitting her underscores his general ass-wipe despicability, as does his childlike joy when Q rids him of two problematic mobsters on his tail and his general inability for compassion for others. The guy's a slimeball, and perhaps the biggest flaw of the film is that he survives until the final credits, but then, reality-based characterization is common to many Larry Cohen movies; he seems to know that being an asshole doesn't mean you'll do badly in the end. (Hell, in the world of today, being a lying sleazebag or asshole gets you a position in the White House, if not the position in the White House, not to mention on the Supreme Court.)

Rest assured that for all the humor since accrued by the dated special effects, Larry Cohen did not make Q as a straight-faced horror-fantasy movie: it is very much an intentional black comedy, and all the better for it. Time and again, he juxtaposes incongruent scenes and genial dialogue that can't help but instigate a laugh, especially since it is all played so straight.

If you have never seen a Cohen flick, Q is a good place to start — and if you don't give a flying fuck about Cohen or his films but just want a fun flick or some prime 80s cinematic trash, Q is likewise a great genre film that guarantees 93 minutes of fun genre entertainment. Give it a go.

The fine poster above is by the US-American artist Bob Gleason, who is probably most famous for his work on the one sheet for John Carpenter's Halloween (1978 / trailer). The artist lives in Portland, Oregon, and has an official website that features galleries of the fine art paintings he now concentrates on but makes no mention of past work in painting film posters. He now paints, on commission, something known as "actual reproductions" of historic, "favorite master works" (not interesting) as well as cityscapes utilizing a palette straight out of a psilocybin trip (far more interesting).

↧

Short Film: Closed Mondays (USA, 1974)

November 29, 2018, 11:57 pm

≫ Next: Book of Blood (Great Britain, 2009)

≪ Previous: Q (USA, 1982)

Let's take a moment to honor the man pictured directly above, the American animator and filmmaker William Gale Vinton (born 17 Nov 1947), who took that final boat trip with Charon almost two months ago on 4 Oct 2018.

From Vinton's humble beginnings as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early sixties, he went on to founding Vinton Studios, which eventually became "a $28-million-a-year enterprise". Unluckily, he lost the firm in 2002 to some bad luck, bad choices, bad investments, and the wrong CEO. (Go here for the full story.) Vinton Studios is now called Laika, and is behind two of our favorite feature movies, Henry Selick's Coraline[2009] and Chris Butler's ParaNorman [2012 / trailer].)

An extra — Vinton Studios also worked on

Michael "I Like Children" Jackson's
music video toSpeed Demon,
"the tenth, and last, single to be released from Bad":

Closed Monday is the movie that started Vinton's career, you might say. True, he made early shorts and stuff — e.g., the documentary Gone for a Better Deal or his first animation short, Culture Shock, the release dates of which we could not locate — but Closed Monday is the earliest directorial and/or producer credit listed at the imdb and basically got the ball rolling. Vinton made the short together with the artist Bob Gardner (19 March 1951 – 21 April 2005, poster example below), with whom he toiled together for roughly 14 months. Closed Monday went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, beating out such illustrious company as Peter Foldes' short Hunger, our March 2014 Short Film of the Month. (Foldes, by the way, was also behind our September 2015 Short Film of the Month, the disturbing anti-nuke classic,A Short Vision.)

Try as we might, we couldn't locate the original, uncensored version of Closed Monday— somewhere along the way, the words "USUAL CRAP" were deemed unsuitable for the masses and blacked-off of the gallery sign seen at the beginning of the short. Likewise, the main character also never gets around to saying "Hell," as he did once long ago. (To quote Joseph Conrad, "The horror! The horror!")

The narrative is short and simple: a drunken old man wanders into a closed exhibition, where he does not see pink elephants but, instead, is confronted by artwork that seemingly comes alive. Most people see this little short as a humorous example of claymation, but truth be told Closed Monday is very much a horror short, the main character of which does not survive. (The short's duality — humor with an edge of discomfort — is also found in Vinton's later feature-length claymation movie, the rarely screened "children's" movie The Adventures of Mark Twain [1985 / trailer].)

Enjoy.

Will Vinton & Bob Gardner's

Closed Mondays (1974):

↧

Book of Blood (Great Britain, 2009)

December 6, 2018, 11:17 pm

≫ Next: Short Film: Beauty of Horror – Christmas Claymation (USA, 2018)

≪ Previous: Short Film: Closed Mondays (USA, 1974)

(Spoilers.) The introduction of HD can only be seen as an event to rue. Since the advent of the HD DVD, one no longer knows for sure whether a film just looks like a TV movie because it was truly filmed on video or whether it was bestowed its cheap, flat and overly sharp TV look despite its original film stock. Book of Blood, in any event, has too much nipple and blood (not to mention discretely side-shot penis) and non-US accents to truly look like a Big Three*movie, but for all its neo-noir cinematography and inconsistently timed dollops of stale chills and effective grue and gratuitous nudity, this slow-moving and relatively uninvolving horror movie often feels like a Halloween night TV flick.

*ABC, CBS and NBC, the traditional "big three" commercial broadcasters that held sway in the US until FOX and cable circumcised them down to size. FOX News then totally circumcised the intelligence of the US public, and now we have Trump and a nation doomed to be the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards. Reverse evolution takes many forms, baby. (Now buy me a jet. Jesus wouldn't have wanted for me not to have one, either.)

But no, Book of Blood is a "real" movie, based on two tales — "The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street (A Postscript)"— found in Clive Barker's book of the same name, and directed by John Harrison (a former friend and colleague of George Romero who functioned as executive producer for Romero's didactic and disappointing Diary of the Dead[2007]). Book of Blood is also a not-very-scary movie and a mess, but at least it features the beautiful Sophie Ward and… and… and… a lot of nice non-US accents and some pleasant shots of the Edinburgh skyline. Other than that, well, the movie did, obviously enough, supply employment for a lot of people, and employment is a very good thing. (People without employment are the spawn of Satan.)

For the most part Book of Blood is a haunted house movie, though a lot of extraneous stuff happens elsewhere. And as a haunted house flick, at times it brings to mind earlier such films like The Haunting (1963 / trailer) or The Changeling (1980 / trailer) or The Others (2001 / trailer), while never coming anywhere close to being half as involving or chilling or surprising as any of them. (It does, however, have an early scene in which a girl gets her face ripped off — fun stuff like that ain't found in any of the older films just listed.)

Book of the Dead opens with Sophie Ward's somber recital of the "fact" that drives the movie: "The dead have highways, running through the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. They can be heard in the broken places of our world, through cracks made out of cruelty, violence, and depravity. They have sign posts, these highways, and crossroads and intersections. And it is at these intersections where the dead mingle, and sometimes spill over into our world."

Yep: when you die, you go to the great highway in the sky where you walk round forever yearning to talk about yourself with the living world. And if you're lucky, you stumble upon a place like the house in the movie, a place that is an inter-realm intersection, where if you're even luckier you can tell your story by cutting it into the skin of some uninteresting milquetoast like Simon (Jonas Armstrong) before you continue on down the highway. Of course, one wonders why such intersections are even needed, when elsewhere in the movie ghosts of the dead show up and do things far from the house, like playing ring around the rosy on a lawn or drowning a hired killer in an isolated cabin.

Though the supernatural crossroads of a house is the core setting of the movie, the Book of Blood opens elsewhere, in a diner where a hooded Simon is having a cup of java under the watchful eye of Wyburd (Clive Russell of Outpost: Black Sun [2012 / trailer]). Simon ends up strapped to a table in an isolated cabin — so guess what Wyburd is — the setting whence the movie moves into the dreaded flashback mode, one that even involves flashbacks within flashbacks.

The entire framing sequence, in all truth, reeks and feels of padding: were the film to simply tell its story, it would be too short and even more dialogue-heavy, and thus all the more turgid. Solution? The framework situation, which fattens the film and allows it to end with two more deaths… regrettably, the final death of Wyburd, an absolutely idiotic supernatural event coming from the far left field, instigates guffaws and seriously undermines an already seriously undermined movie. One must assume it is the dead masses that kill Wyburd, probably just because they can, for were Simon at all vengeful he would surely have rather waited until the person who hired Wyburd shows up. (To a clean, dry cabin and mildly moist dead body. Ghosts can really clean house if they want to.)

Book of the Dead is one of those kinds of movie that not only makes use of idiotic plot devices to drive the plot, but has a plot that is best fully understood only after one has read a synopsis somewhere. Top Idiotic Plot Device Award go to the idiotic plot device of Simon convincing Mary (Sophie Ward of Waxworks II: Lost in Time[1992 / trailer] and A Demon in My View [1991 / trailer]*) that he's psychic by fixing her car tire to pop while she's driving — it's not like he would actually have to be clairvoyant to know that on that specific rainy night: 1. She would drive down the same street he's trudging at the very same time he's trudging; 2. She would see and recognize him through the rain; 3. She would stop and offer him a lift, thus giving him a chance to look at her car's tire and say "No thank you but drive carefully"; and 4. She wouldn't have a major accident or die when the tire pops. (Oh, wait a minute! He is clairvoyant… but didn't he say he lost the ability while still young lad?)

*Both being way better movies than this one here — which says a lot about the quality of this one.

As for top plot point that needs synopsis clarification: that Simon stops aging after he becomes a "book of the dead" is so ineffectually communicated in the movie that the viewer seriously scratches their head at Mary's sudden head of white hair — especially since her face is still so wrinkle-free and young. (Please: tell us the brand of skin moisturizer she uses — we'll take a crate.)

Found nowhere, neither in the movie nor in a synopsis, is why, if the dead can write all over the walls of the haunted bedroom, they even need or want to carve their stories into Simon's skin. Give 'em a ton of pencils and their stories could be told more quickly and effectively and fully on the walls of the room than epigrammatic and one-by-one on Simon's body. In turn, considering how boring most people's lives are while alive, it is hard to believe that the tales the dead tell are so intriguing as to make Mary rich after she starts writing them down — but then, much of Book of Blood is hard to believe.

We'll totally skip talking about — no we won't — the whole bit about how quickly Simon gets into Mary's pants by first standing naked in front of her and, later, telling her that he masturbates when he can't sleep and then pulling her hand down between his legs… OK, admittedly: the latter scene turns out to be a dream sequence, but into her pants he does eventually get because, basically, as so many porno movies realistically reveal and any man who isn't an incel already knows, all a man really needs to do to get a woman to spread her legs for him is to show her his cock. Fact: sooner or later, guys, if she sees it she'll crave it. (See: Lasse Braun's serious 1986 study of the phenomena, The Flasher, featuring Harry Reemsand Billy Dee.)

Speaking of what women crave, can someone clarify the what and the why of whatever cravings Mary had that she would go through the unconvincing evolution from serious scholar to disappointed lover to cold and heartless scrivener of the dead?

Much of Book of the Blood is shot to look as if it is a darkly colored film noir, and this dour look is perhaps the best things about the movie. To say that the acting is variable is an understatement, and the movie is never engrossing enough to allow the viewer to truly get involved in or care about any of the characters, much less care about the narrative or plot developments. And what's with the dragonflies? (Like, they're even less scary than cockroaches.) And, sorry, but just because one character calls Simon a hunk doesn't make him a hunk — from start to finish, he remains what he truly is: an ineffectual milquetoast of an actor who looks more like he wants to hold onto Mama's apron strings than have Mary sit on top.

All in all the Book of Blood is a drudge and a snore and a total disappointment that is 100% instantly forgettable. You want a haunted house film? Then go for something better, like The Haunting (1963) or The Changeling (1980) or The Innocents(1961 / trailer) or Haunting of Hell House (1973 / trailer) or Crimson Peak (2015 / trailer) or Stir of Echoes (1999 / trailer) or Housebound (2014 / trailer) or The Woman in Black (2012 / trailer) or even House (1986 / trailer) or House (1977 / trailer).

Even this movie is scarier

than Book of Blood—

trailer to Monster House(2006):

↧

Short Film: Beauty of Horror – Christmas Claymation (USA, 2018)

December 13, 2018, 2:51 am

≫ Next: The Butterfly Room (USA/Italy, 2012)

≪ Previous: Book of Blood (Great Britain, 2009)

So, once again t'is the season to be pretend to be jolly and feel brotherly love, support crass commercialism and gain weight and argue with the family and generally repeat the same shit as last year and every year before. And as we are always in awe of Christmas commercialism, this year's Christmas-themed Short Film of the Month is actually a commercial that we stumbled upon via our DuckDuckGo search "christmas horror animation". What can we say… other than, "Cool!"

But we also don't have a lot of time to verbosify today, so let's just look at what Movieweb says: "Christmas horror may in fact be one the the greatest subgenres of all time. Alan Robert's The Beauty of Horror: Ghosts of Christmascoloring book gets treated to its own NSFW claymation video. Santa has been possessed in Robert's Ghosts of Christmas coloring book by the popular undead Ghouliana from the author's previous installments in the series. Santa goes on a crazy killing spree, murdering all of his friends and it's truly disturbing. Everything is so well done, and it's so graphic. It's hard to un-see, so if you're squeamish about watching the Elf on the Shelf get ripped apart, stay away from this video and coloring book."

Alan Robert worked together with the claymation dude Trent Shy, whose great page at YouTubeis just waiting for your visit.

In any event, here at a wasted life we wish you a Hairy Christ Pissed Day and a Flabby Boo Year! And after you've enjoyed the short above, check out some of the past Christmas Short Films of the Month listed and linked directly below for easy access.

December 2017: Winter Stalker (USA, 2010)

December 2016: Santa (Greece, 2013)

December 2015: The Living Want Me Dead (USA, 2010)

December 2014: Father Christmas (Canada, 2011)

December 2013: A Very Zombie Holiday (2010)

December 2012: Treevenge

December 2010: X-Mess Detritus

↧

The Butterfly Room (USA/Italy, 2012)

December 20, 2018, 3:28 am

≫ Next: Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

≪ Previous: Short Film: Beauty of Horror – Christmas Claymation (USA, 2018)

Somehow it seems oddly fitting that it was an Italian, Jonathan Zarantonello, that, after years if not almost decades, finally gave the great Barbara Steele a lead role in another horror film. After all, it was an Italian, the great Mario Bava (31 July 1914 – 27 April 1980), that gave Steele her breakthrough double-whammy as the duel lead females of his 1960 masterpiece, Black Sunday (trailer). What is less fitting and far less satisfying is that the movie Ms. Steele so effectively carries on her shoulders — a film far superior to her few film credits of the previous two decades, namely the wannabe cult farce The Boneyard Collection (2008 / trailer), Fred Olen Ray's The Prophet aka Fist of Doom(1999), and the decidedly obscure Austrian fantasy Tief Oben aka Deep Above(1994) — has not only remained relatively obscure and ignored, but also didn't really lead to all that many further roles. (Kudos to Ryan Gosling for at least giving her a small part two years later in his arty directorial debut, Lost River [2014 / trailer].)

Spoiler-heavy Trailer to

The Butterfly Room:

TheButterfly Room'sopening credit sequence already speaks a lot about what is to come: aesthetic but with a sudden shock, it indicates a directorial eye aiming towards art as well as horror. And while the movie seldom achieves the same level of visual aesthetics as the in the opening credit sequence, The Butterfly Room is well shot, never gratuitously gory, and ingenuously constructed.

During the credit sequence, one is not initially sure whether one is being witness to a suicide attempt or an unexpected menstrual flow, but over the course of a narrative that interlaces multiple times lines to tell it story, the viewer learns which it is — indeed, throughout the movie, the viewer is often given clarification only in retrospect. Zarantonello's interweaving of different temporalities does on occasion leave one slightly unsettled, as one is often not 100% sure where one is within the tale, but it proves to be a stimulating narrative trick that not only ends up working, but is, in the final scenes, tied into a tight and neat bow.

Set in Los Angeles, the story could work in any larger city. Barbara Steele is Ann, a reclusive and butterfly-obsessed lady of the later years (Ms. Steele was 75 at the time) who is, without doubt, a psychopath. And like so many crazy egoists, her id and person are not immediately apparent to those around her. But the viewer knows her screws are loose from the start, as unlike anyone in the movie we see her as she apparently for no reason kicks the ladder out from beneath an Afro-American workman (Joseph H. Johnson Jr. as Chris) chain-sawing tree branches.

Not that we know it when she does it, but not only is kicking away the ladder not the worst act that she has already committed, but there is also a method to her actions. Before we learn what the method is, however, and all that she has already done, we witness how she comes to befriend the young Julie (Ellery Sprayberry), the daughter of Claudia (Erica Lei Leerhsen of the unjustly maligned Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 [2000 / trailer], The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2003 / trailer] and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End [2007 / trailer]), a young and not particularly capable single mother...

The Butterfly Room is rare in that it is movie dominated by females. True, men that function to advance the narrative do pop up here and there — e.g., the ill-fated Chris or the taxidermist from whom Ann busy supplies (the great character actor James Karen [28 Nov 1923 – 23 Oct 2018]) — but with the exception of Nick, the contemptible building handyman played by Ray Wise (of Swamp Thing [1982 / trailer] and so much more), the men are all fleeting appearances of little consequence. Females are the focus of the movie, and all but two — the previously mentioned young Julie, and the equally young grifter Alice (Julia Putnam of House of Bad [2013 / trailer]) — are adult, carry emotional baggage, and are or were mothers. And with the exception of some of the more-fleetingly seen mothers when Ann is out uncovering Alice's secrets, all are noticeably emotionally and/or psychologically damaged and hardly "perfect" mothers. Indeed, Alice's mother, Monika (Elea Oberon), a one-legged prostitute that obviously enough made Alice what she is (a conniving, thieving con artist who literally sells herself to play the daughter of lonely women), is definitely a horrible mother — but then, so is/was Ann. (When reviewing all the mothers of the movie, it could be feasibly argued that The Butterfly Room has a definite anti-mother undertone. For a perfect anti-mother double feature, watch this movie with Sonata[2004].)

In many ways, The Butterfly Room feels like a classic Italian giallo film, only that no black gloves ever appear and there is very little mystery to who the killer is, even if you don't always initially know who the victim was. Indeed, since one knows that Ann is rather unhinged, there is little true mystery to the movie; instead, the tension lies in when and how the snake is going to bite again. And thus the body count rises, unnoticed by the other characters of the movie, until the final orgy of violence is ignited and Barbara Steele goes full Tallulah Bankhead (Die! Die! My Darling! aka Fanatic [1965 / trailer]) / Gloria Swanson (Sunset Blvd. [1950 / trailer]) / Bette Davis (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962 / trailer]) / Shelley Winters (What's the Matter with Helen? [1971 / trailer]) / add the name of your favorite former cinema beauty* and a late-career horror movie in which she plays a lady who loses it. But even before Ann finally reaches for the sledgehammer and Alice's final fate is revealed, The Butterfly Room delivers some shockingly violent deaths.

*Yes, even Shelley Winters didn't look that bad once upon a time.

Barbara Steele rules the roost in the film, moving smoothly between ice queen to needy, friendly to hateful, seemingly normal to total nutso — sometimes within a single scene. Fellow cult fav Ray Wise does another one of his seemingly easy turns as a smiling but morally corrupt house janitor. Special note should also be given to the young actress Julia Putnam, who does a well-tuned performance as the duplicitous Alice.

For those who like to play "Spot the Faces", a variety of genre cult names also pop up throughout The Butterfly Room for a single scene or two, including Joe Dante, P.J. Soles (Halloween[1978 / trailer], Uncle Sam [1996 / trailer] and so much more), Adrienne King (Friday the 13^th [1980/ trailer]), Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984 / trailer], A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987 / trailer], and The Demolitionist [1995 / trailer, with Susan Tyrrell]), Camille Keaton* (What Have You Done to Solange? [1972 / trailer, with Joachim Fuchsberger], Sex of the Witch [1973 / music], and — most famously — the original I Spit on Your Grave [1978 / trailer]), and the previously mentioned James Karen (Hercules in New York [1970 / trailer], Return of the Living Dead [1985 / trailer], and so much more), but with the exception of Langenkamp and possibly the almost unrecognizable Camille Keaton, they come and go too quickly to truly make a "Hey! That's…" impression and thus are simply functionally effective as tertiary or minor characters.

*What? No Tisa Farrow?Catriona MacColl? [Add your favorite still-living cult horror actress's name here: _______________.]

For all the bodies, The Butterfly Room is hardly a gratuitously violent film in the typical bodycount/slasher tradition. Zarantonello is very much interested in the psyche of his characters, and the emotional and psychological scars that drive them and their actions. The final scene also infers that the flaws (for a lack of a better word) of our progenitors can very well become our own, as the psychological scars left behind can be a slow but inescapable formative element that unavoidably shape and create.

Well made, engrossing and often shocking, The Butterfly Room is well worth checking out, and not just for the added attraction of the great Barbara Steele. It works as a horror film and a suspense film, not to mention as a tragedy, and will easily also appeal to those not particularly enamored by the modern gore-laden horror genre in general.

↧

Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

December 27, 2018, 9:42 am

≫ Next: Best Films Watched in 2018

≪ Previous: The Butterfly Room (USA/Italy, 2012)

Babes of Yesteryear, a wasted life's irregular and PI cis-gender feature, takes a look at the filmography of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema of the past. Some may still be alive, others not. Our choice of whom we look at is idiosyncratic and entirely our own — but the actors are/were babes, one and all. (Being who we are, we might also take a look at some actor cum beefcake, if we feel like it.)

As The Oak Drive-In puts it: "With her long hair, Amazonian build & beautiful natural looks (usually devoid of make-up), nobody seems to personify that 60's & early 70's sex appeal 'look' better than [Uschi Digard]. She had a presence that truly was bigger than life — a mind-bending combination of hippie Earth Mother looks and a sexual wildcat. […] She always seemed to have a smile on her face and almost seemed to be winking at the camera and saying 'Hey, it's all in fun.' Although she skirted around the edges at times, she never preformed hardcore…"
Today, Uschi Digard is still alive, happily married (for over 50 years), and retired in Palm Springs, CA. To learn everything you ever wanted to know about her, we would suggest listening to the great interview she gave The Rialto Report in 2013.

Herewith we give a nudity warning: naked babes and beefcake are highly likely to be found in our Babes of Yesteryear entries. This one in particular features a lot of boobage. If such sights offend thee, well, either go to another blog or pluck thy eyes from thee...

Go here for Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

Affair in the Air

(1970, dir. Phineas T. Kum-Quat)

Not to be mistaken with the 1970 PBS documentary likewise entitled Affair in the Air and featuring the pilot Robert Lyjak (1 Oct 1929 – 4 Feb 2015) which, unlike this movie, seems to be a lost documentary by now. This movie here is directed by Phineas T. Kum-Quat — is one surprised to find out that the director has no other film credit to his name? But whereas the real names of the various actresses are known — "Vicky Labbs" = Bambi Allen, "Phoebie Vag" = Sandy Carey, and "Ves Pray" = Uschi — the real name of the director is not. (By the way: that's Sandy below kissing her way over Uschi's talents.)

The iafdsays, "Uschi plays a stewardess on an airplane with quite relaxed rules on nudity and screwing aboard! The Swedish champion of the sexploitation age is back in some of her rarest material! Hot, stacked, and always ready, watch Uschi's perfect T&A wiggle their way through this action-packed feature!"

"Action-packed"? Way back in 2010, at the imdb, the movie led Hans-56to write that the experience of watching Affair in the Air"makes you wonder why this movie was ever made".

Of this one-day wonder's male "stars", "Mike Hunt" (aka Norman Fields [8 Nov 1924 – 14 Nov 1996]) is supposedly one of the asshole honkies found somewhere in the Blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song(1971 / trailer below), while "Dickie Toole" (aka Richard Smedley) is seen somewhere in Al Adamson's Psycho à Go-Go (1967 / trailer) and his Brain of Blood (1971 / trailer) — films one and all that are far more entertaining than this baby.Affair in the Air can be found all over the web, including here at X-Hamster.

Trailer to

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971):

Fuzz

(1970, dir. Unknown)

Not to be mistaken with the Burt Reynolds (11 Feb 1936 – 6 Sept 2018) / Raquel Welch vehicle of the same name released two years later (trailer), although Uschi also makes an appearance of sorts in that movie, too. (Go to 1972 for the explanation.) The 60-minute hardcore version of this Fuzz film can be found here at Tube Porn Classic.

Fuzz is a one-day wonder, director unknown — Phineas T. Kum-Quat, maybe? — once "lost" until rediscovered and released, among other places, by Alpha Blue as one of The Lost Films of Uschi Digard. A typical hyperbolic online description: "For the first time, the 1970 classic Fuzz has been transferred digitally for your viewing pleasure! In this erotic masterpiece, John Holmes has a poolside orgy, and the ever-beautiful Swedish magazine model, Uschi Digard, has a lesbian bedroom romp. You won't want to miss this vintage release!"

Not from the film, but from 1970 —

Roy Ayes plays The Fuzz:

If the imdbis to be trusted, the "plot" is as follows: "Vice Cops go under covers to try to destroy a house of sin. However when they become entangled with the local honeys they just might let crimes go unnoticed." Sounds like it was taken from a DVD box...

The un-credited flesh includes numerous unsung regulars of the California exploitation scene of the day and age, including Maria Arnold (Angel Above, The Devil Below [1974 / trailer audio] & the horrendously dull Meatcleaver Massacre [1977 / trailer]), Neola Graef (seen with Uschi in the picture above), Marland Proctor (9 Sept 1939 — 8 Oct 1988, of Curse of the Headless Horseman [1972 / trailer], Garden of the Dead [1972 / full film, the uncredited inspiration to Route 666(2001) and possibly the first zombie film to feature running zombies], Henning Schellerup's The Black Bunch [1973 / trailer below], Black Starlet [1974 / clip], Wheeler aka Psycho from Texas [1975 / trailer] and so much more), and William Howard (Terror at Orgy Castle [1972 / full film] and The Hand of Pleasure [1971 / full film]).

Trailer to Henning Schellerup's

The Black Bunch:

The Pimp Primer

(1970, dir. "Nick Phillips")

Another one-day wonder directed by the sorely underappreciated and unjustly unknown Z-film filmmaker Nick Millard, otherwise aka "Nick Phillips" (and Jan Anders, Max Boll, Joe Davis, Hans Dedow, Hans Delow, Jamie Delvos, Pet Elephant, Bruno Geller, Alan Lindus, Allan Lundus, John Meyer, Philip Miller, Nicholas Milor, Clem Moser, Alfredo Nicola, Don Rolos, Helmud Schuyler, Otto Wilmer, and surely more).

The plot as given by numerous online porn sites: "Carl (Tommy Toole), a low-end hustler and pimp, uses his girlfriend (Colleen Murphy, aka Sheri Jackson, of Alice in Acidland [1969 / opening] and The Babysitter [1969 / trailer]) to start his own prostitution ring. Trouble begins when Carl recruits Sherrie (Diane Clark), a local waitress who likes sex. A cheesy narrator narrates this morality tale. Features early cameos by adult super-stars John Holmes and Uschi Digart ['Party Guest in Dress']!!"

Impromptu interview with

Nick Millard, the filmmaker:

About Pimp Primer, DVD Drive-Insays that this "incredibly obscure sexploitation relic", which features "Uschi Digart in a hideous red wig", "is pretty generic": "Frankly, there's very little going on here, with threadbare production values and a clothesline plot nudging shoulders with abundant sex (thank heaven for the fast-forward button), but this oddity has an MVP in the form of Colleen Murphy [aka Sheri Jackson]. Colleen wasn't a top-tier sexploitation starlet, but she's certainly one of the toughest, no-nonsense broads you'll see in films of this type! With a full-figured physique, a whiskey-and-cigarettes voice, and a pouty baby face, Colleen is also a fine actress, ripe for rediscovery and deserving of a cult all her own. […] With plenty of beaver and pickle shots, this is a great example of the type of storefront-theater film popping up on the cusp between softcore and hardcore. It also feels like a 'white coater', with a moralistic narrator explaining the importance of the story [...]. He also makes sure to discuss exactly what a pimp is ('Pimps range from the businessman type to the casual type, who do nothing more than live off the earnings of his girls'), for those of us who are clueless in that department. With a library music score that would sound more at home in a Greer Garson melodrama, cheap sets, and hard-boiled dialogue and characters, Pimp Primer is a decent weekend wonder worth 60 minutes of your time if only to see Colleen Murphy in one of her few surviving films."

Trailer to the DVD Grindhouse Trash,

with scenes from The Pimp Primer:

Dead Eye Dick

(1970, dir. Unknown)

Supposedly aka Dead I Dick and Dick's Dead Eye, this 59-minute movie is yet another obscure one-day wonder, directed by "[One-Shot] Unknown", which can be found all over the web should you care to watch it.

Over at imdb, two people have watched it, including that omnipresent purveyor of porn, lor, who says, "What we get from anonymous filmmakers is clumsy stagings, full-frontal nudity, a split-beaver close-up, simulated sex and dry humping. In time-honored tradition our hero keeps his black sox on during sex. […] Big-bust Malta (aka Neola Graef) is diverting as a client called 'The Princess', and fan favorite Uschi Digard brings out even bigger breasts as [the] secretary for [William] Howard, the Dick. When Uschi flubs her lines, it's full speed ahead — bloopers left in the print. […] Helping kill time here is the beautiful Kathy Hilton and the ubiquitous husband & wife team of Pete Dawson and Jan Davis. Overall, the movie plays like an extended vaudeville routine."

The Midnight Graduate

(1970, dir. Don Brown)

Don Brown, one might remember, also directed The Madam(1969), in which Uschi also played a lead role. (See Part I.) Here, she is even featured on the poster. In his book Contemporary Erotic Cinema (Ballantine Books, 1973), William Rotsler, hardly a man known for quality filmmaking, spleens exactly one line on the movie: "Stars Uschi Digart, one of the Big Stars of the simulation films and really the only reason this rip-off title is listed." The rip-off, of course, being two-fold: Midnight Cowboy (1969 / trailer) plus The Graduate (1967 / trailer).

For that, One Sheet Indexhas the original plot description: "Midnight Graduate is the foremost study of the confusion surrounding the bisexual female. Our beautiful and buxom leading lady, Jackie (Uschi Digard), is exposed to the secret world of the lesbian, and to her surprise, finds herself enjoying every minute. She meets and loves and is loved in return by the various types exemplifying the female homosexual. However, her heterosexual feelings, while being submerged for this period of time, finally re-surface as she discovers herself and her true feelings in a most unusual and shocking climax. Filmed in gorgeous color at some of the most interesting interiors and exteriors around Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, and containing beautifully explicit sex scenes, Midnight Graduate is a big audience pleaser."

Whether film is a "rip-off" or a "big audience pleaser" can only be left to conjecture, as it is presently still a lost film — so check your attic. A lone voice out there, Jeffrey Hartmann, claims the film was released somewhere along the line as Wild Mix.

In what was surely an odd pairing, Midnight Graduate was shown at the since-demolished North Carolinian Center Drive-In Theatre ("now a Golden Corral Steak House") with The Executioner, which we assume is the 1970 Sam Wanamaker (14 June 1919 – 18 Dec 1993) movie...

Trailer to Sam Wanamaker's
The Executioner (1970):

The most interesting name involved in Midnight Graduate — aside from Uschi, that is — is perhaps the guy behind the movie's soundtrack, Jaime Mendoza-Nava(31 Dec 1925 - 31 May 2005), a "serious" musician who was a former mainstay of no-budget movies.

A Jaime Mendoza-Nava Composition:

Sandra, the Making of a Woman

(1970, dir. "Robert McCallum")

"Robert McCallum", aka Gary Graver (20 July 1938 — 16 Nov 2006); this film is a.k.a. Half a Wife and I Am Sandra. We took a look at this film in 2014, in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part VII: 1970, if only because the online magazine called Funhousesaid Novak had produced it (something we still doubt).

Director Gary (aka Robert McCulum, Robert McCallun, Robert Mc Callum, Robert Mccullam, Robert Mccullum, June Moon and more) "had a long and illustrious career as a cinematographer and director and writer and actor and producer and worked for people ranging from Novak to Roger Corman to Orson Welles to Ron Howard to Al Adamson (he was 'director of photography' on the unforgettable Dracula Vs Frankenstein [1971]) to Spielberg. It is estimated that aside from his 'respectable' (or semi-respectable) projects, he may have worked on more than 135 adult movies, which naturally explains why he was eventually inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame for his life work. (Critical Conditionhas a nice profile of the man's work here.)"

Scene from

Sandra, the Making of a Woman:

We went on: "Over at imdb, weinerm of Boston says that 'Basically this movie is an excuse to see Monica Gayle in various stages of undress', but at Steven Puchalski of the great and forever entertaining Shock Cinema Magazine sees a bit more in this 'surprisingly-energetic, coming-of-age sexploitation' movie: 'Although loaded with the requisite sexcapades, you get the feeling that director/editor/photographer Graver was also striving for a modicum of cut-rate reality, while his high-octane cinematic savvy graces the most generic horseshit with radical energy and imagination. Best of all, this sexplosion has Monica Gayle baring it all in the title role, several years before popping up as 'Patch' in Jack Hill's seminal Switchblade Sisters (1975 / trailer). For this early gig, she [...] plays a 19-year-old rural babe who gets fed-up with her emotional wreck of a Dad who slaps her around and guzzles cheap hooch by the glassful. Tossing her virginity away to some local pinhead (who instantly wants to marry her), she then hitches her way to San Francisco, with the aid of a fetishistic lingerie salesman. On her own for the first time, a biker feels her up in a movie theatre, she's hit on by her lesbian landlord, and she gets a job as a horny psychiatrist's receptionist. Of course, since Sandra craves sex as badly as they do, it all works out fine... It's usually a waste of time to mention acting when it comes to early sex-pics, but in this instance, Gayle is actually good as the down-trodden country gal, who dumps her repressed home town in order to 'find herself' in the Big City. Don't confuse this with some type of feminist tract though, because most of the time Sandra is flat on her back, with some nameless dick inside of her. [...] The script also gets points for not viewing Sandra as a slutty nympho. Instead, she's just an average girl learning to enjoy life and love (while all the local guys queue up around her bed). But its Graver's style-to-burn which makes this film a treat. [...] This is a prime example of a talented filmmaker doing his damnedest to turn a sow's ear into a slightly more artistic sow's ear. Happily, he succeeded.'"

The newspaper clip above comes from ...the scene of screen 13..., which writes: "11-2-76, Corpus Christi — The address used to be the Grande Theater and a part of Braslau Furniture Store before turning into this Mid-Late 70’s incarnation. In 2012, the block was torn down, and I have a feeling that the Bail Bond office was where the theater once stood. I will not be surprised if 'Sandra' was the respected Sandra: The Making of a Woman." Here at a wasted life, we assume Necromania is the 1971 Edward D. Wood Jr. movie Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (full NSFW film).

Further east, in Schenectady NY, as the advert above (from Chateau Vulgaria) shows, Sandra was placed on a double bill at the porn-purveying Colony Art Theatre, a good place to have your first homosexual experience, with an obscure three-year-older B&W flick entitled Peddlers of Sin (1967). Sin's production company, the Californian firm Mitam, registered to Wesley E. Depue (who retired to Palm Desert and died 25 May 2003), produced an untold number of now rare — if not mostly lost — cheap sleazy sex flicks and roughies in the late sixties with such wonderful titles as Tortured Females(1965 / embedded below), Male Service(1966), Wayward Wives (1968), Housewives and Bartenders (1968), Ruined (1968) and Loves of a Psychiatrist (1968).

Full film —

Tortured Females (1965):

Lead actress Monica Gayle, seen below with Ushi, retired from making movies in 1979 and has since become a cult fav, with many fans lamenting her "disappearance". But she didn't exactly disappear, she simply turned her back to her past: she got married and took her husband's last name, moved to the a section of the valley once owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had kids.

Uschi Digard (picture above with Monica Gayle) shows up briefly to play "Miss Lynn", a door-to-door make-up saleslady with whom Gayle ("Sandra") eats fish taco. Co-scripter Robert Aiken, who started his career as "Ford Dunhill" playing Rock Hudson's younger brother in This Earth Is Mine (1959 / scene), also has speaking parts in Russ Meyer's Vixen! (1968 / trailer) and Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970), as well as in Lee Frost's anti-classic, Love Camp 7 (1969 / trailer below); in the last, he's credited as "Robert Baker".

Trailer to Lee Frost's anti-classic

Love Camp 7 (1969):

Cherry, Harry & Raquel!

(1970, dir. Russ Meyers)

Aka Megavixens & Three Ways to Love. Depending on the version you believe, this movie is either a Russ Meyer classic of surreally episodic narrative, or a movie cobbled together from a project crippled by accidents. In any event, Cherry, Harry & Raquel! features the premiere appearance of two Russ Meyer's favs actors: Uschi Digard and Charles Napier (12 April 1936 — 5 Oct 2011). The movie also featured the first full frontal of a nude male in a Meyer's movie, courtesy of Charles Napier's romping through the desert with Larissa Ely.

Trailer to

Cherry, Harry & Raquel!

We took a look at the movie in our R.I.P.: Charles Napier career review, where we wrote that Cherry, Harry & Raquel!"[…] is enjoyable in a disjointed way. Napier plays Harry, a corrupt sheriff smuggling drugs out to get an Apache who has gone into the business for himself. Harry is shacked up with Cherry (Linda Ashton), a nurse, and bonks Raquel (Larissa Ely), a hooker writer. They guys all die violently and the gals smoke pot and get it on.... in between, Uschi Digard romps around the desert naked.

There are three stories to why she does so: Russ Meyer supposedly needed to fill the running time after 1) one of the lead actresses quit the film early, 2) a photo-lab fuckup resulted in the loss of much of the original footage, or 3) it was an intentional artistic decision on Meyer's part. (Meyer always claimed the last after he gained critical respectability.) Napier once said that the scene of him wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and boots as he romps across the desert with Ely was the most embarrassing thing he ever had to film."

That scene of him flopping in the wind is possibly also the last male nude scene in a Meyer's film to feature a "real" wiener instead of the lengthy (and rubber) male appendages found in Meyer's subsequent skin flicks.

Uschi, billed as "Astrid Lillimorr", appears here and there throughout the movie as "Soul", wearing nothing or not much more than an Indian headdress. Oddly enough for a Meyer movie, the two female leads, Linda Ashton and Larissa Ely aka Larissa Cartier, though typically pneumatic for a Meyer's project, are oddly lacking in presence, which might explain why neither ever made another movie.

From the Movie —

Toys of Our Time,

performed by The Jacks and Balls!

Oh, yeah: "Tom Wolfe", the credited co-scriptwriter, is actually Tom McGowan, a man best known as one of the co-directors of the infamous disasterpiece Night Train to Terror(1985). His segment in that movie, "The Case of Claire Hansen", was cobbled together from his 1980 movie, Cataclysm aka The Nightmare Never Ends ("trailer").

Norma

(1970, dir. Ted Roter)

Aka Norma Isn't Quite Normal. Supposedly based on a book of the same name written by "Norma Stevens", but we were unable to locate any such novel or biography online (although there is a Norma Steven out there who authored the surely gripping book, Homemaking, An Invitation to Greatness).

More than one online source points out the obvious similarities of this film with the indefinitely superior but unbelievably flawed Hitchcock flick Marnie (1964 / trailer). As Leslie Y. Rabkin states in her book The Celluloid Couch: An Annotated International Filmography of the Mental Health Professional in the Movies and Television, from the Beginning to 1990, Norma is "another remnant of the era when porn (soft-core, to be sure) had to be framed as a tale 'told to my shrink'." Uschi is hardly there in Norma at all: you find her and her assets in the orgy scene.

Actor and director Ted Roter (8 Mar 1930 – 29 Oct 2000) — aka Tovia Israel, Tovia Borodyn, Erica Fox, Peter Balachoff, Pierre Balakoff, and Peter Balakoff — moved between TV and sleaze and porn, and was known to show his own sausage. He also appears in this movie, but we don't know what he shows.

Among his movies as director are Prison Babies (1973, / poster above), Hollywood She-Wolves (1976 / film), The Psychiatrist aka All the Devil's Angels (1978), and the Golden Age porn classic Little Girls Lost... (1983); as an actor, non-porn, he's found in, among others, The Hang Up (1969, which we looked at briefly in R.I.P. Harry Novak Part IV), Sinthia: The Devil's Doll (1970 / poster & trailer below), and The Devil Made Me Do It (1974 / poster further below).

Trailer to

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll:

Special note: Norma could possiblyalso be the big screen debut of long-deceased cult fave character actor George 'Buck' Flower (28 Oct 1937 – 18 June 2004), playing "Mother". A further cult name found in Norma: Valda Hansen (3 Nov 1932 – 21 July 1993) of Ed Wood's anti-classic, Night of the Ghouls (1959 / full film). Lead actress Mady Maguire went on to study law and went into family estate and conflict settlement; she currently seems to live in... a southern state that doesn't rhyme with Kansas.

TCMhas the plot: "Norma Stevens (Mady Maguire), who at the age of 13 watched in horror as an assailant killed a boyfriend with whom she was about to make love, has become, at 23, a guilt-ridden nymphomaniac. She goes to Dr. Bradley (Chris Warfield [29 Mar 1927 – 1 May 1996] of Diary of a Madman [1964 / trailer], aka as the porn director Billy Thornberg), a psychiatrist, and tells him of her recent, disturbing sex experiences. Her lovemaking with a delivery man (Art Metrano) is interrupted by the appearance of a strange man at the window. Later, she has sex with the manager (Ted Roter) of a sex exploitation movie theater, and the figure again appears. Dr. Bradley dismisses Norma's fears as fantasy. Norma has a disappointing experience with a lesbian and is raped by a sadistic motorcyclist (Harv Selsby). She is taken on a date to a sex party, and the mysterious intruder again appears as she is making love with two men in an upstairs room. Dr. Bradley hypnotizes the distraught Norma, and she remembers the identity of the man who killed her boyfriend and realizes that he is the same man who has been stalking her."

At Raleigh, North Carolina's now-defunct Center Drive-In Theater ("now a Golden Corral Steak House"), Norma was once upon a time on a double feature with the undoubtedly superior Therese and Isabelle(1968 / trailer below), a "sapphic US/German production, with Essy Persson and Anna Gaël" directed by Radley Metzger (21 Jan 1929 – 31 March 2017).

Trailer to

Therese and Isabelle:

The Politicians

(1970, writ & dir. "Derek Ashburne", aka Bob Augustus)

"Politics make strange bedfellows"

Aka Naked Are The Cheaters. Uschi Digrad, credited as "Heidi Sohler", shows up as briefly (as normal) to play Lisa, the masseuse. By 2003, director Bob Augustus, a Texan whose real full name is Robert Augustus Burge, was in charge of the major porn video distribution firm VCX, which he left two years later to found TVX Home Video. TVX ended up being on the wrong side of the Lara Jade Coton Case, which "has become one of the defining copyright cases for small content creators."

The plot of The Politicians, according to TCM: "Larry Channing (Robert Warner) is a Washington, D. C., procurer whose social secretary, Sandra Dixon (Angela Carnon of The Black Alley Cats [1973 / trailer below, which we looked at briefly in R.I.P. Harry H. Novak Part X: 1973] and Policewomen [1974 / trailer]), an ex-manicurist, keeps him and a number of prominent politicians sexually satisfied. Larry matches two of his girls, Laurie (Neola Graef) and Susan (Dixie Donovan of HG Lewis's Miss Nymphet's Zap-In [1970]), to an Arab sheik, and Karen (Vicki Carbe, aka "Victoria Valentino", Playboy's Playmate of the Month for September 1963, seen above) to Bud Chandler (Vincent Mongol), a prominent politician who is being groomed for a cabinet post. They are shown having sexual intercourse with their clients. Bud falls in love with Karen; and Susan becomes pregnant. When Susan goes to have an abortion, however, she is raped by the abortionists. In addition, Sandra is involved in a lesbian encounter. Sandra leaves town to visit her mentally retarded brother, Dwight (Robert Copple of Criminally Insane [1975 / trailer]), in North Carolina and assists him in masturbating, to make his birthday that much happier."

Trailer to

The Black Alley Cats:

In Great Britain, oddly enough, this movie was often paired with the Doris Wishman anti-classic Double Agent 73 (1974 / trailer), a movie otherwise known, in non-metric system countries, as Deadly Weapons. Harry Reemsshows up in that Wishman movie to get smothered.

London's Time Outwas moved to write that Naked Are the Cheaters is an "absolutely dire, farcically amateurish non-film about a Washington wheeler-dealer who runs a callgirl service on the side. Possibly stripped at some point of most of whatever rudimentary sex footage it contained; at any rate, tricked out with some incomprehensible flash-cutting, the perfunctoriness of the proceedings is impossible to describe."

If we are to believe Jenny Henderson's book The North Carolina Filmography: Over 2000 Film and Television Works Made in the State, 1905 through 2000 (ISBN 9780786412945), the flick was made in the state where heterosexual children seem to have to worry more about transgender sexual assaults in bathrooms than getting shot at schools or changing weather patterns due to global warming.

Getting into Heaven

(1970, writ. & dir. Edward L. Montoro)

Uschi, credited as "Marie Marceau", in a rare title role. We took a look at it in the 1970 entry of our R.I.P. Harry Novak, Part VII, where we wrote:

"Dunno to what extent Novak had anything to do with this flick when it came out in 1970, but it was on a two-film 'Harry Novak Presents' DVD released by Something Weird (complementing Angels [1976], which is proven to have been Novak production) — and it stars Uschi Digard (as the titular Heaven), so how could we not take a closer look at it?

NSFW Trailer to

Getting into Heaven:

"As far as we can tell, this is one of only two movies that Edward L. Montoro ever directed (the other being The Loser aka Platinum Pussycat aka The Pink Pussycat [1968 / trailer]). But as a film producer and distributor of eurotrash and independent productions via his firm Film Ventures International (FVI), Montoro stood in the shadows for many a classic, remembered and forgotten, including: William Girdler's Grizzly (1976 / German trailer) and Day of the Animals(1977 / trailer— with Leslie Nielson), Stridulum (1979 / trailer), Juan Piquer Simón's Pieces (1982 / trailer) and Los nuevos extraterrestres (1983 / theme), Beyond the Door (1974 / trailer), Don't Go in the House (1979 / trailer), Anthropophagus (1980 / trailer), The Dark (1979 / trailer) and more, more, more.

"Montoro's luck as a successful distributor and producer began to go sour in 1981 when he picked the Italo Jaws (1975 / trailer) rip-off The Last Jaws (1981 / trailer) and eventually lost a court case against Universal; this was followed by a few less than successful releases like Mortuary (1983 / trailer), The House on Sorority Row (1983 / trailer) and the unjustly ignored Night Shadows / Mutant (1984). Finally, following a messy divorce with his wife Joan and illness and a long stay at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Edward L. Montoro emptied Film Ventures International's accounts of a couple of million dollars and, much like DB Cooper, was never seen again. (A loss, perhaps for the world of B & C & D films, but surely an improvement of his life.)

Trailer to

Night Shadows / Mutant (1984):

"But to get to Getting into Heaven, Trash Film Guru gushes: 'Ah, Uschi. [...] Admittedly, a good number of the flicks she appeared in were pretty dismal, but she could liven up even the most listless celluloid atrocity by just showing up on screen and taking her clothes off. Okay, her Swedish accent, when left un-doctored, was so thick as to be impenetrable, but who really cares? [...] And let's be honest — it's not like every film she was in was terrible. [...] Case in point: old-hand nudie director Edward L. Montoro's 1970 steamy low-budgeter Getting into Heaven. I'm not here to tell you it's some lost classic or anything of the sort, but it is a fun, never-dull slice of skinema that stands apart from other productions of its ilk for, at the very least, being a consistently engaging production that all the principals involved in at least appear to be trying to make as good as it could possibly be. [...] Beyond that there's not a great deal more one needs to know by way of specifics, apart from the fact that every woman in this movie is darn easy on the eyes and more than willing to disrobe at the drop of the hat and stay that way for a good few minutes. [...] The "humor" is all groaningly obvious and more than a touch misogynistic, but [...] there's nothing blatantly anti-female enough going on to rise to the level where it would genuinely bother your conscience.'

"Lastly, One Sheet Index has the plot: 'Heaven (Uschi Digard), Sin (Jennie Lynn) and Karen (Phyllis Stengel) are three wild Hollywood models who want to break into the movies more than anything. Their only hope is a dirty old man, Mr. Salacity (Miles White), producer of films. Salacity has no interest in using the girls except for his own private pleasure. The trio tries every trick in their bag in attempt after attempt to convince Salacity that they are talented ... at everything! A picnic in a secluded grove gives Heaven and Sin their best chance to "persuade" Salacity to hire them. But as much as he enjoys himself, their efforts to become starlets are in vain. Along the way, Heaven gets turned on to Sin with sensual, then hilarious results. As Heaven's boyfriend, Bernie (Scott Cameron), has just about convinced her to marry him and forget the movies, she gets one last wild idea that she feels Salacity cannot resist. In a last final attack the three girls attempt to exhaust Salacity, who has been kidnapped and held prisoner in their bedroom, into submission and a job. However, this marathon "love-in" has just the opposite effect on Salacity and long after all three girls are totally drained he is still ready and willing. Just as Heaven is agreeing to marry Bernie, Salacity has a brainstorm and decides to hire all three girls to star in his new film.'"

Uschi GIF from cinegif.tumblr.com.

Private Arrangement

(1970, dir. Wes Ransome)

In John S. Schuchman's Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (ISBN-13: 978-0252068508), Private Arrangement is pointed out as an example "of deaf characters in sex-oriented films". (Who is deaf, we dunno.) Director Wes Ransom (aka as Wes Ransome) seems to have made only one other film, 1969's Do Me! Do Me! Do Me! (poster below). Scriptwriter Abner Shaw was a one-shot wonder. Uschi, billed "Euji Swenson" shows up to play "Linda".

The plot, as supplied by the often unreliable Prince Pervo at Something Weird: "The Playpen cruise, which can only be booked by Private Arrangement, offers '70s-style weekend kicks to lonely secretaries Gloria (Lynne Lori), Emily (Sheri Jackson), and Bev (Vanessa Nelson). But this ogiastic yacht party becomes a real bummer when one of them turns up dead. Cracking the case is none too difficult, inasmuch as there's a slavering idiot hunchback Peeping Tom (Gus Bianca) aboard who looks like Mel Brooks mugging in a stocking cap and who's caught red-handed with the naked corpse. Meanwhile, enjoy the cruise... The party kicks off with Sapphic traffic in the grand salon between Gloria and Emily, who appear to be having great fun with their noses in each other's twats. Then Linda […] and Bob (Marland Proctor) screw heartily in the stateroom, affording many classic angles on the ripest melons in the sexploitation field. Bev shows us that she's no slouch at dicktation, and Gloria, her engine revving from her pussy play with Emily, socks it to the Skipper's (Ray Sebastian) yardarm in the cockpit (or whatever you call that part of a yacht where the steering wheel is). And to round out the weekend, there's nude sunbathing on deck, skinny-dipping over the side, an orgy, and, of course, that idiot hunchback who chokes Emily to death. Made by Mitam Productions, a small, sleazy production company who, in a world of small, sleazy production companies, was among the smallest and sleaziest. (They also made that other hunchback-and-hooters classic, the Sexy Shocker Tortured Females [1965 / poster below].)"

The only other person to date (04.12.18) who seems to have felt that Private Arrangement is worth writing about is the great purveyor of porn lor_ who, on 23 November 2010, uploaded the following at the imdb: "The sex scenes are shot MOS, but the audience has to sit through endlessly tedious and talky wraparound footage […]. Lynn Lori stars as Gloria, reading her turgid dialog off of cue cards as Lt. Boris Burke (porn stalwart Roger Gentry) grills her endlessly about a murder case. He wears dark glasses, making it easier for him to look downward and read his own cue cards. […] It's tame, repetitive softcore sex, with the guys getting naked for sunbathing scenes above deck, but keeping covered for the humping. I suspect 1970 audiences expected stronger stuff. […] To create a modicum of plot, Gus Bianca appears as a hunchback with cheap makeup and a creepy do-rag type of head covering. He gets sent to a mental institution at film's end, probably to join erstwhile filmmaker Wes Ransome there. […] In typical SWV fashion, the final frames of the print are shredded. Had this entire surviving print been shredded instead, there would be no loss."

All the Lovin' Kinfolk

(1970, writ & dir John Hayes)

Aka Kin Folk and The Closest of Kin. Uschi shows up twice for a few blinks of the eye in an un-credited appearance, first for "an out-of-nowhere soft-core sex scene in a chicken coop" and then at the end as the one of the gals working at the house of fun.

Director John Hayes had already worked with Uschi in his film The Cut-Throats (1969), which we looked at in Part I: 1968-69. The film's true lead actress, Mady Maguire, as mentioned before, left the sleaze-film biz to earn money in law.

Scene from

All the Lovin' Kinfolk:

The plot, as found at TCM: "Upon graduating from Glen Holler High School in 1933, Cindy (Mady Maguire) decides to leave behind the dingy mountain hamlet and go to live with her married sister Sue (Donna Young of the surreal porn flick The Devil's Garden[1973] & Stephen C. Apostolof's Five Loose Women [1974 / trailer]), whose circumstances she believes to be more comfortable than her own. Cindy's distant cousin Zeb (Jay Scott of Garden of the Dead [1972 / full film]) has decided to go to work at a gas station on the main highway, and they leave Glen time and, to seek new horizons. That afternoon Cindy meets her salesman boyfriend, and they make love in a field, leaving Zeb to stand watch over the salesman's car. After a night at a roadhouse where the cousins make their first contact with the outside world, they reach Cindy's destination. Cindy bids Zeb a cold farewell, but her expectations are shattered when she discovers that Sue lives in a run-down house and serves as little more than a slave to her husband Luke (William Guhl of Kiss of the Tarantula [1976 / trailer] and Grave of the Vampire [1972 / trailer]) and his gang of moonshiners. After fending off Luke's determined advances, Cindy is driven out of the town by the mountain folk, who have been told that she made improper advances toward her sister's husband. Determined to rescue her sister, Cindy goes to work as a prostitute in Madam Rose's (Lynn York) house. Meanwhile, Zeb has also met with disappointment. After arriving at the gas station, he found that his boss had died, leaving Zeb to look after his widow and daughter, Tricia (Ann Ryan). Zeb and Tricia are mutually attracted, but she refuses to have sex with him unless he wears a prophylactic. She describes the device to the ignorant Zeb, but he arrives at the drug store at closing time and, disappointed, visits Rose's house. There he is recognized by Cindy, who becomes jealous when she hears of his attraction to Tricia, and she seduces him. Zeb agrees to help Cindy, on the assumption that she will then leave Rose's house; and the following day they rescue Sue, narrowly escaping their pursuers. Cindy rents an apartment for the three of them, but Zeb, realizing that Cindy plans to continue in her chosen profession, leaves to rejoin Tricia."

At Letterboxd, Matt Lynch says "If you want to see a gross sweaty farmer tease at a young girl's pubic hair with his teeth, have I got the movie for you!" At the imdb, however, Hermit C-27 concentrates on the essentials: "[...] This story of hillbillies makin' hay as indiscriminately as the farm animals is of course almost by definition junk. But this movie does have a redeeming feature —an appearance by the fabulous Uschi Digard. [...] Now, if you know anything about Ms. Digard, you know that even though she's an accomplished linguist, fluent in several languages, her Swedish accent precludes her playing an Appalachian native. So she's seen here as a city lady (of the evening) whom one of the country cousins is lucky enough to have some commerce with. Her scene is brief but it will be the most vivid memory you have of this movie — provided that one sees it."

The advert above for a screening at Cinema 2000 was found at Cinema Treasures; it comes from the 24 November 1972 issue of The Toronto Star.

Dirty Pool

(1970, writ & dir "Ed Stevens")

Possibly produced by the productive Ed Wood of porn, Carlos Tobalina (5 Apr 1925 – 31 March 1989). Could one-shot wonder "Ed Stevens" merely be a pseudonym? Speaking against the rumor that Tobalina was the man behind the flick is the fact that the movie was distributed by those famous East Coast distributers of seventies smut, Distribpix— the poster above was even found at their website. Nevertheless, the film is obviously from the West Coast, and Tobalina used clips from the movie in his 1972 "documentary"Pornography in Hollywood. Uschi's the main babe of the thinly plotted movie, but the equally curvatured Neola Graef (seen below and credited as "Joyce Adams") shows up as well. It can be found online, for example at Tube Porn Classic...

Letterboxdhas the "plot": "A husband (Marland Proctor) is being driven crazy by his insatiable wife. It seems that all the time she spends sunbathing has made her a nymphomaniac. A doctor sends over a pair of swingers to 'counsel' the couple." (Uschi, as "Pat Tarqui", plays the insatiable wife cum sun goddess.)

TCM's version of the "plot" differs slightly: "In sunny California, a couple takes a Sunday drive in the country and finds a shady spot in the woods to make love. At the same time, a wealthy married couple sunning themselves by their pool makes love beside the pool and under the water. The first couple sees them, waits until the husband leaves, and then forces the wife into depraved sexual acts. The husband returns, is shocked, and, attracted to the strange woman, takes her into the house and makes love with her. The others soon follow, and the foursome joins in an orgy that leads to a brutal climax of the film." (The description is a pared-down one of the plot as described at One-Sheet Index.)
DVD Drive-Inintones: "It's great to see this forgotten Distribpix rarity, but it's definitely one of their lesser catalog titles, probably because it was shot in California. Uschi of course looks amazing in a leopard-skin bikini, almost bursting from the seams, and is photographed lusciously floating nude in the pool! But this is one of those really cheap-looking softcore films filled with not-so-hot sex scenes that eventually become monotonous and draining (no pun intended). There is some interesting, amateurish underwater photography, but this is a standard soft s-and-f film."

Movies Made Mefinds the narrative technique of interest: "The story is told through voice-overs by the people we're currently watching... for example, we'll watch Uschi and her husband have sex, and we'll hear what each of them is thinking while they go at it. These voice-overs are accompanied by some beatnik / psychedelic music that seems oddly appropriate for this title, and we even get the occasional poem read by the various people that deal with the scene at hand. It's definitely an interesting way to tell the story, to say the least."
The deliciously attractive Neola Graef, aka Malta, who herself is worthy of a Babes of the Past career review, stopped making films with Female Fever (also featuring Uschi), which was released in 1977 but filmed a good six years earlier. Neola returned to her maiden name, even keeping it after getting married. She's still alive, and is now single, but that's all we're going to say. (Amazing what you can learn on the internet. And odd that she still doesn't have a page at Boobpedia.)

Dr. Christina of Sweden

(1970, dir. "Nick Phillips")

"Watch out, you may be queer and not know it."

Dr. Christina (Linda York)

Like many of Nick Millard's porn films, Dr Christina was filmed without sound and had the voiceover added later, so the tale is told by means of narrated images.

Jason S. Martinko offers a succinct plot description in his book, The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988: "Dr. Christina (Linda York) writes a sex column for a Swedish tabloid. She's sent to Paris, France, to interview young French people about their views on sex. A young couple is happy to show Christina that 'actions speak louder than words'."

Dr. Christina… thinking:

The dude who does Scorethefilm's Movie Blogsays, "I know what to expect going into these kinds of pictures — boring sex scenes, lame dialogue and groovy music. Dr. Christina is the only voice you hear and she's essentially narrating her sexy trip to Paris. Most of it is silly but it's sometimes fun. Within 61 minutes, this picture delivers three hardcore sex scenes. The first is between a guy and a girl and the other two are a pair of lesbians (each with a different couple). They consist of the usual excess of kissing and caressing but stopping short of delivering the goods. The final scene features my hot girlfriend, Uschi Digard. I only sat through this to get to her scenes. There's an awful lot of shots of Dr. Christina walking around Paris, talking to herself. Those are actually kind of neat if seeing 43-year-old footage of Paris does anything for you. I dug it [...]."

"I must have been turning into a faggy, lesbian bull dyke."

Dr. Christina (Linda York)

At one point, Dr Christina takes a longer gander at a poster to Alain Robbe-Grillet's arty L'éden et après aka Eden and After (1970), which is reason enough to present a scene from the movie below.

"The Powder of Fear":

In regard to this "foray into more explicit waters" conducted by director Nick Philips aka Nick Millard,Mondo Digitalsays that the story is "embellished with his typical fetish-oriented touches. Here the protagonist is blonde Swedish journalist 'Dr. Christina' […]. When not busy wandering the boulevards, she watches a male-female couple going at it, then dreams about two women making out, and finally observes a lesbian sex show featuring Uschi Digard. Boots and leather wear figure prominently. Though the first sex scene is unquestionably hardcore, the rest of the film feels like a standard 'almost-but-not-quite''60s grindhouse film complete with lots of moaning, writhing, and flailing limbs; the uncredited Dr. Christina may be the main character, but she's pretty much obliterated from the screen when Uschi shows up for the big climax, easily the highlight of the film. Though Philips shot this on location, it has a fairly grungy, low-budget veneer all the same — which is probably for the best, given the subject matter."

Probably Next Month —
Uschi, Part III: 1970, Part II

↧

Best Films Watched in 2018

January 4, 2019, 7:13 am

≫ Next: Curse of the Puppet Master (USA, 1998)

≪ Previous: Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

Photo above taken from the Crackedarticle

6 Creepy Things That Happen To The Human Body (When You Die).

And thus another year has come to an end — but, unbelievably enough, the world hasn't. Like Rome, however, the world is burning, but we, instead of playing the violin prefer to watch movies — by choice "strange" films of any epoch, elder cinematic miscarriages, or straight-to-DVD abortions, preferable fished from a dumpster.

In 2018 we posted 51 blog entries, but while we did indeed watch more movies than we wrote about, we only got around to scribbling a total of 23 of our typically "sub hack film reviews"[Connor Black, 2008]. (Here we must give mention to two movies that we saw, loved, but never had the time to write about — had we written about them, they would be presented below: Sugar Hill and Her Zombie Hitmen (1974 / trailer) and The Lobster [2016 / trailer]. As we will watch both films again someday, a review might still occur.)

But now, as the New Year is still busy wiping off its placenta, it is time to say which flicks we saw and wrote about in 2018 were the "Best".

"As always, the Short Films of the Month are automatically excluded from the list, if simply due to the fact that they since they were chosen as a Short Film of the Month they are also already recommended as memorable and worth watching." Nevertheless, we do give special mention to August's short film, the historical artifact Mickey Mouse in Vietnam (USA, 1968), June's artistic triumph The Nose (France, 1963), May's visually intriguing Neomorphus(Brazil, 2011), and February's disturbing Pica-Don(Japan, 1978).

In 2018, unlike so many previous years, we rather enjoyed a substantial number of the movies we watched. Still, some films that got a good review didn't make to this list: this list is for movies that are more than just "a fun film for an evening of beer and bong hits", though we do heartily recommend such evenings. Here are the movies that we didn't just enjoy, but that left a mark by shocking, impressing, or moving us (if only like a healthy bowel movement or well-used sex organ).

As normal, the movies are not in an order of preference. Enjoy the list, and hit the linked title to get to the original review.

Troll 2

(Italy/USA, 1990)

A disasterpiece of unbelievable proportions, it truly deserves its infamy. It is fabulous. Imperative viewing. And don't forget the popcorn.

Christmas Evil

(USA, 1980)

A strange and often uncomfortable little film, obviously a directorial labor of love, and indefinitely better than most Christmas cinematic pap. Don't bother with a public domain copy, watch a good copy to get the full cinematic effect.

Freaked

(USA, 1993)

A tasteless and forgotten comedy that successfully mirrors the American soul. Ripe for rediscovery.

Day of the Animals

(USA, 1977)

A prime slice of 70s trash from the independent auteur William Girdler(22 Oct 1947 – 21 Jan 1978), featuring Leslie Nielsen (11 Feb 1926 – 28 Nov 2010) as an alpha asshole. Day of the Animals is not the best of Girdler's films, but it's still memorably enjoyable — and has a great cast. William Girdler's promising career ended when "he was killed in a helicopter crash in Manila, Philippines, on January 21, 1978, while scouting locations for his tenth film project".

Der Mönch mit der Peitsche

(Germany, 1967)

1960s pop German krimi"based" on an Edgar Wallace book: totally ridiculous and total kitsch, but wonderfully fun. One almost never goes wrong with a mid-series Rialto Edgar Wallace production. Starring Joachim Fuchsberger(11 Mar 1927 — 11 Sept 2014).

Castle of Blood

(Italy, 1964)

A flawed B&W Italian semi-classic starring horror icon and total Babe of Yesteryear, Barbara Steele. B&W, Italian, horror movie, Barbara Steele — how could anyone not want to watch this movie? Technically, we shouldn't include the movie 'cause we had seen it before — but, hell, we were puberty-aged when we saw it. A whole 'nother life, not the one we have now.

Rammbock / Berlin Undead

(Germany, 2010)

German zombie movie that manages to be far more intriguing than the average contemporary zombie flick. (Dunno if the poster above was ever used or is just some fan poster, but we like it.)

(USA, 1982)

A prime slice of 80s trash from the independent auteur Larry Cohen. Not the best of his films — see: God Told Me To (1976 / trailer), with Richard Lynch(12 Feb 1936 – 19 June 2012) — but still one of his better ones. Time has been kind to this memorably enjoyable grindhouse classic.

Thanks to Skeptic Review for the original image.

This Year'sTrump's Mushroom PenisAward
for the Biggest Pile of ShiteWatched in 2018 Goes to…

Shark Week

(USA, 2012)

For the second year in a row, a film by "director" Christopher Ray wins the award for the worst movie we watched in a year. (OK, we didn't bother to write about Zombie 4: After Death [1989 / trailer], starring Jeff Stryker, but then we did watch the shredded version so there was nothing we could really review. Had it been uncut, we might have sort of liked its terribleness. Stryker, by the way, is not uncut.)
Please, someone start a GoFundMe for enough money to pay Christopher Ray to never make another "movie". (Note: He also placed in 2017for his turkey Mega Shark Vs Crocosaurus [USA, 2010]), a marginally "better" movie than Shark Week.)

↧

Curse of the Puppet Master (USA, 1998)

January 11, 2019, 3:14 am

≫ Next: Skenbart: En film om tåg / Illusive Tracks (Sweden, 2003)

≪ Previous: Best Films Watched in 2018

(Also known as Puppet Master 6.) Many years ago, some filmmaker named Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator [1985]) directed a flop, produced by Charles Band, entitled Dolls(1987 / trailer). Two years later, Band reanimated the basic idea of killer dolls in a direct-to-video flick called Puppet Master (1989 / trailer),* directed by David Schmoeller, the man behind the decidedly odd semi-classic Tourist Trap (1979). Puppet Master was not a flop, and so a direct-to-video/DVD franchise was born which, despite occasional excessively long periods of hibernation, has proven unkillable. (Indeed, just last year [2018], a non-canonical, extremely bloody, black comedy reboot entitled Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich[trailer], featuring a brief appearance by the great Udo Kier as a Nazi Andre Toulon, was released.)

*Guy Rolfe (27 Dec 1911 – 19 Oct 2003), the dollmaker in Dolls, even eventually took over the part of the titular Puppet Master, Andre Toulon, in Part III: Toulon's Revenge (1991 / trailer), Part IV (1993 / trailer), Part V: The Final Chapter (1994 / trailer) and Part VII: Retro Puppet Master (1999), after the actor of parts I& II (1990 / trailer), William Hickey (19 Sept 1927 – 29 June 1997), went to the great toy chest in the sky.

Trailer to

Curse of the Puppet Master:

By the time part VI, Curse of the Puppet Master, rolled around, the franchise had been dormant for four years. Producer Charles Band and his father Albert Band (7 May 1924 – 14 June 2002,director of Zoltan, Hound of Dracula [1977 / trailer] and I Bury the Living [1958]) turned to the productive hackster David DeCoteau, who had previously directed the franchise's first and most popular prequel, Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge(1991), to once again point the camera. (As he often does, DeCoteau hid behind a female nom de plume, "Victoria Sloan".) And although the final result proved to be this overtly cheap and uninteresting entry, Curse of the Puppet Master, the "movie" neverthelessproved popular enough for Band & Co to promptly sign DeCoteau up again for the following year's Retro Puppet Master (1999).

Pretty much a standalone movie with but the thinnest of narrative links to the previous Puppet Master flicks,Curse of the Puppet Master sees the puppets now in the possession of Dr. Magrew (George Peck, of Dawn of the Mummy[1981]), the proprietor of a Californian puppet museum. The very first scene, of Magrew driving out to an isolated rural location where he sets fire to a small crate within which faint screams can be heard, reveals an obscure fact that is visually reiterated numerous times in the movie: it never rains in Southern California, nor does it pour, but girl, don't they warn you, it thunders and lightnings, man, does it thunder and lightning … after sundown.

Albert Hammond's

It Never Rains In Southern California:

Daddy and Son Band also hired "Benjamin Carr" (real name, Neal Marshall Stevens), the scriptwriter of The Brain (1996), to write the screenplay to Curse, but for whatever reason — too low pay, maybe? — Carr/Stevens didn't bother delivering an original script and, instead, more or less totally cribbed the script to Bernard L. Kowalski's* cult "nature's revenge" horror Sssssss (1973 / trailer), replacing that film's mad scientist's goal of creating a race of snake people with Dr. Magrew's desire to create killer puppets from people. But the semi-sexy daughter is still there (Emily Harrison as Jane Magrew), as is her love interest and male object of the Doctor's nefarious machinations — but whereas in Sssssssthe male object is a brainy college grad, in Curse of the Puppet Master the male object is a modern Lennie Small (as in: see Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) named Robert "Tank" Winsley (Josh Green of Spiders [2000 / trailer]).

*Admittedly, Sssssss (aka Ssssnake) is probably Kowalski's most enjoyable film, but the director is perhaps best remembered for his early no budget trash classics, Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) and Night of the Blood Beast (1958 / trailer). Unjustly forgotten within his directorial oeuvre, however, is the idiosyncratic TV western horror, Black Noon (1971 / full film).

Curse of the Puppet Master is an incredibly slow-moving flick that feels as padded as it does narratively thin. The repeated scenes of Robert diligently and carefully carving away at a new puppet are particularly annoying, as they look to be the same scene simply re-edited for repeated use. They are also made all the more pointless by the fact that although Robert is working on a wooden puppet, the puppet revealed at the film's climax is a metal robot. (One wonders how slipup that obvious makes its way into any film, even one that aims as low as this one.)

Filmed in a clear and clean video aesthetic, the movie's visuals offer little in way of building suspense or horror, and [intentional] humor is likewise nonexistent. Even the usually fun sight of killer puppets on the move is substantially dulled, as unlike in the other Puppet Master flicks, the full bodies of the puppets here aren't shown when they are supposedly on the move. The result is that they usually look as if someone is holding them off screen and bobbing them forward in some half-assed attempt to emulate a walking movement. The death count is relatively low and most of the killings are similarly uninspired, the highlight being of course the obvious money-shot kill of the über-asshole wannabe rapist Joey Carp (Michael D. Guerin) who, properly enough, has Blade slashing at his face while Tunneler drills away at his crotch. (Being a puppet, Tunneler should perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that pegging is done from the back.)

But if Joey is the movie's focal bad guy, he is in fact but one in a small litany of dislikable or morally questionable characters. Both Sheriff Garvey (Robert Donavan of The Hazing [2004] and Corpses [2004]) and Deputy Wayburn (Jason-Shane Scott of Return of the Killer Shrews[2012 / trailer]), for example, though ostensibly simply pursuing first a missing persons report and then a murder case, are less diligent representatives of law and order than position-abusing, violence-prone dickheads. Dr. Magrew, in turn, despite an appearance of benevolent friendliness and paternal attentiveness, is both duplicitous and conniving and utterly heartless, if not mad — but he is also at least a funny sight whenever he puts on his trench coat and hat and slouches off to do something despicable. (Sorely missing from his general appearance is a long moustache, one which he could have twirled whenever he stands around looking foreboding.)

While opposites are said to attract, the "romance" between Jane and Robert rings more of dramatic necessity than believability. Likewise, for a college grad, Jane is amazingly slow at figuring out that her Daddy done lied to her when he, in order to do his planned dirty deed with Robert, sends her away to pick up a non-existent package. The why and timing behind her returning to the forest to look into the burnt box she and Robert found previously is not exactly logical, either, as there is no obvious link between it and her Dad's lie. (Still, it does allow for the appearance of the Matt doll, perhaps the only truly unsettling sight of the movie — far more unsettling, in any event, than Robert's two mildly effective dream sequences.)

On the whole, despite or maybe because of its limited cast of characters, Curse of the Puppet Master feels both padded and oddly empty: its narrative progresses like spilled chilled molasses, and for all the predictability of the events they don't even manage to lead to an effective resolution, ending instead as if half the film material of the climax somehow got lost. (All tease, and then major PE.) It seems somehow beyond believability that a movie as uninteresting and dissatisfying as this one managed to revive the franchise.

Long Trailer Night —

Trailers to the first 10 Puppet Master films:

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Skenbart: En film om tåg / Illusive Tracks (Sweden, 2003)

January 17, 2019, 2:52 am

≫ Next: Short Film: The Snow Man (USA, 1940)

≪ Previous: Curse of the Puppet Master (USA, 1998)

(Spoilers) Skenbart: En film om tåg, which didn't really reach the English-speaking world (but for various film festivals, mostly LGBTQ) asIllusive Tracks, is an entertaining if slightly schizophrenic — and unjustly unknown —neo-noir farcical black comedy that truly deserves discovery outside of its home country of Sweden.

Set at Christmas time 1945, the movie revolves around the bumbling do-gooder, Gunnar (Gustaf Hammarsten of Brüno [2009 / trailer]), a Wittgenstein-reading editor of a small publishing house who has quit his job to go to Berlin to help with the post-war rebuilding efforts. Also on the Berlin Express he boards are a war-injured soldier (Robert Gustafsson), a ticketless Catholic doctor (Magnus Roosmann) out to murder his wife (although he would prefer that his mistress do the deed), the mistress Marie (Anna Björk) and the wife Karin (Kristina Törnqvist), a gay couple, two nuns and some two or three dozen war refugees on their way home. The movie interweaves a variety of narrative threads, but for the most part the focus is on the disastrous results of Gunnar's attempts to do good, which are not all that noir, and the noirish narrative of the murderous doctor and the two women in the doc's life. Of the two strands, the latter has the most interesting developments, while the former almost becomes predictable because one quickly comes to realize that if Gunnar is involved, it will go wrong.

To say the film is idiosyncratic is perhaps a bit of an understatement. To what extent the director Peter Dalle, who also wrote the script and took on the role of the train's almost-Teutonic acting, uptight conductor, consciously emulates the directorial and narrative playfulness of the Coen Brothers (Blood Simple [1984 / trailer], The Hudsucker Proxy [1994 / trailer], The Man Who Wasn't There [2001 / trailer], and so much more) is open to discussion, but the incongruent but well-conceived intermingling of B&W period setting, humor, crime and excellent cinematography often call the Hollywood auteur duo to mind. Dalle may not quite be of equal visual or narrative caliber, and his humor is often crasser (see: the excessive puking of the refugees), but his film is nevertheless a tightly scripted, highly creative farce that is both a visual pleasure and blackly funny.

That said, the tribulations of the soldier, like the results of Gunnar's attempts to do good, do become a bit predictable — whenever he appears, one comes to know his injuries will only increase — but the consistency of his bad luck and positive attitude only serve to make the humor of his last two appearances in the movie doubly as funny. Likewise, Gunnar's easy and nonjudgmental acceptance of the sexuality of Pompe (Gösta Ekman [28 July 1939 – 1 April 2017]) and Sixten (Lars Amble [10 Aug 1939 – 20 Aug 2015]), a gay couple whose closest equivalent is perhaps Martha and George of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf(1966 / trailer), is extremely contemporary for a movie set in 1945 — but then, characters in many films often display attitudes that differ from those common to the temporal setting. Indeed, "realistic" is not an adjective usually bantered when talking of celluloid farces of this ilk.

Gunnar's clumsiness transcends imagination: literally, no act he does, good or otherwise, leaves those around him unharmed. And while one cannot help but feel sorry for him by the end of the film, his general clumsiness and disaster-proneness prove to be a truly deadly: arguably, by the last scene, he has committed unintentional manslaughter by the dozens.

As for the murderous triangle of the doc and two women, the big twist at the end won't catch the more observant all that off guard, even if it might not really hold water all that tightly if one ruminates about all that must have transpired the days, weeks, months prior to the train's departure. The doc, in any event, is a truly repulsive person, and while for much of the movie one assumes his Christian justifications are merely blather he uses to control his mistress, by the end of the movie one realizes he is very much a "faithful" hypocrite. He would be a grotesque exaggeration were it not that he and his self-righteousness are a relatively realistic if unintentional (and biting) reflection of the contemporary religious right of America: evil, in the end, is only evil if "the others" do it. (Which is why Trump is truly making a rare truthful statement when he says that he could shoot someone and not lose voters/supporters.)

On occasion, Skenbart: En film om tåg calls to mind some of the better German Edgar Wallace thrillers of the early 1960s, though the question of "who dunnit?" is never as much in the forefront here as in those earlier movies. Still, some of the more obscure POV shots call back to similar shots found in, say, Wallace films as diverse as The Indian Scarf(1963) and The Hand of Power(1968), and the doctor, a fairly threatening figure in a Santa Claus mask, also bring to mind the masked killers found in those films and so many slashers since then. One scene is also a cute visual reference to Hitchcock's overrated Vertigo (1958 / trailer), while the setting as a whole recalls any number of earlier crime films or noirs set aboard a train, from (again) Hitchcock's TheLady Vanishes (1938 / trailer) to The Narrow Margin (1952 / trailer) to Lars von Trier's oddly forgotten Europaaka Zentropa (1991 / trailer), not to mention the first version of the classic murder-on-a-train tale, Murder on the Orient Express (1974 / trailer). Indeed, not only does the Orient Express make a quick cameo in the background during the closing scene, but much like in that movie, the premeditating murderer(s) of the movie remain unpunished.

It is a true shame that an obvious labor of love like Skenbart: En film om tåg remains so unknown and overlooked by the world. It is a film that should appeal to many, but is perhaps a bit too bizarre and blackly humorous (not to mention foreign) to draw in the masses, despite its great cinematography and entertaining narrative. In the end, what Skenbart: En film om tåg is above all else is a cult movie waiting to be discovered. Help make that happen.

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Short Film: The Snow Man (USA, 1940)

January 24, 2019, 12:29 am

≫ Next: R.I.P.: Dick Miller

≪ Previous: Skenbart: En film om tåg / Illusive Tracks (Sweden, 2003)

In many places in the world, January is still a snowy winter month. And that is why we're presenting a winter-kind of short film. In theory, this film is set in the summer month of July, but snow is snow is snow, and snow is needed to make a snowman. Even an evil snowman. And before the caps melt and snowmen are but a legend of the past, here is short animated film that shows why kids and cute animals shouldn't play with snow. (Matches are more fun, anyways.)

The Snow Man was written and directed by John Foster(27 Nov 1886 – 16 Feb 1959) and Emanuel "Mannie" Davis(23 Jan 1894 – Oct 1975). In their lifetime, the two worked together on at least 126 cartoon shorts, if not possibly more. The Snow Man and Terrytoons'The Ghost Town(1944 / short film) are the only ones they did together to overtly feature any "horror" elements.

The plot, as given at the Internet Archives facebook page: "An innocent frolic in the snow turns into a horrifyingly homicidal rampage. Nothing a little global warming can't solve, though."

Like weird old cartoons? Check out these other 20th-century cartoon shorts chosen in the past as a Short Film of the Month:

March 2010: The Skeleton Dance (USA, 1929)

Feb 2011: The Hangman(USA, 1964)

Jan 2013: Bimbo's Initiation (USA, 1931)

Oct 2013: Swing You Sinners! (USA, 1930)

Aug 2014: Balloon Land(USA, 1935)

Oct 2014: Hell's Bells(USA, 1929)

Sept 2015: A Short Vision (USA, 1956)

Feb 2017: Der Fuehrer's Face (USA, 1942)

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R.I.P.: Dick Miller

January 31, 2019, 1:26 am

≫ Next: Way of the Gun (USA, 2000)

≪ Previous: Short Film: The Snow Man (USA, 1940)

25 Dec 1928 – 30 Jan 2019

While we had planned to post something else today, we awoke to find out that one of our all-time favorite character actors, the American thespian treasure known as Dick Miller, entered the Great Nothingness yesterday. There was simply no way a passing like that can be ignored.

A Bronx-born Christmas Day present to the world, Miller entered the film biz doing redface back in 1956 in the Roger Corman western Apache Woman (trailer). He quickly became a Corman regular and, as a result, became a favorite face for an inordinate amount of modern and contemporary movie directors, particularly those weaned and teethed in Corman productions. (Miller, for example, appears in every movie Joe Dante has made to date.)

A working thespian to the end, Miller's last film, the independent horror movie Hanukkah (trailer), starring fellow low culture thespian treasure Sid Haig, just finished production. In it, as in many of Miller's films, his character is named Walter Paisley in homage to his first truly great lead role, that of the loser killer artist/busboy Walter Paisley in Roger Corman's classic black comedy, A Bucket of Blood (1959).

Logic would dictate that anyone who is interested in a blog like a wasted life should be at least passingly familiar with Dick Miller as an actor. If not, we won't ask "What are you doing here?" but, instead, suggest that perhaps you check out the documentary That Guy Dick Miller, "a funny, candid, and upbeat look at Dick's career which spans six decades with more than 175 motion pictures, 4 television series and over 2000 television appearances."

As per the film's website, the documentary follows "Dick from his first big role in Bucket of Blood [to] The Terror(1963), on to Gremlins 1 (1984) & 2(1990), New York New Year [sic] (1977), The Terminator (1984), Demon Knight (1995) to the Fame TV series (1982-87), and up to one of his latest roles in […] Burying the Ex (2014). He has worked for such noted directors as: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Roger Corman, Joe Dante, Ernest Dickerson, Sam Fuller and Jonathan Kaplan, to name a few, and over the years, he has shared the screen with Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Boris Karloff, Ray Milan, Ray Milland, Jada Pinkett Smith, Julianna Margulies, Kim Novak, and David Carradine, and many more. There is a wealth of rare footage, photos and video, plus never before seen 8mm shots behind the scenes of movies little, and legendary. Film fans get rare glimpses into Dick's family, his early days in New York, the move to L.A., his struggles, his process and his artwork. Augmented by animation, illustration, and hundreds of clips, personal home movies, and 47 interviews – we can see why 'that guy's in everything!'"

Trailer to

That Guy Dick Miller:

A multi-part career review of Dick Miller's career in feature films will follow… eventually.

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Way of the Gun (USA, 2000)

February 3, 2019, 10:14 pm

≫ Next: Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part III: 1970, Part II

≪ Previous: R.I.P.: Dick Miller

Supposedly a cult movie, which leaves us here at a wasted lifewondering why. True, The Way of the Gunhas more forced quirkiness and idiosyncratic characters and excessive violence and guns and secret agendas than the average pubescent has zits, but in the end the movie is only slightly more interesting and definitely a bigger mess than an exploding whitehead. (Which, actually, can on occasion be rather interesting, according to some people.)

The directorial debut of Christopher McQuarrie, whose career at the time had already somewhat stagnated despite his co-writing credit on the highly successful The Usual Suspects(1995 / trailer), The Way of the Gun, notwithstanding being a bit of a box-office bomb, must have been seen by the right people, for Brian "I didn't do it" Singer's favorite co-scribe now scribes for and directs no one less than that never-aging Hollywood institution who never slept with Chad Slater a.k.a. KyleBradford (below), Scientologist sunny boy Tom Cruise.

"Karma's justice without the satisfaction. I don't believe in justice."

Joe Sarno (James Caan)

Christopher McQuarrie has gone on record that the final script for Way of the Gun is actually a watered-down version from his original idea, which evolved from the concept of a script featuring an unsympathetic leading man that no "cowardly [Hollywood] executive" would accept. An idea (possibly conscious, possibly subconscious) that actually raised its hand ever so slightly four years prior to Way of the Gun in the far more successful horror movie, From Dusk till Dawn (1996 / trailer).*But unluckily, while Juliette Lewis, who appears in both Dawn and Gun, is equally effective in both movies, neither Ryan Phillippe nor Benicio Del Toro (in Gun) has the charisma of George Clooney (in Dawn). As a result, though their characters might be just as psycho as Clooney's Seth Gecko — anyone remember how nonchalantly he torches the gas station attendant? — they really do remain unsympathetic assholes. Likability, or identification with the characters, is a problem that is hard to overcome in non-horror* anti-hero films that focus too much on all that which makes the heroes anti (see, for example, Álex de la Iglesia's Dance with the Devil [1997 / trailer]): one really doesn't give a flying fuck about what happens to the two leads, and only waits for their invertible death. (In the case of The Way of the Gun, the ending is nevertheless open enough that, had the movie been a hit, a sequel could have been an option.)

* Horror films, particularly body counters of the kind featuring anti-heroes of the likes of Freddy & Jason, are a completely different kettle of fish: as the whole point of the movies is the kills, one seldom dwells upon or cares about the unstoppable killer, thus even a child molester (like Freddy) can become an identification figure for the audience.

Way of the Gun is very much a western in contemporary clothes, a kind of buddy movie ala Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid (1969 / trailer) but with dickhead buddies. The link to the earlier buddy western is most obvious twice in the movie: first by the last names of the two lead asswipes, Parker (Ryan Phillippe, ofFranklyn[2008]) and Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro, of Sin City [2005 / trailer]), which are the real family names of Butch and Sundance, and second by the final shootout, which uses the same location as the final shootout in the earlier Redford & Newman western.

"Can I ask you something? Are you a faggot? See, you asked me if I was heterosexual; I asked you the same question, only I was clear about the answer I was looking for."

Parker (Ryan Phillippe)

Interestingly enough, for all their obvious homophobia, Parker and Longbaugh of Gun come across like they would secretly like to lick each other's lollipop and cross pack fudgefar more than most duets found in buddy films; it has something to do with the way, like old couples, they need not talk when they communicate, and how Longbaugh seems so jealous when Parker plays cards with the pregnant Robin (Juliette Lewis of Kalifornia [1993 / trailer], Romeo Is Bleeding [1993 / trailer], Metropia [2009 / trailer] and The 4th Floor[1999]). But, no, like so many closet cases — anyone remember Dennis Hastert? Ed Schrock? David Dreier? Larry Craig? — they would rather hate what they are than admit to what they crave…

Ode to Larry Craig:

But then, they hate more than just men-loving men: they hate everything and everyone, so let's skip the armchair psychology of the "why" behind them being shitheads and just accept that they are — as is amply displayed in the opening scene, in which the male anti-couple more or less start the fight, or the later scene at the sperm bank where they overhear all the info that leads to their decision to kidnap Robin, the surrogate mother for the child of gangster Hale Chidduck (Scott Wilson [29 Mar 1942 – 6 Oct 2018] of In Cold Blood[1967 / trailer]) and his trophy wife Francesca Chidduck (Kristin Lehman of Hemoglobin [1997 / trailer]), for a hefty ransom and a life ever after on easy street. The kidnapping, however, is definitely not a "brains kind of operation", as per Longbaugh, and just as they go south physically while on the run, everything goes south literally.

Way of the Gun is, as one might surmise by the title, a violent film. But oddly enough, for a violent film it has a lot of long sequences in which nothing really happens: people talk a lot, quirky personality traits are shown, and agendas and secrets and relationships get revealed — sometimes at an interminably snail-like pace — and then, BOOM! The bullets start flying again and the bodies dropping. Not that one really cares which bodies drop.

In general, the acting cannot really be faulted, as everyone manages to successfully reflect the one-side of their one-sided characters. Phillippe, for whatever reason, sports a truly ridiculous accent of the kind found in bad James Cagney movies, but everyone else in the film at least sounds like their accents are real. Juliette Lewis is great as the pregnant Robin, more than capable of convincing emoting and characterization, while her real-life father (Geoffrey Lewis [31 Jul 1935 – 7 Apr 2015] of Night of the Comet[1984], Lust in the Dust[1985], Moon of the Wolf[1972] and so much more) is an interesting and wryly funny loser of a tertiary character named Abner Mercer. James Caan, as the bagman Joe Sarno*— like everyone in the movie a man with a secret and personal stake in the kidnapping — steals the screen whenever he has to talk, but he loses some of his aura of believability during the final shootout, in which he comes across as a bit too old, out of shape, and (physically) slow. But then, the big final shootout is pretty much a washout anyway.

*A name, we can only assume, chosen as some sort of allusion and/or homage to the real life Joseph W. "Joe" Sarno (15 Mar 1921 – 26 April 2010), the legendary sexploitation director of multiple dozens of picturesque titles, ranging from Lash of Lust (1962) to Inside Little Oral Annie (1985 / full film).

Midway in the movie, after Parker and Longbaugh kidnap Robin and the resulting gunfight ends up with the bodyguards Jeffers (Taye Diggs, of House on Haunted Hill [1999 / trailer] and Dylan Dog: Dead of Night [2010 / trailer]) and Obecks (Nicky Katt of Planet Terror[2007] and Riding the Bullet[2004]) in jail, Sarno shows up for the first time and, amidst all his patently well-written dialogue, gives Obecks a veiled warning by saying, "The only thing you can guess about a broken down old man is that he is a survivor." At the final shootout, Sarnoarrives at the stereotypical Mexican bordello with a gaggle of "broken down old men", one and all fellow bagmen and, going by their ages, survivors. Over the course of the subsequent oddly anti-climactic climactic scene, however, one begins to wonder how any of them ever survived long enough to die at the poorly choreographed and lensed shootout. For being the climax of the movie, it drags and is neither visceral nor tense or involving, and surprises only in an idea involving old bottles... for that, however, the shootout still remains as sloppy and unsuccessfully over the top as to be expected from a final set piece of a bludgeoning movie as consciously hip and irritating and uneven as Way of the Gun.

In any event, though we do findPhillippe far cuter than Chad Slater a.k.a. Kyle Bradford, we were not amused. You probably won't be either.

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Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part III: 1970, Part II

February 9, 2019, 2:34 am

≫ Next: Isle of Darkness / Mørkets øy (Norway, 1997)

≪ Previous: Way of the Gun (USA, 2000)

Babes of Yesteryear: a wasted life's irregular and PI feature that takes a meandering look at the filmographies of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema of the past. Some may still be alive, others not. (Being who we are, we might also take a look at some actor cum beefcake, if we feel like it.)

As the photo above possibly doesn't reveal but the blog-entry title above does, we're currently looking at the films of one of the ultimate cult babes ever, a woman who needs no introduction to any and all red-blooded American hetero male whose hormonal memory goes further back than the start of the 80s: the great Uschi Digard.*

Today, Uschi Digard is still alive, happily married (for over 50 years), and last we heard retired in Palm Springs, CA. To learn everything you ever wanted to know about her, we would suggest listening to the great interview she gave The Rialto Report in 2013.

Herewith we give a nudity warning: naked babes and beefcake are highly likely to be found in our Babes of Yesteryear entries. If such sights offend thee, well, either go to another blog or pluck thy eyes from thee...

Please note: we make no guarantee for the validity of the release dates given… or of the info supplied, for that matter. And if you know something we don't, let us know.

Go here for
Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

The Last Step Down

(1970, dir. Lawrence Ramport)

A.k.a. Young Love and Even Devils Pray. A simple online search finds this film available for free at any number of online porn sites — look and ye shall find.

Over at that bane of free enterprise known as Amazon, you can find the most common commentary on the film, probably taken from the DVD itself: "The recent revival of interest in 1970s grindhouse cinema has unearthed some bizarre and seedy films, but none are as shamelessly exploitive as these two entries in the softcore horror genre. The Last Step Down observes the initiation of several voluptuous young women into a satanic cult. With its zoned-out actors and lethargic plot, The Last Step Down is a cynical reaction to the counter-cultural fascination with the occult in the early 70s, reducing the worship of the Prince of Darkness to a prolonged humping-and-groping session. Also included is Russell Gay's ultra-rare [short film] Blood Lust, an especially salacious (and unexpectedly stylized) adaptation of Le Fanu's Carmilla." The image below is of the German 8mm release of Blood Lust (image found at Gav Crinsom). The German title translates, literally, into something like "Dracula and His Bold Teeth"; in daily slang, however, it translates into "Dracula and His Hot Babes".

Cartelera de Cinereduces the plot of this one-day wonder to "A naive country girl new to the big city gets involved in the underground sex scene," but TCMgoes into greater detail: "Prostitutes Norma and Sue (Uschi Digard& Neola "Malta" Graef) decide to initiate Kathy (Terri Johnson), a virgin, into prostitution. They take her to a hidden monastery where devil worshipers are holding a black mass. Kathy zealously submits to a series of sexual assaults during the black mass, in reality, an orgy. Norma and Sue force Kathy to join them in a lesbian orgy when they perceive that the bacchanal has stripped her of her inhibitions." The image below shows Graef and Johnson conducting verbal intercourse.

The "Monk with Mustache" is played by Michael Donovan O'Donnell, who is also found in bit parts in Dick Tracy (1990 / trailer) and Satan's Cheerleaders (1977 / trailer below).

Trailer to

Satan's Cheerleaders:

Bill R., at the blogspot The Kind of Face You Hate, thinks that "The Last Step Down is the kind of film that can make you think that sex is maybe just gross and stupid and you shouldn't ever do it." He also mentions that, "Released in 1970, The Last Step Downis the vision of director Lawrence Ramport and screenwriters Arthur Allen and Phil Miller. It could be that each of those names is a pseudonym, and, indeed, it appears that none of those men ever worked on another film again, if, I repeat, they're credited here under their real names. Both possibilities strike me as equally likely. Who would want the credit for having made The Last Step Down, and who would want to offer work to the men who made The Last Step Down?"

The imdb, at least, lists Phil Miller as the production manager of two far superior films, Peter Bogdanovich's credited feature film directorial debut Targets (1968 / trailer) and Ted V. Mikels'The Black Klansman a.k.a. I Crossed the Color Line (1966 / trailer), the latter of which did not serve as the inspiration for Spike Lee's Black Klansman (2018 / trailer).

In any event, "It should not come as a surprise that The Last Step Down was Lawrence Ramport's one and only film as a director. [10K Bullets]"

Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife

(1970, dir. "B. Ron Elliot"& "L. Ray Monde")

Written by "Virginia Vulvania". As Letterboxdpoints out, "Mark 12:31 instructs, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' After Hours 69:69 suggests, 'Do unto thy neighbor as she likes it.'"

"B. Ron Elliot" is actually actor/director Byron Mabe (10 April 1932 – 13 May 2001) who, of course, achieved everlasting cult fame due more to some of his more infamous directorial projects, of which this sex film is not one — but what true trash-film fan hasn't heard of A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine (1966), She Freak (1967 / trailer further below), The Lustful Turk (1968 / trailer) or The Acid Eaters (1968 / a trailer of sorts)?

Co-director "L. Ray Monde", otherwise known as Lee Raymond, is less renowned, but he did appear in She Freak and, in 1972, directed the trashy and fun The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide (1972 / body swap). Supposedly his real money-making career was as a pilot for United Airlines.

Trailer to She Freak (1967),

Mabe's tacky remake of

Tod Browing's Freaks(1932):

Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife is one of two Mabe films Uschi appeared in; the other one being one of Mabe's lowest-budgeted and least-liked films, The Big Snatch (depending on the source, 1968 or 1971, see Part I). That film he directed as "Ronnie Runningboard", the same name he uses in this film as the actor playing the character of Dan. Uschi, credited as "Heidi Sohler", plays the character named Uschi. (The wardrobe, by the way, was supplied by "Phunkie Attire", while "Otto Focus" was the cameraman.) As the title infers, the thematic focus of the movie is the oh-so-contemporary topic of wife swapping.

Altered Trailer:

"Filmed at a Swapping Center", Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife doesn't seem to be readily available any longer — or it is so dull no one wants to write about it. So, let's go to TCM(again) for the plot: "A prominent attorney and his client bring their wives to a lakeside cottage for a weekend. The group's sexual inhibitions break down after much drinking and the screening of stag films. The two husbands exchange partners, and the wives later have sex with each other. On the other side of the lake, a lecherous, middle-aged professor has brought three of his female students to a rented cabin. Two raunchy dune buggy enthusiasts make camp near the professor's cabin, smoke marijuana, and attract the attention of the three coeds. They soon become sexually acquainted. Later, the five young people go to a nearby tavern and meet the lawyer's party. After some initial disagreement, they proceed to have an orgy."

We found the newspaper advertisement directly above at Chateau Vulgaria, which points out that the clipping is for an "Entertainment Ventures double-feature at the Center Drive-in, from June, 1971. Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife (1970), with Uschi Digard, has been MIA on video; Starlet! (1969 / scene), with Shari Mann and John Alderman, told the story of an actress' rise to the top; on VHS and DVD-R from Something Weird."

Contrary to some sources, including the imdb, the Ann Dee [Mann]of this movie is not the same Ann Dee singing in A Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967 / trailer).

The Ann Dee of ATMMsinging

a medley of Carnival/This Dream:

It is probably also safe to assume that the movie Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife has absolutely nothing in common with the 1968 Brandon House erotic novel Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife by "Lew Palmer", other than the title [image below from alt glamour]. "Lew Palmer", by the way, if we are to believe the Library of Congress'sCatalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series: 1968: July-December, is actually Thelma L. Reahm, "a happy, healthy, married, active Christian writer, content with a simple life."

As for the US poster, it is yet another example of the fine art from the forgotten, self-taught (!) Mexican American artist Rodolfo Escalera(1 June 1929 – 25 Jan 2000); the current purveyors of his legacytend to ignore his days as a sleaze film poster artist.

The Magic Mirror

(1970, dir. Unknown)

Another one-day wonder featuring Uschi as an unnamed woman who buys a magic, antique mirror that takes her on sex trips by making her fantasies become real; the result is four distinct sexual scenes. Some people assume The Magic Mirror to merely be an a.k.a. title for two other later hardcore movies Love and the Great Grunt(1972 / trailer) and Satisfaction Guaranteed (1976?), which are pretty much the same movie, but The Magic Movie is the egg that came before the chicken: scenes from this softcore sex film were edited into the later hardcore versions to pad time, add characters, and/or make a "new" movie … in which it looks like Uschi is actually taking chorizo onscreen. (She, famously, denies to this day that she ever filmed "real" hardcore scenes — but if you search long and hard, you can find a rather boring homemade B&W short of her on her back doing the dirty for real with her husband.)

The pedigrees of all three films mentioned are open to conjecture: the "unknown" director of The Magic Mirror is claimed by some as being Stu Segall, while the imdb claims that Satisfaction Guaranteed was directed by "Melvin Kissem" (which just happens to be the name of a no-budget porn flick from around the same time [full movie] supposedly directed by Charles Davis Smith [18 June 1930 – 20 Sept 2017]). In turn, tapatalksays Love and the Great Grunt "employs copious footage from […] The Magic Mirror, as well as hardcore footage lifted from Devil's Due*(1973)," the latter of which was shot by "Ernest Danna". In its graffiti credits, LATGGclaims to have been directed by Antony Weber, who directed Uschi in Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death (1973), a film we look at later. More than one website claims Weber as the director of"Satisfaction Guaranteed a.k.a. Love and the Great Grunt". (So you decide for yourself who did it. We think it was the butler.)

*Famous for its inspired line of dialogue, "You must kiss the cock of Satan!" (And also for being one the many porn movies that derailed the career of former Cortland County district attorney Mark Suben when it was revealed that he was the former porn actor "Gus Thomas", one of the the lead wieners of Devil's Due. [Poster below.])

Way back in 2002, at the imdb, Sum Flounder wrote that the film, "in grainy, sweaty 16mm", is for "the most undiscerning members of the 'raincoat' crowd": It "involves Uschi purchasing a large mirror. Whenever she gazes into it she witnesses (or experiences?) various fantasies. The only one I can still remember after all this time involves a copious amount of shaving cream. [...] There are probably more than a few people out there who will watch any movie with Uschi in it. Those guys won't be disappointed, although I won't say the same for everybody else."

Also the imdb, five years later john22900 has a slightly different take on the same basic tale of what he says is "not a particularly great film": "Uschi purchases a haunted mirror that she is told has the effect of making one's inhibitions disappear and their dreams and fantasies come true whenever they gaze into it. There are four separate episodes in which Uschi (or others) gaze into the mirror and lose their inhibitions — and clothes. The first involves a balding TV repairman, the second some lesbian poll takers, the third some friends of hers, and the final episode concerns a burglar and a cop. Low budget and very simple in concept. The best thing — correction: the only thing — worthwhile here is the fabulous Uschi."

The rest of the unnamed skin is supplied by Maria Arnold (of Meatcleaver Massacre [1977 / trailer]), Kathy Hilton (of Sex and the Single Vampire [1970]andBlood Sabbath [1972 / great boobs below / full movie]), William Howard (of Terror at Orgy Castle [1972 / full movie], poster above), and other people with Joe and Jane Schmoe bodies.

Blood Sabbath dancing:

Oddly Coupled

(1970, dir. Henry Bolder& Karl Rawicz)

Produced by William Byron Hillman. More than one website claims that this movie is a.k.a. Betta Betta in the Wall, Who's the Fattest Fish of All? They might be the same film, but then they might not be. Though the VHS cover below does share some of the same names, Betta Betta in the Wall, Who's the Fattest Fish of All? shares more same names with 1977 cheapie What A Way to Go a.k.a. Bottoms Up,* also by director Karl Rawicz and producer William Byron Hillman (or William B. Hillman). The thing is, that movie, marketed as a teen T&A comedy, shares the exact same plot and some of the same characters as the adult film Oddly Coupled, but seems to have a completely different cast ... but then, none of the cast of Bottoms Up ever made another movie, which lends credence to the concept that all names might be pseudonyms — which in turn leads to the logical assumption of simple repackaging.

*Neither of the two titles, What A Way to Go or Bottoms Up, should be confused withthe earlier films likewise bearing them: What A Way to Go (trailer below), the odd black comedy from 1964 starring Shirley MacLaine (and featuring Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, Bob Cummings and Dean Martin), and the unknown British comedy from 1960 (poster above).

Trailer to

What A Way to Go (1964):

Compare the plot of Bottoms Up— "A skinny, virginal mechanic (Adam Janas) is taken into erotic captivity by three lovely nymphs who decide to give him an enlightening course in sex education. Their goal: to transform a naive nerd into a sexual dynamo for the voluptuous Gertie (Sparky Abbrams)."— to that of Oddly Coupled as given by Mike King at the imdb: "Nerdy Hobart Moore is kidnapped by three women, and brought to a house occupied by Gertie, a morbidly obese nymphomaniac. Hobart is more interested in making sure his tropical fish are being fed than in any of the women." Also at the imdb, dardura108 mentions how he "especially liked the heavy-set chick who gets compulsively excited anytime someone says the word 'sex'. Also, the slo-motion slap-stick on the water bed is pretty funny."

In any event, Uschi appears (uncredited) in Oddly Coupled as the "Brunette in Bed"— or rather, as the woman in a sex film the lead character is made to watch.

Oddly Coupled is available at Something Weird, where Don the Deviate, says: "A jumbo order of Fish 'n' Chicks! The vivacious Malta [a.k.a. Neola Graef] screws some guy in the front seat of her convertible. Pretty Donna Young screws some guy on a beach blanket. But Hobart Moore prefers the company of his fish. Say what? Hobart ('My friends call me "Ho-Ho".') is a shy skinny proto-nerd (and Huntz Hallclone) who is kidnapped by a carload of pretty gals — Gloria (plain), Didi (airhead), and Sheri (tart) — and taken to their home as a prospective boyfriend for Gertie. Say who? Gertie is an obese nymphomaniac who doesn't like to be called 'Madam' because 'it sounds so dirty, boo-hoo'. (Are we in a brothel of some sort? Don't know.) Fat-mama Gertie desperately wants Ho-Ho to be amorous, so the gals (including Maisie Day, a prunish, washed-up cook and former beauty queen who talks and acts like Ruth Gordon) take turns trying to interest Ho-Ho in the birds and the bees rather than fish. This includes watching home videos of normal people having sex (like Uschi Digard and Johnny Rocco). Trouble is, the gals prove to be too neurotically wacky to screw — indeed, in light of Sheri and Didi's behavior in bed, Ho-Ho's preference for fish actually appears perfectly sensible. Moreover, anytime the word 'sex' is uttered, Gertie comes charging through the door like a rhino in heat! Obscenely clad in a baby-doll nightie, all 300 pounds of her quavering in slow motion, she launches herself into bed like a dirigible gone amuck. In a final touch of delirium, Oddly Coupled (a.k.a. One More Time) keeps flashing to a hallucinogenic scene shot through a fish tank where some lovely naked woman beckons. Ho-Ho's fantasy? Who knows. Just how odd is Oddly Coupled? Its original title was Betta Betta in the Wall, Who's the Fattest Fish of All? That odd."

One must say, the plot as given at SWV sure doesn't correspond to the movie's poster, does it? Also, contrary to one or two online sources, the actress credited as "Betty Blake" in this movie is not the forgotten lounge singer Betty [Ann] Blake(9 Apr 1937 – 19 Sep 2001).

Betty Blake sings

Moon and Sands:

Raquel's Motel

(1970, dir. Unknown)

A.k.a. Uschi's Hollywood Adventure, a title given once she became legendary. But under its original title, which obviously enough was inspired by the name of the then A-list actor Raquel Welch, Raquel's Motel was theatrically distributed by the legendary firm Distribpix.

Speaking of Raquel Welch —

Space-Girl Dance:

As Uschi's Hollywood Adventure, you can get it at Something Weird, where Mike Accomando of Dreadful Pleasures offers the following description of events: "See Uschi French kiss a foot-long hotdog! Gasp in amazement at her gravity-defying pumpkins! Thrill to Uschi and her coital colleague Maria Arnold [a.k.a. Carie South, Tina La Wise, Franki Rider, Marie Arnold, Maria Aronoff, and Maria Jamison] in the climactic group orgy! Gag in horror at the acne-scarred hillbilly stud who wears two different colored socks! This paean to perversity features [...] sex goddess Uschi Digart in another sin-soaked, soft-X bonanza of blazing lust. Uschi is a peek-freak who admits, 'There aren't too many women voyeurs around, but I'm one of them!' She operates a sleazy motel that's 'rigged with secret panels and peepholes'. John, 'a good, strong, sturdy-looking guy', and his new bride Barbara (Mycle Brandy),* check into the motel on their honeymoon. Uschi, nostrils flaring, spies on them as they have a pillow fight then consummate the marriage: 'He was some man. He met her stroke for stroke and she gave him one hell of a ride!' Back in her bed, Uschi wiggles out of her low-cut nightie. She kisses her reflection in the mirror, tweaks her erect nipples, rubs baby oil over her [...]. In no time our newlyweds are crotch-deep in carnality. John goes all giddy over a horny maid (skin flick veteran Maria Arnold). He bends her over a table and skewers her doggie style. While this is happening, Uschi is delivering her own special brand of 'room service' to Barbara. Uschi's Hollywood Adventure(a.k.a. Raquel's Motel) culminates in a 4-way orgy: 'The more the merrier!' If you're a fan of Uschi Digart — and who the hell isn't? — this movie will affect you the same way a full moon affects a werewolf."

*Mike Accomando, like "heystevesteinberg" below, is a bit mixed up here: Barbara is played by Nora Wieternik (a.k.a. Sally Acres, Me Me, Nora, and Paula Principe), while Mycle Brandy, now a "four time stroke survivor", is the bearded dude who two years later played Prince Precious in the classic Flesh Gordon (1974) — you see him in the trailer below. (Nora Wieternik is also there to play Queen Amora.)

Trailer to

Flesh Gordon (1974):

Over at the imdb, back on 8 October 2013 heystevesteinberg shared some childhood memories with us: "I saw this, first run, Times Square in NYC. Before the projectionists got their mitts on this, there was original hardcore action in this movie. I think, like many movies of that specific timeframe, it was released in two versions, one harder than the other. Most of the action in the movie is simulated and as all Uschi fans know, there is no existing footage of her doing anything hardcore, but Mycle's bj scene definitely included hardcore, non-simulated action. Which should surprise no one: she did a ton of h/c stuff in the early 70s. [...] Sexploitation flicks in 1970 and 1971 were pushing the envelope, often shooting two versions, one with h/c scenes and the other, for the adult drive-in circuit, were tamer. [...]"

Score the Filmsays, "This is typical of the era during the transition into hardcore pornography, monotonous simulated sex with strange narration and a groovy soundtrack. This one is better than most in that the visuals aren't as repetitive and it's got Uschi Digard and her jungle drums. I swear those things should be hanging in a museum like the Louvre."

The newspaper clipping above is from Pittsburgh, where Raquel's Motel was paired with the 1972 release Distortions of Sexuality(full movie), another Distribpix picture, written and directed by Gary Kahn (a.k.a. Khan). "Distortions of Sexuality is a serious film. It deals with rape, voyeurism, chronic masturbation, hypnotism. The hardcore sex scenes are explicit in detail, boldly conceived, and visually stunning. An intelligent film for mature audiences has finally been made that meets the standards of a perceptive audience. [One Sheet Index]" The Art Cinema is still around, though it was renamed the Harris Theaterin 1995.

Roxanna

(1970, dir. Nick Millard)

Little known fact: Millard's father, Sam S. Millard, was an early exploitation film distributer/maker and one of the infamous "40 Thieves", alongside illustrious names like Kroger Babb and Dwain Espser (see: Maniac [1934]), "a circle of innovative and money-minded American exploitation film distributors. [Gentle Thug]"

Of Sam S. Millard's movies, the most famous one is perhaps Is Your Daughter Safe?a.k.a The Octopus (1927), a now lost movie that "was one of the earliest exploitation films which contained nudity. A compilation of medical documentary films and stock footage of nude scenes dating back to the 1900s, it was presented as an educational film about the dangers of venereal disease, white slavery, and prostitution. [Wikipedia]" (Notice how, on the advert above, the screenings were segregated by sex.) Other early [also lost] titles he was involved include Scarlet Youth (1928) and Pitfalls of Passion (1927, poster below).

But back to Nick Millard and the original version of Roxanna. Therein, Uschi shows up, un-credited, as the "Lesbian in Gloves" who breaks the heart of the movie's lead actress (Louise Thompson) — watch Uschi put on the gloves directly below.

Scene with gloves:

As odd as it might sound in this contemporary world of direct-to-internet plotless porn, once upon a time porn was considered by some as a radical statement and/or a genre within which artistic statements could be made. Be it the early softcore roughies of Russ Meyer or the later porn chic fluff of "Henry Paris" (i.e., Radley Metzger), some of those involved were talented filmmakers, and others simply wanted to go places where no man had gone before: whether the gay flicks of Wakefield Pooleor the avant-garde heterosexuality of the Amero Brother's Bacchanalle(1970 / scene) or the hippy B&W Thundercrack(1975 / trailer) — the last a film that could easily be mistaken as a Guy Maddinfilm, had Guy Maddin ever made porn — or even the surreal hardcore sex and gore of Hardgore(1976), many filmmakers agitating in the nether regions of the sex film would try (some more often, some less often) to add some art to their product. This is also the case with Roxanna, a depressing, almost anti-sex sex film by the underappreciated West Coast exploitation filmmaker Nick Millard.

Some of Nick Millard's Roxanna

set to Sebastien Tellier's Fantino:

Fantino (2006) VS Roxanna (1970) from Simian Panofsky on Vimeo.

Over at Women In Prisonfilms, the film description they surely stole uncredited from elsewhere also makes note of this: "[...] Roxannais classic softcore in the freaky 70s tradition and unlike most 'modern' pornography, it's void of any hardcore scenes. But while most of the films of this genre and from this decade are basically just fluff, Roxanna stands out with its genuinely unsettling tale of a (possibly) drug-addicted girl (Louise Thompson) who finds more than she expected with her first lesbian encounter. She becomes so enthralled with her experience that when her lover (played by Uschi Digard [...]) leaves her, she finds herself needing to fill the void that's been left. She does this by basically taking her sexual experiences to more and more outrageous extremes. [...] The film ends as it started, with scenes of Roxanna, naked and screaming to herself, tearing out her hair, and evidently locked in a white room that looks very much like it's supposed to represent an institution. She's there because her sexual appetite has gained her nothing, and because of this, she tries to take her own life. This is one of the most unusual films of this nature that I've ever seen. There is no dialogue ever during the movie, only narration; done in a strange 'jivish' beat style, over top of one of the best 70s scores I've heard. The movie is filmed from bizarre angles that only go to accentuate the genuine weirdness that permeates every part of this film. Roxannais basically an artsy porno with morals."

Also on hand enlivening the procedures is cult fave starlet Monica Gayle, whose nubile assets graced exploitation films for around ten years beginning in 1969 and whose career spanned from movies like Paul Hunt's The Harem Bunch (1969), Ed Wood's Take It Out in Trade (1970 / trailer) and Larry Buchanan's Strawberries Need Rain (1970 / a trailer) to Jack Hill's The Jezebels a.k.a. Switchblade Sisters (1975 / trailer) and Gus Trikonis's Nashville Girl (1976 / Monica sings). Like so many of those working in the soft-core biz, she eventually disappeared… for years no one knew what happened to her, but dedicated research reveals that Ms. Gayle-Kern, "a former actress who had television roles in General Hospital, Days of Our Lives and Fantasy Island", currently lives in a section of the Valley previously belonging to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Spread It Around

(1970, dir. Unknown)

Spread It Around is found listed on almost all Uschi Digard filmographies, including the one at what seems to be her own website. What's odd is that she isn't in the movie, at least not in the Spread It Around available at Something Weird, where you can watch a rather entertaining trailer to a movie entitled Spread It Around… Basically, there seems to be more than one movie bearing that title. What a surprise — not.

At Something Weird, in any event, Don the Deviate (who would surely always mention when Uschi is there), makes no note of her in his film description for SW: "A redhead, a brunette, and a blonde decide to spread it around in, yes, Spread It Around. You see, they're unsatisfied suburban housewives who need extra cash. In the end, of course, they become satisfied suburban housewives with plenty of cash. The gals — each looking more delicious than the other — make a valiant attempt at acting and there's some genuinely funny dialogue here, but the show-stopper is the soliloquy by 'Lance the Plumber', who claims to be a Ph.D. in chemistry but who's really, as they might have said in the Seventies, no Olivier." The beautiful buxom gal exploring the limp dicks and dry tacos of the swinger lifestyle in the one-day wonder shown in the trailer is the less renown but equally attractive Malta (a.k.a. Neola Graef).

Has nothing to do with the film —

Brian Collins sings
Spread It Around:

Over at the blog Scorethefilm, as part of his Uschi Digard Needs to Have My Babiesproject, the dude watched the movie and found further inconsistencies, saying: "Here's a 47-minute softcore snoozer from 1970 that has five typically tedious sex scenes, one with the gals and four with each of them balling their doctor, milkman, etc. The girls are attractive and the acting as is you expect but there's one thing missing and that's Uschi Digard, the sole reason for my wanting to see it. [...] I checked out the Something Weird Videosite and they have a movie with this title and accurate description but the trailer is for another movie of the same title and there's no Uschi in that one either."

For that, however, at the imdbHans-56 also watched a movie entitled Spread It Around and, rating the film a 1 out 10. He wrote on 8 October 2010: "[...] Three women can't get enough sex at home, so they jump on every man in sight. This is 1970, so we are talking soft core. And it shows. [...] The acting is awful, the budget super low, the direction is clumsy, the camera-work is jumpy. So, to sum it up: this is a misery on celluloid. I cannot recommend this movie to anyone, with the exception of fans of Miss Digart[italics ours]. But I think even they will be very disappointed, for she did make tastier movies."

Street of a Thousand Pleasures

(1970 or 72, dir. "Clay McCord")

"Clay McCord" is actually William Rotsler (3 July 1926 – 8 Oct 1997). For some odd reason, this film is often (and obviously incorrectly) claimed as Uschi's first film appearance... at best, it might be the first time she's credited on a poster. She is one of the many naked slave girls bouncing around in the movie which, depending on which source you choose to believe, was made either in 1970 or 1972. Street of a Thousand Pleasuresis easily found online at almost every porn film site.

As Harry H. Novak distributed Street of a Thousand Pleasuresat one point, we took a look at it in Part IX: 1972of his career review, where we cobbled the following together:

A.k.a. Arab Slave Market and Dreams. Novak distributes another Rotsler film, this one co-written by "Sam Dakota", who seems never to have done anything else. [Since then, we've come to assume that "Sam Dakota" is actually "William Rotsler".]

Boob GIF:

This movie has the distinction of being mentioned in AMC Filmsite's History of Sex in Cinema: The Greatest and Most Influential Sexual Films and Scenes, where they write: "This was a notorious X-rated sexploitation (called a 'nudie cutie') film from the early 70s [...]. The film's subtitle was: 'There's something in it for everyone.' It also promised: 'A Journey through the Whispered World of Women.' In the virtually plotless movie, American businessman/oil field geologist John Dalton (John Tull), during a trip to the Middle East away from his nagging wife in Los Angeles, rescued Arab sheik Abdul Ben Hassein from an assassination knife attack by shooting the assailant. He was rewarded with a trip to the spectacular 'street of a thousand pleasures,' where he was introduced to the slave market-harem filled with dozens of naked women functioning as sex servants.* He viewed scores of feminine treats with 'Girl-A-Vision' (a hand-held camera presented his point of view from a hands-on perspective, often with enlarged close-ups of body parts). Bodies could be caressed or kissed, and eventually, John had brief sex with a few of the females, including a black belly dancer (Malta**). The film ended with another strike by the Arab assassin, who killed the sheik (having sex) by stabbing him to death, while nearby, John was also having sex. After wrestling with the assassin, John left the Middle East and returned home with a willing American slave."

*[Uschi Digard is the "Busty Slave Girl"; pin-up girl Michelle Angelo is the "Busty Girl with Apple" (the photo of her above comes from a 1968 issue of Playboy); Joyce Gibson a.k.a. Joyce Mandel (10 Mar 1950 – 13 Oct 2016) is the "Busty Girl with Goblet".... "Busty" can be used to describe 97% of all the gals in the movie.]

**[Interesting casting: "Malta", a.k.a. Neola Graef, was a white chick. So either the credit here is wrong or there was a second Malta on the scene back then.]

Flick Attack, which finds "the breast-to-penis ratio is something like, what, 4,200 to 3", says "I have never seen more female nudity in a motion picture than the flesh on parade in Street of a Thousand Pleasures. Hell, I have never seen more female nudity anywhere — motion picture or otherwise. For that alone, you really don't need to read further; just watch it."

The lead "non-Arabic" man of the movie, John Tull, has long since fallen off the face of the earth, but prior to doing so, in 1976 he had a few "assistant director" jobs, including on the disasterpiece Drive-In Massacre (trailer)and, more interesting, on Matt Cimber's The Witch Who Came from the Sea.

Trailer to Matt Cimber's

The Witch Who Came from the Sea:

Take My Head

(1970, dir. Michael & Roberta Findlay)

A surprise to us! According to the imdb and her own filmography at her website, Uschi (supposedly) takes part in a Michael & Roberta Findlay movie — admittedly, one of their most obscure titles in a career full of obscure titles.

"Shot without sound, this is little more than a series of soft-core vignettes strung together via narration. Not a highlight in the careers of NYC sexploitation filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay. [Kodiapps]"

Michael Findlay, as most sleazesters know, died at the age of 39 by helicopter-blade beheading on 16 May 1977. Roberta Findlay only stopped making movies in around 1989; we've only ever seen her 1985 horror movie The Oracle, a poorly made sleazy funfest if there ever was one. Among their early joint projects is the B&W roughie Satan's Bed (1965), a movie remembered now primarily because it features a young Yoko Ono — you even see her in the trailer below.

Trailer to

Satan's Bed (1965):

Take My Head was released by Distribpix— the poster art alone would indicate that, even if the company name weren't there. At their own website, they currently (Date: 9 Jan 2019) have the poster but absolutely no info about the flick.

Interesting here is that like the Findlays, and unlike Uschi (and Maria Arnold), cast members Arlana Blue and Alex Mann (24 July 1941 – 6 July 2010) were active on the East Coast sleaze-film scene, not the West Coast (though Mann did eventually go westin around 1979). Mann's "best" films are probably The Love Captive (1969 / let's dance), Behind Locked Doors (1968 / trailer), the ridiculous Microwave Massacre(1983 / trailer) and the "classic"I Drink Your Blood (1970 / trailer). Arlana Blue, a lithe actress from the early days of NYC sleaze, faded away soon after her few final appearances in sublime sleaze like Bloodsucking Freaks (1976 / trailer), Let Me Die a Woman (1977 / trailer below) and Invasion of the Love Drones (1977 / trailer).

Doris Wishman's classic

Let Me Die A Woman:

But to return to Uschi. Our search of the web dug up only one person who had seen the Take My Head and bothered to write about it, the ever reliable purveyor of porn lor, which he did on 27 July 2011 at the imdb: "The Findlays detoured into all-sex filler with this obscure 1970 porn film which, other than for Michael's purple-prose voice-over, lacks the qualities of their other work. [...] It survives only in fragmentary form on VHS. The 45-minute version I watched does not feature superstars Uschi Digard and Maria Arnold [italics ours] [...]. No matter, the picture as it stands is merely MOS footage of lesbian gropings or Alex Mann groping femmes shot in loop fashion, silent and pointless. It cries out for hardcore, XXX content, which was just around the corner. With scenes presented out of order, even the slapped-on narration doesn't help, as Michael Findlay attempts to create interest via his alter ego commentary. He keeps exhorting Alex to live his dreams, imagine making love to the two lesbians living next door he peeps at, or to have sex with a young woman he encounters out in the snow, with an injured ankle. [...] Level of Michael's writing here is below the campy standards of his best '60s soft porn, for example, telling Alex's character: 'Eat breakfast David, eat as you have never eaten before!' The ingestion here refers to the film's dubious moniker, all about cunnilingus. That's because fully visible simulated cunnilingus on screen was permissible by 1970, not fellatio (the hit Mona [1970 / NSFW] changed all that). The actual humping is as phony as all soft porn, with much full-frontal female nudity provided by the Findlays, but only fleeting shots of Mann au naturel, he generally relegated to 'sex in underpants' mode. Non-content includes a distressingly cheap sequence of thin Nadia (Arlana Blue) belly-dancing for David and then humping him on his breakfast table — strictly home-movie production values. She is later pressed into service as a random lesbian. [...]"

It is entirely possible that an original copy of the film still exists somewhere, walled away in a walled-up closet. Trash film fans, listen to this interview of Roberta Findlayat the Rialto Report and weep...

Love Secrets of the Kama Sutra

(1970, dir. "Raj Devi")

(Trailer) Not to be confused with the "serious" European flick Kamasutra — Vollendung der Liebe, which made it to the US, recut, as Kamasutra — Perfection of Love(1969, poster below). The great soundtrack to that film is by Irmin Schmidt and Inner Space Productions, otherwise known as the Krautrock band, Can.

Soundtrack to

the other Kamasutrafilm:

According to Jason S. Martinko's The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, Love Secrets of the Kama Sutra is a.k.a. KAMA SUTRA '71. At the imdb, however, they are listed as two different films with only a few names in common (John Holmes, for example, but not Uschi Digard). We don't see Uschi in the trailer below, but we do see the great Neola Graef...

Trailer to

Love Secrets of the Kama Sutra:

In any event, Martinko says "Raj Devi" is actually some guy named "Phil Todaro" and the plot concerns: "A young couple with an unhappy sex life visit an Indian guru, and he educates them on the lovemaking described in the Kama Sutra. Different positions are acted out in a series of vignettes. The couple is enlightened and has a graphic encounter with the old Indian's maid before they leave. The screenplay was written by Larry Roberts. Cinematography was done by Stephen Gibson (as Steve Gibson) and film editing was done by Cineatro. Luristan worked as the music supervisor. It was distributed theatrically in the USA by Variety Films in 1970. It was also distributed in the USA as Love Secrets of the Kama Sutra by Compix in 1970."

"Phil Todaro", by the way, was the producer of a variety of obscure New York sleaze films in the 60s, but seemingly retired after producing, as "Phil Todd",the 3-D gay porn flick Manhole a.k.a. Manhold a.k.a. Manholed (1978), the last directorial effort of thesame guy who brought you that trash classic I Drink Your Blood (1970 / trailer), David E. Durston (10 Sept 1921 – 6 May 2010), who is credited in Manhole as director "Spencer Logan").

The guy pictured on the above advert to an Adonis Theatershowing of Manhole is probably one-porn-film wonder Eric Swenson, but the notable name of the movie is DeVeren Bookwalter (8 Sept 1939 – 23 July 1987), who started his film career on the receiving end of Andy Warhol's early short, Blow Job(1963, see below).

An edit of Blow Job set to

The Velvet Underground's
Waiting for My Man:

Manhole also features Jamie Gillis (!) (20 April 1943 – 19 Feb 2010), Zebedy Colt (20 Dec 1929 – 29 May 2004), and Wade Nichols (28 Oct 1946 – 28 Jan 1985) — the last of whom we mention so as to have an excuse to once again embed below his time capsule of a disco song, Like an Eagle.

Wade Nichols as Dennis Parker

singing Like an Eagle

We assume that Martinko's "Phil Todaro", a.k.a. "Phil Todd", is the same person that Bill Landis(1959 – 2008) & Michelle Clifford refer to as "Phil Todero" in their oddly condescending 2002 publication, Sleazoid Express, whom they describe as the "bewigged henchman" of the "bottom-feeder film distributor/exhibitor Chelly Wilson" (25 Dec 1908 – 24 Nov 1994). To share some of their published gossip regarding Todero and Andy Milligan's (12 Feb 1929 – 3 June 1991) movie Vapors (1965):"Chelly Wilson's Variety Films distributed the film. But Phil Todero, who worked for Chelly managing the Eros Theater, got his hands on the print. Todero was a bewigged old queen, a true piece of 8^thAvenue debris who acted as Chelly's front man even while baldly skimming off of her on the side. Todero was so low that, in the 1980s, he was even stealing $50 from each of the Eros's male dancers' pathetic $125 weekly pay envelopes. Andy [Milligan] would fume that Todero made money off of San Francisco showings of Vapors, where it played as a gay cult film through to the mid-1980s. Long before the movie was released on tape, Todero was selling video bootlegs for $100 a copy to film collectors out of the Eros box office."

Andy Milligan's
Vapors:

But to get back to Love Secrets of the Kama Sutra. As perhaps to be expected, the only person who seems to have seen the film and seen reason to write about it is the ever reliable purveyor of porn lor, which he did at the imdb on 8 December 2014:"The fact that KAMA SUTRA '71 was released late in 1970 explains its contents: what would have been a normal storyline porno film has the semblance of documentary footage appended in order to pass for the sex education mantle that was permitted during the early days of public exhibition of XXX features. There is travelogue footage of India, pompous narration about erotic art and ancient texts on the art of love. […] Film proper begins presumably back in La-La Land on the West Coast of our proud nation […]. Main couple of Harry Anderson (John Dulaghan, of The Thing with Two Heads [1972 / trailer] & Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song[1971]) and his wife Grace (Ruthann Lott) peek through the doorways of various rooms, a lame loop-carrier technique so that they can voyeuristically watch folks making love in the various bedrooms and we, the paying customers can see what they see. […] First porn couple features an ultra-busty actress whose technique is still arousing 44 years later, and like some of the other footage was reprised a year later in another junker titled Worlds of Love (1972). […] Back home we witness their unhappy marriage, as the film unsteadily segues into a routine porno soap opera. Grace cheats on Harry with a young stud named Joe (Robert Lott), while Harry's off cheating with his blonde secretary Susie (Ann Perry). Turns out Susie is married to Joe. Later the foursome meet up at an unsettling dinner where the audience enjoys knowing more than Harry does about their actual relationships. A contrived happy ending occurs after we see the Indian girl's big dark nipples for one last time. Naturally the end title reads 'The Beginning'."

As according to the newspaper clipping below, the movie was part of a double feature at the Colony Theater in Schenectady, which had a sad end, and the Oxford, which is also history. The second movie, Temporary Wives— "One's fun... three can kill a guy"— was directed by "Gene Shamblin" and seems lost; check your attic.

Titillated Tex

(1970, dir. Unknown)

The film seems to be lost, but the trailer is still around online, just not on any website we would want to embed from. The traileris definitely NSFW. Despite what some sites claim, it isn't a Russ Meyer movie. DVD Drive-ingoes so far as to say, that the "film [was] apparently unreleased despite the obvious involvement of Harry Novak". Plot? Softcore sex and more softcore sex — including softcore senior sex — and Uschi shot from her best angle... or should we say "breast angle"?

Meandering off to other cast members, Jack Richesin (13 Feb 1917 – 5 Jan 1986), one of the male members, wrote the screenplay to Ted V. Mikels's The Doll Squad (1973, trailer below), which features the great Tura Satana(10 July 1938 – 4 Feb 2011).

Trailer to

The Doll Squad:

The Art of Gentle Persuasion

(1970, dir. Sanford White)

Possibly a.k.a. The Gentle Persuasion. Director "Sanford White" is best known, if at all, as the scriptwriter to William Rotsler's great anti-drug roughie, Lila a.k.a. Mantis in Lace (1968 / trailer further below). Considering Rotsler's penchant for being a jack of all trades and using pseudonyms, we find "Sanford White" a very suspicious name.The Art of Gentle Persuasion is apparently both White's only directorial project and his last foray into film, for he disappeared afterwards. Prior to TAoGP, White wrote and produced Gordon Heller's Free Love Confidential (1967 / poster below) — Heller also ceased to exist after his single film credit.

If we are to believe The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures (Volume 1, Part 1, Page 253), the theme song of The Art of Gentle Persuasion, entitled Sexy World, is sung by "Tushi Grabasso". We figure this movie here a lost film, as so little is to be found about it. Check your attic.

Trailer to William Rotsler's

Lila a.k.a. Mantis in Lace (1968):

Though described as a white-coater by most, TCMhas a plot description — the only one we could find — that doesn't sound very "documentary": "Rolf, a self-assured executive known as 'The Boss,' runs his home and his business by the same guiding principle: 'What's good for the boss — is good for the company.' He dominates an assortment of people, including his wife and domestic servants, his friends, and his business associates, and encourages them to participate in a variety of sexual practices — various positions of sexual intercourse, mate swapping, group sex, lesbianism, anal and oral sex." Uschi is there for the ride, but we know not where.

Marriage American Style

(1970, dir. Unknown)

This soft-core short (c. 37 m), which plays like a less-than-one-day wonder but could well be an eviscerated version of a forgotten longer-length one-day wonder, undoubtedly makes a titular play upon the then-popular anthology comedy TV show, Love American Style (1969-74). It should not be mistaken with the Ralph Rose & Marty Friedman comedy Marriage American Style? (1966), a film so obscure that it hasn't even found its way into the imdb yet.

Full movie —

Marriage American Style?

Over atSomething Weird, Don the Deviate, Ph. D. says, "And how's this for a high concept: Uschi Digard meets the Marx Brothers! Well... sort of. See for yourself in Marriage American Style, a mélange of zany monkey business and madcap mammary merrymaking. Mmmmmm... See Uschi's cunning-Swedish-lingus bring 'Candy Clit' (Donna Young, the scrumptious star of Wild Honey [1972]) to the climactic decision to leave her lug of a husband! See divorce lawyers 'Groucho & Co.' depose their clients in a topsy-turvy hands-on consultation abounding in visual puns! See the six-inch kielbasy! See the Bingo game in the bedroom! And, best of all, see Uschi's delectable double Ds in action!"

According to Sex Gore Mutants, "Marriage makes no sense, has no style and appears to have been made with virtually no script. Direction is perfunctory at best, while performances are game but insanely overbearing. Lighting and camerawork are hideous, and production values are strictly non-existent. The sex is limited in this 38-minute production, with the only real prolonged scenes of flesh being the aforementioned lesbian encounter between Candy and Miss Grunt (Uschi). But, let's face it, the only reason you'd want to watch this mess is for Digard. […] Here, she looks fantastic and those breasts are given a healthy amount of screen time."

The magazine that the boss reads at his desk is the December 1970 issue of Playboy (cover above), featuring centerfold Carol Imhof, and the soundtrack supposedly uses (uncredited) Johnny Pearson's (18 June 1925 – 20 March 2011) Sleepy Shores… which seems odd, seeing that the song was released in 1972.

Johnny Pearson's

Sleepy Shores:

Thaw the Frigid Bird

(1970, dir. Unknown)

Another one-day wonder with no credits in which Uschi has three sex scenes (straight, lesbian and orgy). Once a "lost" movie, it was rediscovered for DVD release. The common plot description: "From 1970 comes the classic erotic title Thaw the Frigid Bird, starring stacked Swedish magazine model Uschi Digard in a tale of what happens when business and pleasure come together. In this office taboo trysts and scandalous sex are the order of the day. Enjoy this vintage film digitally for the first time!"

DVD Drive-In, which only saw the trailer, says Thaw the Frigid Bird is "another graphic sex film with an appearance by She of the Gargantuan Bust, Uschi Digart, the undisputed queen of the Double DDs! It has an unsexy love scene with a nasty bald guy and his 'secretary' on top of a desk, followed by the steamy Uschi bedroom scene where she really gets into it! When was she never into it?! […] It looks ultra-cheap, which is a major plus, and was shot with live sound apparently!"

Trivia: Uschi's female costar, Fifi Watson, played the title character in Mona: The Virgin Nymph (1970), poster above, "the first, theatrically-released, feature-length 35mm 100% hardcore narrative film with an actual storyline — actually a threadbare plot (accompanied by explicit sex scenes) that created the pattern for future porn films of the 70s. [AMC Filmsite]"

Sexual Freedom in Denmark

(1970, dir. "M.C. von Hellen")

A "documentary" a.k.a. Dansk sexualitet, Sensual Freedom in Denmark, and Love and Sexual Freedom. "M.C. von Hellen" was a guy named John Lamb (30 April 1917 – 21 Dec 2006), a.k.a. John Haynes and/or Harry Z. Ross. Lamb's first movie, which he wrote and directed, is the seldom seen Mermaids of Tiburon (1962), which features the great Diane Webber a.k.a. Marguerite Empey (29 July 1932 – 19 Aug 2008), one of the great nudists of all time. She, as Marguerite Empey, was a Playboymagazine's Playmate of the Month twice: first in May 1955, and then in February 1956. (She is also a total Babe of Yesteryear and fond memory of many a post-Baby Boomer.)

The totally unknown music group Islandrocks

uses Mermaids of Tiburon for their video

to the song Freaky Girl:

As a director, John Lamb went "documentary" a total of four times: prior to Sexual Freedom, he took a look at nudism in The Raw Ones (1965 / trailer), and then he later decided to document Sexual Liberty Now (1971 / full NSFW doc) and Sex Freaks (1974 / full NSFW film). But perhaps his most out there movie is the unjustly forgotten head-trip downer, Mondo Keyhole (1966), co-directed by Jack Hill.

Trailer to

Mondo Keyhole:

To return toSexual Freedom in Denmark: according to the abstractto Eric Schaefer's scholarly text Hardcore Education: The Case of Sexual Freedom in Denmark, Sexual Freedom in Denmark"explored the liberalization of censorship in Denmark in the late 1960s while advocating for similar changes in the United States. Lamb used explicit sexual imagery with educational material to promote enlightened attitudes. The film was a box office success and became a popular tool with teachers while paving the way for hardcore movies on American screens."

In Jason S. Martinko's The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, Martinko says: "This was a groundbreaking film when it was released in American theaters in 1969 or 1970. It gives an honest view of the perspectives of sexuality and pornography by Danish people of all ages. In Denmark at the time, there were no censorship laws against any material depicting consenting adults in a sexual manor. It gives an interesting visual history of Greek, Indian and Chinese erotica; a section on different lovemaking positions; a segment on contraceptives and how to use them; a graphic sequence showing childbirth and breeched birth; prostitution; female frigidity; the history of censorship in the USA; a segment about nudist colonies and more."

Like most white-coaters and marriage-manual films, it hasn't aged all that well. Sex Gore Mutantsgets it right by saying, "Freedomis a bizarre relic, an oddly compelling and undeniably amusing throwback to a time when the very idea of pornography worried and offended people. It's impossible in these Internet-savvy times to appreciate how shocking this must've been upon its release, but it holds up as an interesting albeit naïve and overly serious 'documentary' regardless."

Among those featured in the documentary: Rasa von Werder (born 16 July 1945), better-known as Kellie Everts,Miss Body Beautiful of 1969 and Miss Nude Universe of 1969 — that's her above. She was into weightlifting long before it was socially acceptable: "On February 2, 2007 the World Bodybuilding Guild (WBBG) awarded her 'Progenitor' of Female Bodybuilding and in August 2007 inducted her into their Hall of Fame. [Wikipedia]" Currently, she strips for god and runsThe University of Mother of God Church.
The female of film's bookend scenes of a nude couple cavorting like Adam and Eve in nature is none other than: Uschi. Who knows who the guy is... Do you know?

As can be seen by the advertisement above,and as one would naturally expect, Sexual Freedom in Denmark was also screened at one of the many (legendary) Pussycat Theaters, in this case the tenth that was opened (of around an eventual 30 or 40 locations), at 7734 Santa Monica. The chain, originally founded by the underappreciatedDan Sonney (23 Jan 1915 – 3 March 2002) and the legendary Dave Friedman when they bought an abandoned 40-year-old, 400-seat theater at 444 South Hill Street (Fifth and Hill) in downtown L.A. once known asBard's Cinema Theatreand/or the Town Theatre, was eventually taken over by the couple Vince Miranda(15 April 1933 – 3 June 1985) and George Tate a.k.a. George Munton (unknown – unknown). Between 1977 and 1994, at the Pussycat at 7734 Santa Monica, which began its history as the Monica, "the Los Angeles Police Department made 2000 arrests for lewd conduct on the premises". By 2003, it was the last remaining Pussycat after filmmaker Roger Corman saved it "by brokering a deal with an unnamed buyer". It now belongs to Jonathan Cota, who became George Tate's significant other soon after Miranda's death from cancer. Currently, the location is known as Studs at the Pussycatand runs gay porn.

Trivia: When the theater manager of the original Monica got busted for showing "obscene materials" in the mid-60s, he got busted for screening the film above, Stephen C. Apostolof's Motel Confidential (1969 / scene). Plot: "An old Italian dude runs the aptly named Quickie Motel where a variety of customers come for romantic romps, seedy sex and afternoon delights. [Movie DB]"

Trailer to

Dad Made Dirty Movies (2015):

Coming eventually:
Uschi Digard, Part IV: 1971, Part I

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Isle of Darkness / Mørkets øy (Norway, 1997)

February 14, 2019, 2:32 am

≫ Next: Short Film: Supervenus (France, 2014)

≪ Previous: Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part III: 1970, Part II

If there's one thing all city slickers should know, it's that the rural backlands are dangerous. We've seen the proof of that in hundreds, if not thousands, of movies. Whether in the Appalachians, as in Deliverance (1972 / trailer), Tasmania, as in Dying Breed (2008), the Outback of Australia, as in Wolf Creek (2008 / trailer), the backwaters of Ireland, as in Plague Town(2008), the scrubby hills of rural California, as in Necromancyaka The Witching (1972), or on some obscure island somewhere, as in either version of The Wicker Man (1973 / trailerand 2006 / trailer), those picturesque rural hamlets are all pretence, and the inhabitants are out for... something unpleasant. (And if the villagers pray and sing and are oh-so-pious — you know, Republican-like — well, it's your own fault if you stick around.)

It would seem that the distant, outlying but inhabited islands of Norway are no different than the rest of the world, if only a little bit less gratuitously bloody. But it would also seem that Julie (Sofie Gråbøl of The House That Jack Built[2018 / trailer], Alien Teacher [2007 / German trailer], and the original Nightwatch [1994 / trailer]), the Danish heroine of this totally obscure, flawed but surprisingly intriguing and effective slow-burn horror thriller, has never seen a movie like those previously mentioned because she does what no person (much less a single woman) should do: moves, all by her female lonesome, to become a teacher at some remote fishing village somewhere deep within the beautiful fjords of Norway populated by fine if extremely reserved, God-fearing people.

But then, unlike her the viewer already knows that those fine people aren't quite as traditionally upstanding as one might think: the viewer has the advantage of an opening scene of suicide/murder in a church bell tower to the singing of the town choir. But what first appears to be the lead-in for some Harvest Home (1978 / trailer) scenario soon reveals itself to be far less supernatural-based, if not downright anti-church and/or anti-blind faith, and liberally sprinkled with an aftertaste of anti-patriarchy. (Unluckily, much as in real life, patriarchy cannot be stopped.)

How Julie ends up in that picturesque village is, perhaps, the stuff of TV movies — which this movie could possibly be, despite the limited but often unpleasant nudity and sex and violence, including some narratively necessary but nevertheless repellent rape scenes. (Seriously: if for whatever reason you cannot deal with rape scenes, skip this movie.)

But back to how the Danish school teacher Julie ends up in the boonies. Basically, within the course of an afternoon she loses her job as a teacher, catches her boyfriend screwing her coworker gal-pal and, if that weren't degrading enough, that same night she gets turned down by the handsome but gay bartender while drowning her sorrows at some Copenhagen bar. Since work for teachers is so plentiful in Scandinavia, however, she decides to pin the "Teacher Wanted" classifieds to the wall and take the first job that her tossed dart hits — even if it's in Buttfuck, Nowhere (or Norway, as the case may be).

In all truth, the whole pre-isolated island sequence is rather lame, and features some pretty bad acting, but once Julie is on the ferry gliding through the fabulous fjords, the movie gets a lot better and, over the course of events, delivers more than one sucker punch. That said, it also somewhat episodic and slow, with some wonderfully atrocious 90s fashion and style — were any rooms outside of bars and bordellos really painted red back then? — but by the time the movie reaches its moebius strip ending, all is forgiven. (Including the fact that a woman in a coma for around nine months wakes up in makeup and as full-figured as she was when she lost consciousness.)

Actually, as soon as Julie lands in town, sticking out like a sore thumb on a hand with no fingers, there are multiple points where one can only wonder why she doesn't just pack up and leave (especially considering the Scandinavian job market for teachers). But there is her sense of duty as a teacher, all the more awoken by the young teen Solveig (Sina Langfeldt), a girl with budding breasts trapped in an unhappy family situation and chronically mobbed by all her classmates. It is through her that Julie learns that the truth behind some local tragedies — including the suicides of two of Solveig's friends — is something else than the prevailing stories told. Likewise, her itch for the charismatic local pastor, Roald (an effective Paul-Ottar Haga), makes her think twice about leaving, but like that of so many women her choice in men is not praiseworthy. In the end she stays in hope of somehow saving Solveig from the town of religious hypocrites that blindly follow a man with a narcissistic personality disorder surely equal to that of Fjotolf Hansen, nee Anders Behring Breivik — only to make the clasic mistake of not swinging her shovel a third or fourth time (a mistake common to so many horror movies, even after Scream [1996 / trailer]).

Title track to the movie —

Seigmen's Mørkets øy:

Much of the first half of the movie is mostly false scares and unseen threats: Julie faces dangers that prove unfounded (like the ax-wielding town idiot), or is forever unaware that she is not alone in her house. But come the big feel-good scene, in which Julie and Solveig finally bond as only gals can, the veneer begins to fade and the tragic horror and tension begins to increase. The horror of the movie reveals itself as not that of the typical body-counter or slasher, and the bodies — despite the opening scene and known prior deaths — do not exactly fall in great number. The horror of Mørkets øy is far more psychological and sexual, with the focus being far more on the abuse of patriarchal and religious power, the reduction of women (of any age) to sexual objects meant for domination and procreation, and the innate evil of blind faith and obedience. And, lastly, that smiling faces sometimes lie.

We caught the German release of this movie film, entitled Insel der Dunkelheit by chance: it simply lay at the top of our DVD pile. Once upon a time it was also available in English, either as Isle of Darkness or Island of Darkness. Again, Isle of Darkness is far from a perfect movie, but if you like suspenseful European slow burners, it is worth a gander if you stumble upon it.

As for us, Mørkets øy surprised us enough that we're seriously thinking about taking a look, someday, at director Trygve Allister Diesen's subsequent, and surely equally depressing, tale of American country life and social intercourse, Red (2008 / trailer).

Used somewhere in the movie —

Mono's Life in Mono:

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