The Horde (France, 2009)

May 13, 2013, 3:30 am

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Going by this website here, the subtitled version of The Horde that we caught was the French theatrical version. Not that the missing footage really changed our visual experience all that much, other than for the fact that we initially totally missed out on the fact that the invading white dudes were rogue cops out for revenge, something we only discovered ten minutes or so into the film when a badge was finally pulled to show the drug-dealing thugs that they're cops. Indeed, due to the crappy tattoo on the forearm of the skin-headed bearded dude (who one initially assumes is the film's hero) that is so intentionally in the frame when he discovers the dead body of his bearded compatriot, we initially pegged the revenge-driven invaders as a group of French neo-Nazis or some other right-wing racist/fascist lowlife out for retribution for the death of some of their fellow scum. Indeed, considering the racial riots that had occurred in France not all that much earlier than the film's production, the set-up would have made sense. 

But such an obvious political statement is not made in The Horde, though the riots do undoubtedly simmer lightly below the film's real plot. And though racist scum teaming up with minority scum is perhaps a more interesting idea, The Horde instead features rogue cops out for revenge and violent gangsters who shoot just as quickly and can kick butt just as easily. Even then, the film quickly dumps the cops vs. robbers concept for visceral and gore and blood and bullets and zombies and action — served not in ounces, but in gallons. It is perhaps a shame that the film only has one mildly likeable character, but then, since the film at least doesn't shy from having the only truly logical possible ending of the situation as presented, The Horde also has no reason to meet mainstream expectations by having likeable heroes instead of totally fucked anti-heroes. And, hell, some of the anti-heroes are pretty damned cool — the Nigerian über-gangsta Adewale (Eriq Ebouaney of Hitman [2007 / trailer] and Thirst [2009 / trailer]), for example, is cooler than ice cubes on your girlfriend's cherry nipples. 

Still, they are alphatier assholes in this film, one and all, a fact underscored again and again in scenes ranging from a "take no prisoners" killing prior to the zombie outbreak to the later entertainment enjoyed by the senseless torture-as-play of a former neighbour turned zombie, and to the total lack of loyalty among "brothers" and the totally nihilistic ending that basically renders all activity up to that point as unnecessary. The world that The Horde agitates in, even before the zombies rise, is one of human animals, and though little of the world is shown prior to the big night, it is doubtful that the Paris of The Horde truly holds all that much more hope or beauty or anything nice than the hell on earth that breaks out unexpectedly and inexplicitly on the dark night of the narrative.

And out of the blue the outbreak does occur. The first clue is a growling watchdog that, just before the slum building gets locked down, runs out into the darkness only to squeal and become silent. By then the skin-headed bearded dude (Aurélien Recoing of Children's Play [2001 / trailer]) is almost already out of the picture and it looks as if all the cops are gonna die — but then some dead suddenly come back alive pissed as shit and attack. That, and the smoking and aflame cityscape outside the window, reveal that hell has come to earth. (The undead in this film need not be bitten to return, they need simply to die.) An uneasy truce is declared, not unanimously, and the cops and gangstas join forces to fight their way out of the building — never really explaining "to where", as going by what is outside there is no "where" to go to. From there on out, the blood and guts and body parts and bullets go flying and there are a number of nasty knock-down hand-to-hand combat scenes that put this film smack dab into the centre of Adrenalineville. 

The Horde is a bloody, take-no-prisoners film that thrills and entertains and never gives the viewer much time to think or get bored, though it does often give the viewer reason to flinch. For a low budget film, it is notably well made: well shot and edited, every image is framed so as not to waste any space and the art direction captures the filth and scuzziness of the location and people perfectly. Sometimes the filmmakers go a bit over the top (the big scene of a cop atop of a car shooting wildly amongst the encircling endless crowd of dead is less the highpoint that it should be than simply laughable) and sometimes they overdo the nastiness (the previously mentioned torture scene of the dead neighbour is really unpleasant), but the film on the whole exudes so much unbridled energy and testosterone and even anger that it simply bulldozes past anything and everything about which one might complain. It also doesn't really offer anything new to the zombie genre, other than the French language, but for that it still serves the old and familiar piping hot.

As well made as it is, The Horde is nevertheless not a pretty picture, to say the least — so leave the girls and the wimps at home, get together the few guys you still know who don't yet shave their pits and testicles, and pop this film into your DVD player. After that, about the only things left to do to have a real fun film night with dudes is to drink that beer and smoke those joints; and once the film is over, to burp and fart loudly and freely and nod in agreement with the film as you all start to complain how the bitches just can't be trusted...

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R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part III (1973-74)

May 22, 2013, 11:11 am

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Harry Reems
August 27, 1947 — March 19, 2013

On 19 March 2013, Herbert Streicher — better known under his later name Harry Reems — went on to start selling real estate to those taking part in the great porn shoot in the sky.The following is the second instalment of a review of some of the films he was involved in, this time from 1973 to 1974.

Part II of the career review of Harry Reems can be found here.

 

The Female Response

(1973, dir. Tim Kincaid)

Aka Everybody's at It. The directorial début of "Tim Kincaid", born TimGambiani (the bearded dude here to the left), who first entered the film biz as an actor in the forgotten regional film Quadroon (1971) and went on after this R-rated exploiter here to become "Joe Gage", the well-known director of some early classics of hardcore gay pornography, most notably Kansas City Trucking Co. (1976 / full NSFW film), El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978 / full NSFW film) and L.A. Tool & Die (1982 / full NSFW film). As Tim Kincaid, he eventually returned to R-rated exploitation and made such fun, culty stuff as Bad Girls Dormitory (1986 / full film), Robot Holocaust (1986 / Russian trailer), Breeders (1986 / trailer), Riot on 42nd St. (1987 / trailer), Mutant Hunt (1987 / trailer) and the fiasco that is She's Back (1989 / scene) before retiring to get married to Cynthia De Paula and have a couple of kids. He's since divorced and back in the gay porn biz (though we personally hope he one day returns to the exploitation film biz). In regard to his first film, over at Fangoria Kincaid explained the inspiration to the film as follows: "I was sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for my ride to Boston, where I was booked for a couple of weeks of extra/stunt-driving work in The Boston Strangler (1968 / trailer), when I read a New York Times article about the burgeoning soft-porn industry. I instantly decided that was how I'd get my foot in the door as a director." Oddly enough, however, The Female Response is not an X-rated fuckfest, but an R-rated American International Pictures (AIP) exploitation film. Over at Film Score Monthly, member Bob DiMucci says: "The Female Response is a 1973 comedy-drama-exploitation film that has been seen by very few people since its initial release. According to publicity for the film, it's 'a penetrating insight into the sensual needs of women. Shown in documentary style, the film traces the emotional and sexual problems of a group of women, including a legal secretary, a high-priced call girl (Gena Wheeler), a suburban housewife (Raina Barrett), an attractive hippie (Michaela Hope), and a dental hygienist. An important feature of the film is a series of on-the-street interviews surveying public opinions on a number of today’s important questions such as individual attitudes toward today’s morality and sex'." Reems, billed by his birth name Herb Streicher, has a small part as Max.

Fleshpot on 42nd Street
(1973, writ. & dir. Andy Milligan)

 

Roughly 7 Minutes of Fleshpot on 42nd Street:

Aka The Girls on 42nd Street— Harry Reems, credited as "Bob Walters", plays Bob in this mid-career film from Andy Milligan (February 12, 1929 – June 3, 1991) who, as Wikipedia so demurely says, "was an American playwright, screenwriter, cinematographer, actor, film editor, producer, and director, whose work includes 27 films made between 1965 and 1988." He was also a Z-budget auteur exploitation filmmaker whose technically inferior films seldom cause an indifferent reaction. Over at Cinefear they explain: "This film was available in both a nudy [sic] and hardcore version. This is Milligans [sic] take on the Flesh (1968 / trailer), Trash (1970 / scene) and Heat (1972 / trailer) films of Paul Morissy [sic], only better. A very sympathetic portrayal of marginal[s] and prostitutes in the big apple. A young Harry Reems appears under a different name as the sympathetic boyfriend of a girl gone wrong. [...] Anyhow, Neil Flannagen (of Guru, The Mad Monk [1970 / trailer]) steals the show as a drag queen who takes a beating after soliciting a male john unaware of his tricks (sic) true gender. A funny line in the film mentions how 'Irish women are frigid' I guess thrown into the film as a compliment to Andy's mom. I dated Irish before, when they are passionate, you can't beat them, but when they are angry, they beat you!" Over at Sleazoid Express, Michelle Clifford and the dearly depart Bill Landis go into more detail about Reems' part in the film: "[The hooker and main character] Dusty (Laura Cannon) meets a nice guy from Staten Island, Bob (Reems). He's got a 9-to-5 job, and, incredibly, doesn't hold her job as a prostitute against her. He's comfortable with her, and that's what really matters. [...] It's startling to see the human being before Harry became the grotesque, mustachioed, drug-fueled porno poster boy of the 1970s. Harry demonstrates that he could play a low-key, sensitive character as well he could the crazed Nam vet rapist in Forced Entry (1973)." Sleazoid Express continues to explain: "Fleshpot on 42nd Street displays Andy's self-hatred rooted in what he was, where he lived, and the kind of people he spent his life associating with. More than any of his other movies, it's like flypaper for his mental illnesses, as if it were capturing and killing bugs that came out of his skull. As fucked up and uneven as it is, the film remains an affecting portrait of a real-life situation that's soap opera based by nature. Fleshpot on 42nd Street is a half-brilliant, genuinely alienated relic of its time and its maker." In real life, at the age of 62 Andy Milligan died of AIDS on June 3, 1991, at the Queen of Angeles Medical Center in Los Angeles. Broke and without financially solvent friends, he was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Los Angeles.

For the hell of it — Milligan's The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (full film):

 

It Happened in Hollywood
(1973, dir. Peter Locke)

 

Nowadays Peter Locke is a Hollywood producer to be reckoned with, but once upon a time he actually directed three films, all of which have more or less been forgotten: You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You'll Lose That Beat (1971, starring a young Zalman King), this triple-X porno film here, and the R-rated sex comedy Kitty Can't Help It (1975) aka The Carhops. All Movie says that this hardcore comedy here "has the dubious distinction of depicting more sex acts per minute than any such feature to [that] date" and that — like, no duh! — "the movie should not to be confused with the 1937 feature comedy with the same name". Back in 2007, Steven Puchalski had the following to say about It Happened in Hollywood in his great magazine Shock Cinema: "[...] Produced by Screw Magazine founders Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein, this 35mm feature was slightly more ambitious than most mutton-flogging fare [...]. Felicity Split (Melissa Hall) has an overwhelming dream to become a sex-film super-starlet, and she certainly has the enthusiasm for the job (though not the body; she's vaguely cute, but scrawny with flapjack tits). Her boyfriend Elliot (mustache-free Harry Reems) buys her a bidet (that licks her pussy clean) [...]. After convincing talent agent Peter Pull (Marc Stevens) of her skills, the road to adult stardom awaits, and everyone digs Felicity — during a photo shoot, even the make-up girl has sex with her. Her big break comes when she lands the lead role of Delilah in a $4 million Bible-porn epic (which the filmmakers promise will end up in Cannes). [...] Despite its 'Hollywood' title, all of the film was shot in NYC, with much of it at a long-renovated East Village theatre space on East 12th Street and 2nd Avenue. Although slightly kitschier than the usual raincoat-crowd dreck, this is still far, far from any semblance of art. Befitting a Screw offshoot, it boasts a little crude-'n'-weird humor (e.g. a guy cums while on the phone with Felicity, and fake-jism spurts out of her receiver), but even as the ever-smiling Ms. Hall works hard to keep us hard, most of the cast isn't much to look at. [...]."

Radio report on It Happened in Hollywood:

High Rise
(1973, writ & dir. Danny Steinmann)

 

In High Rise, Harry Reems (credited as "Richard Hurt") plays a guy named Herbie. In the days of Porno Chic, hardcore films were actually seen as a springboard to serious above-ground careers— and they sometimes were for those other than the actors, as can be seen by the examples of among others Peter Locke, Alfred Sole and this man here, Danny Steinmann (January 7, 1942 – December 18, 2012), who used to pseudonym "Danny Stone" for High Rise, his directorial début. (Steinmann had also used the name for his "feature-film" début as an actor in 1966 when he played the lead in Hallucination Generation [trailer].) Steinmann's directorial career, however, was marred by difficult productions, re-cut films and projects that never panned out, so his fourth and final film, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985 / trailer) marked his retirement despite its financial success. Steinmann's other two films are also of note: Savage Streets (1984 / trailer) and, as "Peter Foleg", The Unseen (1980 / trailer). High Rise seems to be some sort of overlooked and surreal porno; even Amazon.com praises the movie: "Hilarious and underrated classic telling the story of a girl looking for an apartment in the Big Apple. Top production values [...], with highlights including Harry Reems and a model train set, an extremely erotic lesbian threesome, and a 20-minute climactic orgy featuring the best adult film theme song ever." (The music, by the way, is from Jacques "Jack" Urbont who, among other things, did the theme song to the 1966 Saturday morning Iron Man cartoons.) Over at imdb, andrew-egee from the United States says the movie is "more performance art than porn": "It's light-hearted, sometimes bizarre, and it fails to be pornographic only because its gonzo pop-art style is so distracting. Gonzo pop-art to the point that you could probably play it in the background at a party and keep people more amused and entertained than offended. [...] The underlying message is that life is beautiful, sex is fun, and people are weird-looking but joyous." Also at imdb, sarabay1978 raves: "Surreal hardcore films were not an extreme rarity during the mid 70s. Overnight Sensation (1976), Bacchanale (1970), Visions of Clair (1977 / scene), to name a few, were attempts at making meaningful pieces of art cinema with explicit sex, but there was never anything quite like High Rise. The shoestring plot of a woman (Tamie Trevor, seen above) going apartment hunting and falling into a series of sexual escapades is not the cleverest of plots but it's not the plot which makes this the extreme oddity it is. Danny Steinman [...] crafts a marvelously subversive, impeccably photographed treat. Harry Reems and Jamie Gillis star in the film's first and third vignettes with Reems as a strange child-like toy collector whose room is covered in both American and Confederate flags, and Gillis as yet another misogynistic nut! The minimal script allows for these two underrated thespians to ham it up to their best abilities. Both are hilarious. [...] The music perfectly complements the wonderful photography and adds another dimension to the effectiveness of this film. [...] The movie climaxes in perhaps the strangest orgy ever put on film [...]. Complete with a 7 minute version of the title song (pay attention to the lyrics, they're amazingly cryptic!), boxers, Abbot & Costello posters, Groucho Marx, gurus, psychedelic lights, and weird opticals and eventually being revealed as a massive film within a film (a running gag throughout the entire movie). [...] Suffice it to say, this is a film that should not be missed should an opportunity to see it arise!"

Theme to Iron Man (1966):

Forced Entry
(1973, writ. & dir. Shaun Costello)

Commonly cited as the first film to show a disturbed war vet coming home from Vietnam and flipping out. Harry Reems, credited as "Tim Long", plays the lead psychopath of this uncomfortable movie, the feature-length directorial debut of porn director Shaun Costello, billed here as "Helmuth Richler". Costello went on to a lengthy career (1971-89) in his field, both behind and in front of the camera, and is perhaps best remembered — aside from Forced Entry— for Water Power (1977 / excerpt), an equally infamous porno based on the on the real-life Illinois "Enema bandit", Michael H. Kenyon, who gave female college students forced enemas in the 1960s and 70s; in regard to Water Power, Costello says: "[To] this day I think it's the funniest movie I ever made." (Up until the release of The Avon Dynasty: The Shaun Costello Collection, Shaun Costello had never made a film under his real name. As he put it in an interview at AV Maniacs: "I had never been embarrassed by my connection to the porno industry, but I never advertised it either, and certainly not under my real name. This was the first time I had ever seen my real name attached to any of these films, and although I probably overreacted, I was horrified. Unlike most of the people I knew in the porno industry, I had another life, in another world, and was quite successful at not mixing the two." Not any more.) Forced Entry is a film that gains strong reactions; even Harry Reems seems to have despised it, stating in his autobiography Here Comes Harry Reems that it is the one film he regretted doing. (Oddly enough, Costello says "I hired Herb to play the crazed rapist because I knew him pretty well, and thought he would do a good job, which he did. He was very into this part and worked hard to pull it off.") In the review of the DVD release at DVD Talk, reviewer David Walker says: "If it were possible to give this film a rating of less than zero, I would do it. Do not watch Forced Entry, period. Any questions?" Grindhouse Database, which points out that the film is more of a triple-X roughie than a normal porn flick, has a different opinion, stating: "Overall Forced Entry is one of the more important and relevant films to ever come out of that age of pornography. It's a film that really transcends the time that it was made and might even be more important now than the age it was made. Sure there's a ton of nasty sexual activity in the film but the subject matter and what the movie is actually saying goes way beyond that. But be warned fellow perverts this one is the least boneriffic porn you will ever see, but it is absolutely brilliant and is finally getting the rightful attention it deserves." Cinesploition explains the plot: "Released at the peak of the Vietnam War, it was the first motion picture to use that war as central to its theme. Porn-legend Harry Reems stars as the deranged Vietnam veteran who hunts down young women, brutally torturing, raping and eventually killing them. Forced Entry is a bizarre combination of horror and sado-masochistic hardcore pornography combined in the best Grindhouse tradition. Shocking, disturbing and brutal!" The movie has been loosely remade twice, both times with the same name: the first, a non-porno exploiter from 1975 (trailer), stars Tanya Roberts (of Tourist Trap [1975]); the second, from 2002, is a repulsive straight-to-video violent fuckfest from Lizzie Bordon that landed its filmmakers in jail. The full original version is easy enough to find on the web if you search a bit...

Trailer:

 

The Devil in Miss Jones
(1973, writ & dir. Gerard Damiano)

 First NSFW 7 minutes:

Nowadays, the reigning form of pornographic film is extremely insipid and ruled primarily by HD unnatural, hairless bodies of plastic perfection pumping away tirelessly after the minimum possible setting of a plot situation. (Example: A naked man and woman meet in the bushes of a nudist camp and look in the direction of beyond the camera. She: "Hey! That's my husband with that woman over there!" He: "And that's my wife he's screwing!" She: "Should we get even with them?" He: "Yes. Let's fuck, too." She: "OK." They pump away for 30 minutes.) But once upon a time, in the days of Porno Chic and before the dawn of video, pornography was a bit different. Yes, there were the plotless loops and hand-helpers for the raincoat crowd, but there were also those who saw the sex film as a viable genre with a future and actually tried to make sex an aspect of the film and not the only thing of the film. (Those are the filmmakers that made sex films like this one, in which the plot was integral to the story and the events shown, including the carnal activities that were actually the film's true drawing card.) It was a view shared, if but for a short time, by the press and critics, as can be seen by the serious reviews of films like this one that were found in publications such as Variety ("With The Devil in Miss Jones, the hard-core porno feature approaches an art form, one that critics may have a tough time ignoring in the future") or written by critics such as Roger Ebert ("The Devil in Miss Jones is maybe a three-star dirty movie. It's the best hard-core porno film I've seen, and although I'm not a member of the raincoat brigade, I have seen the highly touted productions like Deep Throat and It Happened in Hollywood.") That the public of the time likewise viewed the porn film as a viable genre can be seen by it reception: as the tenth most successful film of 1973, just behind Paper Moon (trailer) and Live and Let Die (trailer), it earned $15 million at the U.S. box office. Not surprising, actually, that much like films such as Die Hard (1988 / trailer) or Batman (1989 / trailer) have spawned untold sequels and reboots, The Devil in Miss Jones has suffered five screen and/or direct-to-video sequels — The Devil in Miss Jones Part II (1982), The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning (1986 / scene), The Devil in Miss Jones 4: The Final Outrage (1986), The Devil in Miss Jones 5: The Inferno (1995) and The Devil in Miss Jones 6 (1999) — not to mention unofficial remakes such as Erwin C. Dietrich's Was geschah wirklich mit Miss Jonas? (1976) or real remakes like The Devil in Miss Jones (2005).

 Soundtrack:

But let's return to the 1973 version, Gerard Damiano's follow-up to Meatball (1972), in which the filmmaker went a different route and dumped excessive goofy comedy for a serious if not slightly downbeat dramatic plot and ended up creating another acknowledged classic of the Golden Age. (Roger Ebert: "The hard-core stuff aside, they maintain a very nice, moody, even poignant atmosphere that's a relief after all the frantic fun-seeking of Miss Lovelace and colleagues. [...] This is the first porno movie I've seen that actually seems to be about its leading character — instead of merely using her as the object of sexual variations.") The plot, as explained on numerous websites: "Justine Jones (Georgina Spelvin), a spinster in her early thirties takes her life-not because of anything that happened to her but rather because nothing ever happened to her. Each day a void, a nothingness, piled up on the nothingness of the day before. Confronted by the devil (John Clemens) and faced with spending an eternity in hell, she imposes the hypothetical premise: If I had my life to live over, I would live a life filled... engulfed... consumed by lust!!! This sets in motion a series of erotic encounters that reach far beyond the range of human experiences-an in-depth study of sexual behavior that transcends the norm and blooms into a true from of erotic art." They fail to mention the rather depressing and ironic ending of the movie... Harry Reems appears as "The Teacher", the man who helps school Miss Jones upon her return to earth.

Trailer to the remake (2005):

 

Fast Ball
(1973, dir. "Tim Davies")

 

One for the raincoat crowd, with Harry Reems (credited as "Jim Greos") as the main penis; penis number two was played by "Frank Wixon". Director "Tim Davies", aka "Tim Hayes", made a total of six sex films in 1973 — including this one — before falling off the face of the earth (the other films being Round Robin, Redliners, Head Nurse, Head Set and Quick Turnover). In truth, however, both Tims are actually two more pseudonyms of Leonard "Lenny" Kirtman, who usually used the pseudonym "Leon Gucci". Among the numerous projects that he produced or directed are the horror schlupp-schlupp-spurt-spurt flicks Erotic Dr. Jekyll (1976), Sex Wish (1976), The Devil Inside Her (1977 / scene / full NSFW film) and Unwilling Lovers (1977 / scene / full NSFW film), as well as the grindhouse horrors Carnival of Blood (1970), Curse of the Headless Horseman (1972) and Death by Invitation (1971 / trailer). The poster of Fast Ball infers a sports sex film ("She had a nice curve and a fast ball", "No one ever struck out" and "She could handle more than one ball"), but One Sheet Index offers a different plot: "This is the true to life story of a young and beautiful girl (Andrea True) who runs away from her home and her middle class parents, in search of excitement and adventure in a motorcycle gang. Worried, her parents hire a private investigator to track her down. He follows her through the city for several days and secures a film and tape record of her sexual adventures with the leader of the motorcycle gang ("Jim Greos", aka Harry Reems). Love is rough for the young girl. She discovers that her boyfriend is intimately involved both with her and her roommate (Darby Lloyd Rains). In a fit of jealousy, she decides to seek revenge by sleeping with the gang leader's brother (Frank Wixon). That night the leader and her roommate discover the two of them making love and what ensues was a scene that you will not soon forget."

From Leonard "Lenny" Kirtman, without Harry Reems — Trailer to the Carnival of Blood and Curse of the Headless Horseman double feature:

Carnival of Blood plus Curse of the Headless...von bmoviebabe



Head Nurse
(1973, dir. "Tim Davies")

 

A one-day wonder for the raincoat crowd, with Harry Reems and Andrea True. Director "Tim Davies", aka "Tim Hayes", made a total of six one-day wonders in 1973 — including this one — before falling off the face of the earth (the other films being Round Robin, Redliners, Fast Ball, Head Set and Quick Turnover). In truth, however, both Tims are actually two more pseudonyms of Leonard "Lenny" Kirtman, who usually used the pseudonym "Leon Gucci". Once again, One Sheet Index knows the score: "Doctor Millstein decides to hire a new Head Nurse. He selects Carol, a young naive trainee who has just arrived from the country. Carol does not understand his techniques when he asks her to undress. He gives her a thorough physical— oral, anal and genital. She finds it strange and pleasurable at the same time. Carol feels that this must be part of the job. She is witness to many strange scenes. She sees Dr. Rogers making love to a corpse. [!!!] She sees Dr. Millstein making love to test tubes. She is sent for further training with the nurses and gets involved in lesbian scenes. Now she is ready to meet her patients. As she goes from patient to patient, she realizes more to nursing than meets the eye."

Andrea True Connection's 2nd "hit" — NY NY You Got Me Dancing:

Filthiest Show in Town
(1973, dir. Richard & Robert A. Endelson)

Aka The Naughtiest Show in Town, The Sexiest Show in Town, and The Wickedest Show in Town. The début film of the bros Richard Endelson and Robert A. Endelson, to quote Rob Craig in his book Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan, "[...] is one of the earliest examples of the 'omnibus' or 'pastiche' film, wherein short comedic sketches with a loosely-based theme are surrounded by a framing device which (theoretically) ties them all together. [...] The basic premise in Filthiest Show in Town is that a risqué television network, 'National Genital Television,' is raided and brought to trial on obscenity charges [...]." Perhaps this film once existed in an X-rated, in-out-in-out-in-out version, but the version available now on DVD or online is strictly soft-core: lots of frontal nudity of both sexes, no action. At Rovie, Clarke Fountain seems only to have noticed the main show of the omnibus: "This low-budget soft-core pornographic satire actually has more story than porn. The story concerns the obscenity trial for a pornographic game show ['The Maiden Game']. The contestants, who appear in skimpy underwear, choose to date one another based on the answers they give to various erotic questions. Harry Reems and Dolly Sharp are among the more-or-less clothed porn luminaries who appear here. The film is to a certain extent a satire of the dating game shows of the time." Video Vacuum complains "[The] Filthiest Show in Town is essentially a porno movie without the porn. Even the worst pornos with the worst plots and the worst acting have SOME decent XXX action. But with this film, you have to sit through all the plot stuff and horrid acting without the benefit of being rewarded with hardcore footage. [...] Most sex comedies are filled with double entendres, but this movie can't even muster a single entendre. Heck, it's more like a half entendre. There are also some commercial parodies sprinkled throughout, but again, none of them are funny. There are some stretches where the film feels like a Kentucky Fried Movie (1977 / trailer) rip-off. Minus the laughs, of course." Richard and Robert A. Endelson went on to do one more film together, a forgotten "grindhouse classic of racism, rape and revenge" entitled Fight for Your Life (1977) which, to quote Blue Underground, is "one of the few movies to ever drive even the most jaded 42nd Street audiences into uncontrollable frenzy. This is the story of three escaped convicts (led by William Sanderson of Blade Runner (1982 / trailer) as the sickest psycho redneck in cinema history) who take a middle-class Black family hostage for a relentless nightmare of racist humiliation, sexual violence and extreme vengeance. No sleazehound who's seen it can ever forget Fight for Your Life!"

Trailer to Fight for Your Life:

 


Over Sexposure
(1973, dir. "Vance Farlowe")

AKA Spikey's Magic Wand and Different Strokes. OK, we admit the following is mostly conjecture and we here at A Wasted Life have no proof, but the loose strings do seem to tie a possible bow in our eyes — please feel free to send us info confirming or disproving our conjectures. 

Anyone out there know the writer John Warren Wells? During the 1970s he wrote a number of "non-fiction" books on sexuality in the United States with such swell titles as Beyond Group Sex, The Wife-Swap Report, Three Is Not A Crowd and Different Strokes or How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie. Interesting books one and all, if dated, and all well-written — which they should be, considering that "John Warren Wells" was/is actually Lawrence Block. Of the last book mentioned, Different Strokes, the eBook afterword says: "Let me begin by telling you, Gentle Reader, that the book you just read, the script and production diary of the 1970s film Different Strokes, is nothing but a pack of lies. No such film was ever produced, and all the engaging characters, the acts they perform and the sparkling conversations they conduct, are wholly fictitious, the products of the fertile if warped imagination of one person." Oddly enough, however, he also says that he actually held production meetings with a director and producer and wrote a script and held a casting call with the projected starlet — no one less than Andrea True — during which they watched some of her fuck films, but that later, "somewhere along the line, everything seemed to stall out." And while the film Block wrote, as far as he knew, never got made, he still wrote the book about it as if it had been made: "And so I finished the book. Did I make any changes in the screenplay? I have no idea, but my guess is that I used it exactly as I'd written it. Then, of course, I had to write the production diary, but that was easy enough. It was fiction, and I’d been writing fiction for years."
So what's all that got to do with Over Sexposure? Well, Over Sexposure, the director of which is theoretically unknown, is also known by the name Different Strokes, while in Harry Reems's biography he mentions that he made a film named Spikey's Magic Wand, directed by "Vance Farlowe", that upon its release was renamed Different Strokes. And some on-line sources claim that Spikey's Magic Wand is the original name of the German-language porno film entitled Dr Snake und die Geilen Baby Dolls("Dr Snake and the Horny Baby Dolls"), which is easy enough to find on the web. What we notice is that all films were released in 1973 and feature many of the same names (Jamie Gillis, Marc Stevens, Harry Reems, Cindy West, Georgina Spelvin and Andrea True) and, furthermore, the picture of the blonde babe on the poster of Different Strokes is taken directly from Dr Snake und die Geilen Baby Dolls. Could they all be one and the same film — and possibly be based on John Warren Wells's original script, entitled Different Strokes? Who knows — regrettably, while we have many of John Warren Wells's books, we don't have Different Strokes or How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie, and though we've seen snatches of (and in) Dr Snake und die Geilen Baby Dolls online, we have no access to the others for comparison. In any event, one flaw to our conjecture is that the films also seem to all have different plots — but who knows, maybe one or the other or all were once upon a time based on Lawrence Block's original porno script, Different Strokes.

The German dub of Spikey's Magic Wand ("Dr Snake und die Geilen Baby Dolls"), which one German site claims is one of the weirdest of all times, tells the following tale: "Dr Snake no longer can get it up! At least that is what his wife thinks, so she goes for the chauffeur. In the meantime, the Doc prefers to get it on with his naturally horny secretary and invents a sex machine that enables multi-ultra-turbo orgasms." In turn, according to Something Weird, the English version of Different Strokes aka Over Sexposure aka Spikey's Magic Wand tells the following story: "In one corner, you've got Bernie, an Afro'd twerp who looks like the lost fourth Hudson Brother. In the other corner is Charles (Rick Lutze), a chuckling muttonhead with a bad Prince Valiant hairdo(n't) and his slutty almost-Asian wife. After a bout of rise-fuck-and-shine, Bernie splits for Charles' house where he works as Charles' wife's agent (she's a screenwriter — oh, sure) and, of course, he's screwing her right under Charlie's nose. But Charles is too busy to notice 'cause he's laying pipe to Jennifer West, the only member of his acting class (!) which is apparently held in his living room. The whole elaborately stupid scheme is, er, blown wide open when Charles and his wife stumble upon Bernie conducting a cavity search on the acting student. Charlie's wife confesses to boning Bernie, and he makes her eat out the wanna-be starlet. This is some kind of solution, I guess." For those of you who speak German, the NSFW Dr Snake und die Geilen Baby Dolls can be seen for free here.

The Collegiates
(1973, dirs. Robert Josephs and Carter Stevens)

Written by "Merry Seaman"; director Carter Stevens, born Malcom Stephen Worob ("a chubby Jew boy from New Jersey", to use his own words), worked on both side of the camera (in a variety of positions and under a variety of names) but retired in the early 1990s. His early films like this one were generally light-hearted affairs, but by the 80s he was pretty much a specialist of S&M and B&D. He also directed the horror porn House of Sin (1982), appeared in the Italo-sleaze film Blue Nude (1977 / soundtrack), and was the publisher of one of the most popular S&M publications in the US, The S&M News, by the time he was forced into retirement by bi-pass surgery. According to the interview with him at Cinefear, he never planned to become "an adult film maker": while trying to break into the industry with a "legit" exploitation film, he met Terry Levene from Aquarias releasing — the man that brought Dr. Butcher MD (1980 / trailer) to the US — who told Carter that he would release any X-rated film Carter would make no matter how bad, so Carter gave himself a crash course in porno films ("I went out and saw about a dozen pornos in about 3 days") and went and made The Collegiates on a budget of $17,000. The rest is history, as they say... Over at SexGoreMutants they saw the film (which is currently available on a variety of DVD collections) and say: "Opening with twee music, we watch pretty and demure student Georgia (the superbly named Tanya Tickler) return to her student residence after the summer holidays. Upon her arrival, she walks in on housemates Kathy (Kim Pope) and Leslie (Bertha Jones) enjoying cunnilingus from a very willing Lexington (Harry Reems). Georgia disapproves and refuses Lexington's invitation to join in, instead retiring to masturbate in bed while the other three continue to fuck. Georgia, her housemates inform Lexington, is a very uptight virgin. Not for long, if this three have anything to do with it! That's it story-wise, but the film doesn't need much more to fill its tight 58-minute running time. The sex scenes are well lit and surprisingly tender, taking their time to unfold before reaching their reasonably well-captured money shots. In-between, we get an unexpected amount of decent acting, witty dialogue and even some artful camerawork." The soundtrack was written and performed by the Manchester group Sweet Chariot and Friends. The full film, by the way, can be watched online right here.

Carter Stevens talking about making porn:

 


The New Comers
(1973, writ. & dir. Lloyd Kaufman as "Louis Su")

 

Aka Seven Delicious Wishes. Even Lloyd Kaufman had to start somewhere. Actually, he had some other non-porno credits before this, but just before he founded Troma, he ran into some financial difficulties due to his mega-flop third directorial effort Big Gus, What's the Fuss? (1973) and, alongside various other projects under his real name, popped out three X-rated features to kill his debts. (Aside from The New Comers, he also made The Divine Obsession [1976, also as "Luois Su"] and Sweet and Sour [1974, as "H.V. Spyder"].) As is often the case with sex films of that time, despite serious attention — Variety even gave The New Comers a review — the movies have been forgotten, if not buried, and little information can be found about any of the films online. But over at One Sheet Index, they have the original press packet, which states: "From the great show biz legacy that gave us Sound of Music (1965 / trailer), Hello Dolly (1969 / trailer), arid [sic] Irene (1940), comes The Newcomers, the first musical comedy of its kind. A compelling story of young, innocent love is intertwined with a socially significant discussion which explores the question of legalized prostitution. This X-rated musical comedy features an original score and was photographed in 35mm Eastman-color. X-rated Super-Stars Georgina Spelvin, Harry Reams, Tina Russell and Marc Stevens head the unusually large cast of talented young performers, who sing, dance and frolic their way into the hearts of mature men and women everywhere." Assuming it is truly a musical, then it beat the film commonly given as the first porno musical, Bud Townsend's much better known Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy (1976 / trailer) by a good three years. As is perhaps appropriate for a porno musical, the film also features the forgotten penis of "Davey Jones", seen above to the left, whose similarity to a specific member of The Monkees named Davy Jones has caused some to insist that the latter made a sex film or two.

 
The full version of the film that made Kaufman go porno, Big Gus, What's the Fuss? (1973):

 


Case of the Full Moon Murders
(1973, dir. Sean S. Cunningham and Brud Talbot)

Aka The Case of the Smiling Stiffs and Sex on the Groove Tube. Cunningham's third directorial effort and follow-up to The Last House on the Left (1972 / trailer), which he only produced. He co-directed this flop with Brud Talbot. Cunningham we all know about, but Talbot is a dead and forgotten man; born Joseph Bruce Talbot (19 Sept 1938 - 20 Nov 1986), he had previously acted in forgotten low budget dramas like Force of Impulse (1961) and Without Each Other (1962), and went on to act as a producer of the great 3-D western Comin' at Ya! (1981 / trailer). According to Robert Firsching at Rovi, "Looking for a project after producing the successful Last House on the Left, genre filmmaker Sean S. Cunningham took on Brad Talbot's idea of filming a softcore sex comedy in Florida. When the money disappeared, Cunningham was left to finish the project on his own, and its troubled production is evident in every painfully unfunny frame." The Case of the Smiling Stiffs was pretty much a flop everywhere except in Australia, where it was supposedly a hit. It got re-released with hardcore inserts but didn't do any better; currently only the soft-core version is known to have survived. Harry Reems plays the reporter Silverman, who actually solves the case, and for a change we never see his weenie. The porn site 3X Updateexplains the plot: "A man's body is found, the victim of a female vampire who doesn't go for the neck... [...] An arresting tale that bares investigation! For the past four months, the city of Miami has been plagued by a mysterious string of murders, occurring after each full moon. Each corpse is male, and has been found in bed with a huge grin on his face. Unlike the case of Dracula, who drained his victims from the neck, these victims are drained from a more discreet part of the body. The police department and the two zany detectives, Joe (Fred Lincoln) and Frank (Ron Milkie of Torture Chamber [2012 / trailer], Satan's Playground [2006 / trailer], and Friday the 13th [1980 / trailer]) that are called in to investigate, are baffled. Joe and Frank, along with Silverman (Harry Reems), a reporter, begin a thorough investigation. No stone remains unturned in their search for the killer. Their dedication to finding the culprit gets them involved in orgies, parties and strip poker games, in which they become participants — but only 'in the line of duty'!" Sheila Stuart stars as Emma, the female vampire who makes the men very happy as she sucks out their blood.

 
Scene from Case of the Full Moon Murders:

 


College Girls
(1974, director unknown)

Little is known about this film; even its distributor, DistribPix, is unable to supply the name of the director or stars in its list of productions — unlike the less-than-reliable iafd, which supplies no director but claims that the movie stars Harry Reems, Dolly Sharp and Darby Lloyd Rains. Oddly enough, however, DistribPix did list the same three stars on their blog on 15 February 2010 when they claimed the film was going to the lab to be transferred for future DVD release, but since then they have been silent and no new news has appeared. The poster above goes to the original film... which shares the title with another grindhouse piece of flotsam from 1968, College Girls (poster left), a B&W sexploitation comedy by the sadly overlooked and minimally talented director Stephen C. Apostolof.

 NSFW trailer to Stephen C. Apostolof's College Girls:

COLLEGE GIRLS sex comedy sexploitation 1968...von chikungfu

Apostolof, the well-informed might know, made his directorial début as "A.C. Stephen" with the Ed-Wood-Jr-scripted Orgy of the Dead (1965 / intro) and then went on to work with Wood on at least seven more known projects: The Class Reunion (1972), Drop Out Wife (1972), The Snow Bunnies (1972), The Cocktail Hostesses (1973), Five Loose Women (1974 / trailer / full film), The Beach Bunnies (1976) and Hot Ice (1978). According to TCM, the plot to Apostolof's College Girls, which was distributed by Sack Amusement Enterprises (a now-defunct, once white-owned Texas firm which has its place in film history as once being the major distributor of "race films"), is as follows: "Behind the ivy-covered walls of an American University, students pursue a variety of erotic activities. Professor Bryce (Sean O'Hara) prefers sex 'research' to teaching biology; no female student ever fails his course. Rosie and Fluff (Gee Gentell) take charge of initiating the virgin Wistful (Randy Lee) into Lamba Sigma Delta (LSD) fraternity. At the celebration that follows, inhibitions are released with a variety of stimulants. Harry (Moose Howard), a roughneck football player, rapes Janie (Dianna Rosano), who is comforted by Prof. Bryce's lesbian wife (Michelle Rodan). 'He-Man' Charlie (Forman Shane), head of the fraternity, Class president, football hero and playboy, downs too many LSD tablets and attempts to fly off the balcony. He awakens in a doctor's office and swears off drug-induced excitement." The plot of DistribPix's College Girls is as unknown as the film's director.

Logo for ''Sack Amusement Enterprises'' (1939):

 


Pleasure Cruise
(1971, 1973 or 1974, dir. Don Lang and/or David Sear and/or Phillip Bojalad)

Another film of mystery featuring Harry Reems. There is an 18-minute version of it over at Hot Movies, but originally it seems to have been about an hour in length. As can be seen by the pictures at Hot Movies, the basic plot seems to be that people on a boat and screwing. As normal, its original distributor, DistribPix, is unable to supply the name of the director or stars in its list of productions (much less a plot description) — unlike the less-than-reliable iafd, which offers no plot but does list the film's fuckers as Harry Reems, Steve Blackwell, Andrea True and Sandy King. They also list "Don Lang" as the director, whereas the Copyright Encyclopedia lists him as producer and David Sear as the director; Sear also directed in Reems in Ape Over Love (1974). In turn, One Sheet Index lists the totally unknown Phillip Bojalad as the director, and the poster they have lists (as does the imdb) a "Donna Martine" as being in the movie, a name that we couldn't find anywhere else. Something Weird has a film under the same title, but it is doubtful it is the same film as it does not seem to feature Harry Reems or Andrea True or even a single Afro-American actor, which is what Steve Blackwell is, and the massively mammaried brunette shown at Something Weird is nowhere to be seen in the photos at Hot Movies. (Also, over at imdb, in lor of New York City saw the Something Weird release and categorically says that the film is "a regional porno film made in Tennessee [with ...] no relation to the Harry Reems / Andrea True movie of the same name.") But to offer up the only plot description we could find (at One Sheet Index) of the Reems/True movie: "The Captain and his wife had a good thing going. They rented out their 50-foot Pleasure Cruiser on a daily basis for a good fee. However, when they rented their boat to two young and beautiful girls, they got more than they bargained for. No sooner did they leave the dock then the girls turned the cruise into a sexual orgy that burns up the ocean. The captain is liberal enough to close his eyes to what is happening between the girls and his crew. However, when they all decide to have a picnic on a deserted island, and the Captain's wife goes with them, he gets a little nervous. Then he decides that they have been gone to long. So he swims ashore to check things out. What he finds is that his wife is the leader in the sexual daisy chain that makes the party on the boat look tame. He goes berserk and destroys them all to teach them that pleasure can be carried to far."

A Touch of Genie
(1974, writ. & dir. Joseph W. Sarno)

Harry Reems plays "Himself" in this X-rated fantasy comedy from the legendary (s)exploitation filmmaker and producer Joseph W. Sarno, the auteur who brought the world such trash classics as Sin in the Suburbs (1964 / 5.5 minutes / full film), Flesh and Lace (1966 / scene), Moonlighting Wives (1966 / trailer / full film), The Bed and How to Make It! (1966 / opening titles) and the early X-rated classic Inga (1968 / opening credits). Jason Russell, the then-husband of porno legend Tina Russell (who's in the film) and former working penis, "conceived" the plot: a riff parodying the classic TV show I Dream of Jeanie (1965-70). A Touch of Genie was long thought lost, but it recently resurfaced and is now easy to find on DVD. Movie House says "Not only is this film from the classic era of hardcore and stars all the biggest names from 70s porn, but it is hilarious and professionally assembled. This is one of Sarno's favorite films, and for good reason. He combines Yiddish theater humor from his childhood, a spoof of a popular TV show, and hardcore performers to create something that has to be seen to be believed. I couldn't decide if the comedy shtick or the sex was the best part of the film. This is a romantic comedy, and has an appropriately happy ending, but the getting there was all of the fun." Mondo Digital seems to share the general opinion, and says. "[This] is an obscure, presumed-lost oddity from Joe Sarno from his brief goofball comedy period in the mid-'70s, and the end result mixing porno chic culture with rib-nudging Jewish humor resembles what might happen if some nutcase grabbed a colorized print of Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960 / trailer / full film) and reshot random scenes with actual sex. The performances and direction are all over the top, to say the least, and it's a grin-inducing reminder of a time when people treated this genre like any other." The plot? Let's go to 3x Update for that: "Poor Melvin! His meddling mother is making him nutz. His only relief is the covert afternoons he spends at New York's notorious Times Square porn theaters. One day, Melvin discovers a genie in a bottle (Chris Jordan). What does he wish? To become his favorite adult superstars and indulge in wild sexual adventures with the sexiest women of the silver screen. Starring Doug Stone as Melvin Finkelfarb and Ultramax — the First Lady of New York Porn! — as his Yiddishe mama." While it lasts, the x-rated cut of A Touch of Genie can be found here.

Trailer:

 


The Love Witch
(1974, dir. Mort Shore)

Here's a forgotten burlesque that seems to have gotten a DVD re-release at some point with some exceptionally deceptive packaging (see left). And though a hardcore film, Harry Reeves is one of the two non-sex performers of the film, playing multiple parts: The Judge, the District Attorney and the Sheriff. Seeing that the framing story of the film concerns a man on trial for obscenity, Reems' casting is obviously a direct reference to his court troubles after Deep Throat(1972). The other non-sex performer who plays the defendant on trial, in an odd case of serendipity, is no one less than Gus Thomas aka Ralph Carl aka Robert Bell, who was an active cocksman from 1972-75 and appeared in such films as It Happened in Hollywood (1973) and High Rise (1974): Thomas, whose real name is Marc Suben, is now the District Attorney of Cortland County, NY, and — needless to say — regrets his porno past. According to imdb, the real name of director "Mort Shore" is "Morton Schwartz", but under either name he seems to have only made this film before falling off the face of the earth. According to one German-language website, which says that one should not expect a forgotten classic when screening this film, Harry Reems does all the talking in the film as a voiceover and all money shots are emphasized with TV Batman (1966-68) pop art interjections like "ZAP!", "POW" and whatever. The courtroom material seems to have been added later to the hardcore material, some of which is shot neither on a boat nor in an ocean, so The Love Witch could well be an example of the old trick of making a "feature film" from remnants; if so, the raincoat crowd was probably a bit put out by Reems's speeches about freedom of speech and artistic liberty. Over at imdb, pbutterfly of the United States seems to have liked the movie: "This movie is about people getting it on and having a good time on a boat called The Love Witch. It all feels very natural, and there is no privileging of male pleasure, nor is there an objectifying camera. The sex is shot from a neutral angle, and is mostly full-body. The text emphasizes sexual expression without making any judgments about women, and the sex scenes are interspersed with courtroom scenes in which Harry Reems [...] pleads the case of sexual freedom, playing several characters against creative avant-garde painted backdrops. The plot is structured almost like Dante's Inferno, in which Harry Reems takes the judge to the boat to witness these sins of mortals, and they debate as to the moral or immoral character of the sex they are witnessing. In all cases, sex is seen as positive and fulfilling, and so the message to the audience is to release themselves from the shackles of morality and repression, and enjoy their bodies. A very 1970s take on sex, both refreshing and political."

Deep Throat Part II
(1974, writ. and dir. Joseph W. Sarno)

 Deeper and Deeper, from the soundtrack of Deep Throat II
(written by Tony Bruno and M. Kupersmith):

Every successful film begets its sequel, and this one is soft-core; four more hardcore "name-only" sequels followed eventually, none of which — unlike this one here — featured either Linda Lovelace ("I'm just a simple girl who likes to go to swinging parties and nudist colonies.") or Harry Reems. As far as we can tell, Deep Throat Part II is the first film that Harry Reems made with Sarno (DPII came out in February 1974, A Touch of Genie in May). To ensure an R-rating, the film was made soft-core, but the English-language version in general circulation seems to be missing even the non-graphic sex scenes (you have to get the Italian version to see them). The primitive editing of the film has led to the rumor that the film was originally shot as a triple-X film and then re-edited and the sex scenes lost, a rumor director Sarno negated in interviews. Whatever the case may be, the final film that was released was described by a critic at Variety as "the shoddiest of exploitation film traditions, a depressing fast buck attempt to milk a naive public". A.V. Club doesn't have a higher opinion of the film, either, saying: "[...] The acting is terrible and the 'wacky' comedy excruciating, but the biggest problem with Deep Throat II is that it's such a blatant, ill-conceived cash grab. Even though the title Deep Throat had become a household name, there were still communities that wanted nothing to do with it. The R-rated sequel was pitched to a wider market, but Sarno's producers still met resistance from the heartland — and annoyance from pornhounds, who had no interest in watching Lovelace and Reems not have sex. [...] Deep Throat II definitely seems to be missing something — besides entertainment value, of course." 

AV Maniacs, on the other hand, sees the film succeed on a bad-film level: "The film is quite interesting as a curiosity item. It's not a good movie, and the comedy in it is pretty mundane (save for Reems and Gillis, who are always reliable and always entertaining), but the sheer weirdness of it all helps the film, much like it did in Linda Lovelace for President (1975 / scene / another scene)." The plot? Over at Rovi, Mark Deming seems to have seen the "antic ribald comedy": "A well-meaning nurse finds herself targeted by a handful of would-be espionage agents in this oddball adult comedy, an in-name-only sequel to the most infamous porn film of the 1970s. Nurse Lovelace (Linda Lovelace) works for Dr. Young (Harry Reems), a high-strung sex therapist with an outsized erotic appetite. The equally libidinous Lovelace often helps the doctor as a surrogate, and she finds herself quite taken with one of their clients, Dilbert Lamb (Levi Richards of Radley Metzger's Naked Came the Stranger[1975 / DVD trailer] and Doris Wishman's Come with Me My Love[1976 / trailer] and A Night to Dismember[1983 / trailer / full film]). Lamb is a nerdy computer expert who is frightened of women but attracted to his straight-laced Aunt Juliet (Tina Russell), and Lovelace is working with him to resolve his anxieties about the opposite sex. But Lovelace is hardly the only one interested in Lamb; he's been working with the government on the development of a new supercomputer, and he's being followed by a handful of inept Soviet agents led by Sonya Toroscova (Chris Jordan), a CIA operative (Jamie Gillis) and his dim-witted underlings, and Ken Wacker (David Davidson), consumer advocate and political gadfly. As Lamb becomes the focus of an underground manhunt, Lovelace becomes a pawn in the game, and might be in grave danger if anyone involved knew what they were doing. [...]."

 La La Linda from the soundtrack of Deep Throat II
(written by Michael Colicchio):




Teenage Cheerleader
(1974, dir. Richard D'Antoni)

This film was one for the raincoat crowd: virtually no story, tons of sex. As far as we can tell, director Richard D'Antoni only made one other film, the similarly themed porno from 1973 entitled Campus Girls. Harry Reems is just one of many working stiffs in this film, the "Guy in Library". DistribPix, the original distributors (who now offer the film on DVD) say: "Predating the Debbie Does Dallas (1978 / edited trailer) cheerleading phenomenon by several years, this film is a sexy light-hearted farce featuring classic New York pornsters Jamie Gillis, delicious Darby Lloyd Raines and cute Cindy West. The real reason to watch however is the performance by gorgeous one-hit wonder Susie Mitchell." Over at imdb, Anonymous offers a blow-by-blow description: "The film starts as Suzie (Mitchell) walks in on three other female students who seduce the athlete student Leonard (Marc Stevens) in the bathroom before his game. The girls peer pressure Suzie to not only join in but be the only one going all the way. On the way to the game, the school-bus driver takes a break, causing the athletes and cheerleaders to pass the time in a sex orgy. Back in class, a teacher (Jamie Gillis) discusses Darwin and religion while secretly getting a fellatio by a student under his desk. A few rows forward, Leonard secretly gets Suzie to give him a hand job. While in a library, an older guy takes it for granted when a knelt down red-haired cheerleader and her friend suddenly take interest in his crotch. Once again, Suzie comes in and is peer pressured to be the one going all the way. The young school nurse inspects Suzie's boyfriend's strained crotch from the game, and suddenly gives him fellatio. Suzie comes in but the nurse pressers her to join them. Later on, Suzie gets it on with various school athletes in various locations." The censured poster is from Sweden.

Deadly Weapons
(1974, dir. Doris Wishman)

One of Doris Wishman's most famous films, Deadly Weapons features Harry Reems in a non-porno role. We saw this movie years ago in a double feature with Double Agent 73 (1974 / trailer) which, according to Wishman's cinematographer C. Davis Smith, were both filmed at the same time. We have to admit that despite being big fans of bad films — and both films are very, very bad — we found the two movies far more unsettling and disturbing than funny or entertaining. Chesty Morgan is anything but an appealing or attractive or talented performer, and she actually often not only looks as if her gargantuan breasts are causing her severe pain, but she seems almost drugged. We felt dirty watching these films, as if we were trying to laugh at the expense of a freak of nature that was suffering due to the deformity. Over at 366 Weird Movies, which describes Wishman (as do many) as "the female Ed Wood and the creator of history's least sexy sexploitation movies", they are able to make jokes about that which repulsed us, saying: "John Waters had the incomparable Divine. Wishman had the incomparable Chesty Morgan. The big difference is that Divine could actually act. Morgan, an exploitation freak of nature, was the energizer bunny rabbit to Wishman's directorial enthusiasm. Morgan's voice is dubbed in both films. Apparently, her Polish accent was so thick as to be indecipherable. Unfortunately, her acting range is nowhere near as mammoth as her breasts. Morgan begins with leathery boredom and ends with celluloid sleepwalking. Now, dress this big-breasted zombie up in bad wigs and garish clothing to enact a zany plot!" (Some credit for this "movie" should probably also go to Wishman's scriptwriter and niece Judy J. Kushner [22 Dec. 1941 - 27 May 2006], who also worked on the scripts to Wishman's A Night to Dismember [1983 / trailer / full film], The Immoral Three [1975 / trailer], Double Agent 73 [1974] and Love Toy [1973 / trailer].) TV Guide explains the plot as follows: "Sent by his gangster boss Mr. Batty to retrieve an incriminating address book, thug Larry (Richard Towers of Nubile Nuisance [2006 / trailer]) instead steals it and launches his own blackmail scheme. He leaves the book for safekeeping with his girlfriend Crystal (Chesty Morgan), who doesn't know about his shady line of work. Crystal visits her father, who wonders why she is unwilling to tell him anything about the man she is hoping to marry. When Batty finds out that Larry is the one blackmailing him, he orders his henchmen Tony (Harry Reems) and 'Capt. Hook' (Mitchell Fredericks) to kill him. They shoot Larry while he is on the phone with Crystal; not knowing she is listening, they discuss their plans to skip town for awhile, Hook to Las Vegas, Tony to Miami. Having also heard that Hook enjoys burlesque houses, Crystal goes to Las Vegas and gets a job as a stripper in the hotel where Hook said he would be staying. After a show, he invites her for a drink and takes her back to his room. She drugs his drink and then smothers him to death between her breasts. Heading to Miami, she kills Tony in the same way. Crystal returns home and mentions to her father (Phillip Stahl of Wishman's Keyholes Are for Peeping [1972 / scene]) that she must contact the police regarding the book that got Larry killed. That night she finds her father searching her apartment: he is Mr. Batty. She refuses to give him the book and he shoots her. Mortally wounded, she pulls a gun from a cabinet and kills him, too." Chesty Morgan took part in one other movie of note after this, Fellini's Casanova (1976 / trailer), but her scenes were deleted.

 

Trailer:

Deadly Weapons (1974)von bmoviebabe
 

Memories Within Miss Aggie
(1974, dir. Gerard Damiano) 

 

Written by Ron Wertheim (see Sexual Freedom in Brooklyn and Selling It in Part II of this career review). Gerard Damiano followed his horror film Legacy of Satan (1974) — which may or may not have originally been an X-rated porn horror but is only available in a savagely edited sexless version — with this film. Over at imdb, according to genet-1 of France, "Gerard Damiano's third fiction feature after Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones is a dark and chilly fable, intended, he says, to carry on the story of the latter's heroine, Justine Jones, had she not committed suicide." Carnal Cinema points out that "The fractured reminiscences of an elderly woman might not sound especially erotic, but then Memories Within Miss Aggie is not really an erotic film; it's an explicit film — an adult film — but not a film that can really be characterised to as erotic. Our principle cast is comprised of an aged couple, the eponymous Aggie (Norah Ashera) and her companion Richard (Patrick Farrelly), who appear to be suffering from a variety of ailments. He is ashen-faced and confined to a wheelchair; she is physically able — as evidenced by her scrubbing the floor at the film's outset — but may not be mentally sound. Stepping outside, she 'sees' a young couple running hand-in-hand — an image which is subsequently presented as a memory. Furthermore, when she discards the water with which she's been cleaning, she momentarily perceives the previously-white snow to be stained with blood." BFI, in turn, reduces their commentary to the bare bones: "The elderly Miss Aggie inhabits an isolated farmhouse with Richard, a man of few words. While making him a cup of tea one day, she remembers or fantasizes sexual episodes from her youth." In the memories she narrates, in each case a different actress plays her character. Harry Reems shows up as delivery man in one of her "memories" who she seduces after using a small doll to get herself all hot and bothered. As was often the case in the day of Porno Chic, the film was even reviewed in The New York Times on 23 June 1974, where Vincent Canby said: "[...] I was anxious to see Memories Within Miss Aggie, a movie that one critic has described as being 'rich with intimations of Psycho (1960 / trailer), and Images (1972 / scene) and Faulkner,' and whose director, Gerard Damiano, a former hairdresser and X-ray, technician, has been called the Ingmar Bergman of porn. [...] Corn is more like it. [..] Memories Within Miss Aggie is an overcooked, guilt-stuffed cabbage of a movie, which, like The Devil in Miss Jones, pretends to seriousness through its synthetically solemn framing device. [...] When Aggie has gotten through her three fantasies, which are probably all that the budget would allow, Damiano lets us in on a secret that we could have been let in on at any earlier point in the film. That is — are you ready — that none of these things really happened, and that Miss Aggie, as crazy as a bedbug, put a carving knife through the skull of the man whose body she still keeps by the kitchen stove. [...]"

Doctor Feelgood
(1974, dir. Robert M. Mansfield)

Aka Dr Feelgood's Sex Clinic. Harry Reems and "Inger Kissin" (otherwise known as Andrea True) are the big names on the posters of this movie, a movie about which virtually nothing can be found online. Check your attic, as we would assume this movie to be lost. We did find one mention on page 113 of Vol. 27 of John Willis' Screen World (1976); it offers no plot description, but reveals that the film was "presented" by forgotten exploitation producer Allan Shackleton. In regard to the double feature advertised here left, in a copy of the Ottowa Citizen from Feb 1, 1978, Charles Gordon rather surrealistically says in his article Time again for a review of available smut that "It is difficult to know how to compare these two. Each employs a unique mis-en-scene but she gets shot fatally in the tummy in the first one. In the second, she survives and painfully relearns how to water-ski, only to die of pneumonia after catching a chill during the burning of Atlanta and forgetting that she never had to say she was sorry." Another website has Uschi Digard listed as participating in the film, something neither John Willis nor any poster confirms. We would assume that this film is probably a "comedy" for the raincoat crowd that tries to ride of Reems's then-famous persona as the "doctor" that found Lovelace's clit in her throat...

Wet Rainbow
(1974, dir. Duddy Kane)

 

Written by the equally pseudonymous Roger Wald. This relatively unknown film seems to get good press by those who see it. The University of Chicago explains the film as follows: "Made at the height of the so-called 'porno chic' period, this big budget character study drama was directed by the mysterious Duddy Kane, this being his only credit. Sexploitation stalwart actors Harry Reems and Georgina Spelvin play married Greenwich Village artists who become obsessed with a young hippie named Rainbow (Valerie Marron). While Spelvin fears her desires might make her a lesbian, Reems wants to introduce Rainbow into their relationship, but fears Spelvin will not accept breaking their monogamy. Wet Rainbow a rare film which deals earnestly with bisexuality and uses explicit sex to develop its characters." Carnal Cinema, in turn, says "The film was clearly cheaply made and, like others from the period, looks quite primitive with hindsight. The lighting, for example, is very flat and the interiors appear to be filmed in a couple of modest apartments. There are some evocative New York exteriors, and a couple of notable dream sequences — visualizations of Spelvin's emotional turmoil — but nothing particularly imaginative. Spelvin and Reems make an engaging couple but [...] they've both done better work elsewhere. What really makes this movie interesting is its apparent sincerity. Wet Rainbow plays like a dramatic film that just happens to contain explicit sex." Gore-Gore Girl is a bit more amazed by the film: "Holy shit, this film is good. And I mean outstanding. My viewing buddy even said that despite the sex scenes being shot really well, it was almost impossible to find them hot because there was so much to think about (this is a compliment to the film). I think it manages to be hot as well as be intellectually rigorous. This is a complex look at a relationship that involves two people — the excellent Harry Reems and Georgina Spelvin — who are intelligent, artists, probably a bit elitist, and getting older. They fantasize over Reems' young photography student, and eventually things start to fall apart. I don't want to say any more than that, partly because I don't want to spoil the film, but mostly because there's so much subtle complexity to this film that it would be difficult for me to articulate it in this short space. I actually cried during this film. Great stuff." A crappy version (as in quality of the transfer) of the full film can, momentarily, be found online here at Mr. Stiff.

Ape Over Love
(1974, dir. David Sear)

 The Kinks — Apeman:

We would love to see the original poster art for this film, which on its original release got busted for obscenity in Duluth, Minnesota. But all we could find was the DVD cover to the Something Weird re-release. Gavcrimson.blogspot.co.uk reveals the films selling point: "[...] The quirky NYC lensed Ape Over Love, a pornographic visualisation of the Kinks' song Apeman in which a lonely Manhattan dog walker (Harry Reems) escapes his humdrum existence by fantasizing that he is a gorilla, a plot premise that leads to various hardcore sex scenes of Reems fucking in a gorilla costume, whilst the aforementioned Apeman plays on the soundtrack without permission (the director of Ape Over Love seems to have been something of a Kinks aficionado, as their then highly obscure 1969 B-Side King Kong also finds its way onto the film's soundtrack). At imdb, Woodyanders (Woodyanders@aol.com) says "Legendary 70's porn stud Harry Reems [...] portrays Roger, a meek, lonely, dorky guy who works as a dog walker for rich, horny Ms. Mammal (hysterically overplayed by 70's hardcore character actress Mary Stuart). While gawking and making faces at the gorilla cage in a nearby zoo, Roger fantasizes about having sex with Ms. Mammal while wearing a shoddy ape costume (said suit is pretty tacky, with rubber gloves for hands and Harry's naked feet completely uncovered). You see, Roger secretly wants 'to be a gorilla'! Roger's sexually sicko dreams come true when he befriends the adorable Ellen (the luscious Bree Anthony), a lovely lass who's also turned on by gorillas. If the story fails to make you burst out laughing, then several of this film's gloriously ludicrous production touches might very well cause you to crack up instead. For starters, there's the neatly varied array of carnal activity which includes fellatio, lesbianism, cunnilingus, and an especially lively partner swapping climactic foursome. Moreover, the gals holler such inane exclamations as "Oh, you big gorilla!" and "You're such an animal" while doing just what you think with Roger. Plus Roger makes these funny "ooh, ooh, ooh!" monkey noises as he gets it on with the ladies. [...] Director David Sears depicts all the libidinous goings-on in that highly graphic and clinical intense gynecological style which makes 70's porn so uniquely raw and alluring, thus ensuring that this blithely dippy hardcore romp is a real hoot from start to finish."

Stanley Long's famous stag short (without Reems), Beauty and the Beast:

Follow the link to Part IV of Harry Reems' career review.

Short Film: Jasper and the Haunted House (USA, 1942)

May 30, 2013, 1:36 am

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Perhaps some of you noticed that the great Ray Harryhausen, born 29 June 1920, died this month just short of his 93rd birthday on 7 May 2013. Currently we here at A Wasted Life are working on a career review of his films, and while researching his works we couldn't help but also end up looking at some of the great projects of George Pal, née György Pál Marczincsak, (1 February 1908 - 2 May 1980). Aside from producing such legendary feature-length film productions like, among others, Destination Moon (1950 / trailer) or War of the Worlds (1953 / trailer) or When Worlds Collide (1951 / trailer) or The Time Machine (1960 / trailer), George Pal was a prolific short film maker — in fact, he was once nominated seven consecutive years (1942-48) for an Oscar for short films. But during those years, the only Oscar he got was an honorary one in 1943 for "the development of novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons."* 

George Pal first began his Puppetoons in Europe in the 1930s, initially as commercials, a good and visually amazing example of which is 1938's La Grande Revue Philips ("The Great Philips Review"), watch it here, which he made in Holland. Wikipedia offers a succinct description of how Puppetoons worked: "A series of different hand-carved wooden puppets (or puppet heads or limbs) [were made] for each frame in which the puppet moves or changes expression, rather than moving a single puppet, as is the case with most stop motion puppet animation. [...] A typical Puppetoon required 9,000 individually carved and machined wooden figures or parts." (They fail to mention, however, whether that would be for a short film or long film, but we suspect the former.)

It is due to the Puppetoons that our research on Ray Harryhausen led us to our "Short Film of the Month for May 2013", George Pal's Jasper and the Haunted House (1942) — perhaps luckily for the Academy, not the short for which he was nominated in 1942 (that would be Rhythm in the Ranks).** You see, before Ray Harryhausen became the Ray Harryhausen, he was just another working stiff who happened to have a penchant for stop motion animation. And among his early employers was George Pal, for whom he worked on the Puppetoon shorts. And while perusing the Puppetoons and Harryhausen trailers available over at that fabulous on-line repository of cinematic trash and treasures, the Internet Archives, we stumbled upon this film here, Jasper and the Haunted House, which we had never seen or heard of before, and we were so shocked, so bowled over, so speechless, that we decided we just had to share it with everyone. 

Here we must briefly say that the short films we choose, like the feature-length films we watch in general or eventually list in our annual "Best of" selection, are not necessarily good films. What matters to us as that they move us in some way, be it in pleasure, in shock or whatever. And Jasper and the Haunted House didn't just shock us, it knocked us over: other than D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915 / trailer / full film), we have never seen a more racist film than this one.*** It surely is not even the best of Pal's Puppetoons, or even the most typical, but that is not why we chose it: we have chosen it as our "Film of the Month for May 2013" simply because it is as shockingly unforgettable as it is technically brilliant. 

We don't know if Harryhausen worked on this or any of the other Jasper shorts,**** but despite the amazing stop motion animation found in this film (and all the Puppetoons), Jasper and the Haunted House is not the kind of film that one would, after the days of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, proudly claim as having worked on. According to The George Pal Puppetoon Site, even when the Jasper series was made the shorts "were criticized for being racist"; the website then goes on to say that "George Pal was a peaceful man who was shocked when people were offended — he never intended to be hostile. Indeed, Pal had a great respect for African-American culture, particularly their music and folklore [...]." Could be, but as funny and well made as this short is, not only is it — like the other Jasper films, if it and the even more surreal Jasper and the Watermelons (1942 / full short) are typical of the series — shows a huge disrespect for an entire folk, as do many of Pal's shorts, actually, which not un-rarely display some notably blatant minority stereotypes. 

Not only that, but Jasper and the Haunted House itself wasn't a one-shot exception, it was one of a series featuring the same stereotypically racist jigaboo characters. If nothing else, the general tone of this and the other Jasper films (as well as Pal's penchant for racial stereotypes in general) does indicate that if Pal wasn't overtly racist then he was — like white society in general — innately and subconsciously racist, for otherwise the blatant expression of racist stereotypes as found here wouldn't have been met without a blink by him and the ruling class, as they were in general at the time. But then, unlike nowadays, if you were amongst the lily white audience watching Jasper and the Haunted Houseet all. as the opening supporting short, your most likely didn't have any Afro-Americans sitting close by — they were probably (in the South) all at a theatre "of their own", so to say, or (in the North) seated separately in the balcony — so unlike now you wouldn't feel guilty laughing out loud. In any event, back then in those simpler, more innocent days, Jasper the character was popular enough not only to warrant a continual series of films, but even a toy tie-in (see below left).
Needless to say, you probably won't catch Jasper and the Haunted House on television today. As with all the Jasper films, which are often as amazingly surreal as they are well made and racially objectionable, there are three main characters in Jasper and the Haunted House: Jasper, the Scarecrow and Blackbird. The ever-gullible Jasper — he is a nee-grow, after all — is on the way to deliver a gooseberry pie to Deacon Jones when the Scarecrow, who always calls Jasper "Boy", and the Blackbird decide they want it. They trick Jasper into going the wrong way and he ends up at the haunted house, where things just don't work out exactly as Jasper's two devious friends expect...

Enjoy Jasper and the Haunted House— if you can. But be forewarned, it might shake your PC roots right down to the bone and deeper. (Anyone ready for Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs [1943 / full short] yet?)

* He did, however, win another one for special effects in 1950 for Destination Moon.
** Embarrassingly enough for them, however, they did nominate Pal's short Jasper and the Beanstalk in 1945 (short).
*** Not quite true; we have seen some anti-Jew films (like The Eternal Jew [1940 / full film]) that are just as or even more racist, but those films were produced by idiots (i.e., Nazis) and not filmmakers we respect.
**** Though we found a questionable site and source, the ALEF Network, which claims that 25 Jasper films were made — and which also makes no bones about it and calls Jasper and the Haunted House "the flaunting of all the worst and most disingenuous Black stereotypes: An audacious inundation of racist filth" — we could only locate 18 others titles: Jasper and the Watermelons (1942), Jasper and the Choo Choo (1943), Jasper Goes Fishing (1943), Jasper's Music Lesson (1943), Jasper Goes Hunting (1944 / short), Jasper's Paradise (1944), Say, Ah Jasper (1944),Package for Jasper (1944), Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945), Jasper's Booby Trap (1945), Jasper's Close Shave (1945), Jasper's Minstrels (1945 / short), Jasper Tell (1945), My Man Jasper (1945 / short), Hot Lips Jasper (1945 / short), Jasper's Derby (1946 / short), Olio for Jasper (1946), Jasper in a Jam (1946 / short) and Shoe Shine Jasper (1947).

Der Rote Kreis (Denmark/Germany, 1960)

June 3, 2013, 5:31 am

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Aka Den blodrøde cirkel and The Red Circle, Der Rote Kreis was director Jürgen Roland's feature-film début after doing about a dozen episodes of the then-popular German crime series, Stahlnetz (1958-2002). It is also the second film of the famed German Edgar Wallace series, made almost simultaneously to the first one, Harold Reinl's much better known and respected initial entry, Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959 / trailer). Like that film and most of the Rialto Wallace films that followed, Der Rote Kreis, which was filmed in Copenhagen, was rather a hit in its day, but for a long time it was seemingly  and  unjustly relegated to semi-obscurity and very hard to find. Now easily available on DVD, Der Rote Kreis reveals itself not only as even a tad better than Reinl's more popular flick that preceded it, but also as miles better than director Roland's only other (official) entry in the Rialto Wallace series, the extremely popular but somewhat flawed Der Grüne Bogenshutze (1961 / German trailer).

As an early entry in the Railto Wallace series, Der Rote Kreis features an oddly obvious lack of truly familiar faces (as in "Wallace Regulars") in the cast: though Eddi Arent is at hand as Sgt. Haggett to supply his at that time still wry humor, none of the main roles feature any of familiar and loved faces that came to be associated with the series. (True, Fritz Rasp, present as a dislikeable victim, was in five Rialto and two super-early non-Rialto Wallace films [The Squeeker (1931 / trailer) and The Sorcerer (1932)] and Ernst Fritz Fürbringer in five, but neither names/faces are of those that quickly come to mind when one thinks of a Rialto Wallace film.) While hardly a flaw in the film, it is noticeable to fans of the series, as is the pedestrian nature of the movie's soundtrack by Willy Mattes, who also did the music to the infamous trash classics The Head [1959 / full film] and Body in the Web [1960 / full film], as well as to Der Frosch mit der Maske); whether or not he was a good composer might be arguable, but what is without a doubt is that Mattes was not a purveyor of mondo musical weirdness along the lines of Peter Thomas (example) or Martin Böttcher (example) or Gerd Wilden (example), the last of whom regrettably never scored a Wallace film.

 Based on Wallace's novel The Crimson Circle, Roland's film is the fifth film version of the story (if one counts the 1929 German and English language versions as separate films, despite the occasional shared stars and director/co-director). Featuring a quick and convoluted story, this version here is an entertaining thriller about the mysterious Rote Kreis ("Red Circle"), a ruthless killer terrorizing London who forces rich people to pay him money in exchange for their very own lives. Anyone who refuses to pay up or who goes to the police is quickly killed. His only identifying mark is the red circle with which he signs his letters or leaves somewhere at the scenes of his crimes....

Inspector Parr (Karl-Georg Saebisch) is feeling the heat of public opinion, as he has no clues as to who the murderer is and seems powerless to stop the killings, which already number at eighteen. Forced by Sir Archibald (Ernst Fritz Fürbringer), the head of Scotland Yard, to work with the popular private detective Derrick Yale (Klausjürgen Wussow), their combined forces seem no match for the Rote Kreis who continues killing all that cross him, sometimes right under the very noses of Scotland Yard (as is the case with Matrose Selby [Panos Papadopulos of For a Few Dollars More (1965 / trailer)], who is killed in jail between interrogation sessions).

Simultaneously to the murders, the attractive Thalia Drummond (Renate Ewert of Hotel der toten Gäste [1965]) keeps popping up at the most odd places, including as the secretary for the rich miser and potential victim Froyant (Fritz Rasp of Metropolis [1927 / full film], Diary of a Lost Girl [1929 / full film] and many another old German film of note), as a bank teller at a bank washing marked bills, hidden in the clothes cabinet at Yale's office, and taking archery lessons from Jack Beardmore (Thomas Alder), whose father soon is killed by the Rote Kreis with bow and arrow.

Who could the Rote Kreis be? Thalia? Jack? The banker? The mysterious Frenchman Marles (Richard Lauffen) who suddenly shows up to buy the deceased Mr. Beardmore's waterside warehouse? Or one of any of the unfriendly and suspicious people who have offices at Beardmore's office building downtown? Numerous suspects die violent deaths while others remain an option until the end, but in the tradition of a true Wallace tale full of unexpected twists and turns, the final revelation(s) is/are all surprising.

Of course, like many if not all Wallace films, Der Rote Kreis has way too many minor characters and sub-plots and is thus occasionally confusing, but thanks to excess of characters there are also more violent deaths. The B&W cinematography is eye-candy for the eye, and the composition and camerawork is almost never boring. All in all, Der Rote Kreis truly deserves a lot more respect and attention than that which passing time has shown it. We recommend heartily!

A tragic aside to the film itself exists in the form of the eventual fates of the two playing the movie's lovebirds, the actress Renate Ewert (Thalia) and the actor Thomas Alder (Jack). Alder's short career consisted mostly of small parts in "Heimat films" and an occasional B film such as 13 Ways to Die aka Der Fluch der schwarzen Rubens [1965 / title track by Gerd Wilden]. For reasons seemingly unknown, he took his life in 1968 by sticking his head in a stove.

Renate Ewert's death was probably also a suicide, though no note was left behind. As a child, her family had been forced by WWII to immigrate from Konnigsberg in Prussia (now Poland), eventually settling in Hamburg. A beautiful and driven woman, she always dreamt of becoming an actress and, after much hard work and some real hard knocks, eventually succeeded in breaking into films through her work in voiceovers. (Considering how horrible her voice sounds to modern ears, it is almost unbelievable that she found work in that field in the first place.) Her career was mostly one of secondary roles as the jealous girlfriend or seductively mysterious female, and the scandal of her numerous and publicized affairs with various actors and directors probably did more harm than help back in those hypocritical and easily scandalized years. By 1966 her career was over and she was addicted to pills and booze and, in hindsight, probably anorexic as well. Fellow actress Susanne Cramer came to visit her on December 10th, 1966, and found Ewert's three-week-old dead body; her death is attributed to either suicide or starvation, depending on the source used. Whether it be due to social embarrassment or familiar love is open to question (and never documented), but for whatever reason within 18 months both her parents killed themselves as well (though not at the same time).

Director Jürgen Roland, by the way, also made 4 Schlüssel [1966], a German crime film we reviewed many a year ago.

R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part IV (1975-79)

June 10, 2013, 9:55 am

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Harry Reems
 
August 27, 1947 — March 19, 2013

On 19 March 2013, Herbert Streicher — better known under his later name Harry Reems — went on to start selling real estate to those taking part in the great porn shoot in the sky. Here, in the third instalment of his career review, we look at some of the films he was involved in from 1975 to 1975.

Part II of the career review of Harry Reems (1969-72) 
can be found here.
Part III of the career review of Harry Reems (1973-74) 
can be found here.

Sometime Sweet Susan
(1975, dir. Fred Donaldson)

Opening titles:

One-shot-wonder Fred Donaldson co-wrote this with Joel Scott, who went on to direct the hardcore Charlie's Angels (1976-81) rip-off A Coming of Angels (1977 / 7.5 NSFW minutes) before, like Fred, falling off the face of the earth. As far as we can tell, so did "singers" Scot Mansfield and Shawn Harris, who sang the (off-key) title track — talk about a painful aural experience. This movie holds the trivial honor of being the first unionized porn film: all actors were members of the Screen Actors' Guild. SexGoreMutants, which calls the R-rated version of the film "an occasionally effective if downbeat exploration of schizophrenia" and an "intriguing relic", says: "Susan doesn't probe its subject matter as deeply as it aims to. This is most likely due to the fact that the film was originally lensed as a hardcore effort. However, the film was re-released in a soft 75-minute version [...] to obtain an R-rating for theatrical viewing. So what we end up with is a rather plodding and talky film with moments of zestful but non-explicit sex thrown in at times."

 

Trailer:

Video Vacuum, which admits to having "a soft spot in my heart for chicks with bushes the size of a rabbi's beard", explains the plot: "Susan (Shawn Harris) is a foxy mental patient who doesn't talk and fantasizes about her studly doctor (Harry Reems) a lot. After flirting with her a bit, he slowly brings Susan out of her shell and she starts talking. Susan eventually reveals herself to be a split personality and much to her doctor's surprise, her alternate persona, Saundra is a raging slut dog. Sometime Sweet Susan is artier (there are a bunch of freeze frames) and better acted (Reems is particularly good) than most of your run-of-the-mill 70s soft-core psychodramas. That still doesn't mean it's necessarily well made because I counted at least three visible boom mikes." More than one on-line source points out that in Taxi Driver (1976 / trailer), Travis (Robert De Niro of Bloody Mama [1970 / trailer], Brazil [1985 / trailer] and Angel Heart [1987 / trailer]) took his date Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) to the triple-X version of this movie. Here at A Wasted Life, we would agree with Video Vacuum that one-shot wonder Susan (Shawn Harris) is indeed one hot tamale. The X-rated version of the film can be watched here.

Christy
(1975, dir. "Steve Harris")

Christy actually got re-released on DVD for the non-discriminating crowd. This programmer is hardly a film of note in Reems' oeuvre, with a plot that is less a plot than an excuse to present a series of sex scenes (loops, to be exact) and not much more, and we're including it here primarily 'cause we found a poster of the movie online. Reems and his moustache make a guest appearance as door-to-door lingerie salesman John Fuller (!). Imdb credits the film to one "Steve Harris" who, as far as we could find out, made only one other film before retiring (or moving onwards under his real name), Teenage Cousins, another family-oriented triple-X movie from 1975. Our guess would be that "Steve Harris" is actually Leonard Kirtman, primarily because iafd credits the movie to "Leon Gucci" (though the film credits actually name a "Leo the Lion" as director), and both those two names are known pseudonyms of (s)exploitation producer Kirtman (among other films, he produced — among others — Death by Invitation [1971 / trailer], Sex Wish [1976], Unwilling Lovers [1977 / scene / full NSFW film] and The Devil Inside Her [1977 / scene / full NSFW film]). Speaking of pseudonyms, the newly introduced "Annie Christian" (as the supposedly underage title nubile) is actually Valerie Marron — see Wet Rainbow at Part III— who seems to have left the business soon thereafter. The ever-reliable One Sheet Index supplies the plot: "Christy (Marron) is driven by the desire to be a successful night club entertainer. In love with life and all that is tangible, Christy lures a rich young man to her home one night after work. [...] Christy's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet (Andrea True and Marc Stevens), walk in, surprising the couple while they are engaged in an act of love. Ready to defend his daughter's virginity, Christy's father is willing to let the young man go if he is willing to pay them 'hush' money. 'After all, Christy was not only a virgin and a minor, but also an aspiring young entertainer whose career could be marred by unfavorable publicity.' After paying them off, the young man leaves and is happy to get off so cheaply. Mr. Bennet considers this an easy way to make a lot of money quickly, and he encourages Christy to invite her male friends home each night so they can carry out their get-rich-quick scheme. [...] One night, however, Christy attracts a man who refuses to be blackmailed like all the others. A meeting is eventually arranged outside the club where Christy works. An argument develops, a knife is pulled..." Over at imdb, lor of New York City says: "Director Steve Harris [...] proves he's totally incompetent with the final reels, as sloppily executed as the most amateur of porn films. [...] Contempt for the audience, always implicit when Marc Stevens is cast in a leading role, is the Prime Directive for filmmakers at this level."

Justine & Juliette
(1975, dir. Mac Ahlberg as "Bert Torn")

Opening credits:

Aka Sklavinnen der Lust, Marquis De Sade in Love and Swedish Minx. Yet another movie freely inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, the inspiration behind Roger Vadim's Vice und Virtue (1963 / title track) and Jess Franco's Deadly Sanctuary (1969 / full film), among many. Swedish director Mac Ahlberg (12 June 1931 – 26 October 2012) made his directorial début with the Danish erotic classic I, a Woman (1965 / trailer), which he followed with two sequels and a Swedish version of Fanny Hill (1968 / trailer). After moving to the US in the 70s he directed a variety of porn films, but after his first above ground film Hoodlums (1979 / scene) he became a busy B-film cinematographer (he worked on dozens of noteworthy films, including such films as Hell Night (1981), Re-Animator (1985), Sideshow (2000 / trailer), Deathbed (2002 / trailer) and Evil Bong (2006 / trailer). This film here, with over half its cast being Swedish, was probably still made in Ahlberg's home country. 10K Bullets offers the following thorough plot synopsis: "Justine (Marie Forså of Veil of Blood [1973 / trailer]) and Juliette (Anne Bie Warburg) are sisters who have just been kicked out of their aunt's home, because of Juliette's numerous sexual encounters with men. They hitch a ride with a man into the big city and once they are their Justine tired of Juliette's decadent behavior goes her own way. Justine finds lodging at a run-down hotel where the sleazy desk clerk becomes infatuated with her. Juliette is doing much better as she has taken on a job at a brothel and she quickly becomes the places number one attraction. Weeks later the two sisters run into each other by mere chance and Juliette who is doing extremely well financially invites her sister Justine to stay with her. [...] At one of Juliette's parties Justine meets a man named Robert (Felix Franchy) whom she falls in love with and she moves in with him. Justine soon finds out that her prince charming is not what he seems and he soon forces her to have sex with his friends. Meanwhile at the brothel all the girls want to be one to fuck Don Miller (Harry Reems) because the women who is in his arms when he has a heart attack inherits his entire fortune. Will Justine continue to compromise her virtues by submitting to Robert's kinky sex demands or will she finally leave him for good? Can anyone of the many ladies at the brothel be able to give Don Miller the fuck that ends his life or will someone of virtue step in at the right time and collect?" Eros Down says the film is known "for its beautifully photographed hard-core sex scenes" and opinions that "Ahlberg's film-making style and cinematography reminds me a lot of Radley Metzger's work. Their films are always great to look at and have substantive storylines for the genre."

 NSFW Trailer: 

  

Butterfly 
(1975, dir. Joseph W. Sarno)

Opening credits:

Aka Baby Tramp, Broken Butterfly and Butterflies. This is the third and last of three sexploitation films director Sarno made with the real star of this movie, the actress Marie Forså; Butterfly was preceded by Veil of Blood [1973 / trailer] and Bibi (1974). This film here gets the most praise of all three — in fact, it seems to get universal praise. DVD Drive-In says this could well be Sarno's sexiest film: "[...] The best of the three Sarno-Nebe films and probably the sexiest 'soft-core' film he ever made. If Butterflies could be called 'soft-core'... the film was shot hardcore and then the penetration cut out to focus on the reactions and intense chemistry between the performers. Some fleeting moments of hardcore are still present, but this qualifies more as a hard soft-core feature, which would still be rated X today." Torrent Butler explains the plot as follows: "Denise (Marie Forsa) is a beautiful country girl whose life is filled with joy and love for her handsome boyfriend, Freddy (Eric Edwards). But living in an idyllic existence soon bores her, and she is off to the big city to experience the glamour and glitz for herself. She meets Frank (Harry Reems), a dashing nightclub owner who takes her under his wing. But she doesn't take kindly to the fact that she's just one of his stable of women and must choose between the big city life and her dreary farm life." 10K Bullets says "The premise of a pure country girl who goes to the big city and loses her innocence may not be exactly original, still the way the story is set helps lift what is basically a film with a razor-thin plot above average material. This film besides featuring the luscious Marie Forså also features American hardcore icons Eric Edwards and Harry Reems. The addition of Edwards and Reems adds plenty of heat to the film as the sex scenes are electrifying. [...] Overall despite a non-existent plot, this exploitation film works mostly due to its performers who totally immerse themselves during the sex scenes." Hardcore stalwart Eric Edwards, performing in his first European-shot movie, started his career on stage as Rob Everett in the early 60s before moving into porn, initially doing loops with a pre-Deep Throat Linda Lovelace. To quote Luke is Back, "The blonde ageless wonder is the only person to have performed sex on film in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, appearing in about 1000 flicks since the 60s." He no longer does sex scenes, but he still appears onscreen and works behind the camera as well. Some of his credits include The Prey (1984 / trailer), Forbidden Fruit (1984 / full NSFW film), Dracula Exotica (1980 / credits), The Pussycat Ranch (1978) and Invasion of the Love Drones (1977 / trailer). The full NSFW version of the film can be watched here at Mr Stiff.

Every Inch a Lady
(1975, writ. & dir. John & Lem Amero)

 

Five years after Bacchanale (see Part II), Harry Reems swings his unsheathed sword in another film by the New-York-based auteur sexploitation filmmakers, the Amero Brothers, who first entered the sexploitation industry in the 60s with such non-hardcore exploiters like Body of a Female (1965), Lusting Hours (1967), Diary of a Swinger (1967), The Corporate Queen (1969) and Everything for Everybody (1969), among others.

Trailer to an Amero Production (without Harry Reems) — Diary of a Swinger (1967):

Trailer till Diary of a Swinger från rstvideos trailerarkiv.

Every Inch a Lady was distributed by Distribpix, Reems is given star billing on the poster alongside once-popular porn adult actress Darby Lloyd Rains— aka Tara Holland, Lynn Ann Carver , Debbie Rainier, Rachel Brenda, Angel Street and Melanie Daniels — of, among many films, Dark Dreams (her debut film, from 1971 / trailer), Hot Channels (1973 / full NSFW film) and the "Henry Paris" movie Naked Came the Stranger (1975 / trailer). Darby and Harry play Crystal Laverne and Chino, respectively, in a movie that Cinema Babylon lists as a "Crucial American X-Rated Feature" but nevertheless describes as a "very silly hooker comedy". The website Girlandus offers a plot description that can be found all over the web: "Harry Reems and Darby Lloyd Raines are a couple who have built up a thriving business around each's ability to satisfy lovers of the opposite sex. They started out with a plain ol' escort service, but soon found out they could make more cash doing the kinky stuff. So now they specialize in supplying well-paying customers with customized sexual services. The money's rolling in and they seem to be very much in love, but trouble's brewing. Darby overhears Harry pillow talking with one of their workers with whom he's been spending his off-hour sexual energies, and it turns out Harry and his new squeeze are planning to rub Darby out and take over. Suffice to say, Darby gets super even." The feminist blog Gore-Gore Girls likes the movie: "Oh boy, I really loved this film. I initially bought it because I was told there's a scene where Harry Reems fucks Jamie Gillis in the ass with a carrot (true!), but aside from this it turned out to be a really intriguing and entertaining film [...]. The acting is top notch, the narrative flows smoothly and feels organic, and the ending is a real kicker. I came away from this film feeling immensely satisfied, which sometimes doesn't happen because of a disappointing ending. Not this time. I can't really elaborate much further, but this is certainly a film that would emerge triumphant from a feminist analysis. Highly recommended." The NSFW trailer can be found here at Mr. Stiff.

Linda Lovelace Meets Miss Jones
(1975, dir. "Felix Dileone")

"Felix Dileone", the editor of Forced Entry (1975 / trailer), the non-porn remake of the Harry Reems flick Forced Entry (1973) starring Tanya Roberts, uses his editing skill to make a film out of nothing in which — despite the title — Linda Lovelace and Miss Jones never meet. This film was made for the raincoat brigade and rides on the coattails of the fame and success of the names in the title; it can hardly be called a true movie, as it is really just a collection of loops and outtakes strung together with the help of the flimsiest of framing devices. Leave it One Sheet Index to offer the original description of the movie — a description that more than tweaks the truth when speaking of quality: "Four of the top stars ever assembled on the screen together exceed their talents in this picture. Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat, Georgina Spelvin of the Devil and Miss Jones who shook the motion picture industry throughout the world are united with Darby Loyd Rains and Harry Reems in this picture which will make their previous performances look like a social tea party. This gang of sex-loving stars give you lots of lip action; ass swinging; banging; pissing just to name a few. This smorgasbord flick leaves nothing to the imagination. [...] Your audience will have difficulty determining who is now the top sex queen and king but your box office will tell you this Lovelace Meets Miss Jones is your big winner." The plot? What plot? But the non-plot is as follows: "The T.V. repairman (Reems) does his job of fixing a television set for the housewife. He proceeds to demonstrate the cassette system for this innocent woman through her now repaired idiot box. As the demonstration is viewed and the talents of these stars are portrayed on the screen, innocence fades and the repairman proceeds to busy himself with the housewife." The Geman dub of the full, naturally NSFW can be found here.

More
(1975, dir. Ralph Ell)

Who knows when this film was really made or what it is about: online sources give four different dates of production ('73, '74 [iafd],'75 [imdb], and '77 [NY Times]) and list different stars (including such illustrious names as "Anna Banana" and "Gloria Haddit"). But what can't help but be noticed is that the cast and crew of this unknown (and seemingly lost) film seems to be cross-pollinated through two other films made also around the same time: the straight porno Sherlick Holmes (produced by Ralph Ell, and likewise featuring Reems, Bree Anthony [again credited as "Sue Rowan"] and Bobby "Clown Prince of Porn" Astyr, among others), and the gay porno The American Adventures of Surelick Holmes (1975 / NSFW trailer), which Ralph Ell directed and featured (from Sherlick Holmes) the former child actor Zebedy Colt as well as Annie Sprinkle. (As they say at Disneyland, "It's A Small World After All".) In any event, all we could find online regarding the film was the poster above... Seeing the similarity between the tagline here ("A spy story that starts with a bang. And doesn't stop") and the tagline of Sherlick Holmes below ("The master spy steps into the master bedroom") as well as the shared stars and production team, simple elementary could lead one to assume that the films are either one and the same or re-edited versions — anyone out there know for sure?

It's A Small World After All:

 

Sherlick Holmes
(1975, dir. Victor Milt)

Director Victor Milt's real name is the much more pseudonymous-sounding and porno-ripe "Victor Milk"; he left the industry after making a few more films of note (such as White Slavery in New York aka Jackie Starr: X Reporter [1975] and Sex Wish [1976]) and went into the more upscale business of making TV commercials. Recent projects include the documentary Cracker: The Last Cowboys of Florida (2008 / trailer) and the soon-to-be-released regional comedy Run Stinky Run (2013). His bio — click on his name above — makes nary a mention of his X-rated roots. Scriptwriter "Bear Wilson" is also credited as the scriptwriter of the gay porno The American Adventures of Surelick Holmes (1975 / NSFW trailer) and appeared as "Tiny" in the porn version of Li'l Abnerentitled Big Abner (1975); who he really was or what he is doing today we do not know. Over at Distribpix, Dries Vermeulen calls this film "a minor effort", but seeing that the movie has long not been available and has no known video or DVD release, the statement is relative. But back in 1981, someone writing for the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures: Films in Review (Volume 32), did see the film, and explained the plot as one "[...] in which the detective was carried by a time machine to New York's 42nd Street as it is today." (This would explain the abundance of Afro-American females in the film — Maureen Anderson, Candy Love and Cheryl White, among others — considering how seldom white guy on black girl action was and is in porn.) As mentioned above under the entry on More, this film was shot at the same time as the still easily available gay porno, The American Adventures of Surelick Holmes (1975 / NSFW film).

SOS: Screw on Screen
(1975, dir. Jim Buckley)

Harry Reems' appearance in this film is due only to this movie including an excerpt from Wet Rainbow (1974) with him doing Georgina Spelvin and Valerie Marron. Jim Buckley, director (as "Jim Clark") of the ever-popular flick Debbie Does Dallas (1978 / edited trailer), co-founded Screw magazine in the 1960s with the more famous bag of bile, Al Goldstein. This film here, as its title infers, was an attempt to bring Screw onscreen, much as Goldstein more or less did on television with his cable program Midnight Blue (1974-2003). We here at A Wasted Life used to buy Screw now then, primarily because the cover art was so good — as reading material, it was pretty thin. Golden Sin Pleasure was not impressed by the film: "What a waste of my time... [...] We go from not-funny skits to the sad burlesque act of Honeysuckle Divine (her act blowing-off matches, pitching powder, doing sounds, and much more with her vagina; believe me this is more interesting to read than watching) to an old loop from the fifties to a man who is getting a tattoo on his penis... Quite enjoyable and exciting as a program right?" Over in NYC, lor seems to agree: "SOS has Screw magazine honchos Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley on a revealing ego trip, fronting tasteless XXX skits, with several big porn stars of the period along for the ride. It survives merely as a time capsule. [...] Skits are mainly unfunny, substituting vulgarity for humor. The subsequent R-rated hit drive-in movies like Boob Tube (1975 / "This isn't kinky") and its many imitators look almost polished and urbane by comparison." The film originally included a gay blowjob scene, but supposedly it was circumcised from some of the latter VHS releases...  The same year as this film here, Jim Buckley's brother David Buckley produced and directed the early gay-themed film, Saturday Night at the Baths (1975).

 Trailer to Saturday Night at the Baths (1975):

French School Girls
(1976, dir. "Francois Bedoin")

Aka French Schoolgirls. The only websites that bother with this film are porn sites out to get your dollar, and they all seem to gush the same text: "French School Girls brings to life the sexual fantasies of two gorgeous ladies as they lay in bed together sharing their wildest dreams. From worshipping the massive cock of John Holmes to getting plowed in a frenzied double team, these girls love it nasty and crave it raw. The notoriously stunning Tina Russell offers an excellent performance that magnetizes, turns on and satisfies the viewer's taste for pornographic beauty. Shot on film at a time when film makers could be imprisoned for their art. French School Girls Remains a strong movie with its unique vintage style and timeless artistic instinct." Only X-critic has the balls to say something else: "Filled with American actors masquerading under French pseudonyms like Nicole Bardot, Valerie Blue and Jean Petit, and directed by one Francois Bedoin, an obviously phony name if ever there were one, French Schoolgirls is about as French as the bastard love child of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Obviously made in an attempt to cash in on the popular European sex films that were drifting into theaters in Times Square from overseas, the film is obviously as American as mom and apple pie." The movie is made of loops featuring the massive meat of the massively ugly John Curtis Holmes and the (in comparison) less-impressive salamis of others (Reems, Jason Russell, etc.) cut in-between scenes of two nekid US gals talkin' about their sexual fantasies. According to X-critic, "French Schoolgirls is interesting in that it's got three of the decade's finest in semi-prominent roles [...]. On top of that, the attempt to make it a 'French' feature, something which fails miserably, adds some unintentional comedic value to the presentation. Vintage smut buffs ought to enjoy this one. It's [...] a fun time killer an interesting time capsule. Recommended for fans of the era."

Summer of Laura
(1975/76, writ. & dir. David Davidson)

As far as we can tell, the only directorial credit of the occasional porn actor "David Dixon", known with his Dixoff as "Davidson". Harry Reems is in this film, an X-rated turn of The Summer of 42 (1971 / trailer), only because he (along with Marc Stevens and Melissa Hall) is in a porno film — It Happened in Hollywood (1973) — watched by the characters somewhere along the way. For that, however, Wade Nichols is in the film, playing the unlucky love that dies and leaves his babe to seek solace in the arms of another. The plot, as found all over the web: "Along a lonely beach on a summer colony off the Long Island coast, a man walks slowly, reliving a summer, the Summer of Laura, when he was 19. Richie, (David Hunter, who went to appear with two gay legends — Jack Wrangler and Roger — in 1977's Hot House [full NSFW film], a film which has the added attraction in one scene of featuring an old loop of Joe Dallesandro doing everything in the book), has a friend on the island, Hene (Eric Edwards), who is gregarious and mischievous. Like the more sensitive Richie, he too was 19. During that summer of awakening he loses his youthful desires and develops his manhood. On the way to the movies, Richie literally bumps into Laura, (introducing [one-shot] Marcia Moon,) an older woman who lives nearby. She asks him if he'll help her with some chores the following day. He is totally flustered, but agrees. Richie goes to her house and after knocking on the door, and getting no response, enters. On the floor he finds a crumpled telegram which reads, 'Your husband, Bob Hayes [Wade Nichols], has been killed in action.' Laura appears, lonely and vulnerable. She moves toward him in a gesture of human contact. They slowly begin to dance. 'That summer we lost 5 frisbees, saved a girl from a silly snake, saw our first skin flick, and I lost my Laura.' The sea rises and the past is over...." The few who have seen this film and bothered to write about it, don't seem to have liked — in the following from Adult DVD Talk, KayParker33 expresses the common dissatisfactions: "Production values are next to nothing, the movie is on film, but shot like very clumsily and with poor lighting and focus. Any hope of a couples movie are probably dashed during a movie theater scene where the movie in question shows, among other things, a woman pushing eggs out of her pussy. Any hoping for more hardcore action like this, however, will be disappointed as well, as the rest of the film tries to follow the above-mentioned plot, but without any heart or even mediocre acting. [...] It seems that the movie fails on just about every level." As mentioned above, "Wade Nichols" — born Dennis Posa — plays the doomed husband. Wade, who appeared in both gay and straight porno, also had a career as "Dennis Price", the name under which he appeared from 1979 to 1984 as Police Chief Derek Mallory on the soap opera The Edge of Night (1956-84) and, in 1979, released a disco album entitled Like an Eagle on Casablanca. He died at the age of 39 from AIDS-related complication on 28 January 1985.

 Dennis Price singing his club hit, Like an Eagle:

 

Luna di miele in tre
(1976, dir. Carlo Vanzina)

Aka Honeymoon In Three. One of two non-porno Italian films of 1976 that Harry Reems took part in, the film is a sex comedy but not a sex film. Reems is credited on the poster. The directorial debut of director Carlo Vanzina, who co-wrote this movie with his brother Enrico Vanzina; it is a remake of the Neil Simon written comedy The Heartbreak Kid (1972 / trailer), which in turn was also remade by the Farrelly Brothers in 2007 (trailer). Reems plays the character "Gilbert Blain". The plot is pretty much the same in all three films: The guy is together with the wrong woman and while they are on their honeymoon he meets the true gal of his dreams and now must get rid of the first woman... it's a comedy, not a thriller, so no gushing blood.

 Soundtrack:

 

Lettomania
(1976, writ. & dir. Vincenzo Rigo)

Harry Reems' other Italian sex comedy of 1976 was, as far as we can tell, director Rigo's last film. He once made a decent thriller entitled The Killers Are Our Guests (1974 / full film). The following is a computer translation of an Italian plot description: "Giulio (Alberto Squillante of Last Stop on the Night Train [1975 / trailer], The Mad Dog Killer [1977 / trailer] and The House by the Edge of the Lake (1979 / trailer]) is a young wastrel with a passion for the piano, and together with his friend Max (Harry Reems) he divides his time between subterfuge and beds of beautiful girls. When Max meets Dora (Carmen Villani), wife of a famous writer, in London and invites her to Italy, Giulio ends up losing his head to her. But Dora proves to be no easy prey...."

 

Schmaltz from the soundtrack:

Erotic Dr. Jekyll 
(1976, dir. Victor Milt)

 

Victor Milt (see Sherlick Holmes above), as "Tim McCoy", called the shots for this cult-worthy porn film originally distributed and recently released on DVD by Distribpix, which calls the film "an amazing classic" and explains the cast: "Bree Anthony plays a virgin girl, Bobby Astyr is Igor, Zebedy Colt is the Count, Terri Hall (of The Devil Inside Her [1977 / full NSFW film] and Unwilling Lovers [1977 / full NSFW film]) plays a groupie, and of course the star, Harry Reems plays Dr. JekyII." The plot, according to AV Maniacs: "A scientist by trade with a great fake beard, Jekyll is the grandson of the original Dr. Jekyll that we all know. When he discovers grandpa's secret laboratory, he can't help but follow in the family tradition and start playing around with the formula hidden away in the confines of the room. Of course, once Jekyll imbibes, he turns into the sinister Rory Hump, an insatiable sex animal (who loses the beard but of course keeps the trademark Reems moustache) who just can't seem to satisfy his hunger for poon. There's a catch, however — taking the formula three times can have adverse effects and even lead to death. Witness the hunchbacked lab assistant, Igor (Bobby Astyr), who took the potion once and now has to live with the physical deformity that it caused him...." Along the way, Jekyll joins a rock band ("Seeing Harry Reems on stage with a headband all messed up and pretending to be able to play guitar is worth the price of admission alone. He's horrible, and it's great."), becomes a national star and then has to deflower one hundred virgins in one session. In regard to the film itself, AV Maniacs says "Reems is in full on pimp-mode in this film, contrasting quite amusingly with Astyr's extremely hammy Igor. The two of them completely dominate the film [...]. Fast paced and campy as can be, it's actually fairly surprising that Reems isn't better known for this film than for some of his other pictures. [...] He shows some real comedic timing here that proves he was more than just a random seventies dong willing to penetrate poon on camera."

Sex Wish
(1976, writ & dir. Victor Milt)

Originally shot under the title The Night Walker. Victor Milt wrote and directed yet another cult-worthy porn flick, freely copied from — er, inspired by — Death Wish (1974 / trailer) which, among other things, features an early (clothed, non-sex and without cedit) performance of Robert Kerman of Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Eaten Alive! (1980 / trailer), Cannibal Ferox (1981 / trailer) and Night of the Creeps (1986). DVD Drive-In, like most who review this film, offer praise: "[...] An accomplished film and should be remembered today for its great cast and compelling storyline" that is "a well-made, nasty, vicious hardcore roughie which would play just as well at drive-ins and grindhouses without the hardcore sex." But it does have the sex — lots of it, and much of it violent. The ever-reliable One Sheet Index offers the following limp plot description: "After having made love to his wife Faye, (C.J. Laing of The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang) [1975 / NSFW film], The Taking of Christina (1976 / trailer), Daughters of Discipline (1978 / full NSFW film) and Water Power [1977 / full NSFW film]), Ken (Harry Reems) goes off to work at his law firm. Meantime someone breaks into their apartment and a sexual encounter takes place between his wife and the intruder (Zebedy Colt). Later that evening, Reems, after having to go to his neighbor Alice (Nancy Dare) for comfort, finds that she seduces him. [...] In an attempt to forget everything he goes to a local night club where he is picked up by two beautiful hookers. [...]. Satisfied, Reems moves on, in search of the intruder, Zebedy Colt. Soon, he spots Zebedy in the streets and a wild chase takes place between him and Reems through the subway system of New York, but Reems loses and Zebedy gets away. Reems, with the help of the police trace Zebedy down to an exotic night club and Sex Wish ends with a surprise ending and a REAL BANG!" The Bloody Pit of Horror says: "[...] This very unpleasant hard X film has built up a reputation over the years as a sick classic. So does it actually live up to its reputation? For the most part, I'd say yes. At least if you're like me and not well versed on this kind of stuff. The attack scenes are very twisted, effective and made even nastier by the inclusion of hardcore sex. Still, they wouldn't have near the impact they do if not for the effectively deranged performance from Zebedy Colt as the psycho. Colt — a New York stage actor and gay cabaret singer who moonlit in straight porn because the parts were better — goes all out in this role: crying, screaming, laughing and even changing up his voice whenever necessary. If this same performance was in an R-rated film, it would probably be lauded. On the down side, all of the actual death scenes are ineptly staged, with the weapon clearly not making contact with the body. [...]." Critical Condition says: "Sex Wish looks like it was edited with a butterknife and the frequent sex scenes are graphic but passionless (maybe it was meant to be that way but I doubt it). But it is well acted, something you do not find in today's hardcore films. I guess audiences were more demanding back in the 70’s (before the advent of home video, when any hack could film people having sex and release it on video). This movie seems more concerned with the plot and the exploits of Zedeby Colt who is excellent in this role. When we witness his preparation for an assault, it is truly frightening. We see him strip naked, slip on a cock ring, snort amphetamines, apply lipstick to his mouth and pull a stocking over his head. We all know what is going to happen next. It is not a pretty sight and is quite unbearable to watch, but watch we will (there is a voyeur in all of us). The subject matter is not for the faint of heart (feminists would have a field day with this one and rightly so). Although the gore is amateurish (fake blood on bodies with no open wounds) the squeamish should still stay away."

Edited trailer:

 

Miss Nude America
(1976, dir. James P. Blake)

Scene from Miss Nude America with Dick Drost:

Originally entitled The Contest. The directorial debut of lawyer James P. Blake, and (as far as we can tell) only film he ever made. According to Variety, this documentary was one of the top-grossing films of 1980, when the Jerry Gross Organization re-released it as The Miss Nude America Contest. Harry Reems appears as himself, as he is one of the judges of the contest. Temple of Shockexplains the basics: "James P. Blake's documentary about the 1974 Miss Nude America Pageant was filmed under the title Naked City, Indiana and first released theatrically by Trans-American in the fall of 1976 as Miss Nude America ('A film exposing a bizarre American phenomena... and the man behind it'). The ad above is from its Madison, WI opening as The Contest (from Atlas Films) on October 14, 1977." My Duck Is Dead explains more: "Every summer, thousands of people descend upon a place tucked in the cornfields of the Midwest to witness the Ultimate Beauty Pageant. A probing and satirical, behind-the-scenes look at this bizarre event, the contestants who enter, the spectators who attend, the entrepreneur behind it, and the townspeople who tolerate it. This film is somewhat amateurish, but it gives an interesting view of American attitudes to nudity and sex. To European eyes it is not particularly lewd or pornographic. There are some amazing shots, the parade of the candidates all holding a little white balloon and the two officers opening the cortege. But the most remarkable views are those of fully-clothed overweight middle-class males making snapshots at maximum speed without caring for background or composition. Although beauty parades in some European nudist camps do occur, they are more casual and everyone is naked not only the competing women and a few freakish hirsute males. In short this documentary gives an amusing view of puritans going to the dogs and [...] amusing American habits." The nudist camp that once was Naked City no longer exists: its director Dick Drost, "a paraplegic ex-hippie swinger" who appears in the movie as himself, ran into "legal troubles" and thus Naked City closed in 1986. The blog Home in the Railroad Earth wrote the following about "The Dark Side of Naked City": "In a recent post about the Sun Aura Nudist Resort of Roselawn, Indiana, I mentioned that it had once been known as Naked City, and that it had hosted the annual Miss Nude Universe contest. [...] The resort itself began as Club Zoro in 1933, when it was founded by Chicago lawyer Alois Knapp, 'the father of nudism in America.' Dale and Mary Drost acquired the site later — probably sometime after the Second World War. Their son, Dick Drost, took over the resort in 1968, renamed it Naked City, and began holding the Miss Nude Universe contest. The club was popular with truckers because it included a truckstop where the waitresses were nude. Along with the Miss Nude Universe contest, there was the 'Erin Go Bra-less' dance on St. Patrick's Day, the Un-Fashion Show, and the Miss Nude Teeny-Bopper contest. That last contest should have set off a red flag, but it didn't. It turns out that Drost was charged in 1985 with molesting a 13-year-old girl and with showing obscene materials to minors. Eventually he pled guilty to 10 sex-related misdemeanors and agreed to stay out of Indiana for 10 years. As a result, Naked City closed in 1986. Its successor is strictly adults-only." Dick Drost, by the way, opened a new Naked City West in Riverside, CA; in 1990 he was busted again for "distribution or exhibition of lewd materials to a minor." The full film can be watched here at Tube Motion.

Bel Ami
(1976, writ. & dir. Mac Ahlberg as "Bert Torn")

 

Aka For Men Only. Based on the novel of the same name by Guy de Maupassant, which had already been filmed a number of times previously as Bel Ami (Germany, 1939 / full film), Bel Ami (Mexico, 1947), The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947 / first 13 minutes), Bel Ami, der Frauenheld von Paris (Austria, 1955) and the TV movie Bel Ami (Germany, 1968). This version here was filmed in Sweden where, as Dirtymoviedevotee (dries.vermeulen@hotmail.be) of Brugge, Belgium, points out: "It's a measure of the cultural as well as sexual freedom within Scandinavian society at the time that their movie industry's respected professionals might proudly produce pornography without risking any sort of backlash whatsoever." 3xUpdate explains the basic plot of the movie: "Reems [as 'Georg Duroy'] is a journalist given a chance to become publisher of a French hardcore magazine. The feature chronicles his sexual (mis)adventures in pursuit of stories, like an African diplomat's hot-blooded affairs, and photos of the famous in infamous positions, with cute babes trying to drag him into the bushes, or wherever, at every turn. Funny, hot, and very 1970s." Over at imdb, babycarrot67 of Columbus, Ohio, says: "Bel Ami is refreshing and funny, and is a real treat for fans of 70's adult (XXX) cinema. There is an actual plot, the actors and actresses are both very attractive and perform just as well in the dialog-ridden scenes fully clothed as they do naked in their sex scenes, which are numerous. The film also has the almost non-stop euphoria of beautiful 70's Euromusic on the soundtrack. This is a film that adults can view and not feel ashamed or embarrassed. Harry Reems of course is terrific and quite comical as the bumbling hero of the piece, bumping his head on an over-sized phallic sculpture in a so-called art studio, rolling down a grassy hill with the latest female to jump his bones, and trying to sneak a peek at the almost unbelievably beautiful Christa Linder (of the infamously terrible Alien Terror [1971 / VHS credits], The Fountain of Love [1966 / trailer] and The Day of Anger [1967 / trailer], among other films of note) as she showers. Another treat for genre fans is the presence of Jacqueline Laurent, best known for her harrowing roles in the Jess Franco films Lorna the Exorcist (1974 / full film) and Diary of a Nymphomaniac (1973 / trailer). Here she looks beautiful, kicks back, and anxiously samples the physical charms of Mr. Reems [...]. And speaking of director Ahlberg, whose fine I, A Woman (1965 / trailer) remains a classic, this film proves that ten years after I, A Woman he was able to move into more explicit fare and still retain the touch of class and dignity that many erotic filmmakers either lose or never have at all."

 

NSFW Trailer:

Let Me Die a Woman
(1977, dir. Doris Wishman)

Ah, the infamous grindhouse "documentary" by Doris Wishman — we actually saw it as a wee teenager, but senility has wiped it from our brains (the only thing we remember is how we thought everyone in the film intensely unattractive and that we came out of the theatre happy that we felt we had been born in the right body). We are still looking for a cheap copy of the 1978 movie tie-in paperback by M.J. Lukas, Let Me Die A Woman: The Why and How of Sex-Change Operations. Lolita Classics explains the basics: "Let Me Die a Woman is a dramatized pseudo-documentary made by cult soft-porn director Doris Wishman (1912-2002) in 1972. The subject is transsexuals, both male and female, who want to make / have done a sex change operation. The film wasn't released until 1978. The film mixes educational scenes with dramatizations of real events with soft porn. All through the film Dr. Leo Wollman, a sex change specialist, guides us through transsexual group meetings, interviews and even a sex change operation." That the film mixes the "documentary" with the "fictional" explains the presence of actors such as Harry Reems and a (fictional) "post-op" Arlana Blue (of Bloodsucking Freaks [1976 / trailer]) and Michael Gaunt (of City of the Living Dead [1980] and Corruption [1983 / scene]) alongside real transgendered — as well as (a rarity in grindhouse "documentaries") a real sex-change specialist, Dr. Leo Wollman (1914 – 1998), who was also one of the original authors of the 1990 Harry Benjamin Standards of Care. According to the BFI, the fictionalized segments are "based on the experiences of Wollman's patients."

 
Reems & Arlana Blue in Let Me Die a Woman (excerpt):

The blogspot Dollar Theater Massacre, which says "be warned: this film does not hold back", has a remarkably insightful review of the film, which it links it directly to the tradition of the mondo film: "Doris Wishman's Let Me Die a Woman is a unique little mondo picture in that it's focused on sex, but clearly not with the intent to titillate. Honing in on gender dysphoria and offering a glimpse into the lives of several transgendered individuals, it merges an objective, clinical view of the topic with more questionable shock tactics. The result is likely to make most people squeamish for one reason or another, but even today it remains an interesting historical artifact." DTM goes on to point out that despite the occasional sincerity of the movie, "It's not hard to assess Doris Wishman's intent with this film": "Everything here is shown in all its detail, occasionally at the expense of the patients' dignity. Even assuming willing participants doesn't really absolve it from all the poking and prodding that goes on. The tone is more that of a freakshow than a doctor's office." (The sexploitation director remains a sexploitation director — but then, would we want her any other way?) Nevertheless, DTN finds "And yet, amidst all of this, there are beacons of rationality and what seems to be good-natured intent. Most prominent are the interviews with Deborah Harten [seen in the photo above taken from the film's title sequence], who was born a man but had been living as a perfectly happy woman for years when she appeared in the movie. Deborah's stories are interspersed throughout the shocking portions of the film, and serve to mediate some of the more extreme content. [...] As a mondo film, Let Me Die a Woman stands out as one of the more interesting ones if you can stomach the dated attitudes and blatant misrepresentation of its subjects. Still, it seems to mark a shift toward paying increased lip service to values such as tolerance, goodwill, and sympathy, something which would become commonplace and seemingly mandated in later years. [...] In the midst of this, the interviews with Deborah end up nearly swaying the film's tone. Placing her in the middle of all the fear-mongering, pity, thinly veiled prurience, and crass exploitation only serves to illustrate the ills of the society in which she lives alongside with the courage she's displayed in facing them."

 
A scene with Deborah Harten:

The ever-interesting blogspot A Gender Variance Who's Who, however, is less kind in its view of the film, saying: "[...] A cross between a documentary and pornography. In the end it is a failure at both. Dr Wollman, the real sex-change doctor in New York, who reminds us of his MD, his PhD and his DD, shows us scenes where a transsexual explains that she will get a womb transplant and have a baby; dramatised scenes where transies pick up men for sex; gory close-ups of vaginoplasty; dramatised suicides and self-castrations. Incorrect biological explanations are given, e.g. that homosexuality and transsexuality are both the result of incorrect development of glands. [...] What are we to make of this? Wollman was not only a real New York doctor with real transsexual patients, he was co-author of the Standards of Care which are still taken as the guidelines for doctors dealing with transsexual patients. Wollman was the 'scientific and medical advisor' to the film, and so we presume that he agreed with what he says in the film. He is not an actor with no power to disagree with the script. So why so much disinformation about womb transplants and conditions being caused by malfunctioning glands? Did he give equally bad information to his patients? A camp classic? Yes. An embarrassment to transsexuals and their doctors? Yes. A noteworthy documentary? No — even Glen or Glenda (1953 / trailer / full movie) is much better."

 
NSFW Trailer:

French Deep Throat
(1977, writ. & dir. André Koob)

 

The original title was Bouches gourmands, it but seems also to have been released as Adolescentes Libertines. This French film seems to be the directorial debut of André Koob, whose career in films seems relatively un-documented on the web. His roots may lie in sexploitation, but today he is respectable (?) producer of trash, including such films as the Hong Kong "Bruce Le" films Ninja Strikes Back (1982 / full film) and La filière chinoise (1990), the direct to video thriller Twin Sisters (1992 / full film), and Ruggero Deodato's Mom I Can Do It (1992) and The Washing Machine (1993 / French trailer). Reems plays "Dr. Young" in what is commonly simply described as a French version of Deep Throat (1972), with an unknown (and never heard of again) "Emmanuelle Armanet" as "Laura Lovelace". The only description we could find was in Dutch on a Dutch website— a computer translation of their text says: "Linda (Armanet) has her clitoris in the throat, which is discovered Dr Young (Reems). There is grim rivalry between him and Dr Freudus (Jean Luisi of the classic escape film Le Trou [1960 / scene]). A difficult and bad pastiche of Deep Throat, the shamelessness even goes so far as that it even uses a number of scenes from the original movie. A number of comic pieces save the film still from the total failure." The film does have the added attraction of cult actress Alice Arno playing Dr. Young's assistant Greta; Arno — born Marie-France Broquet and the sister of actress Chantal Broquet — is found in many a fun film, including 12 Jess Franco films. Arno retired soon after this film, not wanting to be part of the new trend of hardcore in exploitation.

 Alice Arno & Chantal Broquet in Jess Franco's
Maciste contre la reine des Amazones:

 

The Confessions of Linda Lovelace
(1977, dir. unknown)

 

Less "directed" than edited, the iafd credits Gerard Damiano as the man in charge, but it could have been anybody with a pair of scissors and access to Linda Lovelace's previous stag shorts and hardcore movies — the latter of which, in all truth, only consist of Deep Throat (1972), Deep Throat II (1974) and Linda Lovelace for President (1975). This film here, like Linda Lovelace Meets Miss Jones (1975) from "Felix Dileone", was made for the extra dollar that could be milked from her name and can hardly be called a true movie, as it is really just a collection of loops and outtakes (from DT I and II and, oddly enough, the Lovelace-free fuckflick The Love Witch [1974]) strung together with the help of the flimsiest of framing devices. The "plot" has "Linda Lovelace" (who is played by a double and thus never seen from the front) interviewing for a position as concubine for a sultan (Reems); her sex scenes are all flashbacks from her relatively short early career as a sword swallower and dog trainer.

Harry and His Geisha Girls
(1978, dir. Shinya Yamamoto)

Original title, Ikenie no onna-tachi; Italian title, Femmine calde per supermaschio bollente. Who knows how or why, but Harry Reems — billed as "Harî Rîmusu" — somehow landed in this Japanese Pink film, a "zany sex comedy about a penis transplant gone awry" directed by Shinya Yamamoto, "one of the founders of the Pink film genre". The film seems to have made it to Italy, going by a poster and DVD cover we found online, but it doesn't seem to have had an English-language release; the little information we could find on the web makes it sound positively psychotronic. Over on the AV Maniacsforum, in 2008, Sheldon Warnock offered a plot description he claims comes from "a now-defunct bootleg operation": "[...] Harry plays an impotent businessman who can't satisfy his Pacific Rim wife. So at his mother-in-law's urging he gets a horse-dick transplant and goes nuts screwing everything in sight! Hilariously obscene scenes of Harry in a hospital bed sporting a circus-sized lap tent, banging into walls with his huge cast-covered cock, filling gallon-sized jars from a catheter, mammasan checking out Harry's new equipment by rapping on it with a hammer, jewel smuggling Yakuzas breaking open another giant frozen dick filled with diamonds, skyscrapers and airplanes transforming into giant penises (penii?), yet another inside-out vagina shot, a lesbian dildo tryst, and more!" According to the forum at Dread Central, the film "ends with Harry [...] doggie-stylin' it with a horse that wears a bride outfit." All in all, it sounds like out kind of film...

 

 

Grease
(1978, dir. Randal Kleiser)

The movie that never happened — for Harry Reems. For a brief time, Harry Reems was cast to play the part of Coach Calhoun, a role that would probably have been perfect for him, but Paramount said "No Fucking Way!" and the part went to Sid Caesar (of Curse of the Black Widow [1977 / first 15 minutes] and The Spirit Is Willing [1967 / trailer]) instead. Had he not been dumped, who knows, perhaps Reems would have been one of the few, the rare ex-porn stars — like Tracy Lords (of Cry-Baby [1990 / trailer], Skinner [1993 / trailer] and Excision [2012 / trailer]), Jenna Jameson (of Zombie Strippers [2008]), Sasha Grey, Kim McKamy / Ashlyn Gere (of Evil Laugh [1986 / scene], Creepozoids [1987] and Willard [2003]), Dennis Parker / Wade Nichols, or Sonny Landham (of 48 Hrs. [1982 / trailer] and Predator [1987 / Arnie sings]) — to have a viable (if often short) mainstream career. (Hell, thanks to a few choice film projects — Lust in the Dust [1985] and Trouble in Mind  [1985 / trailer] — even Divine started going mainstream before she died, and her career began with cock sucking and a dog-shit lunch [both in Pink Flamingoes (1972 / trailer), as if you didn't already know].) Grease, based on the long-running Broadway musical, went on to be a major hit and a cornerstone of modern US American pop history. It was followed by a forgotten sequel Grease 2 (trailer) four years later starring a young Michelle Pfeiffer.

Trailer:

Love Syndrome
(1979, dir. Sam Norvell)

"Director" Sam Norvell (aka [among other names] Sidney Niekerk and Bernardo Spinelli), if one can even say this film was "directed", is/was more active as a producer than "director": like many supposed "movies" in porn, Love Syndrome is basically a rehash of a variety of loops and scenes from other films strung together using the slimmest of framing devices. Adult DVD Talk explains everything you need to know to a worthless film with a half-way decent poster: "An interviewer (John Christopher) walks the streets of New York speaking with Dr. Joy Love, (Molly Malone) a sex therapist, who reveals the secrets of The Love Syndrome, a breakthrough treatment in the fight against boredom in marriages. Her therapist partner, Dr. Harry Reems, away at work in Sweden, appears via flashback in a number of 'filmed sessions' where Dr. Reems comes to the rescue of many a bored person or couple. No surprise that nobody wants to take directing credit for The Love Syndrome, a strange mish-mash of stray Harry Reems scenes strung together via this lame interview, which serves more as coitus-interuptus than anything else. [...] Here, the observations of Dr. Love Joy, the therapist, interrupt these Dr. Reems suck and fuck sessions [...] with different one-flick-wonders (actresses that appeared in few if any other xxx films). But wait, once the Harry Reems scenes run out, the producers of The Love Syndrome add an unrelated scene where Merle Michaels drives a car around New York with Samantha Fox (of A Night to Dismember [1983]) and Bobby Astyr sucking and fucking in the back seat. It's a fun scene (!!!), but it's tagged onto the end [and] then the trio are given top billing in the credits." As producer, Norvell credits include a variety of uninteresting porn films, the trashy soft-core Virgin Cowboy (1975) — featuring Liz Renay (of the classic Desperate Living [1977 / trailer]) — and B-films like Roots of Evil (1992 / trailer) and Evil Spirits (1990 / trailer).

 Samantha Fox in Doris Wishman's A Night to Dismember (1983):

  

Part V of Harry Reems' career review will cum eventually...

Piranha 3DD (USA, 2012)

June 18, 2013, 4:21 am

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Piranha 3DD Red Band Trailervon teasertrailer

 

"Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina."
Shelby (Katrina Bowden)

 

Let's talk about sequels. Many suck, without a doubt — for every rare feat like Aliens (1986 / trailer), there are probably a dozen flicks like Speed II: Cruise Control (1997 / trailer) or Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (1995 / trailer) or the jaw-droppingly terrible original The Hills Have Eyes II (1985 / trailer) — the last being one of the all-time worst films ever made, if it can even be called a film (most of the movie consists of flashback footage from the first film... even the dog gets a frigging flashback). Most sequels, however, tend to be like The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999 / trailer) or Robocop II (1990 / trailer), in that they are neither all that good nor that terrible, per say, but oddly empty and unnecessary and terribly pale in comparison to the first film, or like or Pet Semetary II (1992 / trailer), which is oddly empty and just as dull as the film it follows, but indefinitely better acted. Some, like A Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy's Revenge (1985 / trailer) are pretty crappy, but manage to become interesting as time passes and new levels of interpretation become obvious.

 

But some sequels can be enjoyed in their own right, on their own terms, if you're in the right state of mind that it. Take the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986 / trailer), for example: if you're expecting a raw tale of relentless terror like the first film, you're gonna hate it because it is anything but that; but if you're up for a polished, gore-tacular black comedy, you'll find it a barrel of laughs and better than the average Jim Carrey flick. Or let's consider Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000 / trailer), a film that would well have done better had it been released simply as Book of Shadows and not tried to tie itself to the original "found-footage" flick; as a film of its own, Book of Shadows actually does well as a mystifying dead teenager film, but as a sequel, it fails. Of the two sequels just mentioned, we liked the latter because we chose to see it less as a sequel than as simply another film using aspects belonging to the canon of horror that were introduced in the earlier movie; the former we liked because, like the admittedly far better Aliens, it continues the original storyline but takes it off into a new direction.

 

But the type of sequel we like the most is that of a trashy follow-up that is even more trashy than the film it follows. A good example of that kind of film would be the House on Haunted Hill II (2007 / trailer), the sequel to the less-than-perfect remake House on Haunted Hill from 1999 (trailer). Haunted Hill II is a cheap and sleazy piece of filmmaking with a ridiculous storyline and no real reason to exist, but we'll be damned if the people who made that film didn't already know that and, as a result, go for the gusto and make a film that is actually more fun than the original. We laughed throughout most of the film version of Haunted Hill II— the DVD release adds an interactive aspect that is highly William Castle in nature but absent in the straight release we saw — but by the time the hot-looking main bad gal, when confronted by two hot-looking (ghost) babes, goes for a full lesbian make-out session instead of freaking out, we knew we had a film that was not only aware that it was trash, but even wanted to be trash — and could easily be enjoyed as such.

 

Species II (1998 / trailer) is like that, too. We could never figure out why anyone liked Species (1995 / trailer), which aggravated us both times we saw it, but in Species II, by the time the first naked babe's belly expanded like a balloon and then burst in a shower of blood and guts, we were hooked! Species II is pure and unapologetic senseless garbage like we like it. It kept us entertained and it kept us laughing, just like the unjustly maligned sequel Cabin Fever II: Spring Fever (2009 / trailer), which is truly a disgustingly tasteless comedy if there ever were one, and thus has our full recommendations. 

 

And that now brings us to the sequel at hand, Piranha 3DD, the trashy low-budget sequel to a trashy bigger-budgeted semi-hit Piranha 3D (2010 / trailer). Director Alexandre Aja of the original has bailed, replaced instead by one John Gulager, a relative unknown that hoisted the tasteless and hilariously fun splatter flick Feast upon us many a year ago in 2005 (trailer), as well as the two even trashier direct-to-video sequels that followed, Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (2008 / trailer) and Feast III: The Happy Finish (2009). If nothing else, the two sequels showed that John Gulager is the man to call if you want a brainless, tastelessly funny and bloody flick when you have no budget and a penchant for multi-violent cheese. And how does this work out on Piranha 3DD? Well, there seems to have been more studio control, for the flick doesn't go quiet as ape-shit crazy as in the Feast sequels, but although Piranha 3DD doesn't stoop as deeply, it still wallows in its cheapness and exploitive roots and takes a throw-the-spaghetti-on-the-wall approach. And while a lot of spaghetti doesn't stick, enough does to make for a good time and a good laugh...

 

That the budget of Piranha 3DD was substantially less than the first film is already obvious in the opening sequence due to the first guest victims: instead of someone of the calibre of Richard Dreyfuss, we are offered two notable but definitely low-rent cult figures: Gary Busey and Clu Gulager. No Jaws (1975 / trailer) reference here, for sure, but a true if silent statement that what to come is intended as cheap B-movie fun... and cheap B-movie fun it is!

 

Dumbing down from the relatively low IQ original, Piranha 3DD moves the location of carnage from the wide breadth of a lake to the narrower scope of the swimming pools of a water park — and not just any old water park, but one reopening as "Big Wet," complete with an adult section life-guarded by "water-certified strippers." The park is owned jointly by Maddy (Danielle Panabaker of The Crazies [2010 / trailer]), a marine biology student, and her breast-obsessed step-father Chet (David Koechner of Snakes on a Plane [2006 / trailer] and the surprisingly good Final Destination 5 [2011 / trailer]), who owns the stock majority and thus calls the shots and can make such decisions as "Double Ds get in for free!" Thus, boobies galore — and unlike in the first part, an occasional pair even look real.

At an evening party at the water park, most of the central characters are introduced — including Maddy's policeman ex-boyfriend Kyle (Chris Zylka of Kaboom [2010 / trailer]), her eternal secret admirer Barry (Matt Bush), and two of her old friends, Ashley (Meagan Tandy), and Shelby (Katrina Bowden of the excellent Tucker and Dale vs Evil [2010 / trailer]). From here on, one or two people die, another gets a baby piranha up the vagina in what must be an obtuse homage to either They Came from Within (1975 / trailer) or Slither (2006 / trailer) — an event that leads up to the mandatory circumcision scene that doesn't outdo the one in Piranha 3D but still gets all men to reach protectively for their gonads — and the film steadily pushes forwards to the big gory showdown when the fish finally break into (!) the water park and begin to chow down...

 

Although only 8 minutes shorter than the first film, Piranha 3DD seems to fly by way faster. True, the base story is even more idiotic than that of Piranha 3D, but both the violence and the jokes tend to be less mean-spirited and a lot more fun, particularly after the deliciously self-ironic David Hasselhoff appears on scene to be the celebrity lifeguard on opening day (saying quietly to himself, "Welcome to rock bottom"). Likewise, since 3DD was filmed as 3-D film from the start instead of being converted after the fact, its visual effects are often stronger than many of those in 3D, despite being obviously cheaper. Which isn't to say that 3DD is a good horror film — in fact, it is anything but a good "horror" film: it is a hilarious and oddly likeable blood- and breast-heavy burlesque that hides it innate bad-film roots behind its half-way decent production and acting and effects and an obvious self-awareness of its own cheap and sleazy limitations and intentions. The only thing Piranha 3DD wants to do — aside from bringing more money into the studio's pockets — is to entertain with blood and breasts and bad taste, and that it does well.

 

By the way, are we the only one to see the grammar mistake in blurb on the original poster below?

R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part II

June 25, 2013, 3:03 am

≫ Next: Short Film: The Backwater Gospel (Denmark, 2011)

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Ray Harryhausen 

June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013

The Lost World
(1925, dir. Harry O. Hoyt)

1925 Promotional Film to The Lost World:

OK, we admit that Ray Harryhausen had nothing to do with this film here or the next one presented in this career review.... But the fact is that this film here and the later King Kong are the films that inspired Ray Harryhausen to begin experimenting with puppets and effects — had these films never been, there may have been a Harryhausen but it is highly likely there would never have been any Harryhausen films. This film here, and the one below, were so influential in creating the man that made the films that we feel they, too, deserve recognition and presentation — and thus they are here.

The plot of The Lost World, as told by Ron Kerrigan (mvg@whidbey.com) at imdb: "Explorer Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery of The Big House [1930])) is taking quite a beating in the London press thanks to his claim that living dinosaurs exist in the far reaches of the Amazon. Newspaper reporter Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes of The Drums of Jeopardy [1931 / full film]) learns that this claim originates from a diary given to him by fellow explorer Maple White's daughter, Paula (Bessie Love). Malone's paper funds an expedition to rescue Maple White, who has been marooned at the top of a high plateau. Joined by renowned hunter John Roxton (Lewis Stone of The Unknown Man [1951 / trailer]), and others, the group goes to South America, where they do indeed find a plateau inhabited by pre-historic creatures, one of which they even manage to bring back to London with them."

The Lost World, which was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1998, is a silent film version of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. Doyle appears in the opening scene to the film — though the scene is often cut from available versions. In fact, the film that Harryhausen saw is long gone: bits and pieces were cut and lost over the years, as were the original negatives of the original ten reel release, and even the long version now being preserved is actually a cut and paste restoration done using materials from a variety of location, including the Czech Republic.

 

The Lost World could well be the masterpiece of its director, Harry O. Hoyt (6 August 1885 - 29 July 1961), an American screenwriter (among others: Lady in the Death House [1944 / full film] and The Missing Corpse [1945 / full film]) and director whose last feature film as director is the quaintly titillating pre-Code adventure flick Jungle Bride (1933 / full film). His brother, the prolific character actor Arthur Hoyt (seen in the background of films such as The Raven [1935 / trailer], The Ninth Guest [1934 / full film], Fury [1936 / trailer] or A Shriek in the Night [1933 / full film], among many), appears in The Lost World as Prof. Summerlee.

According to Wikipedia, The Lost World is the first film to ever have been shown to airline passengers (in April 1925 on an Imperial Airways London-Paris flight), is considered the first feature-length film made in the United States, if not the world, to use stop motion photography as the primary special effect, and is the granddaddy of all feature-length dinosaur movies, from King Kong to Jurassic Park (1993 / trailer) and its sequels. It was also the first feature film that pioneering stop motion special effects artist Willis H. O'Brien worked on; up till then, he had only done short films like The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915 / full short) or his first dino-film, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918 / full short).

The official Ray Harryhausen website says: "[Ray's] parents took him to see The Lost World sometime in 1925, when he was barely five years old and there he witnessed what looked to be living dinosaurs. It was a revelation. His favorite scene was of an allosaurus fighting and then pushing a brontosaurus off the edge of the plateau where it lands in a lake of mud."

The Lost World (1925) — The Full Film:

King Kong 

(1933, dirs. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)

 Trailer: 

As in The Lost World, Willis H. O'Brien did the breathtaking stop motion effects to King Kong.

To simply quote the official Ray Harryhausen webpage: "Eight years later, in 1933, Ray would see another film that would not only inspire him but change his life. The film was King Kong. Picture the scene of Ray, aged an impressionable thirteen year old, sitting in Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, with his aunt (who had acquired the precious tickets) and his mother. When he left the cinema Ray talked about what he had seen all the way home. Questions came thick and fast, most of which his parents couldn’t answer so Ray had to look elsewhere for answers. He wanted to know about the creatures and how they had been brought to life. He knew they weren't real but how were they able to move?" And thus Harryhausen's lifelong interest in special effects and stop motion animation began, initially reflected in the marionettes and puppets and artwork and short experimental films and onwards until he finally began his mature work...

 

The plot of King Kong as explained by Claudio Carvalho of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1933, the bold and successful filmmaker Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong of The Son of Kong [1933 / trailer] and The Most Dangerous Game [1932 / full film]) travels by ship with a large crew, his friend Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot of Fallen Angel [1945 / trailer] and Sinners in Paradise [1938 / full film]) and the starlet Ann Darrow (Fay Wray of Black Moon [1934 / full movie], The Vampire Bat [1933 / trailer] and Doctor X [1932 / trailer], among others) to an unknown island to shoot a movie. The local natives worship a huge gorilla called Kong and they abduct Ann to offer her in a sacrifice to Kong. Jack Driscoll, who is in love with her, Carl Denham, who aims to capture the animal for an exhibition in New York and part of the crew hike into the jungle, where dinosaurs live, trying to rescue Ann. King Kong falls in love for Ann and protects her against the dangers. But the gorilla is captured and brought to New York. In the middle of a show in Broadway, King Kong escapes, bringing panic to the Apple city."

Remade twice — as an enjoyably bad version in 1976 (trailer), which in no way reveals Jessica Lange to be the talented actress that she is, and as an enjoyable but oddly empty special effects overkill in 2005 (trailer) — the original version was finally deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress in 1991 and added to the National Film Registry.

Jessica Lange proving her versitality in American Horror Story II — The Name Game:American Horror Story. The Name Game Song from michael mossin on Vimeo.

Over the years King Kong, like many movies, has suffered the removal of one or another scene to meet changing times or commercial desires. This includes scenes such as Kong chewing on one native and stepping on another, all scenes of sailors being eaten by the Brontasourus, Kong pushing down Ann's top to get a gander of her breasts, the death of a sleeping woman Kong initially mistakes as Ann and, most famously, the infamous spider scene, which involves the death of a plethora of sailors. Producer Merian C. Cooper supposedly cut the last scene after the first public screening because the reaction of the audience was so extreme that "It stopped the picture cold." Peter Jackson recreated the scene for a recent DVD re-release.

King Kong (1933): The Lost Spider Pit Sequence — Peter Jackson Recreation:

Jasper and the Watermelons
(1942, dir George Pal)

All great artists start somewhere... in the case of Harryhausen, though inspired to enter the field of stop motion animation by King Kong (1933) and the work of Willis O'Brien, his first job (from 1940 to 42) was working for George Pal on the latter's classic Puppetoons. While the Puppetoon shorts are generally lite on credits, on the official Ray Harryhausen website, among the shorts that are listed as having had the participation of Ray are three of Pal's undeniably racist Jasper films: Jasper and the Choo-Cho (1942, with Willis O'Brien), Jasper and the Haunted House (1942) — our Short Film of the Month for May 2013 — and this one here, Jasper and the Watermelons. Unlike traditional stop motion, in which a (usually single) malleable figure on a wire skeleton is moved bit by bit, Puppetoons utilized "a series of different hand-carved wooden puppets (or puppet heads or limbs) for each frame in which the puppet moves or changes expression". As questionable as the Jasper cartoons are by today's standards, what is without a doubt is that they are also often as surreally weird as they are technically fantastic — and Jasper and the Watermelons is no exception in this regard.

Full short:

Tulips Shall Grow
(1942, writ. & dir. George Pal)
 

Again according to the official Ray Harryhausen website, among the George Pal Puppetoons Ray worked on is this is one; at least one other website claims he was the (uncredited) chief animator. To simply quote the George Pal Puppetoon Site: "Pal and his wife Czoka fled Holland as the Nazis were trashing Europe. He saw firsthand the horrors inflicted on innocent, peaceful people by these fascists. When he started making films in America, one of his first was this excellent anti-war piece in which an innocent pair of Dutch lovers are terrorized by the invading Screwball army. The faceless, inhuman, mechanical (literally, made of nuts and bolts), 'sieg-hiel'-ing screwballs are a dark parody of the same faceless inhumanity that could mechanically exterminate innocent lives." The Dutch lovers finally turn to god for salvation, and like in the Pal produced film War of the Worlds (1953 / trailer), god listens.

As Movies over Matter says: "Sure it's propaganda, but it's effective and, more importantly, it's sweet. Don't worry, kids, Jan and Janette (as stand-ins for all the occupied peoples of Europe) will be fine. The Screwballs can't last. What they are made up of is hate and fear and greed, which, like the water-sensitive Screwballs, can't last. The Nazis will also wither away, leaving time for the tulips to grow again." The short was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to another anti-Nazi short, Walt Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face (1942 / full short) — the only Donald Duck film ever to win the award (8 Donald Duck films have been nominated in total to date). In 1997, Tulips Shall Grow was selected by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and is now preserved in the United States National Film Registry.

 Full short from the Internet Archives:

The Storybook Review
(1946, almost everything by Ray Harryhausen)

Aka Mother Goose Stories. After leaving the employment of George Pal in 1942, Harryhausen went to war from 1942 to 45 and produced propaganda and educational films for the US Army: "Ray was honourably discharged at Fort Dix, New Jersey on the 7th February 1946. He left the Army as a Technician Third Class with an American Sv medal, Good Conduct medal, World War II Victory medal and a certificate as a sharp shooter (Ray had never handled a gun before his entry into the Army). [RayHarryhausen.com]"

Free to do what he wanted, Harryhausen decided to make a series of shorts based on Mother Goose rhymes (and thus featuring Little Miss Muffett, Old Mother Hubbard, Queen of Hearts and Humpty Dumpty) that he later distributed to schools as The Mother Goose Stories; a family production, his dad did the armatures, his mom the costumes. We would tend to agree with boblipton of New York City who wrote at imdb that the collection "is more interesting as an historical artefact than as a work of art" or "for Harryhausen fans only". 

 The Storybook Review:

Mighty Joe Young
(1949, dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack)

Mighty Joe Young, an RKO B&W feature that was produced by the same people that brought us the original King Kong (1933), was Ray Harryhausen's first job on a feature-length film. Though Willis H. O'Brien is credited for the Academy Award winning special effects of the film, common knowledge is that he did the designs and storyboards but left most of the stop-motion animation work to Harryhausen. The film was not a financial success when it came out, but the years have been kind to it and its cult popularity even led to a remake in 1998.

 

Of the original version, TV Guide says: "Though produced by the same people responsible for the classic King Kong, Mighty Joe Young is a pale imitation. Jill Young (Terry Moore of Mansion of Blood [2013 / trailer], Double Exposure [1983 / trailer] and Al Adamson's Death Dimension [1978 / trailer]) lives in the jungles of Africa and raises Mighty Joe, an extremely large gorilla. Up pops Broadway producer Max O'Hara (Robert Armstrong of King Kong, Decoy [1946 / short documentary] and, with Turhan Bey, The Mad Ghoul [1943 / full film]) [and his sidekick Gregg (Ben Johnson of Terror Train [1980 / trailer] and Cherry 2000 [1987 / trailer])], who is looking for a 'knock 'em dead' act for his new nightclub in Hollywood. Armstrong and his bunch bring Jill and Joe to the 'City of Dreams' and build an act around the beast. As part of the act, Moore plays 'Beautiful Dreamer' on a piano while the gorilla holds her above his head, and is pitted against 10 wrestlers in a game of tug o' war. Some drunk patrons give Joe some drinks, which spurs him to go on a rampage. The gorilla makes up for his folly, however, by rescuing children from a burning orphanage. He then goes back to live peacefully in Africa. While the nightclub sequence is great camp and the Oscar-winning special effects by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen are top-notch, the film doesn't capture the magic of King Kong. The orphanage fire had originally been tinted."

 

Aside from King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, whose wife Ruth Rose supplied the script to Mighty Joe Young, also made Dr. Cyclops (1940 / trailer), The Son of Kong (1933 / trailer) and The Most Dangerous Game (1932 / full film), among others.

 Trailer:

The Story of King Midas
(1953, dir. Ray Harryhausen [uncredited])

Between Mighty Joe Young (1949) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Harryhausen returned to making shorts, most of them based (like his first solo project, 1946's The Storybook Review aka Mother Goose Stories) based on fairy tales: The Story of Little Red Riding Hood (1950), The Story of Rapunzel (1951 / short), The Story of Hansel and Gretel (1951 / short) and this one here, based on a Greek myth for a change, The Story of King Midas. 

The narration of all four shorts was written by Charlotte Knight, (February 8, 1894 - May 16, 1977), a former schoolteacher, bit-part actress and friend of Harryhausen whose last writing credit that we could find was for the story to 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). Del Moore (May 14, 1916 - August 30, 1970), a radio and TV announcer who appeared in a lot of Jerry Lewis films as well as the counter-culture time capsules Movie Star, American Style or; LSD, I Hate You (1966 / trailer) and Catalina Caper (1967 / Little Richard sings Scuba Party, from the film) supplied the narration.

The Story of King Midas was the last stop-motion short Harryhausen made before teaming up with producer Charles H. Schneer to concentrate on feature-length films, thus leaving incomplete a fifth fairytale short, The Tortoise and the Hare, which he completed decades later 2002 (short) with the assistance of the animators Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh, the team behind The Old Man and the Goblins (1998 / full short) and Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose (1999 / full short).

TCM says that Harryhausen considered The Story of King Midas to be the best of his Mother Goose and Fairy Tale shorts and that it is "his most technically accomplished": "As with the earlier shorts, Harryhausen intended the new series to be used in schools. He shot them in 16mm, with the intent of later synching up music and narration. The changing expressions on the puppets were a variation of the method employed by George Pal on his Puppetoons series [...]. Harryhausen sculpted a small group of plaster heads for each puppet, each having an extreme expression. To create expressions, he changed out the head and did a quick 8-frame dissolve in the camera; the dissolve provided the "in-betweens" to bridge the jump between the extremes. The King Midas animation model was 10 ½ inches high, with a latex body and an interior metal armature." For his short, Harryhausen shifted the tale of Midas to Medieval Europe and gives it a happy ending, but the basic idea of a man who gains the ability of turning everything he touches into gold — the "Midas Touch" — remains the same.

In an interesting film historical reference, the entity in Harryhausen's The Story of King Midas who bestows the king with the touch of gold is obviously modelled after the character of Graf Orlok (Max Schreck), the vampire of F. W. Murnau's classic silent vampire movie, Nosferatu (1922 / full masterpiece).

Full short:

 

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
(1953, dir. Eugène Lourié)

Trailer:

The directorial debut of the Russian-born Frenchman Eugène Lourié, who was far more active (and better) before and after as art director; among his other directorial projects of note are Gorgo (1961 / trailer), The Giant Behemoth (1959 / trailer) and The Colossus of New York (1958 / trailer) — had Lourié not been married, one could well suspect he was a size queen.

The roots of the film seem oddly reminiscent of the eternal question, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Originally conceived by producers Jack Dietz (whose earlier productions include The Corpse Vanishes [1942 / full film], The Ape Man [1943 / full film] and Voodoo Man [1944 / full film]) and Hal E. Chester (who later produced Curse of the Demon [1957 / trailer]) as a giant monster film ala King Kong (1933) playing with the public's rising fear about nuclear power, the production was already underway when Harryhausen showed the script to Ray Bradbury, who had already published a short tale The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in the Saturday Evening Post that happened to share many narrative commonalities; the producers, seeing Bradbury's reputation and name as a commercial plus, promptly bought the film rights to his tale and correspondingly re-titled their project, which eventually then carried the following in the credits: "Screen Play by Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger, Suggested by the Saturday Evening Post Story by Ray Bradbury."

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Review has a succinct plot description of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, about which they say "The film itself is slow moving and Eugene Lourie’s direction literal-minded": "Atomic tests in the Arctic revive a prehistoric rhedosaurus that is buried in the ice. It then proceeds south towards its old hunting ground — where New York City now stands — destroying all in its path." As the first creature feature film to present a giant monster awoken or created by atomic power that goes on a destructive rampage, Beast is the Daddy of many a fondly remembered film to come including, for example, Them! (1957 / trailer), the guilty pleasure The Beginning of the End (1957 / trailer), and even The Amazing Colossal Man (1957 / trailer). (Change to NYC to Tokyo and the Arctic to the Pacific, and what do you have? Right: Godzilla [1954 / trailer]! Furthermore, like Godzilla but unlike in the actual film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the giant lizard beast seen in some of the posters spits flames.) 

 

The rampaging beast, called a Rhedosaurus in the film, never existed as a real dinosaur (for which it is often mistaken) or prehistoric reptile (with which it shares the most features). As pointed out by the Bad Movies Org, the beast "is a landmark Ray Harryhausen creation. After all these years, seeing it tromp down a city street crowded with cars is still great fun for a monster-movie lover." But though a classic of sorts, few people do not find the movie terribly flawed by some atrocious acting. As shugaron316 of the United States says: "The worst part of the movie was the casting, especially the male and female leads. Paul Christian's accent is almost impossible to understand at times, and his acting is wooden. Paula Raymond (of Hand of Death [1962 / trailer] and Mind Twister [1994 / trailer] ) may seem pretty by '50s standards, but I think she has a pronounced overbite and adenoids, the way her mouth is always hanging open! Her acting was also pretty limp. Cecil Kelloway (of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte [1964 / trailer], The Invisible Man Returns [1940 / trailer] and The Mummy's Hand [1940 / trailer]) was a delight, as usual, and Ken Tobey (of the hilarious Hellraiser: Bloodline [1996 / trailer], The Thing from Another World [1951 / trailer], Ben [1972 / trailer] and the unjustly overlooked Homebodies [1974 / Spanish trailer]) was unusually restrained [...]." 

 

A young Lee Van Cleef (as sharpshooter Corporal Stone) saves the day in the end... Actor "Paul Christian", by the way, is actually Paul Hubschmid of The Day the Sky Exploded (1958 / trailer), the Don Sharp directed Taste of Excitement (1970 / theme) and Negresco (1968 / credit sequence).

 

The fictional Rhedosaurus, by the way, later made an appearance in two other fun films that Harryhausen had nothing to do with, the trashy Planet of Dinosaurs (1979 / full film) and the more popular Hammer dino-babe flick featuring Victoria Vetri, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) — Ray Harryhausen worked on neither, but his influence is written on every frame of the films.

 Trailer to Val Guest's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970):


 

It Came from Beneath the Sea
(1955, dir. Robert Gordon)

There goes the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge! We saw this is a wee lad at an after-school showing in the auditorium of Lyles Crouch Elementary School in Alexandria, VA — we thought it the bee's knees, but it wasn't until we saw it again some 10 years later that we noticed that Faith Domergue was such a hot tamale. Yum! Too bad she never posed for Playboy.

Sometime in the 1950s, Harryhausen met producer Charles H. Schneer, who worked with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures; this film, The Beast from Beneath the Sea, was their first joint project, but their professional relationship went on to last almost three generations, finally ending with their last joint project, Clash of the Titans (1981).

 

Despite the lowly credits Harryhausen always got in his films, he was always so involved in every angle of the production — story, script development, art direction, design, storyboards, you name it — that despite whoever is credited as director, the film must really be considered a Ray Harryhausen film; It Came from Beneath Sea is no exception. Here, the credited director is Robert Gordon, a former actor (The Jazz Singer [1927 / Mammy]) turned director whose relatively unexceptional resume includes a few fun things such as Trapped by Television (1936 / full film) and the guilty pleasure starring Michael Gough, Black Zoo (1963). For its original release, It Came from Beneath the Sea was paired with the fun but inferior Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) for double features.

Trailer to Creature with the Atom Brain (1955):

Famously, due to budget reason Harryhausen was forced to give the octopus two legs less than as nature intended, but the fact that the monster is a "sixtopus" is neither truly noticeable nor detrimental to the film. 

The writing credits to It Came from Beneath the Sea include George Worthing Yates, who also helped pen other fun stuff such as Tormented (1960 / trailer / full film) and War of the Colossal Beast (1958 / trailer), among other titles. The plot of It Came from Beneath the Sea as succinctly given by Foster on Film: "A military sub is grabbed deep underwater by something unknown. Doctor John Carter (Donald Curtis of Invisible Agent [1942 / trailer] and the Turhan Bey film The Amazing Mr. X [1948]) and Doctor Leslie Joyce (Faith Domergue of Psycho Sisters [1974 / trailer], Legacy of Blood [1971 / trailer], Fulci's Una sull'altra [1969 / trailer], Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet [1965 / fan made trailer / full film], This Island Earth [1955 / trailer], Cult of the Cobra [1955 / trailer] and Where Danger Lives [1950 / trailer]) determine that the culprit is a giant octopus, altered by radiation. While the military search for the beast, Carter and Commander Pete Matthews (Kenneth Tobey) vie for the affections of Joyce." 

While we here at A Wasted Life think the faults of the film are more obvious to adults than to the kids this movie was made for, Foster also succinctly points out the failing of It Came from Beneath the Sea: "When Harryhausen's creature isn't on screen, things slow down [...]. The first half of the film is a lot of exposition with the characters explaining to each other what is clear to anyone in the audience who had bothered reading the film's title. [...] For all you fans of stock footage (and who isn't?!), this is your lucky day. There's lots and lots of stock footage [...]. The plot isn't much and the ending is anticlimactic. The romantic subplot just takes up time, and the dialog is so-so. [...]. That means it all comes down to Harryhausen. If you love his work, then you'll want to catch this at least once. If you don't like stop-motion animation or '50s giant monster movies, give this a pass."

A Wasted Life, on the other hand, definitely says give it a go...

Trailer:


 

The Animal World
(1956 writ & dir Irwin Allen)

 

Torqued opening sequence:

Main on-screen credit: Animation by Ray Harryhausen. In 1953, producer / director / writer Irwin Allen had rather the success with a documentary film entitled The Sea Around Us, which even won an Academy Award as Best Documentary; The Animal World, which "traces the two billion year history of all living things on earth", was his follow up project. TCM says the film uses "footage shot by naturalists all over the world", which is a nice way to say "lots of stock footage".

As Allen wanted an opening sequences dealing with dinosaurs, he hired Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen to create it; the roughly ten-minute long sequence ended up being their first color sequence for a mainstream film. Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings says: "No story here; just lots of footage with animals in it. It starts out with a direction, recounting the evolution of animals through the ages, but it eventually settles on random footage of animals, with narrators occasionally adding voices to the animals or telling stories about them. If this sounds like it could get a bit tiresome, it does, but it does help if you like to look at animals, though some of the bullfight footage is bound to be unpleasant."

The film ends with the earth blowing up, pointing out that man is the only animal that wantonly destroy itself. The movie was narrated by an unknown named John Storm and, returning from The Sea Around Us, the obscure actor Theodore von Eltz (November 5, 1893 – October 6, 1964), a former silent-movie lead who devolved into supporting roles seen in such films as Strangers of the Evening (1932 / full film), the lost film The Cat Creeps (1930 / trailer) and — as the blackmailing pornographer — The Big Sleep (1946 / trailer). Some of the dinosaur footage was later used in the films Trog (1970) and, supposedly, Americathon (1979 / trailer). Unseen Films is of the opinion that "Irwin Allen's nature documentary is [...] an amusing diversion [...] that hasn't stood the test of time but is still worth seeing." In regard to the dinos, they continue to say "It's easily the worst work Harryhausen ever did. [...] Laughably bad or no it's still a fun sequence."

Harryhausen & O'Brien's volcano in the trailer to Trog (1979):
 

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
 (1956, dir. Fred F. Sears)

 Trailer:

Aka Invasion of the Flying Saucers. Any similarities found in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks (1996 / trailer) to this film here are purely intentional. GorePress, which, like literally everyone who has ever seen the film, "enjoyed this film thoroughly from start to finish", sets the scene: "Dr Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe of The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951 / trailer]) and his new wife, Carol (Joan Taylor), are driving to a military base where they are working on Operation Skyhook, which plans to explore space by sending rockets into orbit around earth. Whilst they are driving, they are stunned to be followed closely by a flying saucer, an aurally memorable experience as much as a visual one. It is the first of many to be seen around the world, but who are the mysterious visitors in the UFOs and what are their intentions?"

Leonard Maltin, in turn, says: "Matter-of-fact presentation gives tremendous boost to familiar storyline (alien invaders order us to surrender peaceably — or else). Literate dialogue, subdued performances, and solid Ray Harryhausen effects make this a winner that belies its B origins nearly every step of the way." The film was "inspired" by the book Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), the second UFO-themed tome by, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, who became one of the early leaders of ufology with the publication of his first book on the topic, the bestseller The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950). The filmscript was by the great Curt Siodmak (House of Frankenstein [1944]), George Worthing Yates (Frankenstein–1970 [1958 / trailer] and Attack of the Puppet People [1958 / trailer], among other fun titles), and the black-listed Bernard Gordon (the producer of the absolutely great film Horror Express [1972 / full film] and writer, as "Raymond T. Marcus", of Zombies of Mora Tau [1957 / trailer] and The Man Who Turned to Stone [1957 / trailer]).

The forgotten director Fred F. Sears — who broke into direction after starting out as an actor and whose last eight features were released after his untimely death at the age of 44 on Saturday, November 30, 1957 — was a favorite of producer Sam Katzman 'cause he worked cheaply and quickly. He made a total of 52 feature films between 1949 and 1957, including some "interesting" films such as Cell 2455 Death Row (1955, starring William Campbell), Teen-Age Crime Wave (1955 / trailer), The Werewolf (1956 / trailer), Rock Around the Clock (1956 / great dance scene) and The Night the World Exploded (1957 / trailer). Some of the footage from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers eventually also found its way into the intriguing anti-Commi flick The 27th Day (1957 / trailer) as well as one of Sears' most memorable films, the even cheaper Sam Katzman production and hilariously terrible C-film, The Giant Claw (1957).

 Trailer to The Giant Claw:

20 Million Miles to Earth
(1957, dir. Nathan Juran)

"Great scientific advances are often times sudden accomplished facts before most of us are dimly aware of them. Breathtakingly unexpected, for example, was the searing flash that announced the atomic age. Equally unexpected was the next gigantic stride, when man moved out of his very orbit to a point more than 20 Million Miles to Earth." 
(Opening narration)

 

Aka The Beast from Space. The last Harryhausen film to shot in B&W, and the first of three films director Naftuli Hertz Juran (September 1, 1907 - October 23, 2002) was to do for Harryhausen. Among the non-Harryhausen films that Juran directed that we here at A Wasted Life find of note are The Deadly Mantis (1957 / trailer), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957 / trailer), the original Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (as Nathan Hertz, 1958 / trailer) and Jack the Giant Killer (1962 / trailer). Among those who worked on the screenplay were Charlotte Knight, the lass who often wrote the narration for Harryhausen's fairy tale shorts; Christopher Knopf, who went on to work on the screenplays of Joy Ride (1958 / trailer) and the almost Twilight-Zone-like TV horror A Cold Night's Death (1973 / first 5 minutes), and Robert Creighton Williams, whose only other writing credit of note was on the second-rate Josef von Sternberg noir Macao (1952 / trailer, with Jane Russell). 

Look and see: there's Ray Harryhausen himself doing a rare cameo appearance in one of his films as the man feeding peanuts to the elephant that later fights the tragic Venusian creature — or at least does so in the prints that weren't cut by TV broadcasters who supposedly deemed the scene as showing unnecessary cruelty to animals (but, in fact, probably simply wanted more time for commercials). The creature is never named in the film, but it is general knowledge that it's an "Ymir". Atypical of Harryhausen films till then, 20 Million Miles to Earth is set abroad, in Italy — because, according to the official Harryhausen webpage, "Ray wanted to see Italy [so] he changed the location of the story, [then] called The Cyclops, which he had co-written with Charlotte Knight, from Chicago to Italy. [...] The live action was shot in Sperlonga on the Italian coast, and in Rome at the Borghese Gallery, the Coliseum, around the river Tiber and in the Roman Forum."

The plot, according Video Vacuum, which says "The Ymir stands as one of Harryhausen’s greatest creations": "The first manned spaceship to Venus crash lands in Italy carrying a Venusian space egg. Predictably, it cracks open and gives life to a reptilian monster [...] that rapidly grows to enormous size and runs amok. A smarmy astronaut (William Hopper of The Bad Seed [1956 / trailer] and The Return of Doctor X [1939 / trailer]) manages to capture the monster, but it inevitably breaks loose and goes on a rampage through the streets of Rome and wrecks havoc at the Coliseum." 

While Maltin is of the opinion that the "Intelligent script, fast pace, and exceptional special effects by Ray Harryhausen make this one of the best monster-on-the-loose movies ever," most reviewers find the Harryhausen effects excellent but the film itself, to quote TV Guide "unusually dull". Joan Tayler returns from Earth Vs Flying Saucers (1956) to play the unnecessary love interest Marisa Leonardo, about whom B-Movie Central says: "Oh man, who's runnin' Hell while she's up here? [...] She spends about the first 1/3 of the movie being bitchy and then after that when she figures out that she can score with Robert, she mellows out finally and starts being more of a help than a hindrance." Bright Lights, ever political, seems to be one of the few sites that points out the obvious: "[...] The film spends entirely too much time revelling in the havoc wreaked by the Ymir rather than condemning those that unfairly forced him into going nuts in the first place." Baby Ymir makes a "what-the-fuck-?" appearance of a few seconds in Joe Dante's original version of Piranha (1978). While big monsters would still appear in his later films, 20 Million Miles to Earth is basically Harryhausen's last pure "creature feature".

 Trailer: 

 

Part III will follow at a later date.

Short Film: The Backwater Gospel (Denmark, 2011)

June 28, 2013, 2:30 am

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Some dude named Bo Mathorne, one of a group of eight for whom this short was a bachelor project at the Danish Animation Workshop, directed this finely made Western horror. (The Animation Workshop, an animation school located in Viborg, Denmark, has been a never-ending source of exceptional animated shorts since the late 1980s.) Kudos go to all eight — their names (aside from Bo), according to the film blogspot: Esben Jacob Sloth, Rie Nymand, Tue Toft Sørensen, Martin Holm-Grevy, Mads Simonsen, Arthur Gil Larsen and Thomas Grønlund — for producing this unbelievably enthralling computer animated film, a perfect example of a truly sublime amalgamation of content and style.

Bigotry and fear meld to turn a town full of normal religious Joes and Jills into a maelstrom of hate-filled and self-righteous killers, as brainless as any zombies you might confront in a world gone mad. Who are the real monsters here — the undertaker, coming to do his job? The blind and brainless town folk, who let ignorance and religion sanctify their literal monstrous conversion and acts? Or the man of cloth who twists the supposed words of god into a screed of unbridled malevolence?

Hypocrisy and hate fill the screen in this oddly beautiful yet ugly and gory horror short, a film that uses our natural fear of death, our willingness to cast blame and our tendency to follow blindly as the driving forces leading to a terrible and destructive climax.

Though set in a time long past, the events narrated reflect those that still occur today all over the world...

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R.I.P.: Jim "The Dragon" Kelly

July 1, 2013, 10:16 am

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Jim "The Dragon" Kelly

May 5, 1946 - June 29, 2013

 

Handsome, ass-kicking Afro-American martial artist of questionable thespian talents who made some fun movies during his quick rise and fall in Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Died of cancer at the age of 67. A review of his films will follow.

Tokyo Gore Police / Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu (Japan, 2008)

July 11, 2013, 6:37 am

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As far as we can tell, Tokyo Gore Police is the first feature-length gore film directed by Japanese special affects master Yoshihiro Nishimura, "the Tom Savini of Japan," who a year later brought us the Pop Art gore masterpiece Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl(2009) and, three years earlier, was a major player in the special effects of the industrial splatter film Meatball Machine (2005). (True, director Nishimura did direct the feature-length film Speakerman: The Boo [trailer] in 2004, but that low-budget oddity is far more an example of a psychotronic kiddy film than true gore.) Here, with Tokyo Gore Police, he remade his 1995 gore short Anatomia Extinction (1995 / scene), changing the plot enough so that the two films almost come across simply as two narratives set within the same dimension and time-frame. 

In tone and tale, Tokyo Gore Police is far darker and more of a downer than the oddly joyous splatter fest that is Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, but that is not to say that TGP is any less amazing. Like virtually all movies that have Nishimura's name connected to them, TGP is bizarrely over-the-top and creatively unbridled, with no idea seemingly too perverse, too weird or too stupid to be included as long as it can somehow be staged. Thus, this movie — which definitely lives up to its name — includes everything from acid-spraying boobies to an alligator vagina to a massive pink and fleshy bazooka dick to a man using the blood gushing from his cut-off legs as a jet-propellant to fly through the air. Many times throughout the movie, Hieronymus Bosch definitely says hello — particularly the armless and legless doggie-girl that the chief of police keeps is an idea that readily brings to mind any number of the great painter's nightmarish tableaus. 

Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi masterpiece RoboCop (1987 / trailer) also says hello in the movie, as Tokyo Gore Police not only shares that film's plot device of a privatized police force but also lightens up the oft-grim events of the narrative by interspersing satirical TV advertisements. But whereas most of the cops in RoboCop are still good guys on occasion, those of Tokyo Gore Police all reveal themselves by the film's end as little more than blood-thirsty killers: the only difference between them and the mutated humans they hunt is that they wear a uniform (a metallic body-armor inspired by the traditional warrior get-ups of centuries past).

 

But at the beginning of the movie, this blurring of good and evil is not yet clear, though the tone and setting of the film is immediately clear: in a near future Tokyo, a squad of police convenes on a rooftop to put down a cannibalistic mutant but is overwhelmed by the seemingly unstoppable killer with a bio-chainsaw arm. To the rescue comes the mini-skirted heroine of the movie Ruka, (a lovely-looking but oddly vacuous Eihi Shiina, the demure nutcase of Audition [1999]), who is carrying a lot of psychological baggage due to the killing of her father (Keisuke Horibe) directly in front of her eyes when she was a wee lass... 

 

Unlike the average splatter films of the Western world — with the exception of the occasional rarity like Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992 / trailer) — the gore and splatter of TGP, like so many a contemporary Japanese gut-geyser, is seldom realistic and always ridiculously exaggerated. And what you see in the opening scene is pretty much what you get throughout the film: geysers of nonsensical guts and blood, later augmented by oft-perverse and always fascinating and nightmarish bodily mutations. On occasion the film also almost seems to be trying to exercise some sort of social critique by acting as a kind of monstrous funhouse mirror reflecting heavily distorted visualizations of sexual decadence, fascism, social irresponsibility and other less-desirable aspects of contemporary society, but the thin threads of serious commentary are usually lost in the over-abundance of ludicrous techno-gore and bio-splatter. 

 

But then, one seldom pops a film with a title like Tokyo Gore Police into the DVD player 'cause one is looking for a socially conscious statement movie. The title promises gore, and the film delivers it — in excess, with hefty dollops of bizarre perversity and surreal black humor. The occasional serious aspects of the narrative might not jell all that well and do little to flesh out the characters (who are all one-dimensional) but they are relevant to the plot. The film could really have used one or two additional likeable characters, but on the other hand that would have detracted from the film's main reason of existence: to amaze and entertain with a glorious excess of blood, gore and insane concepts.

 

And that TGP does in spades, even as it retains an oddly depressing tone until the end, an ending that promises a sequel that has yet to come... the spin-off short 63 Minutes Later (2009), after all, does not directly follow the events of TGP but rather simply narrates how three characters became the bio-techno monsters that they are in the first film.

Tokyo Gore Police is heartily recommended to gorehounds and fans of weird cinema and anyone that fits in-between the two — and is definitely to be avoided by everyone else.

The Fear: Resurrection (USA, 1999)

July 17, 2013, 7:50 am

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German Trailer: 

This totally forgotten movie is, in theory, a sequel to the equally unknown movie The Fear (1995 / trailer), but in the end it is far more a straightforward remake because it far less continues the story of the first film than it does simply retell it, with a few modifications in the plot and in a new setting. In the end, whether one views it as a sequel or remake is relatively unimportant, but what must be said and cannot be denied is that it is a pretty crappy and boring and stupid movie that in no way deserved being made much less being watched.

The plot, as mentioned before, is a reiteration of the first film, but whereas in part one a group of late-twens (early-thirties?) get together for a weekend of facing their fears as part of "a field session [...] weekend of fear exploration in a controlled environment" and then end up dying one by one at the hands of a wooden statue named Morty (Erick Weiss), in The Fear: Resurrection a dorky guy named Mike (Gordon Currie of The Terror Within II [1991]  and The Woods [2006]) returns home to his grandparents  (Betsy Palmer of Friday the 13th [1980 / trailer] and Larry Pennell of  somewhere in Bubba Ho-Tep [2002]) with a bunch of dick-ass friends to throw, he claims, a Halloween party in which each should dress up as their worst fear but which, in truth, is his attempt to confront his worst fear — namely, that he'll become a mass-murdering psycho like his daddy. Needless to say, by the end of the film a lot of people die, but we for one would say not the right ones.

OK, to give praise where praise is deserved, the opening of The Fear: Resurrection is pretty groovy: Mom and son in Halloween costumes on the way home stop at the scene of what looks to be a car accident on a lonesome road. But, no: it's Daddy/hubby killing some female motorist — Mommy/wifey dies soon enough and son gets tossed in the trunk of Daddy's car and then the movie goes downhill quicker than shit begins to stink. As of the minute the film jumps to "20 years later" and the now-adult son Mike pops up on screen, the pacing becomes non-existent, the story development ridiculous, the movie a disaster.

 

As is the case with too many films of its ilk, the stale set up is as unconvincing as are the various "friends" that take part in the weekend. With the exception of Mike's girlfriend Peg (Stacy Grant), none of the one-dimensional characters believably convey that they hang together regularly, much less that they are close-knit group of pals. Ever notice how in these films, no matter how long the guys and gals have supposedly been friends they never stop hitting up on each other? Really: you go on a weekend excursion with only old friends — not one of which is a fuck buddy — and then actually plan to get laid? Realistic behavior, like a believable plot, is not to be found in this movie here. Example of truly believable behavior found in this film: When Morty walks in and disturbs a couple fucking, the guy, Mitch (Phillip Rhys), is so unimpressed by a walking wooden man that the only thing he can say is something like "Hey Dude, get outta here." Though the scene offered the best belly laugh of the movie, we were nevertheless happy to see Mitch fly out the window.

 

And, actually, let's take a look at Morty (John Paul Fedele) for a second. A life-size wooden statue of a dressed man created by the ancestors of an American Indian named Crow (Byron Chief-Moon) named "Morty"? So whatya think: Is that a Cherokee or a Sioux name? And why create and then tend, over generations, an evil totem, one that is just as willing to kill those of your tribe as it is to kill total strangers? An evil totem that can only be controlled in that a BIG magic charm is kept around its neck — but that Crow takes forever to notice is gone? Damn, dude: even if you are an American Indian, you really deserve to die — as does, to tell the truth, the totally dislikable character Chris (MYC Agnew of Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven [2011 / trailer]), the dickhead who steals the magic charm for no real reason other than that if he doesn't do so Morty can't get moving. Unluckily, the dickhead survives the movie.

Oh, yeah, we forgot: Morty is an indestructible shapeshifter — that can be burned to death? And that dicky last scene foreshadowing Mike's eventual evolution into his Dad after all... What the fuck did the scriptwriter do with his brain when he wrote this bowl of smegma? 

Before you get the idea that The Fear: Resurrection might in any way be exciting or scary, be forewarned that almost all the unconvincing death and destruction happens a good 50 minutes into the movie: but for the first five minutes of this preceding 50, all that happens is a lot of talk, talk, talk... and then even more talk. And it isn't like the film is a masterpiece of insightful dialogue or humor, either. It's simply verbose... and boring. So boring that we don't even know why we're bothering to write about it... And, damn! Not even one of the good-looking gals alleviates the tedium by baring a naked midriff, much less a breast.

Take our advice: avoid this piece of shit.

Short Film: Plot Device (USA, 2011)

February 26, 2013, 2:43 am

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Here we have a relatively recent short film that was actually made to hawk the wares of the software firm Red Giant.Red Giant likes to claim that they "understand the challenges of creating a high quality film at an affordable price" and to prove their point they hired the young and (to-date) unknown filmmaker Seth Worley to make a video short utilizing their software (specifically, Red Giant's Magic Bullet Suite of video tools). Worley and Red Giant executive Aharon Rabinowitz supposedly worked hand-in-hand on the project, from the screenplay to the actual production. The end result is a short movie that is less a commercial than simply an entertaining little gem that functions very well as a stand-alone short film — and which, in this way, does more to show what one can do with Red Giant's software than a real commercial ever could have.

As Wikipediasays, "A plot device is an object or character in a story whose only purpose is to advance the plot of the story, or alternatively to overcome some difficulty in the plot. A contrived or arbitrary plot device may annoy or confuse the reader, causing a loss of the suspension of disbelief. However a well-crafted plot device, or one that emerges naturally from the setting or characters of the story, may be entirely accepted, or may even be unnoticed by the audience." In Plot Device, the plot is fantastic and requires the total suspension of belief, but it is also effectively simple, as is evident by Red Giant's own plot description of the film as found on their webpage: "A young filmmaker obtains a mysterious device that unleashes the full force of cinema on his front lawn." And as simple as the plot is, the execution is also just as effective, professional, intriguing and fun. So enjoy Plot Device— and runaway brides, cops and killers, zombies, femme fatales, hipsters and aliens... 

Director Seth Byron Worley (born April 26, 1984), by the way, has been active in films since the end of the 1990s, working on the kind of projects that might be expected of a happily married Nashville, Tennessee, resident with a wife and two children who works for LifeWay Christian Resources, one of the largest providers of religious and Christian resources in the world. (LifeWay, founded in 1891 under a different name by J.M. Frost, a 43-year-old pastor, was dubbed one of the "Best Employers in Tennessee" in the May 2007 issue of the magazine Business Tennessee. According to LifeWay, "As God works through us ... we will help people and churches know Jesus Christ and seek His Kingdom by providing biblical solutions that spiritually transform people and cultures.")Plot Device proved so successful that Worley now has signed away his soul in that city of sin known as Hollywood and, as of August 2011, is represented by ICM.

And to give some other credit where credit is due, the dorky young filmmaker that is the central figure of identification in Plot Device is no less than the brother of the director, Ben Worley, who is also credited as having co-written the film's extremely appropriate music.

The Wasp Woman (USA, 1959)

March 4, 2013, 4:55 am

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One thing you gotta say, Roger Corman always knew a good title when he saw one. So if a title as harmless as The Fly (1958 / trailer) brought in the crowds, surely something so much more monstrous like The Wasp Woman should do so, too. We're too young to know how The Wasp Woman did at the theatres when it first came out — though we do know it was at one point on a double bill with The Fly— but the title has proven itself unforgettable. Likewise, long before the film was honored with countless cheap public domain releases it was a regular on the Creature Feature shows of many a local broadcaster: we ourselves are sure we caught it as a child in both Massachusetts and Virginia, and like everything we saw back then, we loved it. Recently, we caught it again as an adult — regretfully, we must say that we were not quite as amused.

As is occasionally pointed out, the basic plot of The Wasp Woman can be seen on one level as a critique of the pressure society places upon women to remain eternally young. But on the other hand, it can also just be seen as a horror film of the science-goes-wrong kind that — rare in films before the 1980s — has a woman in the main role. Still, the horror of the events that occur do so only due to the pressure she feels as a woman and businessperson to regain her youthful appearance. Thus, the smidgeon of social critique remains present no matter how one views the film. However one chooses to interpret the film, we would still assume that it is doubtful that when Corman made the movie, he himself had any intention of anything other than making some cheap drive-in fodder. But for a film as obviously cheap as this one, Corman takes a much too dry and serious approach, if not much too lackadaisical one as well.

Though Susan Cabot (seen in a cheesecake photo left), in her last film, gives a lot and does well — far more so than most of her co-stars, in any event, with the possible exception of the sassy, hard-bitten secretary Maureen Reardon (Lynn Cartwright, seen below left, looking like a poor man's Jane Russell), who is less memorable as a character than for the oddly intriguing actress playing the relatively unimportant role — Roger Corman was obviously feeling lazy the couple of weeks he spent making this film, for his direction is unusually lethargic. Like the film as a whole, if you get down to it. Which isn't to say the film is a complete bore (it isn't, as it has both the patina of over 50 years and a lot of cheese factor to help make it passable) but the film, like this review, is a bit slow and drawn out. And then, once Cabot's character starts going all waspy, the body count remains low and the end quick.

But despite the quick end, more than the first half of The Wasp Woman is a turgid thing,and that even without the totally unnecessary opening scenes added later by Jack Hill (the director of many a later trash classic, including Coffy [1973]) when the film was sold to television: five interminable and unnecessary minutes of beekeepers during which Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark, a forgotten character actor once seen in the background of films such as House of Frankenstein [1944] or Background to Danger [1943]) is introduced. But in regards to laughs, the opening sequence is one that beekeepers obviously find funny: the night when we watched The Wasp Woman, we happened to have two beekeepers in the crowd (urban bee keeping is rather popular in Berlin at the moment) and they laughed through most it, even if no one else did.

Based on a story by Kinta Zertuche, the screenplay to The Wasp Woman was written by Leo Gordon, the husband of the above-mentioned intriguing actress Lynn Cartwright, who also wrote the screenplay to the equally cheap Corman production of the same year, Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), and two years later had a meaty part in one of Corman's best projects, his rare message movie entitled The Intruder (1961). This film here is less noble, however, and tells of one Janice Starlin — played by the tragic Susan Cabot, whose dwarf son Timothy Scott Roman killed her with a weight-lifting bar while she slept on 10 December 1986 (he got a three-year suspended sentence) — the founder and CEO of Starlin Cosmetics, the sales of which are drastically dropping since she stopped being the face in the adverts. The problem is, now that Starlin is at the haggard side of her 40s, her face is no longer one that can sell youth and beauty. Her managing board is of little help, fit only to tell her that the blame in the drop of sales is her fault 'cause she's getting old. (For a CEO, she is shown a remarkably low amount of respect by her employees — but then, she also seems to have a remarkably unmotivated staff.) Then Dr. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) shows up and tells her that he has found a way to reverse aging through an enzyme found in wasp royal jelly; to prove his point, he turns an old guinea pig into a young rat, which for some odd reason Starlin sees as truly promising so she gives him a lab and budget to experiment further. And following a few more promising results, she demands that the next test of the product be on herself. Dr. Zinthrop, remarkable ethical for someone usually referred to as the film's mad scientist, is not hot to do so, but employer's orders are employer's orders. Needless to say, as to be expected from a 1950 science-gone-wrong horror film, the science goes wrong in a big way...

Of all the characters in the movie, Starlin and Zinthrop are the most human. True, Starlin is stiff and dislikable as her older self, but one does feel that she has been made so by the world that she moves in: a cut-throat business world in which even her own employees patronizingly treat her like a second-rate cog. As her younger self, she is convincingly lively and happy again, as if decades of weight have been taken from her shoulders — and, oddly enough, a the epitome of youth, she is both treated better and shown more respect by her staff than before. As for Dr. Zinthrop, none of his demands are strange or excessive; he is driven by science and not only sees in Starlin a trustworthy employer but is less than pleased to jump ahead to human testing so quickly. At most, he may cave in too quickly to Starlin's demands for being a human guinea pig, but one must remember that back in the days that The Wasp Woman was made, clinical testing was a bit more lais a fair and far less regulated and thorough than now (the Thalidomide scandal, for example, only broke two years later in 1961 — after the drug had already been on the open international market for five years). And once Zinthrop discovers the side effects — thanks to be what looks to be a stuffed rabid cat — he is so perturbed and out of himself that he promptly walks in front of a car, the perfect plot device to get him out of the story and give Starlin the means and reason to do some desperate, late-night testing...

Aside from Starlin and Zinthrop, however, The Wasp Woman is populated with objectionable characters of questionable motivations. The two main male characters, self-important ad man Bill Lane (Anthony Eisley of Dracula vs. Frankenstein [1971], credited as Fred Eisley) and Starlin's annoyingly dislikable head of research Arthur Cooper (William Roerick of God Told Me To [1976 / trailer]), hide their seditious actions behind the claim that Starlin has obviously fallen victim to a conman (Dr. Zinthrop), but their claims sound hollow. Indeed, it is much easier to see Arthur's interventions as being driven by his fear of possibly losing his job as head of research to Zinthrop — a view that is strengthened by his actions just before he meets his just fate: he is busy stealing the notes and serum of Dr. Zinthrop. What drives Bill Lane is open to conjecture — perhaps he is annoyed by Starlin's independence — but Mary Dennison (Barboura Morris of The Dunwich Horror [1970 / trailer]), Starlin's secretary, literally betrays her boss by stealing from and spying on her just to make Bill happy and keep his attention. By the time it is her turn to be in danger, one can't help but hope that she meets her just end, but just as there is no true justice in real life there is no justice in The Wasp Woman...

The Wasp Woman suffers dreadfully from its obvious low budget and underdeveloped script. The creature itself is good for a laugh, but little else in the film is, and the lethargic pacing is hardly mitigated by Corman's dull direction and the generally dreary and galling characters. The years have been kind to the movie, in any event, by intensifying its cheese factor, but there are many other cheesy films out there that are quicker and far more entertaining. (In fact, at least one of the two later remakes of the film is a definite improvement: Brian Thomas Jones's trashy début film, for example, the splatterfest Rejuvenatrix [1988 / final scene] is definitely a quicker, bloodier, cheesier, sleazier and much more fun ride.)

The Wasp Woman— famous title, barely passable film: best enjoyed when there are no other options left lying on the DVD shelf.

Full film: 

Zu Warriors / Shu shan zheng zhuan (Hong Kong, 2001)

March 11, 2013, 1:51 am

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Possibly driven by the unique international success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000 / trailer), famed Hong Kong director and producer Hark Tsui followed up his pyrokinetic gangster drama Time and Tide (2000 / trailer) by returning to the field of supernatural fantasy with Zu Warriors, a remake of his 1983 supernatural fantasy film Xin shu shan jian ke / Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountains (trailer). After its successful home release and along with the fabulous veiled ode to communist China Hero (2002 / trailer), Miramax picked this film up for US distribution and then sat on it for years. Unlike Hero, however, which was finally theatrically released uncut in 2004, Miramax trimmed Zu Warriors by a full 25 of its 104 minutes before sending it straight to DVD in 2005 — an ignoble treatment to what is definitely an intriguing and effective film.

Most of what landed on the cutting room floor was plot and character development (and possibly bloody effects), so the DVD version is definitely action and spectacle heavy but light on continuity and characterization. The result is a film in which a lot seems missing, but that rips you along on a visually exciting and thrilling adventure that makes virtually no sense but is still enjoyable. Zu Warriors is perhaps one of the first Hong Kong action flicks to replace all the old school special effects and matte shots and sets with state-of-the-art computer effects and animation, and as a result it does miss the enjoyable innocence and earthiness of both the original version from 1983 and other earlier masterpieces like A Chinese Ghost Story I (1987 / trailer) and II (1990 / trailer), but as obvious (and sometimes as dated) as the computer animation now is, it still packs a punch.

On a certain level Zu Warriors reminded us of our favorite Ray Harryhausen films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958 / trailer), Jason and the Argonauts (1963 / trailer), or The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973 / trailer), but whereas Harryhausen used stop-motion animation in his bloodless fantasy films to wow us, Hark Tsui uses the computer. In other words the same intention is there — to cast a cinematic but magical spell — but the technology has changed. And like in many of the Harryhausen films, the motivations and actions of the characters in Zu Warriors are not always 100% understandable and the plot evidences a few holes, but also like many of Harryhausen's films, the cinematic magic makes it easy to overlook and ignore such lackings. Also, cut as Zu Warriors is, for all its fight scenes it features very little physical blood (let's ignore the blood cave, which is really not that gory in any event) and thus often feels very much like a kiddy film — which is what those occidental fantasy classics of yesterday mentioned above very much were and still are.

And also like those films, Zu Warriors is a fantasy set in a time long, long, long, long ago at a place far, far, far, far away — in this case here, a magical realm between the heavens and earth above the Zu Mountains inhabited by a race of immortals (that seem to die a lot) called the Omei. As in real life, it takes but one bad seed to ruin everything, and in this case it is the evil immortal named Amnesia (sometimes seen in the form of Kelly Lin, of Sparrow [2008 / trailer]), who wants to destroy both her/his fellow immortals as well as all mortals and rule the wreckage. This threat of total annihilation is met by the brave warriors King Sky (Ekin Cheng of The Vampire Effect [2003] and Tokyo Raiders [2000]), who still suffers emotionally from the death of his master and lover Enigma (Cecilia Cheung), and White Eyebrows (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) and his disciples, all of whom have magical weapons of which they have differing levels of mastery...

The plot of Zu Warriors, like most Asian fantasies, is typically all over the place and intricate and full of characters of varying importance, some of whom you hardly register, but the excessiveness of the scattered plot and underdeveloped characters are for a change perhaps more the work of Miramax cuts than Tsui Hark. An example of just how extreme the editing is can perhaps be best seen in the character Joy, played by the beautiful Ziyi Zhang (of House of Flying Daggers [2004 / trailer]). She plays a human, a mortal, who gets drawn into the war between the immortals and is ostensibly the narrator of the film — but her role is cut down to such a minimum of scenes that her presence is literally unnecessary. Whenever she shows up, it looks as if she is coming from somewhere or just did something important (at one point she is even obviously a leader of an army of humans) but the viewer never knows what. And what about her inferred relationship with one of the immortals, who also agitates in the background to such an extent that it almost shocks whenever he suddenly reappears and frowns? She, like many characters, remains both a cipher and underused; but worse, she also comes across as unneeded — an odd predicament for a character that is supposed to function as a narrator (which she does all of three minutes). Had Miramax cut the film a bit more, they probably could've presented a viable version totally without any mortal characters... which might have made more sense.

Be as it may, the cut version is the one generally available in the West and is the one at hand here — and for all the flaws added by Miramax and any possible flaws that were there in the original version, the film we saw had us mesmerized as much as the Harryhausen films mesmerized us as kids. The mythic battle is full of thrilling visuals and the pace is often breathtaking — the film is anything but boring. And if the motivations and actions sometimes appear strange, write it off to the fact that the characters all move on a higher plane that we can't understand, a fact mirrored in all the inane and pseudo-philosophical exchanges that are sprouted by all characters at any given time. 

But in the end, who really needs to understand more than good vs. evil when the events fly by so fast and the color and images are such a resplendent excess? On a visual level, Zu Warriors amazes and entertains the viewer to such an extent that eventually the story hardly really seems to matter any more. Evil is evil and good is good, so if nothing else you know who the good guys are, and all the cinematic eye candy dished on top only makes the film all the more killer cool. 

Final verdict: Cut to shreds but gorgeous, inane and borderline incoherent but excellently made, Zu Warriors is a highly entertaining film and still worth watching in its butchered form — but if an uncut English-language version ever comes out, we would definitely give it a gander, too.

Demonia (Italy, 1990)

March 18, 2013, 6:01 am

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Gory nunspliotation horror — and, despite what should be a great mixture (gore + nuns + horror, with a dash of boobage in one scene), a dull and scatter-shot movie that is less scary or dreamy and surreal than simply disjointed and oddly lacklustre in direction, narrative and acting. The strongest aspect of the film is the acting of Brett Halsey (of The Cry Baby Killer [1958 / trailer], Return of the Fly [1959 / trailer], Twice-Told Tales [1963 / trailer], When Alice Broke the Looking Glass [1988 / trailer], The Black Cat [1990 / trailer] and much, much more) as Professor Paul Evans, whose main duty seems to express concern or anxiety, though in all truth his facial expressions tend to convey extreme hemorrhoidal pain more than anything else.

Demonia is the third-to-last directorial effort of Lucio Fulci, made at a time when his health was as shaky as his career. Co-written with Pietro Regnoli (the scriptwriter of Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City [1980]) and based on a story Fulci fleshed out with Antonio Tentori (who scripted Bruno Mattei's Island of the Living Dead [2006]), the film is a return to the more gothic narratives of Fulci's better films, this time set under the sun of Sicily, Italy, where a group of archeologists go on an archeological dig and release the revengeful spirit of a demonic nun. Regrettably, much like the movie as a whole reveals a lack of budget or any true thespian talent, the script is both shoddy and episodic and thus comes across as underdeveloped and weak. And while an occasional gore scene does pop up to offer some visual excitement, the film never manages to come close to the quality of Fulci's best or even second-best films.

Not that the first scene would indicate the failure to come, as the movie opens with a well-shot opening sequence showing the crucifixion and killing of five murderous, demon-worshipping nuns. This scene, however, segues into a séance scene that is as obvious a nod to the similar scene in Fulci's film City of the Living Dead (1980) as it is relatively unnecessary, and from there the movie pretty much gets stuck in a rut of mediocrity or ill-conceived narrative decisions. Hell, even the connection between Liza Harris (a beautiful but vacuous and untalented Meg Register, who later appeared in the abysmal Boxing Helena [1993 / trailer]) and the nuns that the séance scene introduces could well have been integrated into the story much more effectively later in Sicily, as could her supposed involvement in archeology. "Supposed," we say, because throughout the film, despite the importance of the premise of archeology — they are all in Sicily, after all, on an archeological dig — we never actually see her or anyone else take part in any archeological activities after the singular stake is hammered into the ground. 

Indeed, the rest of the crew seem to drink and sing more than they do excavate, while Liza, when wandering through the ruins of a nunnery that loom above the archaeological site and confronted by an ancient fresco of a nun in white, does the archaeologically logical thing of destroying the fresco with a pick-axe. (OK, perhaps her action can be written off as a symptom of her mysterious connection with the dead demonic nuns, as her destructive fit uncovers the passageway to the entombed bodies of the crucified nuns.) From then on, even as she tries to undercover the mystery behind the nun's death, we know she is becoming possessed because she's silent and grumpy and wanders around with a (beautiful) face as expressive as a slate and covers her ears and rolls back and forth when her drunken colleagues sing crappy songs around the campfire. Scary! — about as much so as a legless kitten in heat.

In itself, the plot line is a good one and could well have made an engrossing film.Particularly the flashback scenes to the activities of the nuns are disquieting and effective, and they give a slight indication of what the film could have been had the script only been tighter, the acting better and the budget bigger. The contemporary scenes, however, are executed with a less sure hand, and as brutal and bloody as the gore sequences are, they are also often sloppy: when the butcher Turi DeSimone (Lino Salemme of Demons [1985]) gets his tongue hammered to the butcher block, for example, it looks less like he has a tongue long enough to tickle a woman's G-spot than as if he's sucking on a lamb tongue, and when John (Ettore Comi) gets pulled apart, you can literally see the bags containing the guts and gore under the shirt of the dummy being ripped in two.

And speaking of John, his death is a perfect example of the strangely incoherent editing of the film: one minute he's running through the forest searching for his son (Francesco Cusimano), and the next he's tied upside down between two trees. And, actually, up until he ran off looking for his son, it was hardly made clear that the kid was his son at all. The who and the why of most characters presented in Demonia are sorely lacking, thus most characters remain sketchy and flat and never register as a figure of identification; they are two-dimensional fodder and little more. 

And as fodder, they are chosen indiscriminately: the first to go, an archaeological colleague on a boat (Al Cliver of The Beyond [1981 / trailer] and Zombie [1979 / trailer]), has no real connection to the nuns or archaeological site, while the body count in the village — the actual descendants of those who killed the nuns — runs a low two, one of whom,  Lilla (Carla Cassola of La setta [1991 / Italo trailer] and Albert Pyun's Captain America [1990 / trailer]), is an outsider who risks local ostracism by giving Liza the information she wants. Other than the two drunkards that get spiked (effective effects) and the butcher (half-effective effects), the choice of victims seem less based on the decision of the demonic nuns than on a scriptwriter desperately wanting to finally interject another gore scene to enliven the dull events.

But even with the occasional gore highpoints, Demonia not only has somnambulant pacing but is also truly handicapped by its beautiful but untalented lead female who, by being such a walking personification of a Quaalude, thoroughly fails in engaging the viewer. One not only never really gives a flying fuck about what will happen to her, one even starts wishing something terrible finally would. Had she at least gotten naked on occasion she might have won over the male audience — going by the picture to the left from some other unknown film of hers, she's built, she's stacked, she's a brick house — but on the basis of her (blank) character alone, she wins the concern and sympathy of nary a viewer.

In short, Demonia is a meandering flick with an occasional highpoint that lacks élan of execution, is hampered by the notable lack of thespian skills of its lead, and is oddly sloppy technically. The aspects that should be plus points of the film — gore, the nun bits, a groovy dream sequence, a funny scene involving a blood-covered youth, an occasionally creepy atmosphere — do little to make it bearable or worth watching. Demonia remains an exasperating experience because it introduces so much that could be used and developed into something good, and then under-bakes everything. It is, in the end, a third-rate film worth watching only if you're a Fulci completist or, maybe, if you have nothing else around.

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R.I.P.: Harry Reems – Part I

March 21, 2013, 8:30 am

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August 27, 1947 — March 19, 2013

Born Herbert Streicher, the legendary former (heterosexual) porn star of the Golden Age has gone to the porn shoot in the sky.

A biography will follow one day... but till then, follow the links to Part II (1969-1972) or Part III (1973-1974) or Part IV (1975-1979) of his career review.

Short Film: I, pet goat II (Canada, 2012)

March 28, 2013, 9:49 am

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I, pet goat II from Heliofant on Vimeo.
 

So, this month we've decided to jump on the bandwagon and share this wonderfully surreal and beautifully nightmarish short film from the Northern regions of the Americas.  Directed and written by Louis Lefebvre, I, pet goat II is the product of Heliofant. To simply quote their website: "Based in the beautiful Laurentian mountains just north of Montreal, Canada, Heliofant is a nascent independent computer animation studio focused on creating experimental and challenging content. Bringing together artists from the fields of dance, music, computer animation and visual arts, the company is very interested in exploring the common ground that underlies many spiritual and philosophical traditions in a lyrical form." And they do exactly that in this short here, entitled I, pet goat II, which has been rather a viral success.
Personally, we're not too concerned with trying to figure out the myriad of symbolic and cultural references that gush from every frame of this short, particularly when other people have already done it in excess (see here  and here). We take a more philistine approach and simply say screw the meaning: ain't it just a visual and aural delight? Trance-like, disturbing, funny, beautiful, nightmarish, technically excellent — the movie is simply an amazing visual treat, as is the excellent music that scores it. I, pet goat II is simply a hypnotic film; it induces a state of transfixion and  makes us wanna go outside and blow up buildings... 
Not really, but it does make us think we could use a joint. Or should join the Masons. Or sacrifice a Christian child to Satan. Our draw a picture of Mohammed. Or vote Republican, all of which are about the same....
Leave it to those evil Masons and Illuminati of Canada to brainwash us with something as visually astounding and purty as this film here. As rabid atheists, we do find the film a bit too heavy in its Christian references, but we've never let god or Jesus stand in the way of enjoying something, and you shouldn't either. 
Watch I, pet goat II now — and be amazed.

Skeleton Man (USA, 2004)

April 5, 2013, 3:38 am

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Filmed under the title Cottonmouth Joe, this little Nu Image flick was originally made for and aired on the Sci Fi Channel, but it has since somehow found its way onto DVD. It is to date (5 April 2013) the only film directed by Johnny Martin, a well-employed stuntman who has worked in the industry for decades, occasionally even appearing as a glorified extra in films such as Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988 / trailer) or Dead & Breakfast (2004 / trailer). Martin — or at least his production company Martini Films — has also acted as producer on an indeterminate amount of low budget films ranging from science-fiction-tinged horror like Larva [2005 / trailer] to many of Cuba Gooding's straight-to-DVD thrillers like End Game (2004 / trailer) or The Hit List [2011 / trailer]. We would be hard pressed not to think that Martin has only ever directed this one film because either he or those with the financing realized in retrospect that his talents definitely lie elsewhere. 

We also have no doubts that this film was intended as a serious film, as Martin's experience with ironic comedy is virtually non-existent (he had at that time only previously produced one "real" comedy, the unknown Joe Killionaire [2004]). True, Skeleton Man's scriptwriter Frederick Bailey has a limited career in comedy — he's never written one intentionally but has appeared in some, such as Roger Corman's Gas-s-s-s (1970 / trailer) — but his extensive writing and directorial output has primarily been in the field of "serious" low-budget exploitation and trash, where he has helped foist an admirable number of unknown, sometimes awe-inspiring films such as Wheels of Fire (1985 / trailer), Demon of Paradise (1987 / trailer), Equalizer 2000 (1987 / trailer) Demonstone (1990 / scene), Raiders of the Sun (1992 / trailer) and Terminal Justice (1996 / trailer), among others. All serious stuff, in any event, definitely intended for Academy consideration... 

No, Skeleton Man was definitely not intended as a comedy, but serendipity made it one: the combination of Martin's total lack of directorial acumen, Bailey's penchant for banal and cliché-ridden plot and dialogue, a cast of slumming mildly talented actors and untalented actresses, a total lack of professional effects,* and editing that looks as if the editor was busy elsewhere while he cut the film have jelled in such a way that the final product, the film now known as Skeleton Man, is not just absolutely terrible but truly and surreally bad in that special way that makes the final product an unearthly and unique film of Ed Woodian proportions. Indeed, the DVD company that released the film in Germany even realized that and proclaimed it loudly on their DVD release, where they write in large letters "Hier lebt der Geist von Ed Wood weiter!" ("The Spirit of Ed Wood Lives On!").** And it is true: Skeleton Man literally drips the spirit of Ed Wood — much more so than it does drip blood, and it is (in theory, anyway) a violent film. 

If we followed the plot correctly — the film isn't exactly edited to make sense — the movie is a regurgitation of the core plot of Predator (1987 / Arnie sings) but with a few slight changes: in this case here, the predator hunting everyone down is the Skeleton Man (aka Cottonmouth Joe [Dominique Vandenberg, also seen somewhere in Barb Wire (1996 / trailer)]), a supernatural American Indian who, centuries ago, went postal during an Indian wedding ceremony and massacred his entire tribe. Re-awoken by some archaeologists who dig up the wedding site, he is now an unstoppable skull-headed dude wearing a big black cape — needless to say, fashions have changed a lot since the day of the loincloth. He basically just goes around killing anyone who invades his space, although he also seems to have a penchant for indiscriminately entering industrial compounds and slaughtering the workers there, too. For some odd reason he sees people in Predator-vision, so you can run but you can't hide — not that running does much good, 'cause he and his magic horse can also jump time and space.

What should be a great idea — namely, replacing most of the ugly macho men of the Predator-inspired "Delta Team" sent in to investigate with young, beautiful and totally bonkable babes — adds to the overall idiocy of the events, for not one of the gals looks their part. To our displeasure, and unlike in the better grindhouse films that Bailey once wrote (see the trailers of Wheels of Fire and Demon of Paradise), none of the babes ever take their tops off and let their true natural talents swing freely. Oh, well. (The personal physical preference of whoever chose the female cast — one assumes the director himself — is extremely evident in that all the girls have the exact same body type... although we did note that the final girl [Sarah Ann Schultz of Wolvesbayne (2009 / trailer)] is the only blonde and also has a centimeter or two more up top. Thus, in her case we can truly talk of "survival of the tittiest".) 

For all their covered physical charms and attractiveness, the gals don't seem to be capable of doing more than frown a lot and recite their lines woodenly and display all the thespian restraint of, dunno, Mantan Mooreland (of King of the Zombies [1941 / full film], Spider Baby [1968 / trailer] and The Young Nurses [1973 / trailer]). Oddly enough, when it comes to thespian abilities, neither Casper Van Dien (of The Tracker [2000]) nor Michael Rooker (of Slither [2006 / trailer] and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1986 / trailer]), the ostensible name actors in the movie, prove themselves any more capable than the gals. But then, they probably — one hopes — knew what junk they were in and simply couldn't be bothered to try to do a professional job. 

Van Dien, at least, is out of the scene rather quickly: for no apparent reason he suddenly steals a truck and crashes it and dies. Seriously. It is an event that, like most of what happens in the movie, makes absolutely no sense in the context of the plot. But then, much like the progression of events in, say, Bride of the Atom (1955 / trailer / full movie) or Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959 / trailer / full film), little of the narrative or events in Skeleton Man seems to follow any sensible logic, with the film instead opting for a dreamy non-logic in which no matter how stupid or crazy anything is, everyone treats it as if it's as normal as taking a pee after drinking a 6-pack. 

The result is a film full of laughable high points, too many to list here. We ourselves, however, particularly like the scene in which Skeleton Man shoots a fisherman from behind but hits him in the chest; the fisherman, who was of course fishing from the top of a waterfall, then tumbles down through the air with all the natural stiffness of a mannequin (because the way that the "fisherman's body" twists as it falls indicates that the only thing keeping the upper and lower parts of the mannequin together is the clothing, the scene promptly brings to mind the infamous one in Dr. Butcher M.D.  [1980] in which the fallen body/mannequin loses an arm). We also found the scene in which Skeleton Man takes down a helicopter with a bow and arrow entertaining, though we also think it's time that Joss Wheadon finally admit that he cribbed the idea here for his movie The Avengers [2012 / trailer] in which, as you might remember, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) takes down the S.H.I.E.L.D. heli-quarters with a bow and arrow. 

This film is, for all those involved, what Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966 / trailer) was for John Carradine: the deepest point of their careers, no matter how "nada" their careers might be. Thus, of course, it cannot in any way be denied that Skeleton Man is a terrible film — but nevertheless, we rather enjoyed it and recommend it heartily to anyone who truly likes watching the unbelievably dreadful, the ridiculously amateurish, the downright idiotic, the jaw-droppingly craptastic.

Everyone else should avoid it like the STDs...

* Wikipedia is right on the mark when they point out that the notable special effects of the movie is that "Cottonmouth Joe's horse changes from a tan Arabian to a black Clydesdale during attack sequences." 

**They take it all a step further on the back cover by actually lining out the names of the actors involved, followed by the notation "Die Schauspieler möchten unbekannt bleiben" ("The actors want to remain unknown").

Demoniac (French, 1975)

April 12, 2013, 1:26 am

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This Jess Franco flick, like most of the dearly departed director's films, is available under assorted names (for example, L'éventreur de Notre-Dame and/or Exorcism) and versions; Demoniac is the cut that was made for the American audience, in as much as there ever was an American audience for a Jess Franco movie. At our weekly bad film night, we ended up screening it more or less by fluke: tired of watching disappointing recent big budget crap — Prometheus (2012 / trailer), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012 / trailer) and John Carter of Mars (2012 / trailer) being the last three films we had the displeasure of watching — the desire was expressed by one of the group for some good ol' low budget Eurotrash. Whereupon this flick, the only Franco film in our pile of still-unscreened trash DVDs, was popped into the player and our eyeballs were raped as selected massive groans and snorts of derision often drowned out the extremely stilted dialogue. Most of the group that evening was not exactly all that much more pleased by the film that unfolded than they were by the Hollywood crap of the weeks before.

Unlike our compatriots that evening, however, we here of A Wasted Life— although of the opinion that not only is Demoniac one of those rare films that screams to be remade but that indeed any attempt to do so would probably be an improvement — actually rather liked the film. Still, we would be hard pressed to bother watching either the longer version now easily available or the hardcore version supposedly circulating somewhere out there in the big, bad world. Sometimes, no matter what Jacqueline Susann may have said, once is enough.

Actually, seeing how un-erotic the sex scenes are, and how ugly most of the players are — some of the women are passable, but the men are uniformly repulsive, and not just due to bad 70s polyesterEuro-fashion — the concept of a hardcore version of the film is somewhat nauseating. Oddly enough, however, though the Demoniac-entitled version is said to be heavily edited, our Dutch (English-language) DVD nevertheless included a massive amount of nudity and bush as well as the oft-missing knifing scene in which the blonde and curly-haired Countess (France Nicolas) has her entrails pulled from the initially overly vaginal-shaped slit cut into her stomach.

According to imdb, Demoniac required a full four people to write, including Marius Lesoeur (as "A.L. Mariaux"), one of the owners Eurociné, the famed craptastic French production company that brought us this baby here as well as many other unique cinematic specimens like Zombie Lake (1981) and Oasis of the Zombies (1982). For that, the film looks, sounds, feels like 100% Jess Franco — which, depending on one's proclivities, can be taken as either a reason to watch the film or a reason to avoid itlike the plague.
Cheaply made, poorly acted, atrociously dubbed,occasionally almost narratively incoherent and so languidly paced that one could almost call the film lethargic, Demoniac is likewise enjoyably sleazy and often oddly mesmerizing. It is also often rather funny, though all the humor is obviously unintentional: Franco was trying hard to make a serious film, if not an art film, and while hesucceeds in snippets the overall product stands out far more as further evidence of his lackadaisical disposition and general disregard for logic or continuity — Is that at all surprising? — and total independence as a filmmaker, one who makes what he wants and is not subject to the lowly tastes and generic expectations of the masses.

More so than in many of his films, however, the voyeuristic tendencies of the director come to the forefront in Demoniac. Aside from the fact that the main character, the insane and homicidal defrocked priest Mathis Vogel (played by the director himself), spends more of his time watching others having sex or doing nasty things than he does do anything else (other than murder, perhaps), the camerawork is almost obsessive in its focused attention on the sordid sex scenes that are far less erotic in any way than oddly illicit. Often, the viewer almost ends up feeling like a peeping Tom spying on the cellulite-heavy next-door neighbor having sex with the ugly guy with the bad toupee from down the street. And like a true voyeuristic eye, the camera sometimes remains focused on the soft-core fleshy action much longer than it really should — especially seeing that the real horror of this horror film is all the un-attractive European Joe and Jane Schmoes that get naked. In this regard, the film has two highpoints: an orgy scene that is as repulsive as it is unconvincing, and an intriguingly filmed stabbing death of one woman shot from a vantage point that literally fixes the viewer's gaze on her naked posterior. (Had Franco placed the camera closer and a bit to the right, it would have been an extended brown-eye and camel-toe shot.)

The plot of Demoniac involves the homicidal actions of the previously mentioned defrocked priest within the circles of the decidedly jaded and decadent Parisian upper-crust and its hanger-ons, a circle that Franco has cast his eye upon in many a film, including his far less flesh-heavy but more infamous and surreal film Succubus (1968) in which, as is the case with Demoniac and many another Franco film, such as the jaw-dropper Vampiros Lesbos (1971 / trailer / soundtrack / full film in German), arty S&M performances are essential to the narrative. And, as is typical of many Franco films, Demoniac even opens with one such never-ending S&M performance, this time one in which a young, nude and tied-to-a-cross Anne (a young Lina Romay — easily the most attractive person in the whole movie) is tortured and smeared with dove blood by Martine (Catherine Lafferière). Such performances, under the guise of "Black Masses", are held at regular intervals throughout the film and seem to function as a form of visual Viagra for the listless and degenerate well-heeled Parisians. Unluckily, the former priest and escaped mental patient Vogel, who writes "factual" S&M stories for Venus Magazine, the publisher of which (Pierre Taylou as "Pierre de Franval") also runs the nightclub where the masses are held, takes the Black Masses as the real thing and decides to save the souls of various participants by torturing and killing them. (Being an obvious hetero, he might kill an occasional man but he never tortures one.) Along the way, he also falls in love with Anne...

Now that is indeed the perfect narrative for some prime grindhouse sleaze, or? And Franco takes full advantage of it to find continual grounds for yet another gratuitous sex scene or more casual nakedness — interspersed with an occasional scene of flagellation and/or torture and murder as behooves a film about a mad priest who obviously prefers sticking a knife into women more than sticking his weenie. When it comes to verbal exposition, Franco's acting is on par with that of almost everyone else in the film (as in — with the exception of Romay — "miserable"), but when needed he does exude a highly effective greasy depravity that fits both his character and the overall aura of the film like a silken glove. For all Vogel's protestations about saving souls and releasing the devil, there is little doubt that more than anything else he is simply getting his rocks off.

As is often the case with Franco's films, the soundtrack, by his long-time musical collaborator Daniel White and, supposedly, Andre "Jazz Guitar Bach" Benichou, swerves back and forth between totally insipid to truly inspired — but always perfect for the movie. Demoniac does sort of lose steam towards the end, less due to the narrative than the increasingly weak direction and filmic laziness. About the point when Vogel commits his last murder and the publisher runs after Vogel and out of the blue has a fur coat suddenly hanging over his arm, the film suddenly begins to seem oddly rushed. Of no help in this regard is the final, unbelievably incompetent car-chase scene that is literally a sleeping pill and a resolution, complete with a cap gun, that is incoherently staged.

Sleazy and stupid, languid and arty, sordid and inspired, Demoniac is hardly the worst of Franco's films; be what it may, it could well be one of his better ones — but as is the case with all his films, the terms "good" and "bad" are as relative as they are irrelevant. If you are one of the many who has never seen a Franco film that you have liked, it is doubtful that you will like this one. In turn, if you like the films of his that you have seen to date, you probably will like this one. And if you are a newbie, an innocent, a virgin amongst the living dead that make up the masses of this earth — well, there are worse (and better) Franco films to start with than Demoniac. Who knows, you might actually like it. We did. And it is truly sad to think that as of 2 April 2013, the great Outsider filmmaker of Europe (if not the world) will never make another film again.

But really, someone else should do a remake of this flick...

Jeepers Creepers (USA, 2001)

April 19, 2013, 7:38 am

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Aside from the yellow press infamy that he gained with the revelation in 1995 that he had regular sexual relations with a twelve-year-old boy in 1988, Victor Salva has also gained a reputation for making effective (?), low budget genre films which tend to follow but stretch the traditional rules and plots. "Atmospheric and macabre, with no happy endings but not to be taken totally seriously" is how Salva himself describes his work, and indeed, his films are sometimes exactly so, though he might have also added a reference to his preference for rural or secluded settings. 

His first film, Clownhouse (1988 / trailer), has a few kids alone in a house fighting off crazed clowns; The Nature of the Beast (1995 / trailer) is an enjoyable version of Joe Schmoe with a secret confronted with a psycho hitchhiker; Powder (1995) tells a pretentious tale of the discovery of a strange country boy with supernatural powers who grew up locked in his Dad's basement; and Rites of Passage (1999 / trailer) is a father-sons melodrama cum thriller with a few killers thrown in for good measure. For Jeepers Creepers, Salva decided to tackle the genre of teen horror and came up with an odd, supernatural genre-crossing mixture of Duel (1971 / trailer) and The Hitcher  (1986), peppered with a small homage to the police station scene in The Terminator (1984 / trailer).

Jeepers Creepers proved to be a big success at both the box office and with a few odd critics, though this fact probably has more to say about how easily the public is satisfied than it does have anything to say about the quality of the movie. The fact is, Jeepers Creepers is far from an interesting film and is much more a road-kill of a movie, a dull mishmash, a horror gumbo soup full of bad and good ideas, none of which combine effectively; the final result is simply a generic 1½ hour "horror" movie that gets on your nerves more than it does scare or involve. 

The opening scene already lets you know that there isn't even a chance for a gratuitous nude scene, as it is quickly revealed that Darry (Justin Long of Drag Me to Hell [2009 / trailer]) and Trish (Gina Philips of Dead & Breakfast [2004] and The Sick House [2008]) are siblings on their way home to visit their Mom. The introductory dialogue has been praised by some misguided souls as being both insightful and intelligent, but in truth it is simply annoying. (Of course, one could say that since the verbal interaction between most siblings tends to be annoying, the dialogue is indeed insightful and, if not intelligent, then at least realistic.) 

In any event, while driving the rural, scenic route home — something one learned at the latest not to do since Children of the Corn (1984 / trailer) — they get run off the road by some nutcase in an old truck. Soon after they not only see the big, scary guy dump what looks to be a body wrapped in a bloody white sheet down a drain pipe but also get run off the road by the nutcase a second time. Do they go to the police? Of course not, that would be much too an intelligent thing to do. Instead, as Trish so self-referentially puts it: "You know the bit in the horror movies where someone does something really stupid, and everyone hates him for it? This is it." Not only do they go back, but under the most ridiculous and contrived actions, Darry goes sliding down the pipe into nothing less than hell-on-earth and the movie soon falls apart and we hate him and everyone else for it.

True, the secret "haven" is indeed both macabre and horrific, which should be a great way to segue the movie into the supernatural, but the idiocy leading up to the revelation takes all the effectiveness from the twist. And worse, after the sudden transition into horror, the idiocy doesn't stop. In no short time, Salva resorts to the cheapest of all ideas: the character who has no reason to be in the film other than to tell the stuff needed to keep the plot going. In this case, it's Jezelle Gay (Patricia Belcher), a local Afro-American mamma who "sees things," an ineffective one-note character given an ineffective one-note performance. The rest of the film until its rather abrupt end has everyone running from the Creeper (Jonathan Breck of Spiders [2000 / trailer]), a big guy in a rubber suit who has wings and can not only fly, but can crawl along walls like Spider-man, too.

Actually, it is rather a shame that Jeepers Creepers is such a lousy film, for the basic idea is solid: what seems to be a rural serial killer turns out to be an unstoppable beast from hell. Regrettably, Salva, who likes to both write and direct his movies, is much too sloppy a scriptwriter this time around to carry the idea through effectively. An unstoppable, flying demon that drives around in an old truck? A monster whose demonic actions are always foreboded by the 1938 tune of Jeepers Creepers? (What did it do before the song was written, we wonder — or, for that matter, before radios were invented?) And how the hell did it collect all those dead bodies if it only appears for 23 days every 23 years? OK, true: since 1938 he would have had two "harvests" — but in all those years, no other idiot ever discovered his easily accessed underground haven? (The whole idea of it appearing every 23 years is quickly forgotten anyway, for it conflicts much too much with too many aspects of the story. In fact, it is such an albatross one wonders why it was brought up in the first place.) For that matter, how can everyone act so normal at the end of the film, as if cop-killing flying demons that lay waste to police stations and kidnap college students are part of everyday life? (Where the fuck is Hard Copy and 60 Minutes— or at least Fox News and the National Enquirer?)

Jeepers Creepers— original version of the song by Louis Armstrong, not used in the film:

Hell, the problem with Jeepers Creepers is that unlike effective horror films, it features so many holes in the plot and logic that the viewer is unable to simply let go and go with the flow. Instead of being frightened or kept in suspense by what is happening, one is constantly annoyed that the script once again blatantly demands you to turn off your brain. As a result, the film never becomes even remotely scary after the scene in the demon's lair. That the movie became such a hit is truly beyond comprehension, especially since it lacks any all of the sleaze factors that make most equally illogical trash films so enjoyable. 

Oh horrors of all horrors! They made sequel in 2003 (trailer)… and Part III, entitled Jeepers Creepers 3: Cathedral, (trailer) is even on the way — with threats of Parts IV and V even hanging in the air! (Oh well, they surely can't be any worse than part one.)

Starting at 1:12— the much superior B&W Jeepers Creepers short that inspired Salva's film: