Little Evil (USA, 2017)

January 3, 2020, 7:11 am

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Dunno rightly what director/scriptwriter Eli Craig is up to most of the time, but he hasn't exactly had the most active career over the last decade. (A shame, if you get down to it.) The son of the revered American former flying nun Sally Field, Craig had a few odd parts in a few odd movies (like Carrie: The Rage [1999]) before, seemingly out of the blue, he wrote and directed one of the best contemporary black comedy cum horror films to remain unjustly unknown, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (USA, 2010).

As is often the case of idiosyncratic independent productions, however, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was never the hit it should have been and thus, in turn, obviously never opened as many doors as it should have. It probably didn't help all that much that Craig's next project was the failed pay-TV pilot (2013 / trailer) to Ruben Fleischer'sZombieland (2009), the latter of which is a fun film that had the studio support required to become the hit that Tucker & Daleshould have been. (BTW, as if you didn't know, Zombieland now has a sequel: Zombieland: Double Tap [2019 / trailer].)

As luck would have it, however, two years ago and totally off the radar, Craig popped up again with a new comedy horror, Little Evil. Unluckily, it is a film that no one has heard of and that now seems to be relegated to the nether regions of Netfux, its producer, which is where we accidentally found it while searching desperately for something half-way interesting to watch.

Little Evil, like Tucker & Dale, is surprisingly good-natured for a horror comedy, and although its core pedagogic theme may be that we all have free choice — or, to borrow the key platitude of the (sadly) theatrical big budget flop Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant(2009 / trailer), "It's not what you are, but who you are"— Little Evil, like Tucker & Dale, is also an ode of sorts to the power of friendship. For in the end, were it not for all his pals from the Stepfather's Support Group, the hero of Little Evil would hardly have been able save the day (and, in turn, the world) in the final  scenes.

The basic plot of Little Evil is a twist on that of The Omen (1976 / trailer): in 7^th heaven for having married Samantha(Evangeline Lilly), the single-mom woman of his dreams — like, who wouldn't be in seventh heaven if married to Evangeline Lilly? — everyday-Joe Gary (Adam Scott of Krampus [2015] and the great Alan Smithee's Hellraiser: Bloodline [1996 / trailer]) comes to realize that Samantha'sweird and unfriendly son, Lucas (Owen Atlas), is no one less than the anti-Christ, fathered by no one less than Satan himself. All the signs are there to see, for everyone but a beautiful and ditzy mother blinded by her love for her child…

Like Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Little Evil rarely delves too far into the dark, and its jokes are rarely pointlessly mean despite the "horror movie" framework. For that, however, Little Evil is far less bloody or comically violent than Tucker & Dale vs. Evil— indeed, the for-laughs money shots of Little Evil hardly even hold a candle to the original Omen (we never saw the 2006 remake [trailer]), despite that film being a creaky 41 years older. Aside from a quick scene of a teacher being pulled from the spikes of a fence (a scene that momentarily made us remember our favorite Mario Bava movie, Kill, Baby… Kill! [1966 / trailer]) and a truly disturbing dream sequence involving worms, Little Evilis relatively toothless when it comes to the visceral that contemporary audiences tend to expect, even in a horror comedy. It is very much a PG film — not even PG-13 — and is also all the weaker for it…

That said, if one is in no way familiar with Craig's first film, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Little Evil definitely will be a much less disappointing and much more entertaining watch, for it is truly a funny and entertaining horror comedy that only becomes in any way lacking when put in comparison to Craig's first film. Played straight and well-paced, thanks to its low viscerality Little Evil is a horror comedy appropriate for the whole family — which was perhaps Craig's intention in the first place. Give it a go.

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Best of 2019?

January 10, 2020, 2:13 am

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Photo cut from the fake album cover for Karl Malden Reads the Speeches of Lyndon B Johnson, originally created by Twisted Vintage but found at Cut-up Sound. The faux album cover, oddly enough, came up through a Google image search for "Oscar award with boobs"… For more unexpected but fun finds that we've had when searching odd phrases, we suggest you watch our Short Film of the Month for April 2016, Fist of Jesus.

2019 was a busy year — or so we see it in retrospect, as an explanation for why the last year saw the least amount of blog entries (48) since we started a wasted life in a fit of boredom some 13 years ago. And of those 48 entries, only 21 — less than half — were actual film reviews. And from that meager selection, the time has come to choose our yearly "Best of" list… A relatively easy task, in theory, for all we really need to do is list all films that we gave a positive review and we would have a list of ten. But we don't actually find that all the movie we enjoyed truly deserve placement on the list, thus the list of only eight. Plus one special mention, way at the bottom. 

Here they are, but for the special mention in the order that the original review appeared on a wasted life. The titles are linked to the original review.

 

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

Pink Flamingos 
(Baltimore, 1972)

Dolls 
(Italy/USA, 1987) 

Not to be confused with the recently released (2019) killer dolls horror movie of the same name, Dolls (trailer), directed by Cuyle Carvin.

 

 

Vampire Circus 

(Great Britain, 1972)

 

 

The Snake King 

(USA, 2005) 

A terrible film in every way, but we truly enjoyed it. You probably won't.

 

 

The Most Assassinated Woman in the World 

(Belgium, 2018)

 

The Purge 

(Un-USA, 2013)

 

 

Krampus 

(USA, 2015)

Special Mention:

Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla
(USA, 1952)

OK, we trashed it — but have told dozens of people about it since, laughing our heads off as we did so. So maybe we enjoyed it more than we thought…

Sinister (USA, 2012)

January 17, 2020, 1:18 am

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"Don't worry, Daddy. I'll make you famous again."

Ashley (Clare Foley)

In general, a well-shot but not very good tale about an asshole, semi-alcoholic, has-been true crime writer, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke of Daybreakers[2009] and The Purge [Un-USA, 2013]) who moves his family into the house that was the site of the mass murder he wants to write about. (That the house is a murder site is a fact he manages to hide from his family, who seem to be internet illiterate, for much of the movie, in part by playing Donald Trump with the facts.) When Oswalt suddenly discovers evidence in the house that a serial killer is at work, he keeps the info to himself so as to have a sure-fire best seller…. Slowly but surely, however, he can no longer deny the fact that the killings are of supernatural nature.

Many of the film's scares are based on the writer's habit of investigating mysterious nighttime noises, which awaken only him, by wandering around the dark hallways and rooms of the house without flipping on any of the light switches. Much of the movie feels generic and rehashed, but Sinister is nevertheless mildly scary beyond just the plethora of annoying, generic jump shocks. It is the murders caught on the 8mm home-movies, however, that are the most effectively upsetting and unnerving — all the more so once the murderer(s) are finally revealed. In the end, literally,Sinister's true saving grace is its totally downer and unexpected resolution, one so bleak that it does indeed become a shock.

Short Film: The Secret Cinema (New York City, 1966)

January 22, 2020, 3:17 am

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Among the selection of fine blogs we have listed under list of Blogs for Wasted Lives found at the [right] side of this blog is The Dwrayger Dungeon, otherwise seen on the list as 13. Coincidentally, that fine blog began the same year as this one, in 2007, and is still going strong — stronger than a wasted life, to be sure, going by the number of entries it has every year. Would positively give us size envy, were it not that our entries are invariably longer. That aside, the Dungeon's quickies tend to be fun if fluffy, often introduce us to fun stuff or remind us of fun stuff we've forgotten, and always entertain. Check that great blog out if you don't already know it.

Next month, in February, our Short Film of the Monthwill take a look at something the Dungeonintroduced us to, but this month, for January's Short Film of the Month, we want to take a look at a short film we saw long ago and the Dungeon reminded us about: the first film directed by Paul Bartel* (6 Aug 1938 – 13 May 13 2000) that made any waves, the low budget B&W short film from 1968, The Secret Cinema,"a paranoid delusional fantasy of self-referential cinema" that — to quote the ever quotable Steven Puchalski from his great book, Slimetime: A Guide to Sleazy, Mindless Movies —is also "a nightmarish, pitch-black chunk of nervous laughs" and "a wild, psycho trip of calculated mental sadism".

Shot in 1966 and screened at '66 London Film Festival & '67 New York Film Festival, the 30-minute short  gained a slightly wider audience when it was booked in NYC to be screened with Brian De Palma's feature-film debut, Murder à la Mod (1968 / first four minutes). Bartel's short was a labor of love with a non-budget of $5,000 shot in part on the leftover short ends from commercials shoots at the company where Bartel worked (Rose-Magwood) and/or from porno productions. (Considering the times, surely soft-core.) TheSecret Cinemawas filmed silent to cut costs and subsequently dubbed.

Over at All Movie, Hal Erickson has a plot description for The Secret Cinemathat is a bit less blow-by-blow that that found at The Dwrayger Dungeon: "Almost 30 years before Peter Weir brought us The Truman Show (1998 / trailer), cinematic cult figure Paul Bartel [...] was the 30-year-old auteur of this half-hour film, a somewhat sleazy bit of surrealism on a similar subject. Amy Vane** plays [Jane,] a woman whose every move is recorded on film. She didn't ask for this scrutiny: the woman is the victim of a voyeuristic director (Barry Dennen [22 Feb 1938 – 26 Sept 2017] of Madhouse [1974 / trailer] and Jesus Christ Superstar*** [1973 / trailer]), who contrives to hide cameras wherever she goes and show the results in a theater. It is just as warped as it sounds, but it has its own peculiar appeal."

Bartel, taking the idea to the paranoiac extreme, has everyone in Jane's life part of the plot, from the guy she's dating (Philip Carlson) to her fat boss (Gordon Felio [23 Dec 1937 – 27 May 2005] of Aimez-vous les femmes? [1964 / full film in French], Nick Carter et le trèfle rouge [1965 / 2.5 minutes] and Al tropic del cancro [1972 / German trailer]) to mother (Estelle Omens [11 Oct 1928 – 5 Dec 1983] of Dead & Buried [1981 / trailer, with James Farentino]) to her best friend (Connie Ellison) to strangers like a waitress or nurse (Mimi Randolph [26 Dec 1922 – 13 Aug 1999]). 

The Secret Cinema was restored in 2017 by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.**** The version embedded below is found at the ever entertaining source of fun ephemera and serious stuff, the Internet Archives. 

The Secret Cinema:

BTW: Bartel's follow-up film, the entertaining color short Naughty Nurse [1969], which Hal Ericksonprudishly describes as "a 7-minute chunk of erotica that is best ignored", can be found twice at a wasted life: once in the meandering entry R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part VII (1986-2013)(from 19 March 2014) and then again in the meandering entry R.I.P. Dick Miller, Part IV: 1974-76 (from 12 July 2019). Naughty Nurse, like this The Secret Cinema, features sexual twists that hardly shock nowadays but were rather risqué, if not outrageous, in their day. Considering the time The Secret Cinema was made, for example, it was probably positively shocking that Jane's boyfriend not only might infer at one point that he is gay but also appears to be having an affair with Jane's Afro-American best friend.*****

*Cult director and actor Paul Bartel, as you should know, was involved in a noteworthy film or two. His feature-length directorial debut Private Parts (1972 / poster above & trailer below) is a classic shocker, the type of film that just couldn't get made today, and well worth searching out. Death Race 2000(1975 / trailer) is an exploitation classic, and while Lust in the Dust (1985) is far from perfect, it is fun enough. As an actor, he is some of the fish food in Piranha(1978) and appears in (among many flicks) the sorely underappreciated bodycounter Killer Party (1986 / trailer). He remade Secret Cinema in 1986 as an episode of Amazing Stories (1985-87 / German trailer), for which he also took on the role of the devious psychiatrist Dr. Shreck, Jane's shrink, the man behind the whole thing. The newer version, though good enough for a TV episode, is an argument for needlessness of remakes, and how sometimes the magic of a specific film simply cannot be replicated anew or improved upon.

Trailer to

Private Parts:

**Amy Vane, born in California around 1939, never appeared in another film. Over at Theater Sounds, back in 2005 they told a bit about her life: "Amy Vane-Goldbaum AMY VANE-GOLDBAUM is not eighty, yet, but she does vaguely remember life before the Second World War. She was a Theater, Radio/TV major at UCLA and apprenticed at the Laguna Beach Playhouse one summer. Ben Hecht sent her sandwiches. She worked as costume mistress and understudy for Theatre Group at UCLA under John Houseman. She went to New York City, of course, and became a puppeteer and starred in an early independent film called TheSecret Cinema, directed by the late Paul Bartel. It was shown at the London and NYC film festivals in the late 60s and became a minor cult classic. She studied the Miesner Method with the late Jim Tuttle. She left the city for the country and got her Miesner Method straightened out by the very great Beverly Brumm in Ulster County, New York. She is now retired but for years produced and performed marionette plays as Herrick Marionettes and hand puppet plays as Vane & Co, for children, appearing in New York City frequently at the Lenny Suib Theatre up at the Asphalt Green and even once at the Fraunces Tavern." As late as 2017, she was obviously still alive, for she donated $200 to a Dan Savage Go Fund Me projectpertaining to The Secret Cinema, and here it shows she was still kicking in 2018.

*** As Pontius Pilate he does the counting heard in the trailer to a film which features the big screen debut of the "iconic" Golden Age penis Paul Thomas as Peter. The movie — like the original stage production, actually — was and is of course in no way subliminally or overtly racist in its casting of its only truly visible Afro American cast member, Carl Anderson (27 Feb 1945 – 23 Feb 2004) in the film and Ben Vereen (of Gas-s-s-s [1970 / trailer]) in the original stage production, as the traitorous Judas.

****Hans Solo shot first!

***** Stonewall only happened in 1969, and the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia was only decided in 1967, up to which point "misegration" was still illegal in 16 states.

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part IX (1995-2003)

January 29, 2020, 2:06 am

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25 Dec 1928 – 30 Jan 2019

The American thespian treasure known as Dick Miller, one of our all-time favorite character actors, entered the Great Nothingness almost a year ago to the day on 30 January 2019.

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

A working thespian to the end, Miller's last film, the independent horror movie Hanukkah (trailer), starring fellow deceased low-culture thespian treasure Sid Haig (14 July 1939 – 21 Sept 2019), just finished production. In it, as in many of Miller's films, his character is named Walter Paisley in homage to his first truly great lead role, that of the loser killer artist/busboy Walter Paisley in Roger Corman's classic black comedy, A Bucket of Blood(1959). 

What follows is a multi-part career review in which we undertake an extremely meandering, highly unfocused look at the films of Dick Miller. The films are not necessarily looked at in the order of their release... and if we missed a film you deem worthy of inclusion, let us know. (P.S.: Top Gun [1986] is not worthy of inclusion.)

Go here for 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part I (1955-60) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part II (1961-67) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part III (1968-73) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part IV (1974-76) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part V (1977-80) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part VI (1981-84) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part VII (1985-89) 

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part VIII (1990-94) 

Number One Fan

(1995, dir. Jane Simpson)

Scripted by Anthony L. Greene, who two years previously wrote Cirio H. Santiago's Angelfist (seePart VIII) and has since pretty much specialized in erotic thrillers — which is pretty much what this pale and obscure, sex-heavy Fatal Attraction (1987 / trailer) imitation is. Director Simpson came from music videos (for example, the one for Chaka Khan's I Feel for You), and went on to do one more D2V movie, Little Witches (1996 / trailer), not famous for a nude fat-girl scene, before disappearing into videos again. In Number One Fan, Dick Miller has a bit part as a night manager.

Music video to

Chaka Khan's I Feel for You:

The plot description as found at the illegal download site Rarelust: "Hollywood's biggest action star, Zane Barry, played by Chad McQueen (son of Steve McQueen*) is seduced by his gorgeous number one fan, Blair Madsen, played by Renee Griffin (of Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow [1993 / trailer]). For Blair, it's the beginning of a romance she's dreamed about all her life. But for Zane it's a one-night stand. After all, he's about to be married to a gorgeous costumer (Catherine Mary Stewart of Night of the Comet [1984]). As Blair's obsession turns to violence, Zane's life mirrors one of his action movies. Zane must take matters into his own hands in order to overcome the final fury of his Number One Fan." 

*Less interesting among less talented thespian offspring that appear in movies is the guy playing Zane's manager, Scotty Youngman: Charlie Matthau, the son of Charles Matthau (1 Oct 1920 –1 July 2000).

TV Guidecalls the film "trashy and opportunistic", and explains why they think that: "Despite the presence of a woman director, Number One Fan is sexist in any number of ways. This is yet another film in which the male protagonist get to have his cake and eat it too, cheating on his loving girlfriend with a hot two-night stand yet remaining a blameless victim in the film's eyes when the seductress won't let him go. And the male target audience is clearly supposed to lust for Blair as she bares her gorgeous body yet fear her predatory sexuality at the same time. As a thriller, the film is both predictable and unconvincing […]. Aside from the introduction of Billy (Mark Dalton), a character whose potential goes largely undeveloped, the story proceeds with barely a hint of surprise. Indeed, considering its tacky exploitation of such stalking cases as the Rebecca Schaeffer murder, the biggest mystery in this movie is why Paul Bartel, who directed and costarred with Schaeffer in Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989), agreed to take part in it as an actor."

For that, they also point out the good aspect of the flick: it contains "Violence, extensive nudity, sexual situations, profanity." Deaths include a strangling, a meat-cleaver murder, and someone getting beaten to death with a mannequin arm.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

(1995, dir. Ernest R. Dickerson)

Once upon a time, from 1989 to 1996, there was a really successful weekly horror series on HBO called Tales from the Crypt. Based on the EC Comics comic book of the same name from the 50s, most of the individual episodes were based on tales taken from issues of that and other classic EC Comics of the Atomic Age, such as The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, and Two-Fisted Tales. The series, which was hosted by a skeletal version of the Cryptkeeper (the host of the comics who introduced each story), was hardly the first filmic interpretation of the comics. Of the many portmanteau horror anthologies Amicus released in the late 60s and early 70s, two took all their tales directly from EC: Tales from the Crypt (1972 / trailer) and Vault of Horror (1973 / trailer).

But back to the TV series. Towards the end of its run, Universal Pictures decided to do a spin-off series of Tales from the Crypt movies, beginning with this one, Demon Knight. A hit, it resulted in the greenlighting of two more Tales from the Crypt flicks, but the utter failure of Bordello of Blood (1996 / trailer) scuttled the planned trilogy and resulted in the final film, Ritual (2002 / trailer), being more or less treated like an unwanted stepchild.

Trailer to

Demon Knight:

But back to Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, the third directorial project of the talented Afro American genre director and (former) cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson (Bones [2001]), a man who has, regrettably, remained active primarily on TV for the past couple of decades — his last feature film, the drama Double Play (2017 / trailer), was his first in 13 years. (For a fun neo-blaxploitation take on the old PD chestnut Most Dangerous Game [1932 / trailer], catch his second feature film, Surviving the Game [1994 / trailer].) Unlike the tales told on the TV show, the tale told in Demon Knight— and the subsequent two films of the series — was an original one and not adapted from the comic books. And among the fun faces on the cast: Dick Miller as Uncle Willy, a hapless fellow who falls to the temptation of "a dairy farm", otherwise known as a bevy of topless babes. (His character is, basically, the driving source of the movie's sudden and temporary excess of gratuitously naked T&A, all of which gets covered by bikinis when the film gets screened on TV.)

Dr Gore, which gives the movie a "4 out of 4 demonic Zanes" rating, has a plot description of sorts: "The Collector, (Billy Zane of The Phantom [1996]), wants his key. Brayker (William Sadler of Disturbing Behavior [1998] and Freaked[1993]) has it and won't give it back. Sadler escapes to a motel in the middle of nowhere. The main man Zane follows in hot pursuit. Soon the humans will have to do battle against Demon Knight Zane and his hordes of undead ghoulies. Blood, guts and green ooze spurt out in abundance."

While not many websites claim, as does Classic Horror, that the movie is one of "the 40 or so best horror films of the 90s", most do tend to give the movie good press. Over at Awful Horror Movies, for example, they say "This is by far the best movie that we have reviewed for the site […]. The plot is your basic 'demon trying to take over the world' story but it still has enough originality to entertain the audience. The acting was pretty well done with many actors who actually have real movie resumes (unlike some of the garbage we usually review). Billy Zane does an incredible job as the main villain. The effects are not up to today's standards but are still done well for the time period. […] This is not an awful horror movie."

All Horror, by the way, which raves that "Demon Knight is dripping with both personality and slime (from exploded demon heads of course)", also points out how much Hollywood cannibalizes itself: "I had a lot of fun watching Demon Knight, which only got on my radar after watching The Nun (2018 / trailer) and hearing that it ripped it off. James Wan's 2018 Conjuring (2013 / trailer) spin-off ripped off a Tales from the Crypt movie from '95? Turns out that yes, yes it did. The mortal protectors, the demonic collectors, the key, the Jesus blood, the demon teeth, even the big ending scene are the same. The only key differentiators (pun intended) were the location and the genre. The Nun was a horror from start to finish while Demon Knight is a blend of comedy, action and gore. Lots of gore."

Battleship Pretension explains an aspect of why Demon Knight is so good that is generally overlooked: "Ernest Dickerson […] may be at his best tasked with the impossible: generate inspired scares in a purposefully campy endeavor that begins and ends with an almost literal wink. Dickerson establishes the world of Demon Knight quickly. Both recognizable within our reality and distinctly specific to 90s horror, […] there's something to be said for Dickerson's ability to wrangle a number of drastically different acting styles into a cohesive whole. In addition to Billy Zane's penchant for broad caricatures and William Sadler's blue-collar badass character study, Thomas Haden-Church and a young Jada Pinkett (of Set It Off [1996]) deliver large performances that could easily swallow up the earth around them, let alone their co-stars. But somehow, they not just gel but are capable of generating general empathy. I'm speaking un-ironically when I say there's a death in Demon Knight that is one of the more gut-wrenching kills of any 90s horror movie."

The Second Civil War

(1997, dir. Joe Dante)

An oddly precognizant HBO satire with a killer cast (large enough for a Robert Altman film) that reveals that what is laughable on film is often not all that funny in real life — which doesn't mean that this flick isn't funny as hell. Dick Miller shows up amongst the faces to play a cameraman named Eddie O'Neill, who you see all of a split second in the trailer.

Trailer to

The Second Civil War:

The plot: "It's the near future, and the liberal but unscrupulous governor of Idaho (Beau Bridges) has announced the closing of the borders to appease the state's right-wing reactionaries' anti-immigration stance, which winds up coinciding with the scheduled arrival of hundreds of Pakistani children displaced by India's use of nuclear weapons against its neighbor (other U.S. states have taken in refugees from other countries; there's even a Chinatown district in Rhode Island now.) This pits the governor against the president of the United States (Phil Hartman), quintessentially obsessed with winning a second term to where he's neither for or against the governor's plan — it just depends on what the latest poll numbers indicate. A second-rate New Jersey-based news network welcomes this conflict, though: with the Gulf War a past memory and their ratings in decline, the director (Dan Hedaya) fastens upon the governor's scheme to boost the station's Nielsen's share from single to double digits; and being that he has his ace reporter already in Boise, a Hispanic woman (Elizabeth Peña) who just happens to be currently bedding the married governor, he's counting on the inside scoop to keep him ahead of the competition. […] Initially, the White House doesn't take the governor's plan seriously, but when the state's National Guard is mobilized and the governor's inflammatory comments increase, public opinion starts to sway in the governor's favor. In response, the president deploys soldiers to the Idaho borders, with America on the brink of the first inner-country conflict since the Civil War, with the governor taking his cues from his knowing lieutenant governor and the president from the best media lobbyist (James Coburn) in the business. [eFilm]"

AsThe Pink Smoke points out, "Joe Dante's underseen gem […].was funny if far-fetched back in 1997. These days it just seems pertinent, taking on targets it's hard to believe weren't based on what's happening in the country right now. It's telling, for example, that Huffington Post has run articles referring to the division of Trump supporters and opponents as the 'second Civil War,' citing his reliance on xenophobic hypernationalism and extremist rallying. Having Bridges, a former liberal who caters to his state's conservative majority, exploit the outrage against illegal aliens for political gain — especially coupled with subplots about a dimwitted president whose cabinet makes all the decisions for him and a terrorist attack on New York City — makes the screenplay by Canadian filmmaker and satirist Martyn Burke all the more prescient. […]"

Film Threat, however, is less satisfied by the movie: "On a technical level, the switching of these narratives […] is done expertly by Joe Dante, who seamlessly flips from hand-held cameras to typical dolly and crane shots. It's an energy that […] nicely captures in the mania of Dante's America. Yet if The Second Civil War contains a prime weakness, it's in being swept away by this frantic pace, its climax wildly shifting characters and settings as matters around the nation turn to violence. Some films, assisted by skilled editors, can make this breakneck narrative action work. And sometimes, as in the case of The Fifth Element (1997 / trailer), it can even thrive. However, War's sheer volume — of cast, characters and situations — is too overloaded, too top-heavy to come together. This, despite many fine acting performances by James Earl Jones, Denis Leary, Ron Perlman, Joanna Cassidy and James Coburn as a D.C. media lobbyist ('I'm an information facilitator') plus a spray of other Dante alum (Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Kevin McCarthy). But again, it's all excess content piled up around a troubling climax. A sensory overload amidst a sharp, intelligent satire on media and politics that, in The Second Civil War, at last proves too ambitious for its own good."

Over in France, in any event, the Rocky Horror Critic Show gives the movie four out of five Rocky Horror lips.

Scriptwriter Martyn Burke also wrote and directed the not so funny black comedy, The Clown Murders (1976 / full movie), and was also on hand to help write one of our favorite underappreciated comedies, Top Secret (1984 / trailer below).

Trailer to

Top Secret:

Small Soldiers

(1998, dir. Joe Dante)

Dick Miller shows up to play Joe in yet another Dante project which, like so many of his movies, was a moderate success at best but now enjoys cult popularity. "Pitched to children as a 90-minute toy commercial and to adults as a Gremlins (1984, see Part VI) redux about a town plagued by murderous li'l bastards — with vivified plastic army men standing in for Dante's previous party monsters — Small Soldiers was a film that seemed split against itself from the beginning. [tiff]"

Notable as the last movie to feature comedian Phil Hartman (24 Sept 1948 – 28 May 1998), as Phil Fimple: he was shot in his sleep by his wife prior to the film's premiere. Small Soldiers is also notable as the last movie in which former beefcake Clint Walker (30 May 1927 – 21 May 2018), seen above in his prime, participated: he supplied the voice of Nick Nitro — the presence of his voice, along with that of the voices of George Kennedy (18 Feb 1925 – 28 Feb 2016), Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine (24 Jan 1917 – 8 July 2012), is because Dante used the surviving members of the cast of The Dirty Dozen (1967 / trailer) to voice the animated Commando Elite soldiers. (BTW: Dick Miller is also found in The Dirty Dozen – see Part II for more details.) Richard Jaeckel (10 Oct 1926 – 14 June 1997, of Day of the Animals [1977]), another actor of The Dirty Dozen and who was set to voice Link Static, died prior to the shooting and was replaced by Bruce Dern (of The Glass House[2001]).

Trailer to

Small Soldiers:

Small Soldiers is, in the end, a semi-remake of Dante's Gremlins (1984), but instead of furry little critters that spawn evil gremlins that cause havoc, this movie features sentient toys that cause havoc. The final product reeks of the hope of raking in the bucks with tie-ins, though this was perhaps not the original case, if we are to believe what Dante himself says over at Psychotronic Cinema:  "[…] Small Soldiers is an example of a movie that the studio could never decide who the audience was. When we started it was supposed to be an edgy movie for teenagers, and by the time we were finished with it was supposed to be a pre-teen movie that had toe-ins with toy companies and hamburger companies. […]"

The plot, as fully detailed at Screen It – Movie Reviews for Parents: "When toymaker Heartland Play Systems is acquired by Globotech, a military-based conglomerate, toy designers Larry Benson (Jay Mohr of Cherry Falls [2000]) and Irwin Wayfair (David Cross) worry about their job security. CEO Gil Mars (Denis Leary) isn't crazy about their latest designs — some military action figures called Commandos and their enemy, the pacifist Gorgonites — until he orders the designers to make [...] move and talk. With a hurried delivery schedule, Larry uses a batch of top-secret Globotech military microchips to power the toys and ships them off to toy stores without testing them. In the small suburban town of Winslow Corners, Ohio, Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith of Hobo with a Shotgun [2011]) is the teenage son of Stuart (Kevin Dunn) and Irene Abernathy (Ann Magnuson, also seen in Tank Girl [1995]) who runs his father's small corner toy store when his dad isn't around. Receiving a new shipment of toys, Alan convinces the delivery man (Dick Miller) to lend him a series of Commando and Gorgonite toys headed for a larger chain store. Unbeknownst to Alan, the archenemy toys come to life. Archer (voice of Frank Langella), the leader of the Gorgonites, hides in Alan's bag and returns home with him where Alan discovers that there's more to him than just a toy. Meanwhile, Chip Hazard (voice of Tommy Lee Jones) assembles his muscle-bound toy soldier allies to find and attack the remaining Gorgonites who've gone into hiding. Returning to his father's store the next morning, Alan finds the place a mess and the new toys missing. Getting help from Christy Fimple (Kirsten Dunst of Kaena[2003]), a friendly girl he has a crush on, Alan cleans up the place, but gets in trouble with his dad who won't believe his story about the toys being alive. After Chip Hazard and his commando forces later assemble for an attack on the Gorgonites and their human sympathizers — which include Christy's parents Phil (Phil Hartman) and Marion (Wendy Schall) — in the Abernathy 'stronghold,' however, everyone realizes these are no ordinary toys and that their lives are in danger."

A few words from B&S About Movies, who liked the film: "A Joe Dante movie always like a conflict — a battle between blockbuster and personal statement, led by a filmmaker with keen commercial instinct, yet the heart of a non-conformist. Through it all, one walks away with the feeling that while the film itself may have some rough edges, there's a true love for moviemaking (heck, movies themselves) at the core. […] Small Soldiers may have NASCAR, fast food and toy tie-ins, but it feels like a deeply personal film that savors biting the hand that fed the beast that financed it. It may be many things, all at once, but above all, it does not commit the most grievous of all movie sins. It is never, ever boring."

A few words from The Stop Button, who did not: "[…] Watching it, all I could think about was how Dante and DreamWorks studio chief Steven Spielberg ignored they had a terrible script. Of course, Dante still does a good job. […] The casting has some problems. Kevin Dunn plays Gregory Smith's father […] and he's really bad. Dunn's usually good, but his character is just too terribly written for him to work with it. All of the characters are terribly written — except maybe David Cross and Jay Mohr's characters, who are disposable and funny. Smith is supposed to be playing a problem teenager — it's never explained why, but presumably has something to with Dunn's bad parenting. Smith and Kirsten Dunst are supposed to be fifteen — too young to drive — and they show the real problem. Small Soldiers is a kid's movie made by people who don't know how to dumb it down enough. […] It works best as a showcase for outstanding practical and CG effects. Thinking about the movie just hurts one's head, especially when they get into the science."

 

A revised version of Small Soldiers was recently (but unofficially) in redevelopment hell over at 20th cum 21st Century Fox, where the new version was to be entitled called Toymageddon. The project got scrapped, along with innumerable others, when Disney strengthened its film-making monopoly by acquiring 21st Century Fox.

The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy

(1998, dir. Joe Dante)

This TV movie, aka The Osiris Chronicles, was the third Dante project released in 1998 and perhaps the most obscure; it was intended as a pilot to a series that never happened, and for a long time remained almost unavailable. But that was before the advent of YouTube, where you can now easily find the whole pilot. (Foreign DVDs — as in, from non-English speaking countries — do exist, however, and you might pick up the ancient VHS version once released in GB online somewhere). Dick Miller shows up to play a peddler (seen below), and even gets mentioned in the credit sequence.

"Warlord was made for CBS in 1997 but was not picked up and eventually aired as a 'movie' on UPN in 1998 with little to no fanfare. Why? Because it's fucking BORING. This being a pilot it was a two-hour exposition dump of backstory, character dynamics and future plot threads mixed with cheap sets, bizarre costumes and stilted dialog. As a series all of this could have been fixed but as it stands the 'movie' is just yap yap yap, space battle, yap yap yap, gun battle, yap yap yap, space battle… with no arc, no point and even less substance. [Forces of Geek].

The basic set-up, as found in the book Encyclopedia of Television Pilots: "In a futuristic era an interstellar war with Rebels battling the Galactic Republic created a new Dark Age when all progress that had been accomplished became lost or destroyed. Through the recollections of one man, Heenoc Xian (John Pyper-Ferguson of Pin [1988 / trailer]), a soldier, freedom fighter and eventual warlord (ruler of the planet Caliban 5) incidents in the world are seen. Justin Thorpe (John Corbett) is the petty thief (pilot of the ship Osiris) who seeks to rebuild the world he once knew with the help of Heenoc Xian; Nova is his younger sister; Rula Kor (Carolyn McCormick of The Shells [2015 / trailer]) is the Arbitrator (a diplomatic mercenary)."

Credit sequence to

The Osiris Chronicles:

"Curiously, [The Osiris Chronicles] bears enormous resemblances to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (2000-05 / trailer) which would debut in syndication two years later: both involve an attempt to restore a fallen Republic, with the help of the last surviving top of the line ship of the once great fleet; in both, an important and highly respected race proves to have a secret plan of conquest (and for our own good!); and both assemble a rag-tag crew, made up of people who were once enemies. Considering how poorly this film performed, it seems unlikely that anyone would have stolen from it. But you never know. […] And then there’s the rather strange fact that Caleb Carr, the author of novels like The Alienist, wrote the script. Which doesn't change the fact that it is…unremarkable. […] Perhaps the one standout element is the Sublime Plenum, the supreme council of the race of Engineers.  It is marvelously grotesque and features some standout effects work. And it is true that the ships and sets are quite well done, in a routine sort of way. Oh, well, you completists know you'll have to see it.  It isn't bad.  It's just sorta…there. Which, ultimately, is the real problem. [Rivets on the Poster]"

E! Mysteries & Scandals – Susan Cabot

(Aired: 7 Aug 2000)

In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries. In Miller's case, he already started appearing in Making Ofs way back in 1984 (with The Terminator [see Part VI], and throughout the 90s made regular talking head appearances on diverse video and TV documentaries about genre films and filmmakers. Including this short one on the cult actress and Corman regular, Susan Cabot (9 July 1927 – 10 Dec 1986), a Season 3 episode of the E! channel's wonderfully trashy Mysteries & Scandals series, which lasted a full 152 episodes and featured names well-known and forgotten.

Miller, you may remember, worked with Cabot in three films: War of the Satellites (1958), Sorority Girls (1957) and Carnival Rock (1957), all of which we looked at inPart I. Cabot's story is rather a sad one, and somewhat sordid towards the end…

The Full Episode:

Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies

(2001, writ. & dir. Ray Greene)

"In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries."

That is a true for Dick Miller (above from the documentary) as it was for the producer Harry H. Novak, who, like Miller, appears as a talking head in this documentary — which is why we took a look at Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies way back in 2015, in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part XV – Other People's Films & Addendum, where we more or less wrote: 
"[Dick Miller] appears as a talking head in this documentary. The description of the film found everywhere online (and now here, too) is written by Mark Denning, who wrote: 'Pauline Kael once wrote that since movies were so rarely great art, if one weren't interested in great trash, there wasn't much reason to pay attention to them, and one could reasonably argue that few periods brought us more top-quality cinematic trash than the 1950s and '60s. With drive-ins and grindhouses across the United States making room for low-budget exploitation films of all stripes (such as horror, science fiction, teen exploitation, biker films, beach pictures, nudies, and much more) as the major studios were focusing their attention on big-budget blockbusters and television, this was a boom time for inspired trash, and Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies takes a look at the low-budget wonders of the 1950s and '60s, as well as the men and women who made them and the social and psychological subtexts lurking behind many of these movies. Schlock! includes interviews with Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, David F. Friedman, Doris Wishman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Miller, Vampira, and more.'"

"The busty babe on the poster is of course Pat Barrington, and the image itself taken from the poster to one of her 'best' movies, The Agony of Love (1965 / poster above), which we looked at inPart III of [Harry Novak's] career review."Agony is currently easy to find online — for example, hereat the porn site XHamster.

Pat Barrington!:

Route 666

(2001, dir. William Wesley)

Hey! We saw this third-rate horror movie back in 2015 and even reviewed it here at a wasted life— hit the linked title to go to our typically verbose and meandering review. As we said in the first sentence of the review, "The only reason why watched Route 666 is because many, many years ago, when we were but a young spud — so long before this flick was even made — we sort of found Lou Diamond Phillips hunkadelic." That's him directly below in his prime, from some movie entitled El Cortez (2006 / trailer).

Of Dick Miller, in the review we wrote: "Route 666 begins pleasantly enough, once you get through the oddly annoying and overly long credits sequence, in that the great Dick Miller (of The Terror [1963] and much, much more) appears for all of 5 minutes in the opening bar scene. He quickly disappears, and the movie goes downhill real quickly."

Trailer to

Route 666:

(Spoiler!) For another bad movie (with way more boobs and way more badly made) about an un-dead dad that saves his child from other undead, check out the Eurotrash disasterpiece Zombie Lake (1981).

Trailer to

Zombie Lake:

Looney Tunes: Back in Action

(2003, dir. Joe Dante)

Another Dante movie, though word has it he had little to do with the final product and that he found the whole production a nightmare. "Given that Dante's films had so often been compared to live-action cartoons, the pairing of the director with the original Looney Tunes should have been a perfect match. Unfortunately, Looney Tunes: Back in Action— a semi-sequel to the 1996 hit Space Jam (1996 / trailer), which paired Bugs Bunny with Michael Jordan — was a disappointment for many, not least Dante. 'There's some nice things in it, but it's kind of a loud, annoying movie. If I had it to do over I wouldn't do it.'"

The third feature-length live-action/animation hybrid film to feature Looney Tunes characters — it was preceded by Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988 / trailer), which basically featured a guest appearance of any and all important animated character found in film history, and Space Jam, which was a Looney Tunesproject — Back in Action was also a major box office bomb and basically killed Warner Bros' feature animation department… which aims, perhaps, to rise from the dead in 2021, when Malcolm D. Lee's Space Jam II is set for release.

"Gee, it was really nice of Wal-Mart to give us all this free Wal-Mart stuff just for saying 'Wal-Mart' so many times."

Bugs Bunny

All that aside, Combustible Celluloidsays, "Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action […] is a vintage Dante production, full of his passionate regard for cartoons and sci-fi/horror pictures, as well as his funny little cameos (no one does cameos like Dante) and chaotic flourishes. He had one massive hit back in 1984 with Gremlins and he's been successfully revisiting the same material ever since with cold reception after cold reception. The biggest mystery is how kids missed out on the fun." They also point out: " Dante knows he's working with two comedy legends in Bugs and Daffy (both voiced by Joe Alaskey) and he remembers to give them a few great one-liners, independent of his overall vision. Like the original cartoons, youngsters will enjoy themselves, even if they don't get all the jokes. For all the references and product placements […] Dante plants tongue firmly in cheek. In this as well as his other films, he uses these gags to air his mistrust for large organizations, advertising and consumerism, as well as human beings' warlike tendencies. In other words, he wants us to have a good time, but he also wants us to think twice before rushing out and buying a Brendan Fraser doll."

"It's a pain in the butt being p-p-politically correct."

Porky Pig

"You're telling me."

Speedy Gonzales

Trailer to

Back in Action:

Some Fat Guy at the Movies has the plot: "Looney Tunes: Back in Action begins with the standard premise that cartoon characters are real and Bugs and Daffy are actual stars on the Warner Bros. lot. The new lean and hungry VP of Comedy Kate Houghton (played by a shocking lean and hungry Jenna Elfman) is leading a crusade to revamp the Looney Tunes line-up. Her first item of business is to fire Daffy Duck because he only has appeal to chubby guys in their mid-30s living in their parents' house. […] Daffy joins forces with ex-security guard DJ Drake (Brandon Fraser of Passion of Darkly Noon [1995 / trailer] and, as seen below, George of the Jungle [1997 / trailer]) who is also the son of the fake James Bond rip-off Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton, a casting choice that is an excellent inside joke to the industry). Together, Daffy and DJ learn that the Chairman of ACME Corporation (Steve Martin of The Spanish Prisoner [1997]) is trying to get his hands on a magical diamond called the 'blue monkey' and they are the only ones who can stop him."

Some guy named Anthonysaw Looney Tunes: Back in Action and thought, "You might remember the live action/animated film Space Jam, in which basketball star Michael Jordan finds himself in the cartoon world and helps the Looney Tunes win a basketball game. It wasn't bad, but what [Back in Action] does is to have an equal mix of live action and animation. We don't have a human character in an animated world. Instead, our favorite cartoon characters inhabit our world. Consider what you see in this movie: Yosemite Sam owning a Las Vegas casino, Marvin the Martian in Area 51, Granny with Sylvester and Tweety as next-door neighbors, Wile E. Coyote working for the Acme Corporation, and Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a meeting with executives at Warner Bros. […] The movie has a lot of humorous gags and fun action scenes along the way, including a car chase in Las Vegas with Yosemite Sam and his gang and, my favorite one of all, Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs and Daffy through some famous paintings at the Louvre. There are numerous pop culture references that will provide something for the adults, including a spoof of the shower scene from Psycho (1960 / trailer). These jokes may fly over the kids' heads, but they will still love the movie. The point is that the movie works well for both kids and adults. There's a reason for anyone to smile during the film. These animated characters have been around for decades, yet they still can be entertaining in this modern age."

And while most people seem to like Back in Action and feel it underrated, let us offer a word to the contrary from Shadows on the Wall: "The script just isn't smart enough to stay at this level of inventiveness; it falls back on movie in-jokes that are often unfunny, while the amusing spoofs are irrelevant because they're not even Warner Bros films! It's not like Warners doesn't have perhaps the most memorable back catalogs in Hollywood. So why are they satirising things like Psycho (Universal), James Bond (MGM), Star Wars (Fox) and Men in Black (Columbia)? […] And Martin is unspeakably awful, overplaying to extremes that are, frankly, unforgivable. But I blame Dante, who seems to feel that throwing everything at the screen all the time will make a lively, energetic movie. But it lacks coherence and soul; it's just exhausting noise with brief sparks of wit."

Amidst all the anarchy, among other Dante regulars showing face Dick Miller is there to play a security guard. Two non-Dante regulars of note are faces found in many a movie Dante probably knows and loves, Peter Graves (18 Macrh 1926 – 14 March 2010, of Beginning of the End[1957 / trailer] and so much more) and the great character actor Marc Lawrence (17 Feb 1910 – 27 Nov 2005 of The Monster and the Girl [1941] and so much more). In both cases, Back in Action is the last feature film they were to appear in.

Maximum Surge

(2003, "dir." Jason Bourque)

Aka Game Over, this "movie" was "written" by Keith Shaw, who's since gone on to writing and producing a yitload of shitty trash flicks starring has-beens and never-beens, as has director Jason Bourque. Neither name ever promises quality — and neither does this "film" either.

"There are movies out there, like Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010 / trailer) or The Room (2003 / trailer), which are both crazy and wonderful for reasons that we can never fully explain. They're more like emotions that you can't completely put into words, and that's how I feel about a movie titled Game Over; a piece of made-for-TV cinema that stars, at least according to the movie's DVD box art, Yasmine Bleeth and Walter Koenig (of Nightmare Honeymoon [1974 / trailer]). In reality, the movie actually stars Dominika Juillet (aka – Dominika Wolski) and Woody Jeffreys (of Valentine[2001]) […]. [CGM Backlot]"

Trailer to

Game Over:

"Back in the 90s, the gaming industry collectively looked behind its sofa, found a forgotten carton of orange juice that had been sitting next to the radiator for a few years, and decided to see how it tasted. In the fermented insanity that followed, developers everywhere became convinced that the way forward for games wasn't to make them deeper or more exciting, but to make them into films. Interactive movies, if you will. The excitement lasted a couple of years. The hangover and regret never quite faded. Game Over is the obscene tattoo around the nipples of that whole sorry affair. [PC Gamer]"

"Canadian film company Insight Film Studios Ltd. bought old footage from company Digital Pictures used in released and canceled Sega Saturn/Sega CD video games from the 90s! What you are actually watching is the original footage from actual games: 1995's Ultimate Warrior (the Chinese fighting portions), 1994's Corpse Killer(the Jamaican Zombie scenes), 1997's Quarterback Attack, 1993's Prize Fighter, and the canceled game Maximum Surge from 1996! Each of these games has a page on IMDB! […] You can even watch the game footage on YouTube! [Film Obscurities at Wayback Machine]" (Dick Miller shows up in the bits taken from Prize Fighter.)

Plot: "It's fun to watch [Game Over] from the perspective of a gamer, but it's cinematic value is somewhat lesser than most straight-to-DVD releases. When a super computer is hooked into a gaming network, the programmer who designed the game has to enter the virtual reality world of his fantasies and defeat the computer before it causes worldwide catastrophe. Um... yeah, OK. I can't say you'll enjoy this as a movie experience, but you may find it interesting as the footage is readily discernible as film and game segments. [8-bit Central]"

Trapped Ashes

(2006, multiple directors)

Among the five directors that participated in this multi-segment flick is Ken Russell, which why we took a look at the movie way back in 2011 in our R.I.P. Career Review of Ken Russell, where we wrote:

"Russell's last directorial project was his segment for this overlooked and forgotten horror anthology film, which very much follows the structure — as well as the traditional ending — of the classic Amicushorror anthology films of yesteryear. Among the six (sic) directors involved aside from Russell are Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman, [John Gaeta] and Joe Dante — and among the cast are no less than Dick Miller and John Saxon. Neither appears in Russell's segment, however, though Russell himself does as the crazed Dr. Lucy. Entitled The Girl with Golden Breasts, the segment is properly Russellian: The blonde actress Phoebe (Rachel Veltri) is of the opinion that babes with bigger boobs get all the parts, so she decides to lift her career with an augmentation. But she chooses the wrong doctors […] and ends up with a pair of breasts that give breastfeeding a new meaning. Not a segment for the more mammary-obsessed among us..."

Trailer to

Trapped Ashes:

"Joe Dante gets the honor to direct the hardest part of the show (as usual), the wraparound. This time it's the always excellent Henry Gibson […] playing a guide at a sinister, deserted, film studio, driving around with the guests in one of those small open mini-buses. When he tells a story about a mysterious house in the middle of the studio area, the guests — among them John Saxon — talk him into letting them into the house. Bad idea. They're soon trapped in the twisted house and sooner or later they end up telling each other horror stories... […] Trapped Ashes is high on sex, nudity and some good graphic, gory violence. The special effects are very well done, especially the physical effects. It's a damn fine production. I'm pretty sure not everything is for everyone, but I like the mix of styles and how veterans who've done everything can squeeze out excellent productions with very little money. […] Anthology movies […] belong in a grand tradition of Grand Guignol theatre. A new chapter whenever the audience is getting bored, a new bloody surprise around every corner. Trapped Ashes is one of the better films of this fine genre I've seen in the last couple of years. It doesn't reach the originality and high class of old favorites like […] the criminally underrated and absurdly dark masterpiece From a Whisper to a Scream (1987 / trailer), but watch it anyway. [Ex-Ninja]"

Dick Miller, as you may surmise, also appears in Joe Dante's wraparound segment, playing Max the security guard, someone not overly involved in the tale(s) that transpire.

Trail of the Screaming Forehead

(2007, writ. & dir. Larry Blamire)

For years we thought that the trailer to this movie was simply another funny faux trailer that appeared in the aftermath of Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007) double feature. (Follow the linked titles for our opinion of Rodriguez's Planet Terror [2007] and for our opinion of Hobo with a Shotgun [2011], the latter of which is based on one of the faux trailers of Grindhouse.) Little did we suspect…

Trailer to

Trail of the Screaming Forehead:

Trail of the Screaming Forehead, obviously enough, is a parody of the style of alien invasion movie so popular in the 50s and early 60s (and still made today, if with far less innocence). Over at All Movie, Nathan Southern explains the plot: "Aesthetically and thematically, director Larry Blamire's outrageous camp-fest Trail of the Screaming Forehead resuscitates and satirizes bottom-of-the-barrel 1950s sci-fi movies such as X the Unknown (1956 / trailer) and The Creeping Terror (1964 / trailer). Blamire's tale revolves around the scientific discovery that foreheads (and not brains) house human intelligence. In a misguided attempt to prove this axiom, scientist Dr. Sheila Bexter (Fay Masterson of Sam's Lake [2006 / trailer]) injects a serum called 'Foreheadazine' into the cranium of her colleague, Dr. Phillip Latham (Andrew Parks) — whose head rapidly balloons to the size of a watermelon. Meanwhile, a spaceship packed with 'furrowed brows' crash-lands on Earth, and the brows promptly attach themselves to every human in sight. To complicate matters, dozens of locals also get wind of the scientists' project and decide to investigate; before long, the entire seaside community is swarming with addicts of the Foreheadazine drug, a problem that doubles in size when two liquor-happy sailors arrive in town with a boatload of frozen human bodies. Blamire re-creates the visual look of '50s sci-fi films such asThe Blob(1958) by shooting in shockingly bright rotogravure colors — a photographic process he dubbed 'Crainioscope.' Stop-motion demigod Ray Harryhausen— who reportedly inspired this work thanks to such classics as Jason and the Argonauts (1963 / trailer) and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958 / trailer) — is listed as 'presenter,' and his influence can be seen via the special effects of the ballooning heads."

Seriously? The Manhattan Transfer sing the title song to

Trail of the Screaming Forehead:

"As one of the most consistently funny and stylistically pure filmmakers working today, [Blamire's] career spans across different genres, the majority of which are untouched by modern filmmakers. His best works are arguably his forays into horror — the hilarious Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001 / trailer) being a personal favourite.* His films seem simple enough but once one looks beneath the surface it's possible to see just how complex they really are […]. They are non-ironic but deeply self-aware; they are an affectionate piss-take of films that are routinely mocked, but a piss-take that is done with a real sense of what makes those classic movies so wonderful to watch. His films are for those who enjoy The Thing from Another World (1951 / trailer) rather than The Third Man (1949 / trailer); The Cat People (1944 / trailer) rather than Casablanca (1942 / trailer). With this in mind, Blamire's [Trail of the Screaming Forehead] is a triumph. It is a masterpiece of mis-delivered lines, bizarre musical queues and confused dialogue. It's difficult to express just how this is achieved as Blamire always seems in complete control of the chaos. It may well be difficult to make a good movie, but it must be even harder to make a good bad movie. It's standard Blamire territory but somehow he is able to present audiences with something new and fresh every single time. […] If alien foreheads don’t strike you as inherently funny, then perhaps this film is not for you. If that’s the case, you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. [Rob Bachelor @ Roobla]"

*What grammar.

"One of the most amusing aspects about Trail of the Screaming Forehead (and Larry Blamire's films) is the dialogue. It is as though Blamire has taken the colloquial prose from a cheap 40s pulp novel or 50s SF film and put it through a blender that feeds back on itself. The nearest comparison one can make is to the dialogue in the films/plays of David Mamet [see: The Spanish Prisoner (1997)]. This may seem an odd comparison but Mamet writes the same cornball adverb and archaic colloquialism-heavy dialogue and gives it a rhythm that comes as though actors are often intoning specifically written prose from a bygone era. […] The film is tricked out with requisite cameos from Dick Miller and Kevin McCarthy (of Piranha[1978] and so much more), original 1950s stars whose presence was mandatory in any 80s/90s B movie genre parody, as well as Daniel Roebuck and James Karen (of The Butterfly Room [2012] and so much more) who appeared in a good many other B movies of the 80s/90s. [Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review]"

Just a little more Dick coming soon…

Colossal (Canada/Spain, 2016)

February 5, 2020, 1:41 am

≫ Next: Short Film: Room Runners (USA, 1932)

≪ Previous: R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part IX (1995-2003)

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Wow. Who would have thought it possible: an Anne Hathaway film that not only doesn't suck, but is amazingly non-mainstream and interesting. Too bad she doesn't make more movies like this one. As the for the most part not very likeable Gloria, Hathaway plays less a party-girl "writer" suffering setbacks in life than an in-denial alcoholic at the start of the skids. Tossed out of the apartment by her hunky, non-enabling boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens of Apostle[2018 / trailer]), Gloria retreats to the empty family house in her old hometown, where she more or less spends her time doing nothing until she unexpectedly meets an old classmate, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a disillusioned but seemingly likeable townie who runs a bar. What initially seems like the prelude to a generic rom-com about two losers finding and saving each other takes a turn to the weird and leaves the rom-com far behind once the multi-storey-tall monster destroying Seoul, Korea, enters the picture — and is soon followed by a second monster, a huge robot…

Trailer to

Colossal:

Spanish director/scriptwriter Nacho Vigalondo does a good job at making the entire wacky idea work, and the final result is a well-made movie that is far less a brainless monsters-destroying-Seoul flick than an exploration of responsibility and the corruptive nature of power — though, in truth, if one picks up on some of the fleeting asides throughout the movie, the major personality change of one of the characters is hardly surprising or out of place. The guy was an asshole from the start, he only hid it behind a smokescreen of nice-guy antics. (Psychos are amazingly good at that, as anyone who's ever dealt with one knows.) More surprising is the unexpected later revelation that he isn't the only dickhead: when Gloria's boyfriend Tim shows up towards the end, seemingly out of concern, he may not reveal himself as a psycho, but his true colors do definitely fall in the direction of excessively critical in that passive aggressive "for-your-own-good" way typical of manipulative egoists.

Colossal definitely does not paint the modern male in positive colors… but then, even if Gloria does do the right thing in the end, the only thing that truly separates her from the other egoists in the movie is a moral compass that the others lack — for much of the movie, she's an egotistical jerk herself, if one driven by a drinking problem. She only truly begins to change after she finds out her odd connection to the mega-monster trampling Seoul.

Wrongly sold as a comedy when it came out, it is hardly surprising that this intriguing and oddly thought-provoking movie was a flop: anyone who could get past the weird premise and went expecting to see a quirky rom com, got anything but. This is a truly serious movie, populated by (other than the monsters) realistic characters not viewed through rose-colored glasses. True, Gloria does manage to untangle herself from a trap which, in real life, way too many women are caught in, but even her victory is not permitted to remain a feel-good ending celebrating self-empowerment. Instead, it is undermined by a truly simple question posed by a Korean barmaid.

Quirky but serious, Colossal is the type of movie that gives marketing men nightmares because it fits too many shoes and none at all. That alone makes it worth viewing. One thing for sure, we definitely want to check out some of Nacho Vigalondo's earlier Spanish movies, as both Time Crimes (2007 / trailer) and Extraterrestrial (2011 / trailer) sound equally quirky.

Short Film: Room Runners (USA, 1932)

February 11, 2020, 12:29 am

≫ Next: Kidnapping Stella (Germany, 2019)

≪ Previous: Colossal (Canada/Spain, 2016)

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For the January 2020Short Film of the Month, a wasted life took a look at a short film we saw long ago and that The Dwrayger Dungeon, one of the fine blogs we have listed to the right (as 13), reminded us about: the first film directed by Paul Bartel (6 Aug 1938 – 13 May 2000) to make any waves, the low budget B&W short film from 1968, The Secret Cinema. 
This month, February 2020, for our Short Film of the Month we're taking a look at something the Dungeon introduced us to, the ancient Ub Iwerks animation short, Room Runners,* featuring the mostly forgotten character Flip the Frog — indeed, before stumbling upon this film at the Dungeon, we had never even heard of Flip.**

Flip the Frog was created by Iwerks after the animator left Disney and opened his own studio. Between 1930 and 1933, Iwerks produced roughly 40 Flip shorts [per Big Cartoon Database], of which Room Runners, released 10 October 1932, lies roughly in the middle. Of all the Flip the Frog cartoons, Room Runneris perhaps the most obviously and consistently pre-Code, and features jokes of a suggestive and overt sexual nature that completely died on screen after 1934, when the Hayes Code kicked in. (One or two jokes might even still raise an eyebrow today.)

GIF found at the tumblr Space Baby.

Dr Grobs, which says "If you can watch only one Flip the Frog cartoon, this one should be it," has the plot: "Room Runnersstarts with Flip trying to sneak out of his apartment block to escape six months of arrears. Unfortunately, he's discovered by the landlady, and a long chase starts, which also involves a policeman and a running gag of a man with a tooth ache."

TV Tropes mentions that, "Flip the Frog cartoons are almost the defining example of animation from the pre-censorship era. An angry Flip often reacts to trouble with a shout of 'Damn!' Nude or scantily-clad women often appear, usually to place Flip in compromising positions. Innuendo is everywhere; in The Office Boy (1932), a sexy office clerk unwittingly walks around with a 'private' sign hanging from her backside. [Astute viewers might notice she is the same babe as the babe in the bathroom in Room Runners.] Finally, typical cartoon violence has consequences: in Puddle Pranks (1930), a character is eaten by a monstrous bird and appears to die permanently (being chewed up and swallowed)."

In any event, enjoy a forgotten jewel from yesterday, Flip the Frog in… 

Room Runner:

*Coincidentally enough, this ancient animated short — it's only 12 years shy of being a century old — is not the first Ub Iwerks short that the Dungeon has brought to our attention: way back in October 2014, the blog also drew our eye to the great Iwerks/Disney Silly Symphony Hells Bells (1929).

As for Iwerks's works in general here at a wasted life, Hells Bells was preceded by the Iwerks/Disney Silly Symphony Skeleton Dance (1929), the short film for March 2010, and by the totally "what were they thinking?" Iwerks'ComicColor Cartoon, The Balloon Man (1935), aka The Pincushion Man, our short film for August 2014. Now, with Room Runners, Ub Iwerks is officially the most represented filmmaker of our Short Film(s) of the Month.(Should you like Room Runners, and also like Skeleton Dance, dare we suggest you check out the Flip the Frog short, Spooks [1932]?)

** In retrospect, though, we cannot help but wonder whether Flip might not have been an inspiration behind Sally (née "Sarah") Cruikshank's acid trip of a short, Face Like a Frog (1987), our Short Film of the Month for October 2011 — the end credits of which, we must mention, offer "Thanks" to Dick Miller!

Kidnapping Stella (Germany, 2019)

February 17, 2020, 9:42 am

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Kidnapping Stella— a German remake of the British flick The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009 / trailer), a movie that few people saw and was already remade in The Netherlands in 2014 as Bloedlink / Reckless (trailer) — is pretty much a movie that no one needs to see. (Really, how often does a movie need to be remade within one single decade?) For much of its running time, at least for those who are unfamiliar with the other two versions, the narrative's development leads one to expect a new, three-person version of The Grissom Gang (1971 / trailer) and/or No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948 / trailer), but the film has an unexpected twist that takes it into a different direction but doesn't really make it any more interesting.

Set a gray and depressingly urban Berlin that seems neither populated nor short on housing (fact: Berlin, population roughly 3.6 million, has a definite shortage of housing — hell, even hipsters are moving outside the inner-ring by now), the movie starts off like a documentary on how kidnapping someone is a truly expensive act, as the prep work shown would probably break the budget of the average deplorable or hipster or minimum-wage earner, stolen van or not.

Clemens Schick is rather effective as the hardboiled kidnapper Vic, and both he and his character should be in a better movie. Max von der Groeben, however, as the movie's nominal identifiable figure (Not!) Tom, is a dislikable, whiny and stupid wet rag, and all the more so once the movie's twist is revealed. Stella (Jella Haase) is an enigma, but is also given relatively little to work with; nevertheless, the actress can almost emote well enough to almost be as believable as Schick's Vic — not enough, however, to save the movie in any way.

Kidnapping Stella is slow and predictable up until its mid-film twist, but once the movie's "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" is revealed, predictability returns even as the action increases. The Hemingwayesque ending does little to save Kidnapping Stella from conveying the feeling that at worst it is totally unnecessary or, at best, a film school grad project. May the grads move on to bigger and better things...

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R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part X (2009-20)

February 23, 2020, 9:30 am

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25 Dec 1928 – 30 Jan 2019

The American thespian treasure known as Dick Miller, one of our all-time favorite character actors, entered the Great Nothingness over a year ago on 30 January 2019. 

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

A working thespian to the end, Miller's last film, the independent horror movie Hanukkah (trailer), starring fellow deceased low-culture thespian treasure Sid Haig (14 July 1939 – 21 Sept 2019), just finished production. In it, as in many of Miller's films, his character is named Walter Paisley in homage to his first truly great lead role, that of the loser killer artist/busboy Walter Paisley in Roger Corman's classic black comedy, A Bucket of Blood(1959).

What follows is the final entry of a multi-part career review in which we undertake an extremely meandering, highly unfocused look at the films of Dick Miller. The films are not necessarily looked at in the order of their release... and if we missed one, let us know.  

Go here for

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part I (1955-60)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part II (1961-67)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part III (1968-73)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part IV (1974-76)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part V (1977-80)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part VI (1981-84)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part VII (1985-89)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part VIII (1990-94)

R.I.P.: Dick Miller, Part IX (1995-2007)

3rd Shift: Michael's Lament

(2009, writ & dir. Christopher D. Grace)

This independent production from Turmoil Films has seen the light of day on rare occasion, like at the 26th Boston Film Festival, where they described the film's plot as follows: "3rd Shift: Michael's Lament is a film about a young man named Michael (Marc Vos) who battles his inner nature and instincts and tries to live a somewhat normal life in a dark and turbulent world. The story revolves around his view on his world and the relationships with the people he works with. He is a loner and a mystery to anyone that knows him. This story takes place over 3 nights of Michael's dark and mysterious life."

Dick Miller supposedly appears somewhere amidst those three nights as "The Sculptor"— shades of Walter Paisley?!? — but though credited at imdb, we could not find confirmation anywhere online.

Teaser to

3rd Shift: Michael's Lament:

3rd Shift: Michael's Lament from Grace Period Creative on Vimeo.

If anyone out there has seen the movie, no one has deemed it worth writing about — not even blogger Richard Morchoe, who lists 3rd Shift: Michael's Lament as one of his favorite films.

The Hole

(2009, dir. Joe Dante)

After roughly six years in the nether regions of directing for TV — including his contentious episode for Masters of Horror (2005-07 / trailer), The Screwfly Solution (2006 / trailer) — Dante returned to the big screen with the 3-D movie The Hole… sort of: the movie hardly got a release in the US, though it did well abroad.

The Hole, a young adult adventure fantasy thriller, was written by Mark L. Smith, who two years earlier penned the definitely not young adult horror flick Vacancy (2007 / trailer) and some years later wrote & directed the generally generic horror flick Séance (2016 / trailer). As always with Dante feature films, Dick Miller makes an appearance: this time a tiny, uncredited appearance as an 81-year-old pizza delivery guy (photo above).

Trailer to

The Hole:

"Although pitched as a kids film The Hole […] is a brilliant, engrossing, captivating, creepy horror which delivers scares and frights equal to many adult movies. […] Packed with jumps and frights, unsettling scenes and disturbing imagery from the crazy killer clown to the J Horror jerky movements of the ghostly girl, it's a film unafraid to face fear full on. […] Visually striking, it was made in 3D and Dante uses the new medium well. Especially during the nightmarish dreamscape sequences at the end which are reminiscent of 80's horror Paperhouse (1988 / trailer) in their warped perspectives and menacing patriarchal monster. With a great cast of kids who are believable and likable, not grating or annoying, and an excellent story line and script […] The Hole is a fantastic horror movie for all ages. It delivers more genuine chills and thrills than a lot of films for adults with a lot higher certificate ratings. [Love Horror]"

"The plot revolves around an apparently bottomless pit located in the house the Thompsons have just moved into. Rather inconveniently, it turns out to be a gateway to Hell, and as soon as the curious kids have opened it, strange goings-on begin occurring all over the place. [Phil on Film]"

"The Hole will probably dissatisfy hardcore SAW (2004 / trailer) horror fans looking for buckets of gore — and let's be honest here: the movie's final act disappoints. Like your average Stephen King novel, The Hole is all build-up and little delivery. How the story is resolved comes across as a letdown. PLOT SPOILERS! The whole 'the monster can only harm you if you're afraid of it' plot is hackneyed and tired to say the least and something not even 13-year-olds will swallow. [See: Fear of the Dark (2003).] It is interesting to note, however, how much the sets for the final set piece are inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (trailer), a movie made way back in 1920! END SPOILERS! [Sci-Fi Movie Page]"

Another, less-obvious call-back to the classic silents is the name of the factory belonging to Creepy Carl (Bruce Dern), "Gloves of Orlac". This is, of course, a reference to another silent horror from Dr. Caligari's director Robert Wiene, The Hands of Orlac (1924 / trailer)… which got remade by Karl Freund in 1935 as Mad Love (1935 / trailer), and by  Edmond T. Gréville as Hands of Orlac (trailer) and by Newt Arnold as Hands of a Stranger (trailer), both in 1960, though Arnold's cheesier version only got released two years later.

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

(2010, dir. Mark Hartley)
 

As we mentioned in Part IX, "In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries." Where Dick shows up here, we know not yet, but we are going to find out...

 
Trailer to

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

Machete Maidens Unleashed! started out as a documentary on the great if diminutive Weng Weng* (7 Sept 1957 – 29 Aug 1992), and was originally commissioned for Australian television. The Australian director, Mark Hartley, once said, "[I] never thought of myself as a documentary film-maker, but I wanted to tell the story of Not Quite Hollywood (2008 / trailer below). Then afterwards, it was all about getting a narrative film made, but then Machete Maidens came along as a job-for-hire, and those films took me to lots of festivals where they got lots of positive responses. [Bristol Bad Film Club]" And, eventually, helped him get his first full-length feature film job: he helmed the 2013 Aussie remake (trailer) of the 1978 Aussie horror flick Patrick (trailer). It does not seem to have been a hit.

*If you're interested, there is a documentary on Weng Weng out there: Andrew Leavold's 2007 feature-length The Search for Weng Weng (trailer).

Trailer to

Not Quite Hollywood:

Over at All Movie, Mark Deming explains the documentary: "In the 1960s and 70s, drive-in movie theaters and big city grindhouses were eager to book the wildest and most action-packed fare they could find, and low-budget producers were always on the lookout for something unique to offer their viewers. Many of them found it in the Philippines, a country full of exotic locations, cooperative officials and folks willing to work cheap. Local producer Eddie Romero (7 July 1924 – 28 May 2013) began exporting his cut-rate horror and crime pictures to American distributors in the 60s, and before long U.S. filmmakers were traveling there to shoot crazed jungle epics, women in prison thrillers, bloody horror stories and violent wartime dramas. It certainly helped that Philippine extras and technicians would work hard for low pay, and that local stuntmen didn't seem to worry much about risking their necks for a good shot; as one producer put it, 'Human life was cheap, film was cheap — it was a great place to shoot a movie!' Filmmaker Mark Hartley […] shares the inside scoop on the wild and wooly world of filmmaking in the Philippines in the 1960s and 70s in Machete Maidens Unleashed! Featuring interviews with Gloria Hendry [below, not from the documentary], Colleen Camp [further below, not from the documentary], Sid Haig (14 July 1939 – 21 Sept 2019), R. Lee Ermey (24 Mar 1944 – 15 Apr 2018), Roger Corman, Joe Dante, Allan Arkush and many more eyewitnesses to the madness of movie making in the Philippine jungles[…]." Including Dick Miller, of course…

"A sleazy and sordidly salacious stroll down memory lane reveals the trashy wonders that went into the weird and wild world of Filipino exploitation cinema as told by those who made them, acted in them, and very nearly died doing them. […] Lovingly compiled and oozing with a glowing green blood that would make Dr. Lorca proud, Machete Maidens lives up to its title and then some with its bevy of mud-caked, machete wielding wild women, machine gun toting mercenaries, gnarly, nasty looking monsters, one armed executioners and midget super spies. […] Hartley's diabolical documentary never shirks when it comes to presenting the Philippines as anything but a riotously out of control war zone where the behind the scenes stories were often just as, if not more entertaining than the films themselves. The director shows a grand hand at grasping the ideology behind exploitation movies and what makes them work. […]. [Cool Ass Cinema]"

Not from the documentary, but sung by the great Pam Grier —

Long Time Woman from The Big Doll House (1971 / trailer):

Machete Maidens Unleashed! was well received by most, but give voice to a rare dissenter, let's look no further than Regrettable Sincerity: "You'd think that Machete Maidens Unleashed!, an enthusiastic documentary […] about low budget American films made in the Philippines would fit perfectly into my lowbrow criteria, and it would, if it were more than a self-congratulatory clip show. It skirts over the more interesting material, John Landis discussing the bogus feminist read on the women-in-prison genre (he's right, sometimes a naked lesbian fistfight is just a naked lesbian fistfight) and a moment where producer and self-promoter Sam Sherman brags that he knowingly poisoned the audience at a public screening."

Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

(2011, writ & dir. Alex Stapleton)
 

As we mentioned in Part IX, "In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries." But Dick Miller also shows up here as more than just a talking head: clips of his scenes from diverse Corman movies are used.

"Frank Capra said, 'There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.' Roger Corman is never dull, probably because he has a maxim of his own: 'the monster should kill somebody fairly early, then at regular intervals'. These are some words of wisdom contained in Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, whose star seems like less and less of a rebel now as guerilla filmmaking seems to be the order of the day in an era of declining box office takes and uncertainty. [Really Awful Movies]"

Trailer to

Corman's World:

Over at Andy's Film Blog, Andy sticks to the facts (though his choice of films to name seems particularly uninspired): "Known as a king of the Bs, Roger Corman has produced over 400 pictures with titles ranging from Dinocroc vs. Supergator* (2010) to Bloodfist 2050 (2005 / trailer). Carrying himself in an anachronistic, professorial manner Corman has also directed a series of heralded Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, brought the films of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and Kurasawa to the attention of American audiences as a distributor, fought Hollywood excess and championed many charitable causes, and cultivated the careers of such talents as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Dennis Hopper and many others. Corman's World is a loving look at the career of the virtuoso producer, with many of his admirers and former apprentices on hand to sing his praises."

*A film that got "Special Mention to the Biggest Pile of Shite seen in 2017" in our 5 Jan 2018 entry, The Best of 2017.

"That Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel is filled with amusing anecdotes about decades of low budget filmmaking isn't surprising. What is surprising is the way those anecdotes build up into something actually emotionally affecting; watching the legendarily cool Jack Nicholson literally CRYING about Roger Corman will put a lump in the throat of even the most jaded viewer. [Birth! Movies! Death!]"

Song that has nothing to do with the topic at hand:

"[T]he really soft center of Corman's World, in addition to everyone's obvious affection for Roger, is the movie bringing on the long-married Corman's beautiful wife and producing partner Julie. She tells such great life-with-Roger tales as the time she didn't know if their wedding was on or off — because Corman was shooting on location, and phoning to discuss plans would have meant long-distance rates. For all that, for all the gratuitous toplessness, rubber monsters, dismemberments, explosions and Dick Miller cameos, Roger and Julie Corman come across as the most normal and well-adjusted couple in cinema. […] Yes, the nitpickers (Robert Banks and No-Money Mark From Middleburgh Heights) will point out how it's criminal [that] documentarian Alex Stapleton offers no discussion of how Corman's economical reincarnation fantasy The Undead (1957, see Part I) appears to have a script penned in a form of iambic pentameter — try getting the Weinsteins to bankroll that today. Or why isn't James Cameron here? He was a graduate of the Corman film boot camp too. Or what about Corman's Marvel superhero feature The Fantastic Four (1994 / trailer), subversively made with no intention of formal release, in some kind of mercenary legal maneuver. Not even acknowledgment of Little Shop of Horrors (1960, see Part I) reborn as a hit stage musical. For full coverage of Roger Corman's world you'd need a set of encyclopedias (like one obsessive author compiled about Shatner), so invariably something's got to be left out. What's left, though is Corman's World, and it's one any movie buff will want to visit, bad matte-painted backgrounds and stock footage and all. [Charles Cassady, Jr. @ The Cleveland Movie Blog]"

And a rare complaint: "Very little is discussed about Corman's legendary parsimoniousness. About the only stories regarding this, the most notorious aspect of the Corman legend, that we get is Peter Bogdanovich's telling how Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968 / full movie) came about when he was asked to shoot material to add to Russian sf film footage that Corman had obtained; some discussion of the hilariously ad hoc cobbling together of The Terror (1963, see Part II) and how its plot makes no sense; as well as a visit to the set of the making of Dinoshark (2010 / trailer) where actor Eric Balfour proves surprisingly candid about the wild west nature of the shooting. In that Corman regularly came up with ways to cut costs by flaunting union rules and shooting outside the US, one feels disappointed at the timidness of the documentary in being willing to venture into this subject and/or tackle issues that may puncture Corman's own myth-building. After all, when the amusement of some of the stories of Corman's movie-making practices are pared away, he is just another huckster trying to make maximum profit while paying out as little as possible and getting around as much as he can in the way of legal obligations. You wonder at the end of it, would such an awe-struck and hagiographic treatment be made if this were a documentary charting the life of some corporate executive who was celebrating his cleverness in avoiding regulations and paying employees minimum wage? [Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review]"

Burying the Ex

(2014, dir. Joe Dante)

A feature-length remake of the short of the same title from 2008. That short was written & directed by Alan Trezza, who also did the screenplay for this version. Dick Miller shows up a few moments to play a "Crusty Old Cop".

Repulsive Reviews, which "recommend[s] it to anyone who enjoys zom-coms and just wants to kick back and relax with a good flick", has the plot: "Horror fanatic, Max (Anton Yelchin [11 Mar 1989 – 19 Jun 2016] of Green Room [2015 / trailer] and Odd Thomas[2013 / trailer]), isn't happy with his overbearing, overly annoying, green girlfriend anymore and just have to break things off with her. When he finally gets the nerve to do it at a local dog park, she tragically gets hit by a bus. Little does Max realize, however, Evelyn* (Ashley Greene) is destined to come back from the dead, since they made a promise to each other in front of a satanic genie statue that they'd be together always and forever. Now Max has to come up with a better plan if he's going to get rid of his now extremely strong, extremely irritable, extremely undead [ex] girlfriend."

*Needless to say, the name is a typical Dante reference to a cult film, in this case Emilio Miraglia's Italo classic, The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave (1971 / trailer). Among the many cult films glimpsed on TV or elsewhere is, for example, H.G. Lewis's The Gore-Gore Girls (1972), The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962), and Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Trailer to

Burying the Ex:

We Got This Covered was not thrilled: "I'm a Joe Dante fan. That is something I cannot hide. His early work made him a horror icon, and Gremlins (1984, see Part VI) stands as one of my favorite movies of all time. These are facts, and if I ever get to meet Joe Dante, I'd like nothing more than to buy him a drink and hear him reminisce about the good old days. You know, the exciting, creative times that yielded scene after scene of infectious horror fun. Basically, any time before Burying the Ex happened. It's not that Dante created a soulless romcom disguised as a cheeky horror comedy. It's more that any voiceless filmmaker could have made Burying the Ex. No scene glistens with Dante's typically demented polish, and everyone involved seems to be phoning it in. There's not a single genuine moment of chemistry to be found between the three members of this undead love triangle, as each scene only feels more staged than the last."

Over at Rivers of Grue, the Keeper of the Crimson Quill wasn't that thrilled either by what it sees as "a rather unremarkable film, lacking both the wit and wisdom [needed] to be regarded as anything other than middle-of-the-road", but see some good points: "Dante […] wrings every last drop of comedy out of the three-way dynamic in an attempt to bring life to a fairly uninspired script. Considering this took six years to come about from initial conception, the screenplay is remarkably bare of bones, and his very best efforts aren't quite enough to sideline us to its deficiency. Thankfully, all three leads excel, Greene is on-point as our festering third wheel and the chemistry between Yelchin and Alexandra Daddario [as the new girlfriend, Olivia, seen below from the first season of True Detective] is absolutely unmistakable, taking their blossoming love interest to a whole new level. Given the flat dialogue they are required to recite, they locate true common ground and this curbs any potential catastrophe."

To all the above, The Horror Club, which points out that Olivia "has the best rack ever, and she has these eyes that looks like crystal clear pools of liquid heaven", might add: "Burying the Ex, while not being as 'good' as many of Dante's previous works, is still an enjoyable effort, especially for fans of more light-hearted and quirky genre fare. It's definitely closer to being Gremlins 2(1990, see Part XIII) than it is The Howling (1981, see Part VI). Or even the first Gremlins. Fun and light, is what this one is. […] Lots of critics are giving this movie less-than-stellar reviews, and we mostly get why they're doing so, but we just don't agree. We liked it, Negative Nancys be damned! It wasn't perfect, not by a long shot, but it was enjoyable enough that we were able to ignore its issues, and just go with it. If you can do the same, you'll have a lot of fun with this one too."

That Guy Dick Miller

(2014, writ. & dir. Elijah Drenner)

As we mentioned in Part IX, "In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries."

Trailer to

That Guy Dick Miller:

What happens far less often, especially amongst cult actors and especially when the given actor is still alive, is that one actually gets a documentary all of one's own — as did Dick Miller, in 2014, at the crusty age of 86. The film was the second feature documentary of director/writer Drenner, a man with massive editing and directing experience (mostly for video shorts) whose previous feature directorial credit is American Grindhouse (2010).

Trailer to

American Grindhouse:

"According to Miller, the genesis for That Guy Dick Miller came when he was contacted by a German producer looking to make a short film to advance some movies that he had started with Roger Corman. 'He wanted a little thing on War of the Satellites and he got in touch with Elijah Drenner, our director, and he said "Can you put it together?" and he said "I'll look at it."' However, it turned out that there was way too much story in Miller's career for merely a short. 'There were too many pictures and too big character here for a five minute film, [Drenner] needed something more.' As such, Laine Miller was brought on to produce, through her company Autumn Rose Productions, and That Guy Dick Miller was born. [SKM]"

"That Guy Dick Miller traces Miller's career across three distinct eras: the initial burst of activity with Corman; the work Miller found from Corman's star-struck protégés in the '70s […]; and the steady jobs Corman's disciples and fans gave him once they graduated to the studio system. You can see Miller pop up in films by Martin Scorsese (After Hours [1985, see Part VII]), Robert Zemeckis (Used Cars [1980, see Part V]), Steven Spielberg (1941 [1979, see Part V]), Joe Dante […], and almost Quentin Tarantino (his role in Pulp Fiction[1994, see Part VIII] ended up on the cutting room floor), as well as […] exploitation fare like Night of the Creeps(1986, see Part VII), Demon Knight (1995, see Part IX), and Evil Toons (1992, see Part VIII). The documentary also chronicles Miller's stop-and-start career as a writer — his byline turned up on such unlikely projects as TNT Jackson (1974, see Part IV) and Jerry Lewis's Which Way to the Front? (1970, see Part III) (he had to sue Jerry for credit) — and his sometimes-shaky relationship with his father. The film's spine is Miller's marriage with Lainie, a sharp-tongued sparring partner who is his rock during long stretches of unemployment.* [Will Sloan @ Torontoist]"

* And who was once very talented at tassel twirling, as evident by her scene as a burlesque dancer in The Graduate (1967), which can be seen here at AZNude.

"Fans and filmmakers of sci-fi, horror, exploitation, and B-grade romps nigh universally agree that if any one person can be crowned as the 'quintessential character actor', then that title belongs to Dick Miller. Small in stature but big in presence, the affectionate descriptor 'that guy' to identify an unnamed face recognized in what seems like every other movie was practically invented for Miller. […] Over the course of 90 minutes, the film serves as more of an affectionate tribute to the man rather than as an informative retrospective. Names including Roger Corman, Joe Dante, Mary Woronov, John Sayles, and Ira Steven Behr have more to say out of nostalgic warmth for the man as opposed to truly revealing insight behind his personality. Perhaps it is poetic irony that Dick Miller, someone who never had substantial time in leading-man limelight despite a prolific career most actors only dream of, is often relegated to a backburner role in a movie supposedly about his own life. More than once, That Guy Dick Miller loses its way as a focused documentary, frequently taking detours to expand on anecdotes only tangentially related to Miller himself. [Culture Crypt]"

"Overall, That Guy Dick Miller is a fascinating, oddly heartwarming documentary that highlights a significant piece of genre filmmaking history. That piece being the recurring character actor with nearly 200 credits to his name. Much like Best Worst Movie (2009 / trailer), and Spine Tingler! (2007 / trailer), That Guy Dick Miller should serve as a hugely enjoyable time for genre buffs and equally fascinating for people who don't necessarily know a lot about exploitation cinema. This comes highly recommended! [Sick Celluloid]"

The Adventures of Biffle and Shooster

(2015, dir. Michael Schlesinger)

A 2018 DVD release of this collection of shorts, augmented by two additional shorts, was retitled The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster.

"Director/writer Michael Schlesinger dug through some long-forgotten film archives and unearthed this quartet of shorts from America's favorite fictional funny men, Biffle (Nick Santa Maria) and Shooster (Will Ryan). Lovingly shot in black and white (save for the Cinecolor Schmo Boat), the films recall 30's audience's infatuation with terrible puns and out-of-nowhere musical numbers. [Trailers from Hell]"

Trailer:

"Each [short] has a mastery of its own, aside from feeling 100% genuine to the era. In Bride of Finklestein, the only of the shorts that starts with Biffle and Shooster together in the opening scene, the lampoonary of the Universal monster films leads us through a not-quite-mad scientist to an old fashioned gorilla chase. In The Biffle Murder Case, a trope of the book-writing 'detective' meets a trope of the gumshoe detective with a solid poke in the eye at institutionalized racism common in films from this era, plus a rack of unfettered puns. Imitation of Wife is a hoot of a riff on Imitation of Life,* complete with the boss coming to dinner gag and his hayseed nephew in tow — this one also perfectly mimics tincture techniques used even in the silent era to put a little color in the black and white films. Cinecolor is wonderfully recreated in the musical, vaudeville based, farcical Schmo Boat, which opens in black and white but once Biffle and Shooster perform for the showboat's unseen audience becomes full color. The dedication to authenticity extends to the fact the film was shot with a live band performance on open mics. For true cinefiles, this may be the gem of the collection. Also on this DVD, but not in the theatrical screenings, is the supposed last short film the pair made, It's a Frame Up. Here the boys are put in charge of an art gallery and like a really good roller-coaster, the slow set up pays off with a gut busting final five minutes I do not care to spoil. [Michael Demeritt @ Amazon]"

*Which version, we wonder: 1934 (trailer) or 1959 (trailer).

Dick Miller shows up somewhere in Schmoe Boat to play someone named "Walter"— Paisley, maybe?

And now the final three feature-length films, all still in production (or post-production) and all independent productions — so don't hold your breath.

Clapboard Jungle:

Surviving the Independent Film Business

(2020, dir. Justin McConnell)

As we mentioned in Part IX, "In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries." To what extent Dick speaks or what he even says, we know not: this film has yet to be released — but he's up there on the poster.

To quote their official page at that Evil Firm helping to destroy what's left of America's crumbling democracy, "We are excited to announce that after years of production, a ton of editing, and months of testing, we now have Picture Lock on the stand-alone documentary Clapboard Jungle, and have begun sending the workprint screener out to festivals. The 8-episode educationally-focused companion series is also currently in post-production. Both should see release in 2020. Long road to this point, and much work left to do, but thank you for your patience as we get this finished!"

There's no trailer for the documentary so, instead, here's a trailer to director Justin McConnell's most recent release, his independent horror movie Lifechanger (2018) — which Dick does not appear in.

Trailer to

Lifechanger (2018):

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster

(2020, dir. Thomas Hamilton)

As we mentioned in Part IX, "In the entertainment industry, regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for documentaries."

This no budget labor of love is currently in production, so what extent the imdb is correct in listing Dick Miller as one of the talking heads is open to question, for even on the documentary's Kickstarterpage Dick is never mentioned as an interviewee. That said, Dick Miller also only ever worked with Boris Karloff on one project, everyone's favorite patchwork quilt known as The Terror (1963, see Part II). As that movie is in the public domain, we've embedded it below for your viewing pleasure:

Boris Karloff & Dick Miller

in The Terror:

Hanukkah

(2020, writ. & dir. Eben McGarr)

The most recent independent production from the independent filmmaker Eben McGarr offers a double whammy: it is not only the last feature-length movie in which Dick Miller appears, it is also the last movie to feature that other equally legendary character actor, the great Sid Haig (14 Jul 1939 – 21 Sept 2019) — although in Haig's case, there is one more non-documentary movie on his resume that has yet to be finished, much less released: Evan Marlowe's Abruptio. Seeing that in the latter, "all of the characters in it will be acted entirely by full-sized puppets and operated by puppeteers", perhaps Haig's regrettable demise won't hold things up too much.

 

But to return to the Jewish-horror flick Hanukkah; dunno what religion Dick Miller was in real life — Pastafarian? — but in this movie he appears as Rabbi Walter Paisley, a man we assume no longer makes art. He, like Haig, is seen in the trailer below.

Trailer to

Hanukkah:

The Big Screen Cinema Guide, which claims that the movie actually opened on Friday, 13 December 2019, but is currently not in any cinemas, has the plot: "Obediah Lazarus (Joe Knetter of Strip Club Slasher [2010 / trailer]) is the son of Judah Lazarus (Haig), the original Hanukiller. In 1983, Judah terrorized NY for seven nights and was preparing to sacrifice his eight-year-old son, Obediah, on the eighth night. Judah was convinced it was God's will, like Abraham and Isaac, to sacrifice his only son to God. Luckily for Obediah, police tracked Judah down and stopped the sacrifice, but Judah was gunned down in the process. Warped by hatred with no guidance, Obediah Lazarus becomes a religious extremist, intolerant of non-Jews, 'bad Jews', and those he perceives to be enemies of the Jewish faith. He is about to unleash eight nights of horror. A group of Jewish teens are getting ready to party for the holidays, but are in for a Festival of Frights. With the help of a wise Rabbi (Miller), they deduce that the murder victims have violated Judaic law and that their only chance at survival is to embrace their faith."

Rumor has it that Eben McGarr's next horror film, a co-production of Jordan Peele and Tyler Perry, will also be a holiday-themed horror movie entitled Kwanzaa. The production is currently in discussion with Donald Trump to play the movie's psycho, in a plot that we have heard concerns a urine-loving fat man with little fingers whose feeling of inadequacy of size drives him to become convinced that he has to save Christmas — and he is willing to go over Afro-American bodies to do so. Little does the movie's cis-gender hero suspect, but the psycho has the support of a secret cabal of other rich, old white men in all the higher echelons of power…

Dick Miller — R.I.P.

Dick Miller Retrospective, Part I:

Screened for Mr. Miller and fans at Texas Frightmare Weekend 

on 2 May 2009 in Dallas.

Dick Miller Retrospective, Part II:

Screened for Mr. Miller and fans at Texas Frightmare Weekend

on 2 May 2009 in Dallas.

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OK, who greenlighted this one? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that this movie, one of many of the day based on "popular" teen-lit series and filmed in hope of establishing a hit franchise ala the puke-inducing Twilight series (five films, 2008-2012) and mildly interesting Hunger Games movies (four films, 2012-2015), was going to be a flop

Trailer to

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant:

Seriously? A franchise about a teenager named Darren (Chris Massoglia) who, due to his own stupidity (and sticky fingers), gets blackmailed into becoming a vampire? And who, by the film's end, lives in a circus populated entirely by "unusual people" (or to use traditional, P.I. terminology, "freaks")? And who falls in love with a sweet, young girl with a monkey tail (Jessica Carlson)? Who was this movie meant for? Definitely not today's deplorable masses.

But what can we say? We loved Cirque du Freak! (But then, we also never read any of the books. As normal, many — if not most — fans of the book series seem to think that the adaptation sucks limp vampire weenie.)

True, some of the CGI is already dated, and the movie itself takes a bit of time to get going, but the former is generally expected two months after the release of any movie and as for the latter, we at least get a detailed introduction to the world and people that would have come had the movie been a success, all served with a liberal amount of (often extremely) black humor and visual flare. Salma Hayak, like normal, doesn't exactly prove her thespian chops, but for that she does prove that she is beyond sexy even with a beard. John C. Reilly (see "Ham" at Misc Film Fun – Two Music Videos that Tell Stories) is unexpectedly effective in the difficult role of the vampire Crepsley, segueing well between humorous and threatening — much like Michael Cerveris as his nemesis Mr. Tiny, whose goal is to start a war between the vampaneze (vampires who kill their victims) and the vampire (vampires who merely drink from their victims). Josh Hutcherson (seen below n double, not from the movie), who as everyone knows went on to greater success in The Hunger Games and has struggled since, is a bit uneven as Steve, Darren's best friend who chooses evil, but definitely shows enough promise that one can imagine he would have grown into the role and become a truly effective evil asshole. William Defoe (of Daybreakers[2009]) shows up a couple of times as the vampire Gavner Purl, an entertainingly campy figure that probably would have been a lot of fun had the movie become a franchise.

Excuse us as we shed a tear about the spilled milk — and give the movie a gander. A great one to watch with the kids.

Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part VIII: 1975

March 13, 2020, 2:09 am

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Babes of Yesteryear: a wasted life's irregular and P.I. feature that takes a look at the filmographies of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema of the past. Some may still be alive, others not. Our choice of whom we look at is idiosyncratic and entirely our own — but the actors are/were babes, one and all.

As the photo (maybe) and blog-entry title above reveal, we're currently looking at the films of one of the ultimate cult babes ever, a woman who needs no introduction to any and all red-blooded American cis gender, tendentially hetero male whose hormonal memory goes further back than the start of the 80s: the great Uschi Digard.* 

*A.k.a. Astrid | Debbie Bowman | Brigette | Briget | Britt | Marie Brown | Clarissa | Uschi Dansk | Debbie | Ushi Devon | Julia Digaid | Uschi Digaid | Ushi Digant | Ursula Digard | Ushie Digard | Ushi Digard | Alicia Digart | Uschi Digart | Ushi Digart | Ushi Digert | Uschi Digger | Beatrice Dunn | Fiona | Francine Franklin | Gina | Glenda | Sheila Gramer | Ilsa | Jobi | Cynthia Jones | Karin | Astrid Lillimor | Astrid Lillimore | Lola | Marie Marceau | Marni | Sally Martin | Mindy | Olga | Ves Pray | Barbara Que | Ronnie Roundheels | Sherrie | H. Sohl | Heide Sohl | Heidi Sohler | U. Heidi Sohler | Sonja | Susie | Euji Swenson | Pat Tarqui | Joanie Ulrich | Ursula | Uschi | Ushi | Mishka Valkaro | Elke Vann | Elke Von | Jobi Winston | Ingred Young… and probably more.
As The Oak Drive-In puts it: "With her long hair, Amazonian build & beautiful natural looks (usually devoid of make-up), nobody seems to personify that 60s & early 70s sex appeal 'look' better than [Uschi Digard]. She had a presence that truly was bigger than life — a mind-bending combination of hippie Earth Mother looks and a sexual wildcat. […] She always seemed to have a smile on her face and almost seemed to be winking at the camera and saying 'Hey, it's all in fun.' Although she skirted around the edges at times, she never preformed hardcore…" 

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

Please note: we make no guarantee for the validity of the release dates given… or of the info supplied, for that matter.

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

Go here for

Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

Uschi Digard, Part III: 1970, Part II

Uschi Digard, Part IV: 1971, Part I

Uschi Digard, Part V: 1971, Part II

Uschi Digard, Part VI: 1972
Uschi Digard, Part VII: 1973-74

Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.

(1975, dir. Don Edmonds)

 

"The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as 'medical experiments' in special concentration camps throughout Hitler's Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never happen again."

 

Produced by "Herman Traeger", otherwise known as David F. Friedman. Rumor has it that this is the most-viewed movie at both Steve Bannon's and Sebastian Gorka'scircle jerks.

When it comes to exploitation movies, the Ilsa movies are without doubt some of the most infamous.Don Edmonds (1 Sept 1937 – 30 May 2009), whose directorial debut was Wild Honey (1971, see Part V), which also featured Uschi, directed both this, the first Ilsa movie, and the first sequel, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976). The first sequel, like the later two that followed in 1977 — Jean LaFleur's Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (trailer) and Jess Franco's Ilsa, the Wicked Wardena.k.a. Greta, The Mad Butcher (trailer) — ignores the fact that Ilsa actually dies at the end of Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.

Trailer to

Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.:

Undoubtedly Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. got made due to the success of the earlier David F. Friedman Naziploitation WIP sexploiter, Lee Frost's Love Camp 7 (1969 / trailer). The script was supplied by "Jonah Royston", a.k.a. John C.W. Saxton(4 Dec 1930 – 15 May 1987), the scriptwriter behind such fun stuff as Happy Birthday to Me (1981 / trailer) & Class of 1984 (1982 / trailer), and was probably inspired by two infamous real-life female Nazi concentration camp wardens, Ilse "The Bitch of Buchenwald" Koch (22 Sept 1906 – 1 Sept 1967) and Irma "The Hyena of Auschwitz" Grese (7 Oct 1923 – 13 Dec 1945), the latter of whom was supposedly a sadistic nympho. Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. was shot in nine days in Culver City, CA, on the sets of the recently cancelled TV series Hogan's Heroes (1965-71).

Uschi shows up, uncredited, as one of the tortured female prisoners (you can see her in the background of the photo below). If sexploitation veteran Dyanne Thorne wasn't a "name" prior to this movie, she sure was afterwards. The same year she made this movie, she married occasional co-star Howard Maurer. Currently, Dr. Dyanne Maurer (PhD, LLD, DD) and Dr. Howard Maurer (Dr. of Mus., DD), as ordained ministers, do weddings in Las Vegas.

The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre, which lists the movie as "recommended" and calls it "the absolute, unsurpassed apex of exploitation sleaze", has the plot: "In a Nazi camp, men and women are experimented on in a wide variety of horrifying ways by Ilsa (Thorne), an Aryan dominatrix whose pet project involves proving that women can withstand more pain and torture than men, and also tends to punish men that don't perform to her satisfaction in bed until an American (Gregory Knoph) comes to tame the shrew with his sexual prowess. The real tragedy is that this story is based on real experiments and accounts of SS camps, only in this movie the girls are all sexy, and the nudity, S&M and gore are gratuitous and rampant."

The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review says, "The basic appeal of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a parade of tortures. These become quite extreme — burning brands and electrified dildos shoved up the vagina, maggots placed in open wounds, people being boiled alive and splattered in pressure chambers [Uschi]. What is utterly outrageous about Ilsa is how it exploits the Jewish Holocaust for its ends. A pre-credits note announces that it is offering up a true account of the Holocaust atrocities — a claim that is surely akin to a porn film declaring that it is making a realistic statement about rape. […] There is a vague connection to the real experiments conducted in the death camps by people like Dr Josef Mengele and the film certainly, as it states, does convey a grimness in depicting these. (If Ilsa had gone a little bit further the other way in a less exploitative direction it could almost have been a sobering portrait of sadism as Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterwork Salo or 120 Days of Sodom[1975 / trailer]). However, when it comes to the climax where the prisoners turn the tables on their torturers with equally sadistic regard, one can see that the producers of Ilsa are only interested in the pornographic presentation of acts of torture without regard for who is conducting them."

Indeed, House of Self-Indulgence, which insists that "Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is all about postponing the ejection of seminal fluid", points out that "Utilizing the well-worn titillate-then-repulse method of exploitation filmmaking, director Don Edmonds seems to revel in causing your aroused feelings to quickly turn into ones of revulsion and disgust. Having us cheering on a man's genitals to plunge as far as they can vaginally go one minute, only to have us wincing uncontrollably a mere ten seconds later when those very genitals are unceremoniously removed without even as much as a half-hearted Auf Wiedersehen was a tad jarring."

In all truth, the movie a a whole is a bit more than "a tad jarring". Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is the kind of movie that can cost one friendships, so if you watch it, choose your viewing partner with care.

The Klezmatics doing

Woody Guthrie's song Ilsa Koch:

Pastries

(1975 dir. "Adele Robbins")

"Adele Robbins", a.k.a. "David Fleetwood" and Joe Robertson. We took a look at Joseph F. Robertson (17 April 1925 – 8 July 2001) in Part IV: 1971, when we took a look at his sexsploiter A Touch of Sweden, which is actually this movie as well: someone (probably Robertson) took the original soft-core movie and re-edited it with added hardcore inserts and thus A Touch of Sweden becamePastries.

Back in Part IV, we said the following about Robertson:"A former marine — and military mate of Ed Wood — he entered the film biz via D-grade horror, as the producer and/or writer and/or actor and/or director of fondly remembered sub-standard fun, namely Herbert L. Strock's The Crawling Hand (1963 / trailer), Robert Hutton's The Slime People (1963 / trailer) and Gerd Oswald's (less fun) Agent for H.A.R.M. (1966 / trailer). By the seventies, he'd moved into exploitation and even has the dubious honor of having directed a cross-dressed Ed Wood in Love Feast (1969) and Mrs Stone's Thing (1970 / theme music). Once he went hardcore, he pretty much stayed there until the end, though he returned to no budget horror briefly for two horror comedies, Stephen Sayadian's Dr. Caligari (1989 / trailer) and Auntie Lee's Meat Pies (1992 / scene)."

Over at Something Weird, Prince Pervo writes: "Take the sexploitation comedy A Touch of Sweden, add hardcore inserts to it, and the end result is a really crazy pastiche called Pastries, whose trailer promises 'Over Fifty Visual Orgasms!' Start counting... Big movie star Sherry (Uschi Digard) flies home to Sweden on vacation and tells a young, pigtailed farmgirl-type all about life and love in America: 'A good lover is a good lover, no matter where he comes from,' says Sherry as the inserts kick in right away. Baring her hooters at every opportunity, Sherry also decides 'to do something for humanity', so she takes a job as a nurse's aide in a local hospital and starts balling patients right and left. (She also has a fling with Count Dracula [Ray Sebastian] whom she meets at a marina.) Four other nurses […] also perform similar services for humanity. So zealous are these sexploitation R.N.'s that they consistently deliver out-patient care to the nearby Gland Hotel where they all conveniently live. […] This pervert's favorite scenes include Mindy Brandt (a.k.a. Rene Bond) gluing Virginia's (Sandy Dempsey) vagina shut with a procto-syringe so that she can pretend she's a virgin for sheik […], and Selma (Sandi Carey) helping doctors remove a Coke bottle stuck in the rump of gay-barber (John Keith). […] Though A Touch of Sweden is perfectly fine on its own, few films from this era offer so many legendary sexploitation and porno stars all in the same package as Pastries."

Pastries can be found online at your favorite porn site (like here, at XVideos), but directly below are the first 12 minutes of the badly dubbed A Touch of Sweden. 

12 minutes of

A Touch of Sweden:

Inside Amy

(1975, dir. Ronald Víctor García)

A.k.a. Swinger's Massacre and Super Swinging Playmates. Directed by the man who brought you The Toy Box (1971, see Part IV). Ronald Víctor García is now an artist. This "grim, serious and epic hard-R-rated film filled with sex and murder" with "X actresses like Uschi, Rene Bond and Marsha Jordan in bit roles" is available from Alpha Blue. The full film can also be found online at any given virus-laden porn site…

Fred Adelman at Critical Conditionoffers a full synopsis to this "weird little sexploitation thriller from the swinging 70s": "Charlie Tishman (Eastman Price*) is a successful lawyer who is getting tired of only making love to his wife Amy (Jan Mitchell), so when a client suggests he and his wife go to a swingers club, the idea intrigues him. […] Amy is not too keen on the idea […], but Charlie keeps working on her […] until she eventually relents and agrees to go. Once at the swingers club, Amy at first acts like a cold fish until they meet Rod (Paul Oberon) and Marge (Mickie Nader), a swinging couple who invite Charlie and Amy over to their house for one of their frequent partner-swapping parties […]. Amy is still reluctant when they show up at the party, but a couple of stiff vodkas and Amy joins the other women, Marge, Donna (Ann Perry), Diane (Rene Bond) and Irene (Marsha Jordan) as they change into lingerie and pick partners. A funny thing happens, as Amy gets turned-on making it with all the men, including Rod, Jerry (Philip Luther of Alligator [1980]), Bill (Ron Darby) and Jim (Gary Kent of Dracula vs. Frankenstein[1970]), but Charlie is unable to 'get it up' and make love to any of the women. As Amy screws all the men, Charlie gets drunk, becomes disillusioned with the swinging lifestyle […]. Charlie begins to go slowly insane with jealousy and when Bill calls him the following week to invite him over for a poker game and mentions that Amy's 'the best fuck we ever had', Charlie snaps. He stakes out the poker game and follows Jim home. He knocks out Jim, puts him in his car, runs a hose from the tailpipe to the car's window and watches as Jim chokes to death from carbon monoxide poisoning (while Jim pleads, 'I didn't mean it Charlie!'). He next kills Rod in the same manner (The police at first think both their deaths was a gay suicide pact!). Charlie then grabs a sniper rifle and kills Bill as he gets in his car. When Charlie and Amy go to Jerry and Donna's house for drinks, Amy and Donna have lesbian sex (after a three-way with Jerry), while Charlie gets drunk and homicidal. Charlie drugs all their drinks and then strangles Jerry and hangs Donna. As the police close in and Amy is made aware of her husband's murderous habits, Charlie goes totally bonkers and tries to kill Amy…"

*"Eastman Price" is actually Mikel "Slugger" Angel (31 Oct 1926 – 21 Apr 2001), actor, scriptwriter and director. He wrote diverse Matt Cimber movies, and other fun stuff like Demon Keeper (1994 / trailer), Evil Spirits (1990 / trailer), Grotesque (1988 / German trailer), Psychic Killer (1975 / trailer) and The Love Butcher (1975 / clip).

Inside Amy seems to be a love it or hate movie. At Horror News, Todd Martin (like Fred Adelman at Critical Condition) mostly liked it, saying: "Inside Amyis an awesome little flick full of bad acting, bad 70s fashion, nudity, and violence. […] One of the things that I like about the film is the fact that Amy is totally opposed to the idea of swinging initially and wants nothing to do with it. She is completely devoted to Charlie and doesn't care that he has sexual hang-ups. The only reason she even agrees to sleep with other people is because he keeps badgering her to do so and she wants to make him happy. Of course the opposite occurs and she actually ends up enjoying swinging while Charlie hates it, which makes this one fall into the old 'be careful what you wish for' category for him. […] The only down side that I can think of is the fact that there is pretty much no gore and the death scenes leave a lot to be desired. […] For a movie that is also known as Swingers Massacre there is a serious lack of massacring going on here and I would have really liked to have seen Charlie take some of his victims out in some more creative and bloody ways." 

Trailer to

Swingers Massacre:

Trash Film Guru— which asks the valid question "What kind of a movie features Uschi Digard, Rene Bond, and Marsha Jordan and doesn't have any of them […] git nekkid?"— is less impressed by the movie, which it calls "a mid-70s exploitation flick with an inherently anti-sex, pro-traditional-values message, in this case on the 'evils' of wipe-swapping, disguised as a titillating softcore skin parade". In his view, Inside Amy isone of the "most repugnant pieces of business you're ever likely to see" because of "the tone director Garcia takes": "From the moment Charlie can't get his prick to pop up (for Marsha Jordan, no less), it's pretty clear that Ron G. wants the audience to both empathize with, and frankly to assume, the limp-dicked lawyer's point of view! In […] a lazily oozing little number called Who Knows What Goes On Inside Amy?, the lyrics for which tell her (and, by extension, us) that it's Amy herself who's headed down the road to ruin, that she'd better get home and start being a housewife again, that the nasty, filthy fantasies inside her head are going to tear her loving marriage apart — as if all this shit were her fault! Hell, once Charlie starts killing, he's just doing what any normal, red-blooded American guy who's wife has had a fair number of strangers' pricks in her would do, right? […] That's exactly the editorial viewpoint that Garcia assumes with the rest of this flick. […] Who the hell wrote this script — Rick Santorum? So what we've got here goes well beyond the simple anti-sex, puritanical messaging inherent in so many exploitation flicks that market themselves as being transgressive, footloose, and fancy-free. This crosses the line from being anti-pleasure into being straight-up, and muscularly, anti-women, in a way that even the most transparent slasher flick that kills all the girls who like sex while having the virgin save the day and be the sole survivor never could. You'd certainly never get away with anything this stridently patriarchal, not to mention openly afraid of female sexuality, today*— which is probably for the best, I suppose." 

*Maybe not as a movie, but as a Republican, most likely, and as a President, definitely. Which is definitely not for the best.

Kitty Can't Help It

(1975, dir. Peter Locke) 

Since Wes Craven was an editor on this movie, we looked at it briefly at R.I.P.: Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven, Part I (1970-1977), where we wrote:

"A.k.a. California Drive-In Girls, Drive In and The Carhops; the last known directorial effort of Peter Locke. Wes Craven was the editor of this grindhouse comedy, a relatively generic if entertaining jiggler — among the bongos seen, those of the great Uschi Digard, the 'Lady in Hotel Room' [and, on the original poster, as 'the girl with the 48's'].

"Movies About Girls has long, detailed review of the movie, which we've emasculated to the following: 'Here's what important to know about The Carhops. It's not about carhops. The carhopping is over with two minutes into the film. So then, what is it about? Hard to say. Rape, mostly. [...] Carhopshas an excellent poster and an excellent title, which not only got it made, but is apparently still convincing saps like yours cruelly to watch it. [...] Porn and gore, apparently, is something Locke can do with panache. R-rated sex comedies, on the other hand, are just not his forte. Bland, creepy, and depressingly unfunny, with less nudity than you'd like and more threats of rape than you could possibly need, Carhopsis useful only to Uschi completists and groupie enthusiasts keen on seeing Pam Des Barres strum an acoustic guitar. I didn't exactly feel cheated, but I'm pretty numb at this point. You'd probably be pretty disappointed.'"

The car chase from
The Carhops:

Today, we would like to point out what Temple of Shock says: "The Carhops is credited with a 1975 release date on the IMDb, which is incorrect. NMD Film Distributing put out the version known as The Carhops in 1977. As for the 1975 release date, that applies to Kitty Can't Help It, the original cut of the movie without the carhop footage that was added for the '77 release. Given an R rating by the MPAA in 1974, Kitty Can't Help It was released by Mammoth Films in 1975. (The ad above [the "car chase"] is from a May '75 run in De Moines, IA.)"

Every 70s Movie has the plot: "[...] This abysmal sex comedy involves a group of young women trying to get their friend laid properly. The protagonist, Kitty (Kitty Carl), can't find a man who satisfies her, so she shares her problem with buddies who include hookers and swingers, as well as carhops. All of them tell their boyfriends and/or husbands to sleep with Kitty, but none gets the job done. It's not as if Kitty has compunctions about screwing her friends' significant others. Instead, 'comedic' circumstances intrude just when things get hot. In one scene, Kitty and a dude try humping in the desert, but Kitty freaks out when a large iguana appears nearby. Seeking to look macho, the dude not only picks up the iguana but also tries to kiss the lizard, which bites the dude's tongue. And so on. Kitty Can't Help It comprises one underwhelming scene after another, and most of the acting is shoddy. One exception is the versatile Jack DeLeon, whose psychopathic character torments Kitty whenever the filmmakers decide, unwisely, to include something serious […]. Yet the only genuinely famous person in the cast is Pamela Des Barres, who plays one of Kitty's generous friends. Previously known as 'Miss Pamela', Des Barres is a notorious rock-music groupie who penned the definitive memoir on servicing popular musicians, I'm with the Band (1987)."

Paul Ross, one of the two credited scriptwriters, went on to help script the "documentary"Journey into the Beyond (1975 / trailer below) and the horror movie Beyond Evil(1980 / trailer).

Trailer to

Journey into the Beyond:

Female Chauvinists

(1975, dir. Jourdan Alexander)

A.k.a., down under, as Pussy Brigade. In Germany, as the Farm der Superhexen, or "Farm of the Super Witches." In his The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, Jason S. Martinko writes "P/D: Jay Jackson. Cast: Candy Samples (non sex), Roxanne Brewer (non sex), Uschi Digard (non sex), Eve Orlon (as Sunny Boyd), Linda York, Deborah McGuire, Rick Dillon. A girl is sent by a photographer to go undercover into a training camp run by man-hating lesbian feminists. She also brings along her lover, who fakes being a deaf mute. He ends up getting gang raped by the militant feminists. The screenplay was written by Jack Holtzman. Cinematography was done by Fred Goodich and film editing was done by Jay Jackson."

Martinko didn't know that "Jay Jackson" is a pseudonymfor the once-prolific, Israeli-born porn film maker, Jourdan Alexander, whom we took a quick look at in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part XIII: 1978-79, where we looked at his porn flick Heavenly Desire (1979 / song & scene), which Novak had the copyright to, and wrote that Jourdan Alexander was "Born Yaacov Yaacovy on January 27, 1945, in Tel Aviv, Israel (and died September 24, 2008, in California), Jourdan Alexander — a.k.a. Jack Wolfe, Jacov Jaacovi, Jordan Alexander, Jaacov Jaacovi — seems to have entered porn in 1971 with the lost Western spoof A Fistful of 44s (1971); what he was doing between his last known direct-to-video movies, From China with Love (1994) and Backdoor Smugglers (1994), and 2008, when he died, is unknown to us." 

Trailer to

Female Chauvinists:

Female Chauvinists has a cast that includes some pneumatic actresses that would make Russ Meyer proud: aside from Uschi and Candy Samples (12 Apr 1940 – 30 Sept 2019), the impressive Roxanne Brewer (1 Mar 1941 – 1 Oct 1987) and Deborah McGuire (below, with Uschi, from the film) are found in this time capsule.

Over at Cinema Headcheese, in their blog entry Interracial Sex Havoc Part #4: 1976 they say, "This [...] is a sexist satire of the feminist movement. It is also very boring and not funny at all.For starters, the feminists won't let a transsexual join their demonstrations. But the film really kicks off when a girl with enormous tits (Brewer) has sex with a guy (Rick Dillon) while a photographer is taking pictures of them, soon he will convince her to join the movement. 'They are just women; they need a man to straighten them up.' On with the show, women are using bottles as sex toys and one of them says that she became a lesbian because her father raped her when she was young. Anyway, there's loads of interracial sex in this one, mainly between a black girl (McGuire) and several white performers. GOD IS A FEMALE."

It should perhaps be pointed out that the hardcore sex was subsequently added, so not everyone shown having sex is actually having the sex. Indeed, WIP Films complains that the movie "would be a soft-core classic for fans of women with huge breasts, but is ruined by (lots of) badly edited-in additional hard X inserts and scenes".

At Something Weird, Prince Pervo offers a somewhat more blow-by-blow description of the movie: "'Do unto the male chauvinist pigs as they have done unto you!' shrieks Ms. Fulla Bull (Nora Holliday), the gnome-like leader of a militant group of Female Chauvinists […], and while protesting in Hollywood, she attracts the attention of Cecil, a creepy photographer, who gets an idea. 'I want to expose them for the dirty bunch of lesbians they really are,' he tells Boopsie (the breast-heavy Brewer, who probably woud've been a burlesque superstar if she'd been born a bit earlier). Boopsie promptly enrolls in Ms. Bull's training camp which also includes such new recruits as Glory (Debbie McGuire, one of the few black stars of sexploitation), Chi Chi (Eva Orlon, billed here as 'Sunny Boyd'), […] and the dramatically contoured Uschi Digard as Pussy, a die-hard dyke in love with her galpal Lucy (Helen O'Connell). ('Lucy likes Pussy,' get it?) Sure enough, there's plenty of lesbian action in the camp — almost all of which involves Uschi ('It may be a dog-eat-dog world out there, but it's a pussy-eat-pussy world down here!') — but there are also classes on the vagina and male supremacy as well as group masturbation with Dr. Pepper bottles. By pretending to be deaf and dumb, Boopsie's boyfriend Vince also infiltrates the compound and is hired as a handyman and clandestine stud until Ms. Bull learns of him ('We have found a serpent in our Garden of Eden!'). Though a 'castration ceremony' is scheduled, the gals instead decide to spare and 'study him' by keeping Vince in a stable where he's forced to service each girl at a time.... We're also treated to Uschi and Roxanne doing a steamy girl-girl scene; a surreal dream scene in which Uschi and a bunch of the gals rob a 'sperm bank' in the middle of the woods; and, shockingly, Ms. Bull even getting into the action by stripping off her clothes and diving on Vince — a moment in celluloid history that will absolutely scar everyone who views it. And then there's hardcore — most of it spliced in from other films. […] On the other hand, the original version wasn't entirely softcore in the first place and crossed the line with some of the masturbation scenes (note Debbie and the bottle) as well as some oral sex which is somewhat obscured by the camera but definitely not faked. In fact, part of the perverse pleasure here is trying to determine if the active genitalia do or do not really belong to the people on screen. Ah, the joys of studying film...."

Supervixens

(1975, writ & dir. Russ Meer)

We took a quick looked this classic Meyer's film way back in 2011 in our R.I.P. Career Review of Charles Napier, where we scribbled:

"Perhaps Meyer's last truly entertaining and successful films, starring the memorable Shari Eubank [above] in the dual roles of SuperAngel and SuperVixen, Charlie Pitts as the put-upon Clint Ramsey and Napier as the psychopathic cop Harry Sledge. This was the first film we at a wasted life ever saw with Napier, and we never forgot his face. Other faces (and breasts) of note are supplied by the Haji, Colleen Brennan (as Sharon Kelly) and Uschi Digard. Plot: Clint Ramsey has to leave his job at Martin Bormann's gas station and go on the run after psycho cop Harry Sledge murders his wife. Throughout his travels Clint gets raped and harassed by hot wanton women before meeting his dream woman. But then Harry shows up, intent on killing Clint and his new squeeze.... Thank God for Polish dynamite."

 

The image above is an Italo poster from when the film was released. Were a poster like that made today, it would surely be labelled a "Photoshop Fail".

When Haji passed on in 2013, we took a deeper look at the movie in her R.I.P. Career Review: "Digital Retribution says: 'Supervixens is an extremely unusual film. What may at first come across as soft core porn, actually has a pretty good story, and is a hilarious, sexy and is a vicious satire of the times in which it was made. Meyer took the similar themes of his earlier film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965 / trailer)and took everything to a more excessive level. The women are bustier, and regularly topless, the violence more horrific and shocking, the chases faster, the set pieces more rural and the obscure, well, more obscure. With many deliberately scandalous moments in this film, Supervixens is in a genre all of its own…'

We here at a wasted lifefind it a fabulous film, though not all who took part seemed to have enjoyed making it. When asked about the movie in an interview at Rock! Shock! Pop!, the Golden Age porn star Colleen Brennan, who plays SuperCherry in the movie and whose last known credit (as far as we can tell) is Colleen Brennan: Porn's 1st Grandma (2007), tritely said: 'I sincerely believe that Russ Meyer likes breasts but not their complex life-support systems. I didn't like him the first day I met him or the last. [...] And I'm not saying that Meyer was any fonder of me, but I would never have signed up for another one of his misogynistic tit-floggers.'

Haji appears as SuperHaji in this multi-violent cartoon of a soft-core sexploitation film that literally gives meaning to the word cleavage. Among all the cartoon babes that populate this film, SuperHaji does stand out a bit as the overly sparkly hippy waitress that could but refuses (out of spite) to confirm the hero's alibi. While her unique appearance fits the overall lack of reality of the movie, as she explains in her interview in Shock Cinema, her look was due to a misunderstanding: "Russ said, 'We're gonna be shooting in a nightclub.' At that point, a lot of young people were wearing stones on their faces. Gluing stones everywhere. It took me hours to glue those stones all over me, and when I showed up, it was this little cheap roadhouse! It's like putting an emerald on a fake gold necklace! I said to Russ, 'Why didn't you tell me it was going to be this kind of place? Look at me!' But we went with the scene anyway. It was pretty, but I was just a little out of place. [laughs] There I was, serving beer with stones all over me!"

Shake! Shake! Shake!

The lead female of the movie, the intensely beautiful Shari Eubank, plays two roles and left the film business after her next movie, the less-memorable Chesty Anderson, USN (1976 / excerpt), to return to Illinois to teach; she currently works* at Blue Ridge High, and her great smile seems to be very much intact. Over at Bright Lights Russ Meyer once claimed the film, the first that he wrote alone ('together with the actors'), is his version of an Horatio Alger tale: 'They were always about a young man who was totally good, and he would always set out to gain his fortune and he would always come up against terrible people. They did everything they could to do him in, but he fought fair, you know, and he always survived and succeeded in the end.'
*By now, actually, she could well be retired. One stays ageless only on film.

And, finally: the plot — as explained by All Movie: "[...] Clint (Charles Pitts) is working at a gas station (run by none other than Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland), who was working as a bartender in Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) when his wife (Eubank) is brutally murdered by Harry Sledge (Charles Napier), a cop with a deeply sadistic streak. Clint tries to bring Harry to justice while Harry attempts to frame Clint for the crime. In the meantime, Clint is constantly pursued by a variety of women with improbable names, voracious sexual appetites and bodies that make Pamela Anderson look like Kate Moss. [...] Supervixens features a villainous performance by Charles Napier, another from Meyer stalwart Stuart Lancaster and several typically cantilevered beauties, including Haji, Shari Eubank and Uschi Digard." Not to mention Christy Hartburg as SuperLorna, the poster girl, in her only film role ever,* and the Afro American babe Deborah McGuire as SuperEula..."

*Since then, it has come to be revealed that "Christy Hartburg", possibly born Christine Siggelakis,did indeed take part in a few later movie and TV projects, but under the name "Christina Cummings". She had blink-and-you-miss-it appearances in National Lampoon's Movie Madness (1982 / trailer) and Wacko (1982 / trailer). 

Trailer to

Supervixens:

The Black Gestapo

(1975, dir Lee Frost)
 

A.k.a. Ghetto Warriors and Black Enforcers. It was perhaps to be expected that when the legendary sleaze-sploitation director Lee Frost (14 Aug 1935 – 25 May 2007), together with his regular collaborator Wes Bishop (12 Sept 1932 – 25 June 1993), would finally decide to jump on the Blaxploitation bandwagon, they would try something as insane as melding it with Nazi-sploitation. The Black Gestapo was not exactly a big hit when it came out, in part (we assume) because it was so obviously subconsciously anti-black, but the years has given the movie a certain level of cult popularity, to the point that a website like Last Movie Review on the Left— a honky website as lily-white as this one, we assume — now raves "Action, beautiful naked women, big bad black guys, and a cool funky soundtrack. Blaxploitation at its finest." 

Trailer to

The Black Gestapo:

Pre-certhas the plot description as found on some old VHS: "They are the Ghetto Warriors.The People's Army has declared war on the streets. It could have happened in any major city in the United States. Ex-Vietnam veteran General Ahmed (Rod Perry of The Black Godfather [1974 / trailer]) fought for years for a grant from the city to operate a peoples [sic] army, a black organization dedicated to dealing with the problems of the Black Ghetto. His small army of 100 operated weekly food programmes for the poor and several detoxification units for alcoholics and drug addicts. All in opposition to the White Syndicate pumping drugs into the people faster than the peoples [sic] army could stem the flow. It was Colonel Kojah (Charles Robinson of Beowulf [1999] and Set It Off [1996]), Ahmed's Chief of Staff, who suggested they form a security force. Ahmed is cautious knowing that Kojah is capable of extreme violence and does not wish to start a blood bath between Whites and Blacks. However, when pretty Marsha Moore (Angela Brent), a nurse in one of the detoxification clinics and one time lover of General Ahmed is savagely beaten and raped by two of the syndicates [sic] men, Ahmed gives in to Colonel Kojah's demands for a security force and the target is vengeance, power and The Black Gestapo…"

Both Lee Frost and Wes Bishop play white bad guys in this movie, while Uschi Digard plays the white ho' of Kojah.

Trash Citypoints out the obvious: "As the Blaxploitation fad ran its course, entries got more off-the-wall. This may be the looniest of them all, not least for its Nazi footage, set to a funky 'wacka-chikka' soundtrack. […]"

Over at All Movie, Donald Guariscopretty much agrees, saying "Even by Blaxploitation standards, this is one mean and seedy little affair. The Black Gestapo lives up the offensive potential of its title by cramming every bit of nastiness it can muster into its short running time; veteran exploitation scribes Lee Frost and Wes Bishop pack their tale with an endless stream of shoot-outs, bare flesh, fisticuffs and every drop of bad attitude that can be wrung from the subject of race relations. As a result, The Black Gestapo is socially irresponsible but never less than watchable. […] All in all, The Black Gestapo is likely to alienate most viewers on the strength of its extraordinarily tacky premise alone but curiosity-seekers will find it lives up to its perverse promise." 

Music to

The Black Gestapo:

While the Department of Afro-American Research Arts & Culture (DAARAC) doesn't have any contentions with the movie, Bad Azz MoFo takes a look at some of the movie's subtexts and does, thus spleening: "There are so many bad Blaxploitation movies (and by bad, I don't mean good), that it's hard to say which are the ones you should avoid the most. If, however, you find yourself in a situation where you have an opportunity to see The Black Gestapo, I'd really recommend watching something like bestiality videos instead. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if you never watch a Blaxploitation film in your life, this is the one to not see. This ineptly executed little ditty tells the story of the People's Army, a Black Panther-like organization that protects the neighborhood, but is led astray by corruption and white poontang. […] Things begin to get out of hand as the security force start shakin' down the community, takin' up criminal activities, and makin' it with the white ho's that lounge around the pool at the People's Army stronghold, while Kojah and his homies eat fried chicken. Seriously. […] The Black Gestapocan best be described as B-movie honky propaganda. The very concept of black empowerment and militancy is raped and distorted by this low-rent piece rancid garbage. And I do mean low rent. On a technical basis alone this movie is a loser. If movies were toilet paper, this would be the equivalent to wiping your ass with plywood. Apparently writer Wes Bishop and director Lee Frost were trying to draw some comparison to the black power movement, Nazi Germany, and maybe even Idi Amin's regime that was then in power in Uganda."

Over at the imdb, in turn, some guy named horrorbargainbin sees it less extreme, saying instead that "The first half of the film is the better with the evil white crime syndicate going to war with The People's Army. All too soon though, The People's Army is exploiting its own people in the exact same manner the driven-out whites did. No, we can no longer root for the Black Gestapo since they are shown doing or saying the exact same horrible things the whites had previously done in at least three scenes. The point, very much the same as that of the novel Animal Farm, is really driven home so that even the least sharp viewer could grasp it. Those who overthrow the oppressor are doomed to become oppressors themselves."

If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!!

(1975, dir. Keefe Brasselle & I. Robert Levy)

One of only two directorial credits by minor actor Keefe Brasselle (7 Feb 1923 – 7 July 1981, of Not Wanted [1949 / trailer] and Black Gunn [1972 / trailer]); his other co-directorial credit is for The Fighting Wildcats (1957), produced by Richard Gordon (see R.I.P. Richard Gordon). Brasselle's co-director for this movie here is I. Robert Levy, who went on to direct the follow-up film, Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses (1977 / trailer) alone.

This is one of a plethora of puerile sketch comedy flicks to hit the screen throughout the seventies and early eighties, all of which were illegitimate offspring of Laugh-In. This one here is a bit like H.G. Lewis's Miss Nymphet's Zap In (1970 / trailer) in that all the jokes are basically just sex jokes, but despite how cheap If You Don't Stop… might look, it looks like a million dollars in comparison to Lewis's no-budget production.

Like its sequel, this movie was written by I. Robert Levy, Mike Price and Mike Callie; the last of the trio went on to write and self-publish a whole series of "bad taste joke books (available at Amazon, for example) with titles such as The Hilarious Guide to Great Bad Taste Dirty Jokes, The Hilarious Guide to Great Bad Taste Mexican Jokes and/or Trump vs Hillary: The Ultimate Bad Taste Political Joke Book. One and all, perfect Christmas gifts for your Trump-voting family member.*

*Let's look at the sales description to Vice President Pence's favorite book of the series, The Hilarious Guide to Great Bad Taste Gay and Lesbian Jokes Vol 6: "A superb and funny collection of over 220 premium Classic Dirty, Bad Taste, Offensive, insulting, and Perverted GAY & LESBIAN JOKES & ONE LINERS that FAGS, LESBOS, HOMOS, PECKER PUFFERS,CRACK SNACKERS, GASH GOBBLERS, FUDGE PACKERS, DYKES, RUG MUNCHERS, WEENIE WASHERS, ASS BANDITS & 'BRUCIES' Really Hate…. And Rightfully So! Written, Edited and 'Massaged' for the needy 'Bad Taste Deprived' by Acclaimed Comedy & Joke Writer and Prodcer, MIKE CALLIE [...]"

Uschi Digard — a.k.a. "Uschi Bazzoom"— appears often throughout the movie, usually nude.

Retrospace hits the nail on the head by saying, "If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind (1975) is just a collection of off-color jokes put to film. Consider it a film adaptation of a dirty joke book.... which is not necessarily a bad thing. Lightweight, fun, ribald humor is a dead art. I think we're so inundated these days with much more graphic stuff, that cheeky humor just seems... well, a bit lame. […] As to this movie, I really can't give it a proper review except to say that if you like vintage cocktail lounge comedy, you'll appreciate this film. There's no plot, just joke after joke." 

Hah Hah Hah!

There is a framing story, of course, as Movie Guynotes, "They're the kind of jokes that teenage boys whisper to each other in the junior high/middle school locker room after gym class. […] The premise that holds these sketches together is an awards show that recognizes various achievements in all things sexual...... Best Lay of the Year, Best Solo Performance of the Year, Most Persistant Pansy, Best Set of Jugs, etc. The awards show, hosted by Pat McCormick (as himself), plays like an Academy Awards ceremony, it even has a great finale, a Busby Berkeley-like number featuring actor Keefe Brassell (A Place in the Sun [1951 / trailer]) singing Don't Fuck Around With Love. It's one of this flick's many highlights. The viewer gets a series of jokes about homosexuality, impotence, bestiality, adultery, profane old ladies, masturbation, female anatomy and leering sex perverts and degenerates. Some of the gags work and some don't. […] The filmmakers pretty much leave no stone unturned, they reference almost every sexual matter and the movie rightfully deserves it's R-rating. It's one of those dirty movies that no parent in their right mind would allow their teens to watch, even though the level of humor appears to be aimed at 14-year-old boys, so they wait until the parents are asleep before sneaking downstairs to watch it at 2:15 am on cable TV. They keep the sound turned down very low and cover their mouths while they snicker at the corny gags and gawk at the abundance of naked ladies. […]"

We here at a wasted life searched long and hard to find Keefe Brasselle's song Don't Fuck Around With Love somewhere online, but were unsuccessful. For that, however, we found the song below. A real doo-wop song from 1953 recorded by a long forgotten (if ever known) group named The Blenders as an "alternative take" to their official Jay Dee Records release, Don't Play Around with Love.

The Blenders sing

Don't Fuck Around With Love:

The Killer Elite

(1975, dir. Sam Peckinpah)

Uschi Digard, glorified extra: uncredited, she's a party guest in the background of some scene somewhere in this movie. This Peckinpah sock-em chop-em movie (!!!) is based on a novel by "Robert Rostand" originally entitled Monkey in the Middle (but which now shares the name of the film), and if we are to believe Wikipedia (03.29.18), James Caan, the movie's lead, rates the movie "zero on a scale of ten" and only took the part on the recommendation of his advisors; at Revolvy, on the other hand, they say he rates it five out ten.

Trivia unrelated to this film: One of James Caan's earliest film appearances, uncredited, is as a "Soldier with radio" somewhere in Irma La Deuce (1963 / trailer), in which not Uschi but another big-breasted icon had a relatively visible part: Tura Satana (10 July 1938 – 4 Frb 2011) played Suzette Wong. 

Trailer to

The Killer Elite:

At Ozus' World Movie Reviews, Dennis Schwartz, who thinks that "the convoluted plot is enhanced greatly by Peckinpah's gritty direction, though it could and should have been more exciting", offers the following plot description: "Tough guy ladies man Mike Locken (James Caan ofWay of the Gun[2000]]) is a mercenary CIA-like security agent employed by the shadowy organization Com Teg, run by the mysterious Laurence Weyburn (Gig Young of The Shuttered Room[1967 / trailer]) and under him is the ambitious field boss Cap Collis (Arthur Hill). The company receives payments from the CIA to do jobs it is not sanctioned to do. Mike's partner and best friend George Hansen (Robert Duvall) turns out to be a double-crosser who leaves him for a cripple, after he was richly bought off to go over to the other side. […] Bent on revenge, Mike works hard to rehab so he can walk again with the aid of a cane and he also diligently works-out in martial arts. Mike's lured out of retirement by the unreliable Collis when there's a failed attempt at the San Francisco airport by Japanese ninjas to assassinate Yuen Chung (Mako), an anti-Communist Chinese political leader. Mike is further told that the backup hit-men team at the airport were Hansen and an associate named Hamilton. Mike recruits for $500 a day a team of trigger-happy sharpshooter Jerome Miller (Bo Hopkins of Crack in the Floor [2001] and Uncle Sam [1996]) and loyal wheel-man Mac (Burt Young of Blood Beach [1980 / trailer] and Carnival of Blood [1970 / trailer]), and the trio in a straightforward action-packed manner aim to take down the baddies while protecting their idealistic political client."

 

The Parrallax Review was not all that impressed by the movie, saying: "Mid-'70s Peckinpah! Ah, but therein lies the rub. That may have been Peckinpah's most fruitful period, but by 1975, it was also the beginning of the end of his career. There's a distinct feeling throughout this movie that you're muddling through a hangover. Many scenes feel disconnected, and so does much of the acting by Caan, who tries for charmingly unpolished but often gives us smarmy, mumbled lines, as if he were coked out. Caan is said to have introduced Peckinpah to cocaine during the shoot, and the rambling incoherency on screen — including the dialogue and direction — certainly seems in line with that."

Surrender to the Void sees the film as flawed, but also thinks that "The Killer Elite is a remarkable film from Sam Peckinpah that features excellent performances from James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Burt Young. While it may be considered one of Peckinpah's weaker films, it is still a fascinating suspense-thriller that does play into Peckinpah's fascination with man and changing times as well this growing sense of cynicism where honor and loyalty are becoming non-existent. In the end, The Killer Elite is a marvelous film from Sam Peckinpah."

Despite what some think, this movie was not remade in 2011. That Killer Elite, featuring two men we here at a wasted life would love to see in full frontal nude — Jason Stratham and Dominic Purcell — is based on the novel The Feather Men by Ranulph Fiennes and has no Uschi in it, anywhere. 

Trailer to

Killer Elite:

A Climax of Blue Power

(1975, dir. "F.C. Perl")

Director "F.C. Perl" is otherwise known as Lee Frost, a (dead) filmmaker who needs no introduction to sleaze fans. He also used the "Franklin G. Pearl" moniker a few years earlier for Poor Cecily (1973, see Part VII). A Climax of Blue Power was obviously made as a skin-heavy "roughie", but by the time it hit the grindhouses it had been reedited with a lot of XXX inserts. Going by stills that exist, Uschi may have had a larger and nuder part in the original (and lost) soft-core version, but in the hardcore edit that survives, she shows up for all of a few minutes and keeps her clothes on.

As a triple-X movie, Frost's movie is found in Jason S. Martinko's The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, where Martinko supplies a rare, full synopsis: "A sex deviant (I. William Quinn) dressed in a police uniform drives around Los Angeles in a phony police sedan, looking for prostitutes to harass and humiliate. He 'arrests' a harlot (Starlyn Simone, credited as 'Betty Childs') and drives her to a secluded area. He offers to let her go if she'll fellate him, but then he rapes and beats her after she agrees. While peeping on another woman (Angela Carnon, as 'Linda Harris') through the window of her beach house, the deviant sees her accidentally shoot and murder her husband. He intends to make her pay for her crime, but runs off. He visits a massage parlor where Uschi Digard and Bob Creese make quick cameos, and gets a 'massage' from two professionals. Instead of paying the $80.00 he owes, he pulls out his fake badge threatens to arrest the owner and girls for prostitution, and quickly leaves. At home, he lounges on his bed masturbating to 8mm loops of Rene Bond. Haunted by visions of the murderess from the beach house, he knows he must make her pay! He drives there and threatens the woman with a gun, before giving her a bath while dressed as a woman, with a blonde wig and make-up on. After the awkward bath, he carries her to the bedroom for a long sex scene. Angela Carnon had a body double stand-in for her sex scene, which adds to the strangeness. In the end, Angela shoots the deviant in the back, but he staggers to his car for one last chase scene with the cops. The deviant eventually pulls to the side of the road and the cops find him dead in his car."

Opening title to

A Climax of Blue Power:

Over at Amazon.com, Dr. Nono gives this "porn-with-plot potboiler" five out of five stars and says, "For those who like plot with their porn, Climax of Blue Power delivers energetic doses of each. Made in the 1970s when sex films used crudely-wrought plotlines to accent their carnal appeal (and to provide a defense against the obscenity laws of the time), Climax has a story that would have been effective without graphic depictions of sex but its provocative themes are well-served by them. […] The sexual sadism of the 1970s 'roughie' porn genre is usually too absurd to be disturbing, and that's pretty much the case here. Nevertheless, there's plenty of oddball debauchery to distinguish Climax of Blue Power as one of the most interesting roughies of the era. Throw in a great, atmospherically funky soundtrack, dream sequences, a plot twist revealing why the murder was deemed a suicide and a finale car chase that winds through the arid scenery of Southern California, and you got some blue-powerful bang for your buck! And the sex? Yeah, you get that too."

And when it comes to the sex, DVD Drive-inis of the opinion that "Lee Frost most probably shot this as one of his softcore two-day wonders. [...] Frost shot a series of ultra-low budget sex films in the early 1970s, and the look and feel of A Climax of Blue Power seems to gel with these quickies. However, it only saw theatrical distribution in 1974, when softcore had gone the way of the dinosaurs (and after Frost had some kind of credibility as a director, hence the pseudonym 'F.C. Perl' on this baby). It's doubtful Frost shot the hardcore footage for the release version (paging Chris Poggiali!), but it's actually pretty well-integrated. The viewer could actually buy that a given cock could belong to a given actor, and that an active mouth could belong to an active sex performer (the only exception to this is Angela Carnon's body double, who looks nothing like her)."

Girls Guns and Ghoulscould do without the bodywork: "A Climax of Blue Power is not really that much fun to watch. I would have appreciated it a lot more if the ugly hardcore bits weren't so clumsily spliced in. The sex actors don't look anything like their softcore counterparts, most of the time. The film would have definitely stood up as a softcore feature on its own. Still, I guess films such as these weren't made for the Merchant Ivory crowd. Jason Carns tries pretty hard as Eddie, and in some scenes pulls off the psychopath he's meant to be. Lee Frost […] has created quite the sick little drama with this dark, generally unknown little beast, and you can occasionally feel some discomfort being inside Eddie's head, even in the non-explicit scenes when he's just alone and ranting against the world. It does seem that some attempt was made at art, of a sort. Of course, any storylines, drama and character development quickly vanished from sex cinema as the years went by, so maybe films as unique as these need to be viewed and appreciated on some levels." 

A scene from

A Climax in Blue:

Repulsive Cinema is capable of the last, it seems, as they rave: "A Climax of Blue Poweris down and dirty triple X roughie from legendary exploitation director Lee Frost […]. The film is really well-made, stylish and moves along at a great pace, keeping you on the edge of your seat throughout the movie. Jason Carns gives a nice performance in the role of Eddie, and it's unnerving to see him slowly going more and more depraved as the movie progresses. And Linda, the killer, played by the gorgeous Starlyn Simone, does a good job as the killer turned victim. […] Disturbing and tense, A Climax of Blue Power plays out like a tight thriller. One of the very best roughie triple X films of the 70s. Highly recommended!"

More, more, more Uschi still to come.

Pudelmützen Rambos (Germany, 2004)

March 20, 2020, 2:59 am

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An English-language review for this "movie" is probably pointless, as Pudelmützen Ramboswill surely never be dubbed or subtitled in English (or any language), but hell: if we don't review it, surely no one else ever will. (No great loss, probably.)

We here at a wasted life actually have rather a weak spot for Jochen Taubert flicks, going so far as having said a positive word or three for two other of his shot-on-video D2V "movies", Ich pisse auf deinen Kadaver ["I Piss on Your Cadaver"] (1999) and Zombie Reanimation(2009). Theoretically, we should have one or two for this one, too, the title of which translates into Pom-Pom Cap Rambos, as we laughed a lot while watching it. But, shit: this "movie" just goes on for waaaay waaaay waaaay waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long — seriously, only a true masochist could possibly enjoy two straight hours of a Taubert film. And, sorry: padding a movie with Z-level music videos of crappy songs by crappy musicians (above all Jürgen "King of Mallorca" Drews) is unforgivable.

Trailer to

 Pudelmützen Rambos:

To quote from our Zombie Reanimation review: "[...] it is virtually pointless to argue whether this film (or any of his other ones) is good or bad — though it is a fact that the acting sucks, the story idiotic, the production Z-level, the actors uniformly unattractive (though the gal who did the hilariously gratuitous nude scene does have a tasty body), the blood and effects messy but undeniably fake-looking, and the pacing inconsistent. Indeed, [Pudelmützen Rambos] makes almost every other film ever trashed on this blog look like a professional Hollywood production. But then, everything here sucks on purpose, so can it be held against the film?" (It should perhaps be noted that that Pom-Pom Cap Rambos also has "gratuitous nude scene [from a pneumatic gal who] does have a tasty body".)

Cobbled together from past projects and new material and filled with his usual suspects and a few new faces, the nominal D-stars who appear voluntary or involuntary (Ralf Moeller only appears thanks to archive footage, as does Berlin personality Frank Zander) must have been in the midst of a bank-account-draining drug addictions to show face here. Strangely enough, while Dolly Buster (below, not from the film) does a lot of shooting and strutting around in this movie, she never actually shows her assets.

Also not from the film —

Dolly Buster singing
Schöner Fremder Mann:

There isn't a plot for most Pudelmützen Rambos, which features a gang of pom-pom cap-wearing losers (to become a member one must eat puddle testicles — in reference to the German name of the caps, "poodle caps") and focuses mostly on Charlie (Christian Bütterhoff), who has a fixation on Laura Croft (played by a tasty, measurably-mammoried girl whose name we know not). Somewhere along the way the movie veers off into a "save the girls" plot: scene after scene of girls getting kidnapped by the soldiers of a vampire leads to the Pudelmützen gang (and everyone they can get) joining forces to vanquish the evil. Single-scene jokes and the kitchen sink are worked in throughout the movie wherever they can be stuffed, most falling so flat that they become funnier than they are. Taubert, who knows his directorial roots, even works in an obviously intentional Ed Wood/Bela Lugosi Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959 / trailer) homage into the flick: Zander, as the vampire figure, is always played by a stand-in whose face is never shown for every scene not taken from Zander's music videos.

Ever hear of "Outsider Art"? Well, director/scriptwriter/producer/cinematographer/dictator Jochen Taubert does more than just make independent films, he makes Outsider Films. To say his work defies all rhyme or reason is an understatement, but he is obviously a dedicated soul, if not a completely obsessed filmmaker.

Used in the "movie"—

the video to Jürgen Drews'"song"
König von Mallorca:

Short Film: Darling, Get Me A Crocodile (Bulgaria?, 1960s?)

March 29, 2020, 8:22 am

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OK, here we have a truly obscure short animated film about which absolutely nothing seems to be known. We're presenting it because we find its style of animation intriguing and the events portrayed quaintly funny — and because it the short is such a mystery production. Indeed, our extended online research came away virtually empty handed...

 

Darling, Get Me a Crocodile was rediscovered by Something Weird and added as an extra on their DVD double feature of When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding Dong (1971 / a trailer) and the Gigi Darlene nudie-cutie 50,000 BC (Before Clothing) (1963).

The short is listed on the 2010 inventory list* of Movielab but, unluckily, probably due to a conflict in the program that made the PDF, the date of the film is illegible. As many fans of "bad film" know, Frank Henenlotter and Mike Vraney (29 Dec 1957 – 2 Jan 2014) of Something Weird once "ventured to the remains of the New York-based, subterranean Movielab vaults. These two fearless trash-movie advocates and enthusiasts pulled off the exploitation flick equivalent to a daring 'proof of life' mission, hustling their way into the Movielab lair and effectively raiding and rescuing dozens upon dozens of vintage, wildly obscure horror, sex, fantasy and action junk movies, getting their grips on crisp prints and, in many cases, original 35mm negatives. [Coming Soon]" We would assume that it was on that "raid" that this uncopyrighted, dateless, and in all likelihood public-domain animated short was found and saved.

On the Movielab inventory list, as in the film itself, the short is given as a Fleetwood Films production, and while there were and are dozens of Fleetwood Films out there, we would vote (without solid proof) that the Fleetwood Films in question is the firm founded by Myron Bresnick (2 April 1919 – 4 Sept 2011) in 1951, which began with his acquiring the 1948 Russian animated film Little Grey Neck (full film) and a variety of Hal Roach features. He sold the firm to the educational materials provider Macmillan in 1968.

Bresnick had a thing for foreign films, and assuming that Darling, Get Me a Crocodile is a foreign short, it fits in with the kind of stuff he would acquire. And why do we assume the short might be foreign? Well, in 1972, Darling, Get Me A Crocodile made its way to Florida for a while, where it was screened at the University of South Florida (see: page 66 of the 29 Oct 1972 issue of Sarasota Herald Tribune), where it was listed a Bulgarianfilm — although the name of its maker hardly sounds Bulgarian.

As of Florida, the trail goes cold and nothing more can currently be found about Darling, Get Me A Crocodile or its credited maker, E. Husiatowicz. "Husiatowicz" is far more a Polish name than Bulgarian one, but spelt as it is in the film's meager opening credits, it gets no hits online other than the few that mention this film, which infers that the name is either misspelt or made-up.

In any event, enjoy Darling, Get Me A Crocodile, a wasted life's Short Film of the Month for March 2020… and if you know anything about the short, please, share your info with us!

King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword (UK/USA, 2017)

April 2, 2020, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Babes of Yesteryear: Uschi Digart, Part IX: 1976

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Guy Ritchie, one of England's best contemporary auteur director's of entertainingly hip, pop crime cinema (see Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels [1998 / trailer], Snatch [2000 / trailer], Revolver [2005 / trailer], and RocknRolla [2008 / trailer]) obviously hoped to mimic the success of his Sherlock Holmes mini-franchise — see: Sherlock Holmes (2009 / trailer) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011 / trailer), both great films — with this special effects extravaganza, a "prequel" of sorts to the story of King Author. The result is his worst movie since the psychotronic disaster that is Swept Away (2002 / trailer), a massive misfire that is less a Ritchie movie than another Madonna-sized misstep, just without his ex-wife around this time.

Unlike Swept Away, this monster and demon-heavy re-envisioning of the (pre)legend of King Arthur is heavy on all Ritchie's stylistic touches and well-made, but it drowns in CGI excesses and (just like in Swept Away) a total lack of interesting or likable [lead] characters. A major cinematic miscarriage in every way, it is hardly surprising that this totally berserk and bombastic but oddly boring movie bombed. Jude Law is the bad guy, Vortigern, who sacrifices everything he loves to evil demons so as to usurp the thrown from Arthur's dad (Eric Brana) and remain in power. Like all evil kings in flick's like this one, despite totally having the chance, he doesn't simply kill Arthur (Charlie Hunnam of Crimson Peak [2015 / trailer]) when the good lad shows up as an adult and pulls Excalibur from the stone and, instead, allows the lad to escape and thus enables the movie to meander pointlessly onward.

King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword is a ridiculous and ultimately unmemorable special-effects extravaganza that resolves itself as predictably as expected while always conveying the sense that it is still in search of a story, all the while screaming obnoxiously: "I'm a new franchise!" Not.

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Babes of Yesteryear: Uschi Digart, Part IX: 1976

April 11, 2020, 12:41 am

≫ Next: Taking Lives (USA, 2004)

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Babes of Yesteryear:a wasted life's irregular and PI feature that takes a look at the filmographies of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema of the past. Some may still be alive, others not. Our choice of whom we look at is idiosyncratic and entirely our own — but the actors are/were babes, one and all.

As the photo (possibly) and blog-entry title above reveal, we're currently looking at the films of one of the ultimate cult babes ever, a woman who needs no introduction to any and all red-blooded American cis gender, tendentially hetero male whose hormonal memory goes further back than the start of the 80s: the great Uschi Digard.* 

*A.k.a. Astrid | Debbie Bowman | Brigette | Briget | Britt | Marie Brown | Clarissa | Uschi Dansk | Debbie | Ushi Devon | Julia Digaid | Uschi Digaid | Ushi Digant | Ursula Digard | Ushie Digard | Ushi Digard | Alicia Digart | Uschi Digart | Ushi Digart | Ushi Digert | Uschi Digger | Beatrice Dunn | Fiona | Francine Franklin | Gina | Glenda | Sheila Gramer | Ilsa | Jobi | Cynthia Jones | Karin | Astrid Lillimor | Astrid Lillimore | Lola | Marie Marceau | Marni | Sally Martin | Mindy | Olga | Ves Pray | Barbara Que | Ronnie Roundheels | Sherrie | H. Sohl | Heide Sohl | Heidi Sohler | U. Heidi Sohler | Sonja | Susie | Euji Swenson | Pat Tarqui | Joanie Ulrich | Ursula | Uschi | Ushi | Mishka Valkaro | Elke Vann | Elke Von | Jobi Winston | Ingred Young… and probably more.

As The Oak Drive-Inputs it: "With her long hair, Amazonian build & beautiful natural looks (usually devoid of make-up), nobody seems to personify that 60's & early 70's sex appeal 'look' better than [Uschi Digard]. She had a presence that truly was bigger than life — a mind-bending combination of hippie Earth Mother looks and a sexual wildcat. […] She always seemed to have a smile on her face and almost seemed to be winking at the camera and saying 'Hey, it's all in fun.' Although she skirted around the edges at times, she never preformed hardcore…"*
*Actually, if you search long and hard and go to the type of websites that install all sorts of nasty bugs onto your computer, there is a grainy, B&W single shot loop-like film around that looks very much like a private home movie that somehow escaped the home closet. Hard, it is; hot, it is not. We found it once, but didn't save it — much like we did with Neola Graef's current whereabouts.

Today, Uschi Digard is still alive, happily married (for over 50 years), and splitting her time Palm Springs and Los Angeles, CA. To learn everything you ever wanted to know about her, we would suggest listening to the great interview she gave The Rialto Report in 2013. You can find Uschi on that evil thing known as facebook.

Please note: we make no guarantee for the validity of the release dates given… or of the info supplied, for that matter.

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

Go here for

Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

Uschi Digard, Part III: 1970, Part II

Uschi Digard, Part IV: 1971, Part I

Uschi Digard, Part V: 1971, Part II

Uschi Digard, Part VI: 1972

Uschi Digard, Part VII: 1973-74

Uschi Digard, Part VIII: 1975


Chesty Anderson, USN
(1976, dir. Ed Forsyth)
 

A.k.a. Up the Navy, Anderson's Angels, and Chesty Anderson — US Navy.

Opening credits to

Chesty Anderson, USN:

Way back in September of 2012, in a fit of spite, we tried to take a short glance at the careers of everyone who had ever done something in film that died that month. (We failed, needless to say, though we did cast a wide net.) In Part VI of that Sisyphean undertaking, we turned our eyes to Ira Miller (14 Oct 1940 – 23 Sept 2012), "a former member of The Second City (in the 60s) and occasional bit-part actor in comedies" who also appeared in this movie.

And there we wrote:

"Miller appears briefly as a comedian in this mild exploitation film that has a bigger reputation than it probably should, as its only true quality of note is that it is the second and last film of the great Shari Eubank, who starred in this film and Russ Meyers's fab flick Supervixens (1975 / German trailer) and then left the industry to become a language arts teacher in Illinois. Still, the movie-literate Steven Puchalski of Shock Cinema seems to have sort of enjoyed it: 'This pneumatic comedy from director Ed Forsyth is nearly as tame as his earlier drive-in hit, Superchick (1973 / trailer), and runs on the same half-baked charm. In addition, there's a terrifically odd cast, headed up by Shari Eubank in the aptly-named title role. [...] Chesty is just one of the latest crop of WAVES, who, after a hard day of maneuvers, likes to unbutton their blouses and lounge about their quarters in their undies. But when a crooked senator wants to retrieve an incriminating photo (he's in drag) from Chesty's Navy sis, Cynthia (Connie Hoffman), she ends up tossed into a trash hopper and killed in a shredding machine. Of course, the Navy is no use whatsoever, since they think Cynthia is merely AWOL with some guy, so Chesty and her barracks pals have to bring the murderers to justice on their own. With a plot this dumb, it's no surprise that most of the fun comes from the supporting throwaways, including a midget named Stretch, who runs the local watering hole; Scatman Crothers as a pool hustler; and Ilsa's Dyanne Thorne as a nurse. [...] Despite bar-room brawls, a man-eating plant (huh?), and plenty of cleavage, this nonsense has all the depth of a Three's Company episode, with the artistic style to match. Hell, even the obligatory shower scenes are strictly PG. You have been warned.'"

The advertisement above (from ...the scene of screen 13...) for the Showtime Drive-Inis for what could be the movie, despite the fact that the woman pictured is actually the dearly departed eternal GILF Candy Samples (12 April 1940 – 30 Sept 2019); the second movie on the double feature, Delinquent School Girls (1975 / trailer), is perhaps most noteworthy for being the only feature film credit of the pneumatic legendary hippie nude model Roberta Pedon, who actually never met her legendary end as recent research by The Rialto Report has revealed.

The advert below, which is for the Majestic I, which is now a restaurant, shows Chesty on a double bill with the exceptionally bizarre and obscure Sins of Rachel (1972 / trailer further below), a "slice of low budget trash [that] is not a good movie but is worth watching for cult fans interested in the crossroads of queer cinema, exploitation, and melodrama. An older female lounge singer (Ann Noble) is found brutally murdered with her face bludgeoned in. The prime suspect is her son (Bruce Campbell), a tormented gay outcast, for whom she felt incestuous desires and protected from any potential female suitors. [Teenage Frankenstein]" 

Indeed, though an exploiter, Sins of Rachel is a rare for its time in that, as All Movie reveals, once "the painful ordeal of his mother's murder behind him, Jimmy faces his homosexuality with brave determination and rides off into the sunset on Peter's (Chase Cordell) chopper."

Trailer to

Sins of Rachel:

It should perhaps be noted that Chesty's antagonists in Chesty Anderson, USN are the Baron (Frank Campanella [12 March 1919 – 30 Dec 2006]) and his pal Vincent (the great Timothy Agoglia Carey [11 March 1929 – 11 May 1994] of The Killing [1956 / trailer], Shock Treatment [1964 / full film], Head [1968 / trailer], What's the Matter with Helen? [1971 / trailer] and so much more), a fact that must be stated so that it makes sense to point out that Uschi Digard appears in the movie as one of Baron's two girlfriends (the other is played by Pat Parker).

Among the WAVES that assist Chesty: Cocoa, played by one of our favorite Playboy Playmates (September 1978), Rosanne Katon, of Motel Hell (1980). The photo of her below is from Jet.

C.B. Hustlers

(1976, dir. Stu Segall)


"These girls keep the shiny side up and the dirty side down!"

Stu Segall's attempt at vansploitation, though we would tend to think the movie plays more with the then super-popular citizens band radio. For more on director Stu, see Saddle-Tramp Women (1972; see Uschi Part VI). The script was written by two sorely underappreciated Jacks-of-all-trades of the Golden Age of Exploitation, John Alderman (12 June 1934 – 12 Jan 1987) and John F Guff, both of whom also appear in the movie. The three eponymous  "C.B. Hustlers" are played by Uschi Digard, Janus Blythe, and Catherine Barkley. Sadly, however, the movie is pretty lousy — the only truly memorable scene is the Uschi sex scene shot from the viewpoint of the guy beneath her.

Over at Pre-Cert UK, which claims "throughout its 70-minute running time, CB Hustlers never once shifts gear from out of neutral", they also have the movie's plot: "Broadcasting in the coded argot of citizens band radio, Dancer (John Alderman […]) and his girlfriend Scuzz (Valdesta a.k.a. Jacqueline Giroux) set up sexual trysts for randy truck drivers — who get to take their pick from three lovely 'C.B Annies': Silky (Catherine Barkley), Dee Dee (a thick Scandinavian-accented Uschi Digard) and Lemon (Tiffany Jones). Eavesdropping in on the airwave high jinks are 'Boots' Clayborn (John F. Goff) and 'Mountain' Dean (Richard Kennedy), the two proprietors of local broadsheet The Clarion Weekly, who suspect that something untoward is going down and snoop around hoping for the scoop which will propel them into the journalism big league! On the side of the law is 'Smokey'— in the rotund shape of Sheriff Elrod P. Ramsey (Bruce Kimball), who constantly tries to find an excuse to run the hustlers out of the county."

Smokey meets Uschi:

About the only positive statements we could find about the movie were made at Sinful Celluloid: "Now and again you see a movie that makes you wonder, 'Why aren't more people doing that?' It just seems like such a great idea. One great idea that has never happened (on a professional scale) is Mobile Prostitution. WHAT?! Look, I'm just saying that it's enterprising and I am surprised that there isn't a reality show about it yet. What movie had such a great idea as a plot? You know it had to come from the 70s, and the movie is C.B. Hustlers. […] The cast is decent for what they are asked to do. Bruce Kimball as the sheriff is very much a doppelganger for Jackie Gleeson in Smokey and the Bandit (1977 / trailer). Note that Smokey came out a year later. Maybe this film was Jackie's Inspiration, hmmm. […] This is a film about the joy of independent film making. Nothing is too outrageous and everything goes. This flick makes me want a van, pop it in [and] have a six pack of PBR, you could do worse."

Janus Blythe, by the way, began her career is one of the great sexploitation flicks, The Centerfold Girls (1974 / trailer), was in Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive (1976 / trailer) the same year as this film here, and went on to The Incredible Melting Man (1977 / trailer) and both Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977 / trailer) and his atrocious The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984 / trailer). She eventually disappeared into Palm Springs — which, if our information is right, is also where Uschi initially vanished to (Uschi can hardly be described as "vanished" now, since you can find her on facebook).

Fantasm

(1976, dir. "Richard Bruce") 

A.k.a. The World of Sexual Fantasy. We all have to start somewhere, and Richard Franklin (15 July 1948 – 11 July 2007) almost started here. This could perhaps be claimed as the Aussie's first semi-American movie,* but his feature film directorial debut was really the Australian sex comedy The True Story of Eskimo Nell a.k.a. Dick Down Under (1975 / trailer) — not to be mistaken with the early Martin Campbell film, Eskimo Nell (1975), which was produced by Stanley A. Long.

Trailer to

Martin Campbell's Eskimo Nell:

For those of you who don't remember who Richard Franklin was, he directed such fine genre offerings as Patrick (1978 / trailer), Road Games (1981 / trailer) and Psycho II (1983 / trailer), as well as idiosyncratic crap like Link (1986 / trailer).

*Half-American, actually: the linking segments were shot down under, but the sex segments in the US. In the end, however, Fantasm is pure Ozploitation. For years, it never even made it to the North American continent.

From

Fanstasm:

Mondo Stumpohas an interesting interview with the gent (from 2002) in which he says, "[After The True Story of Eskimo Nell] I needed to make a film that would make money. So the next film was a deliberate attempt to make a sort of send up of the Scandinavian sex documentaries […]. ['White-coaters.'] They were all essentially softcore, and we decided to make a kind of send-up of one, really. Not because we wanted to do a send-up, but because we didn't think we wanted to do a genuine one. We just wanted to make a fun film about sex! […] I usually don't list it in my filmography, not because I'm ashamed to have done it […] but because it was such a low-budget thing, and done in as I recall ten or eleven days, so it was really just like a series of student films strung together, if that makes sense. So I don't really, even though it runs feature length, I don't sort of think of it as a feature film. […]" (We thinks the gentleman doth protest too much...)

The linking segments feature English actor John Bluthal (Dark City[1998] and way more) as German psychiatrist Professor Jurgen Notafreud. The segments themselves, of diverse "female sexual fantasies"— we here at a wasted lifecan't help but wonder if Nancy Friday(27 Aug 1933 – 5 Nov 2017) was an uncredited inspiration for the movie — feature a cast that the interviewer rightly calls "a Who's Who of early seventies softcore and hardcore porno", but then the casting was done by William Margold(2 Oct 1943 – 17 Jan 2017), who also appears in a segment. According to Franklin, "They [the actors] didn't cost very much, two hundred dollars a day as I recall. They were all one-day shoots. I think we paid maybe three, four hundred for John Holmes and yeah, that was about it." NO hardcore scenes were filmed.

Girls, Guns and Ghoulshas the plots to the individual segments:

"Beauty Parlour: A naked woman (Dee Dee Levitt) who, we are told by the professor, regards herself as ugly, is brought to orgasm by staff (men) in a beauty parlor who make her over, including her nipples, style her hair and shave her pubic hair off.

Card Game: A woman (Maria Arnold of Meatcleaver Massacre [1977 / trailer] and more) is passed around for sex with the men at a poker game, where her husband (Kirby Hall) continually plays bad hands. Eventually all the participants partake in an orgy.

Wearing the Pants: A frumpy housewife (Sarno& Mahonregular Gretchen Rudolph) catches a sneaky transvestite (Con Covert [1935 – 1990] of Scream in the Streets [1973 / trailer]) in her backyard, stealing her undies from her clothes line. She then ties him up and sodomizes him with a dildo in her kitchen.

Nightmare Alley: A woman (Rene Bond) is dragged into a boxing ring and raped by a black man (Al Williams), as she wanders past his gymnasium. Naturally, she enjoys the experience. Don't show your radical feminist friends this one. Come to think of it, probably best to not show them the film at all!

The Girls: Two women in a steaming sauna find each other attractive, and the more buxom woman (Uschi Digard, of course) seduces the younger one (Mara Lutra).

Fruit Salad: A woman (Maria Welton) fantasizes about a mystery lover (John Holmes, looking particularly unfit and ugly) jumping naked out of her pool and smearing her in fruit and whipped cream. They then jump into the pool, and have sex.

Mother's Darling: A mature, huge-breasted woman (Candy Samples) seduces her own son (Gene Allan Poe), a returned soldier, in the bathtub.

Black Velvet: A black woman (Shayne) strips for three men.

After School: A large-breasted woman (Roxanne Brewer, on the DVD cover below) dressed as a cartoonish schoolgirl drives her fuddy-duddy old teacher (Al Ward) to collapse with her ample assets. His glasses fog up many times.

Blood Orgy: A girl (Serena of Dracula Sucks [1978 / full XXX film] and so much more) has forced, ceremonial sex at a black mass [with a Satanic priest played by character actor Clement George Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein of The Landlady [1998 / trailer], The Haunting of Morella (1990 / trailer) and more].

"While there isn't a lot of explicit material here (though a frequently-scissored underwater sequence with John Holmes is just about over the boundary)," writes Digitally Obsessed, "it does have a nice erotic charge to most of the sequences. At the same time, the producers are not entirely serious and the linking narrative is more than a little tongue-in-cheek. There are also numerous funny segments during the vignettes, including a rubber duck making an appearance during incest in the bathtub and a surprisingly bit of humiliation in the cross-dressing segment. The often bumptious music also lends comedy to the proceedings. The humor helps give this a decent amount of replay value and lifts the film above the typical 'sex ed' film that Fantasm is satirizing. It's by no means a classic, but it certainly has an entertainment value, though the rape sequence may be hard to take for sensitive audiences."

A hit down under, it was followed two years later by Fantasm Comes Again (1977). 

Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks

(1976, dir. Don Edmonds)

The first sequel to Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. (1975, see Part VIII), with same director and of course the same Ilsa, despite the fact that she dies at the end of the first movie. David F. Friedman, however, took a fly. As the scriptwriter Langston Stafford never scripted a film before or after this one, we assume the name is a pseudonym. The art for the German poster above was done by the great (and totally unknown) George Morf, a.k.a. Georges Morf, a Swiss graphic artist who often did the film posters for the great Euro-sleazemonger Erwin C. Dietrich(4 Oct 1930 – 15 March 2018) and is claimed by some as the "discoverer" of the Ingrid Steeger (Ich – Ein Groupie a.k.a. Higher and Higher [1970 / trailer]); others claim that Steeger and her breast assets were actually discovered by a forgotten, Berlin-based photographer named Frank G. Quade. We here at a wasted life might claim that she was actually discovered by the unknown director of the porn loop Die perverse Herrin und ihre Opfer ("The Perverted Mistress and Her Victims"), which can be easily found online should you care to look for it.

 

Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks is rated "Worthless" by The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre, which also deigns to say "all in all, a much campier and less shocking sequel that is even entertaining in its sleazy way but will only to appeal to... well you know who you are." (Yes, we do.)

Uschi has a bigger role this time, as the kidnapped Scandinavian actress Inga Lindström. (She, obviously enough, is in the middle cage above.) Haji — that's her bloody face directly below — is also there again as well, which is why we took a look at the movie at her R.I.P. Career Review we did in 2013, where we wrote:

Haji, credited as "Haji Cat", plays "Alina Cordova" in this, the first sequel to Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974 / trailer) — you see her getting tortured in this film's NSFW trailer below and on the Japanese poster above. In the Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, she is a spying belly dancer who first gets her beautiful love pillows crushed when she is tortured for information about her unknown contractor and is then later killed by an exploding diaphragm... As Dr Gore astutely says: "Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikspromises nasty sleaze and does not disappoint. Every other scene had either blood or breasts or both. It's a great exploitation movie. I recommend it."

The NSFW trailer to

Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks:

We here at a wasted life, in turn, actually saw this movie a decade or two ago in a double feature with Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia [1977 / trailer], but to tell the truth we really don't remember anything about either movie...

Over at imdb, MGbasically describes the intricacies of the movie's plot: "Finding a new employer, and looking not a day older since the end of World War II, Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) works for an Arab sheik (Jerry Delony of The Horny Vampire [1971]) who enjoys importing females to use as sex slaves. An American millionaire's daughter (Colleen Brennan), a movie star (Uschi Digard), and an attractive equestrian are among his latest victims."

Ms. Brennan — seen to your right above with Uschi to your left — when asked in an interview at Rock!Shock!Pop!about her appearance in this Ilsa movie and the first one, both films she regrets having been in, disingenuously states, "Okay, here's the rule of thumb I developed too late: Never be in a movie that strives to attract an audience with whom you would not choose to share a theater." Haji is also relatively circumspect about the movie when talking toShock Cinema, saying: "I will limit myself as far as doing certain things, and some of the stuff they did in that film was a little too funky for me. I liked my part, but I don't think I did a very good job with it."

The infamous and popular Dyanne "Ilsa" Thorne, by the way, is now a minster named Dyanne Maurer who, with her current husband Howard Maurer — the couple appeared in five films together: this Ilsa film here, Ilsa the Tigress (1977 / trailer), Wanda, the Wicked Warden (1977 / trailer), the classic Harry Novak production Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman! (1975 / trailer) and all of two seconds in Franc Roddam's Liebestod segment of Aria (1987 / trailer) — now conducts wedding ceremonies in Vegas.

Up!
(1976, dir. Russ Meyer)


"Prepare to taste the black sperm of my vengeance."

Not the best Russ Meyer movie, the full version can currently be found here on YouTube. Meyer, as "B. Callum", also wrote the script. The "original story" upon which the script is based came from Anthony-James Ryan, a.k.a. "Jim Ryan" (17 June 1921 – 15 April 2006) — who, among other things, long ago played the Handyman in Eve and the Handyman (1961 / scene) — and Roger Ebert, a.k.a. "Reinhold Timme" (18 June 1942 – 4 April 2013) — who, long ago, did the screenplay to Meyer's masterpiece Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970 / trailer). As for Uschi, instead of appearing in this Russ Meyer movie, she acted as an associate producer.

Scene from

Up!

"Look, this is schlock and sexploitation, no doubt about it,"Flick Notes plainly admits, "but that doesn't mean it isn't good. Meyer obviously had a unique view of the world and the latent power of sex, perhaps even more than that, sexual tension. His use of actresses with exceptionally sized breasts and putting prosthetic organs on his male actors, to me, is his expression of how important a factor in life the sexual tension usually is and he is satirizing our pretension and denial about the potency of that reality."

That said, Up! is also the only Meyer film we ever walked out of — it simply had one too many rape scenes, and while we did laugh occasionally, for the first time we found the misogyny overwhelmed the parody. But then, we were watching it in Germany in German before we had learned German with a German woman who had a major panic attack because the rape scenes brought up childhood memories. One day, however, we do hope to give the movie another try, but without female company.

Going by what Girl, Guns and Ghoulssays, in any event, it does sound like our kind of movie: "Along with Russ Meyer's huge-breasted, uninhibited women, rapid-fire editing, glorious colour and off-the-wall dialogue, the plotline of Up! veers towards the totally insane as the film winds up. Well, this little gem of sex cinema is no less a classic because of it. In addition you've got gore and ultraviolence that would make Tom Savini proud in a couple of scenes, along with some Shakespeare. Honestly, what more could you want in a film?"

TV Guideoffers a full synopsis to what they call "Russ Meyer's most preposterous film": (Spoilers!) "A self-designated 'Greek Chorus' (Kitten Natividad) is our guide through events in a Northwestern logging community. Here, Paul (Robert McLane) and Alice (Janet Wood) own and operate a diner. Paul makes extra money organizing S&M scenes for local recluse Adolph Schwartz (Edward Schaaf), who speaks in German and looks an awful like a certain rumored-to-be-deceased Nazi leader. After their latest session is concluded, Schwartz is murdered (via the introduction of a piranha into his bathwater) by a hooded stranger. Horny cop Homer Johnson (Monte Bane) spies lovely Margo Winchester (Raven de la Croix, seen above) jogging in the road. She refuses his offer of a ride, but accepts one from local bad boy Leonard Box, who takes her into the woods and rapes her. Margo accidentally kills him while fighting him off. Homer agrees to concoct a story to cover the incident up, in exchange for Margo's favors. Margo takes a day job at Alice's Cafe, causing such an explosion of business that Alice and Paul decide to expand the cafe into a roadhouse. On opening night, Margo wears an outfit so sexy that it inflames the passions of Rafe, a lumberjack of monstrous size and strength. He rapes Margo on a table, despite the efforts of everyone to quell him. After carrying Margo and Alice off into the woods, Rafe is finally brought down by Homer and a chain saw. Back home in her shower, Margo is attacked by a hooded figure with a knife. It is Alice, the murderer. In an openly satirical sequence, the two women run naked through the woods, tying up the loose ends of the story by discussing various plot complications hitherto unknown to the viewer."

Over at All Movie, Fred Beldin sees a movie of style over substance: "Of Russ Meyer's wild canon, Up! is easily his most frenetic film, a nonstop frenzy of nudity, gore, and bawdy humor that only occasionally makes sense. Never a director to waste much time on character development or motivation, Meyer is even more focused here on sheer action, to the point where viewers can only give up and let the gorgeous scenery and ridiculous proceedings wash over them. As the '70s progressed, Meyer's films became more outrageous in terms of sex and violence, and Up! is no exception, with cartoonishly gory axe fights, a vicious rape scene (with comical 'Boiiing!' sound effects), and endless noisy couplings in police cars, showers, and mountain streams. The convoluted plot concerns some sort of Nazi conspiracy and will require repeated viewings to understand, though each ride through the beautifully photographed woodland pines will provide giddy enjoyment to those who love low-brow excitement. It's hardly the best place for neophytes to begin exploring Meyer's bizarre macho universe, though fans who haven't experienced the film will love the addled rush of images and action, whether it all adds up to a coherent story or not."

DVD Drive-Insees the film as less successful: "Filled with hot-n-heavy sex scenes, fake male appendages measuring at 12 inches long, bountiful women, repulsive violence (including another vicious rape scene), and twists and turns thrown at the audience like hatchets, Up! is half-successful and is such a strong departure from the Meyer we know and love it never really clicks. […] Don't get me wrong, the sex scenes are highly erotic, well-photographed and stunningly edited. But one of the best things about Meyer's films is that he treated sex with a comic flavor, much like John Waters does (or did). None of the sex here is funny, it's included strictly for an adult audience who couldn't get into a hardcore porno theater and settled for the next best thing. The only possibly funny scene is Paul sticking it to Der Fuhrer after all the ladies leave his dungeon! […]"

Up! Featured the first appearance in a Russ Meyer movie of (yes, they're implants) Francesca "Kitten" Natividad, who "apparently taught Russ how to give cunnilingus and have anal sex, practices he had never indulged in before, and was his companion for a good many years, as a friend and/or a lover. When she began appearing in hardcore porno films, both as a softcore participant and an active penetrative sex performer, Meyer was dismayed. Natividad's drug and alcohol abuse reached unbelievable levels, but thankfully she managed to somber up and remained friends with Meyer to his dying day. She is also one of only two or three of his leading ladies who made the effort to take care of his invalid mother when she was in a mental institution. Natividad is also a breast cancer survivor and connects with her fans at autograph shows, conventions and live performances."

Of the rest of the cast, here's some noteworthy trivia:

Edward Schaaf (7 Feb 1922 – 11 May 1998), who plays Adolph "Hitler" Schwarz, made his feature-film debut in 1956 in The Flesh Merchants a.k.a. The Wicked and the Wilds (full movie), one of the many fun exploiters of the sadly forgotten Z-filmmaker W. Merle Connell (7 Jan 1905 – 25 Nov 1963).

The lead actress, Raven de la Croix, who made her feature-film debut in Up! and went on to become "the Burlesque Queen of the 80s", is now on another plane of existence but still on Earth. You can find out more about her at her websites: Raven-Delacroix, Rantings of a Mad Womanand Raven's Cosmic Portal.

Janet Wood, whom TV Guide above reveals to be the mysterious murderer, has roles of varying sizes in other fun culty movies, namely Angels Hard as They Come (1971 / opening credits), The Centerfold Girls (1974 / trailer), Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972 / trailer) and Ice Cream Man (1995 / trailer).

Robert McLane (4 Aug 1944 – 30 Sept 1992), Wood's good-looking husband "Paul" in the movie — he gets naked a lot — can also be found in A Very Natural Thing (1974 / scene), one of the first pro-gay love stories to get mainstream release in the US. It flopped. McLane died of AIDS-related complications eighteen years later.

Monty Bane, who as Homer "the law" Johnson also gets nude and ends up with an ax in his chest, still does an occasional small movie part today. You can find him in the crappy Sleepwalkers(1992) and the interesting Babysitter Wanted (2008 / trailer).

Bob Schott, as Rafe the ax-wielder, went on to a career of playing heavies, but left the movie biz after his sizable role in Charles Band's Head of the Family (1996) to take up photography.

Larry Dean, who plays Leonard Fox, the first dead rapist of the movie, may or may not now be a country singer….

Larry Dean sings

Is There an Outside Chance:

More Uschi to come…

Taking Lives (USA, 2004)

April 17, 2020, 7:31 am

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A dankly stylish thriller that quickly loses all its logic along the way and then descends into total (but always explained!) implausibility by the end, at which point, if you get down to it, FBI agent Ileana (pre-skeletal Angela Jolie) commits much less self-defense than she does long-premeditated (as in six or more months premeditated) murder. As Jolie obviously did not, despite whatever name success gained from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001 / trailer) and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2005 / trailer), have the power to demand a no-nudity contract, a high point for star-nudity fans is her darkly shot sex scene with Ethan Hawk — conducted amidst grisly crime-scene photos — in which one gets fleeting shots of her original, pre-genetic-tested-and-then-replaced breasts. (But not of Hawke's weenie, of course, for seeing weenie means the world will end.) That sex scene, and Philip Glass's somewhat tonally atypical score (he didn't do the main theme, obviously enough) are perhaps the best things found in this speedily paced string of edgy killer-film clichés populated with the scenes and jump scares expected of this kind of undemanding flick, along with one totally unnecessary scene of a pissed-off hothead cop, Paquette (Olivier Martinez of the what-were-they-thinking western Bullfighter[2000 / full film]), punching Ileana.

Trailer to

Taking Lives:

Based on a novel by Michael Pye, Taking Livesconcerns a serial killer who takes over the lives and identities of the people he kills (every other year) and the FBI agent, Ileana, who gets called to Montreal by Inspector Leclair (the always watchable Tcheky Karyo of Gravedancers[2006]) to help catch the killer because, well, Canadian cops are incompetent or something. (Not that Ileana seems all the bright of a lightbulb, either. Sure, she seems bright lying in a grave and making clever deductions, but she only figures out the murderer's OM by accident and from there on in she calls one false card after the other.)

Taking Lives opens promisingly enough with an interesting and unexpected double murder, but once the film forwards to the present day and grand dame Gene Rowland (of The Skeleton Key [2005 / trailer]) shows up claiming to have seen her dead psycho son on the ferry, Taking Lives may stay watchable but logic and proportion fall sloppy dead. It is her sighting of her long-lost son, and possibly his desire to rid himself of his (red-herring) "business colleague" Hart (Kiefer Sutherland of Dark City [1998] and Mirrors[2008]), that theoretically (probably?) set the killer off to execute his big, typically convoluted plan and all the subsequent murders in Montreal.

Among other irrealities, the movie features a wonderfully laughable characterization of a gallerist and what they do that reveals a general ignorance of gallery work — but then, much of what transpires in this movies shows a general lack of interest in reflecting the plausible and the real. Nice cinematography, though, and good editing as well, not to mention that notably tonal-dark Philip Glass soundtrack. But, as way too often, if one wants to enjoy the Taking Lives as suspense thriller, one really shouldn't question the whys or what-the-fucks of the narrative. Definitely NOT a flick that one must see.

Faux Trailer: Don-O-Mite (USA, 2014)

April 22, 2020, 9:04 pm

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We cannot claim to be fans of Mad Men (2007 to 2015), if only because we never caught an episode. We saw a trailer or two, but while they may have looked interesting, and Jon Hamm hunky, prior to the current COVID lockdown we were never really all that much into series — other than for the two hilariously great and likewise dearly departed series, SciFi's Z Nation (2014-18 / trailer) and AMC's Preacher (2016-19 / trailer).

But had this faux trailer we stumbled on recently while working on our upcoming 3-part Babes of Yesteryear focus on Marilyn Joi been for the real thing, we probably would have found the time to at least chest out an episode or two. This thing is great! Hits the groove, has the moves, but with a production level seldom found in the real thing. Hell, despite it all Afro American cast, it was even made by a bunch of lily-white men — how much more like the real thing can you get?

To simply quote director Daniel Frees's own words found at his website: "Mad Men has been part of the new golden age of television and was coming to an end with a 7th and final season. As fans of the show, we knew the storyline was hitting the late 60s early 70s; the same era of films like Shaft (1971 / trailer), Foxy Brown (1974 / trailer), Putney Swope (1969 / one-liners) and of course Dolemite (1975 / trailer). So we re-imagined Mad Men through the lens of the blaxploitation genre and Don-O-Mite was born. We were able to do a lot with a small budget, an amazing cast, and a level of detail for wardrobe and set design worthy of an original AMC show."

Interestingly enough, Don-O-Mite is also a real advertisement, as Slatepoints out: "The trailer is an ad for an ad agency, Leroy & Clarkson, but that's probably the reason it works so well: The writing is clever and knows its blaxploitation roots, while the performances, costumes, and set designs are impeccable. It's hard notto find the agency a little endearing when they create something as dyn-o-mite as this." (So, just out of curiosity: How many non-white folks work at L&C?)

Short Film: Man (UK, 2012)

April 29, 2020, 12:45 am

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We've long thought about presenting a Steve Cutts short as a Short Film of the Month, ever since, many moons ago, we first saw the great music video he did, in the style of a Max Fleischer cartoon, for Moby & The Void Pacific Choir's ditty, Are You Lost in the World Like Me? Way back then, we promptly went online and to his website and saw his other great shorts, including the hilarious Where Are They Now?, which we ended up rejecting simply because we found that we couldn't get past the [possibly incorrect] knowledge imparted by the original movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988 / trailer), that the only way to kill an animated character is the Dip of Doom (which was filled with acetone, wasn't it?). And thus we dithered, until other shorts distracted us and no Cutts film was ever presented...

But then, the other week, we finally entered the Lost World of Cutts's Moby video when our classic Motorola "Beam us up, Scotty" Razr finally died and entered the trash pits of Agbogbloshie. We inherited our first smartphone from our significant other's drawer of outdated models, the perfectly sized Iphone 5. And we promptly took our first step towards selling our soul to that evil firm from hell, facebook, by adding WhatsApp. And sitting here in corona-induced lockdown in our huge garden on Mallorca, suffering that jail feeling (NOT!) just like Ellen Degeneres — jail has never been this good, even though our place ain't worth no millions, that's for sure, and we do both our own cooking, cleaning and butt-wiping — we began to get our first Iphone fixes. And the first WhatsApp dose we got was of a video we had seen years ago and thought fab: Man, by Steve Cutts. What better way to begin one's arm-crotch itch for the smartphone? 

The short, created using Flash and After Effects, possibly needs no introduction as it is considered to be his most popular short film. The classical piece it is set to is In the Hall of the Mountain Kingby Edvard Grieg (composed 1875), a tune many might know from Needful Things (1993 / trailer), or as that whistled by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's classic M (1931 / full film), if not from your parents record collection. [For a killer version by Nero & the Gladiators, go here; for a whacked-out by The Who, go here.] A variation of the piece is also found in our Short Film of the Month for Oct 2014, Hell's Bells (1929). 

In any event, please savour a level-headed representation of mankind's innate and indomitable urge to destroy as presented in Manby Steve Cutts, "a London based freelance artist, 'specializing' in animation, illustration and fine art."

"One day, we might receive a signal from a planet [...]. But we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn't turn out so well."

Steven Hawking (8 Jan 1942 – 14 March 2018)

Sinister II (USA, 2015)

May 6, 2020, 12:31 am

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Ex-Deputy So & So (James Ransone of The Valley of Violence[2016 / trailer], seen below with a friend but not from this film), perhaps the second most-likable character of the first movie — the first being the writer's wife, Tracy (Juliet Rylance), who like all other main characters of Sinister(2012) isn't around for a sequel — has made it his mission to destroy all the houses in which the demon Bughuul, the eater of souls, has led a child to kill their family. He hopes that doing so will end the demon's evil influence, and prevent future deaths. To his shock, however, he finds the latest house, supposedly uninhabited, occupied by Courtney (Shannyn Sossamon of Wristcutters: A Love Story [2006 / trailer]) and her two sons — who are on the run from their well-connected, abusive husband/father, Clint (Lea Coco)…

The movie mildly questions whether evil and/or corruption lies in the person or is a learned characteristic and, also, like Children of the Corn (1984 / trailer; 2009 remake / trailer), proves that cornfields are sites of horror. A lot more emphasis is put on the realistic 8mm home "snuff films" of the past murders than in the first film, and they are as creative as they are unsettling and/or horrific — eventually, however, one cannot help but wonder why the demon Bughuul places such importance on "creative" killings instead of just simple murder using, say, knives or guns or even a handy stone.

For all the repulsiveness of the snuff films, the whole movie itself is seldom truly scary and, despite a game cast giving it their all, seems oddly listless and predictable. It doesn't help that Sinister II plays so freely with the tropes of the first film, resulting in a movie that comes across somewhat as if an existing horror filmscript was quickly retooled as a sequel. Nothing special, in other words, but good for a rainy day or undemanding souls.

Trailer to

Sinister II:

The semi-open ending leaves the possibility of a third film, which doesn't yet seem to be in the cards… dare we pitch an idea? How about Bughull ❤ Annabelle?