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What? Make America great again?
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Film Fun: Music from Movies – The Green Slime (USA/Japan, 1968)
One of those films that more people have heard of than seen, this MGM production was directed in Japan by Kinji Fukasaku (3 July 1930 – 12 January 2003), a productive and for the most part respected director who ended his career with the cult fav Battle Royal (2000 / trailer), "a cultural phenomenon […] considered one of the most influential films in recent decades". A far cry from The Green Slime, in any event, which was one of four films Fukasakudirected in 1968, the best of which is arguably the wonderfully campy Black Lizard (1968 / full film), famous for featuring "Everyone’s Favorite Homofascist", the hunky Japanese nationalist novelist Yukio Mishima (below), as a human statute.
The Green Slime is a tender tale of man-eating, one-eyed, electricity-shooting, rapidly reproducing tentacled monster who hitches a ride from an asteroid to a space station where it reproduces and kills (6 people in total) and the end of mankind in nigh…. The love triangle involves the three leads (below), Commander Jack Rankin (TV hunk Robert Horton, 29 July 1924 – 9 Mar 2016), Commander Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel, 10 Oct 1926 – 14 June 1997, of William Girdler's trash anti-classics Grizzly [1976 / trailer] and Day of the Animal [1977], not to mention Mr. No Legs [1978 / trailer], Blood Song [1982 / full movie] and so much more) and Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi of Jess Franco's 99 Women [1969 / trailer], with Maria Rohm& Herbert Lom, Umberto Lenzi's Manhunt in the City[1975] and so much more).
The functional, by-the-numbers script was written by, among others, Bill Finger (8 Feb 1914 – 18 Jan 1974), a man now considered co-creator of Batman (see the documentary Batman & Bill [2017 / trailer]), and also the man who wrote the turkey Track of the Moon Beast (1976 / full movie / Frank Larrabee's California Lady).
But we are here for the music. And here it is –
The Green SlimeTheme Song:
Great song, it was used only for the 90-minute cut of the film, the one used outside of Asia. The Japanese cut, a tight 70-odd-minute affair that jettisons the love triangle subplot, uses a military march. Charles Fox and Toshiaki Tsushima (22 May 1936 – 25 Nov 2013) are generally credited as behind the film's score, but it is also generally accepted that they had nothing to do with the song at hand. The promo single released by MGM has the song credited to Sherry Gaden and arranged by Richard Delvy (20 Apr 1942 – 6 Feb 2010). Delvy might be remembered by some as one of the founding forces of Surfer music: as a drummer, he began his career in music with The Bel-Airs (listen to 1961's Mr. Moto) and The Challengers (listen to 1962's Surfbeat). "Sherry Gaden", however, is a pseudonym for a musician named Ed Fournier, who also worked with The Challengers and later did songs and music for Saturday morning cartoons. The most recent activity of his that we could locate is/was the group Eddie and the All-Star Band, which included former members of The Challengers, like Randy Nauert (1 Jan 1945 – 7 Feb 2019), who plays the sitar on The Green SlimeTheme Song. Nauert, in his widely circulated statement online about the song, says that Rick Lancelot a.k.a Ricky Lancelloti (25 Aug 1944 – 7 Apr 1980), who sang leads for the Banana Splits as well as for Zappa, did the vocals. The theremin is played by former Glen Miller Orchestra bandmate Paul Tanner (15 Oct 1917 – 5 Feb 2013).
So after that history lesson, let us here at a wasted life share with a discovery we made while researching the theme song to The Green Slime (trailer). Ed Fournier uploaded at YouTube an album he made years ago as the music group Unkldrt (a name, we assume, derived from the nonexistent German word "unkleidert", in past tense, which would probably mean something like stripped or unclothed). Entitled UN-17, the LP features such fine titles as Long as I Got a Face You have a Place to Sit, Shave the Bush, I'm A Lesbian Trapped In A Man's Body and U Get the Ugly One. It will surely appeal to the pubescent humor in all of us, and is just waiting for discovery ("Rediscovery" doesn't apply here as no one ever knew about it in the first place.)
Complete album –
Unkldrt – NC-17:
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Cooties (USA, 2014)
(Spoilers.) Kill-the-kids time… laughing all the way. Perfect for the Coronavirus season, an independent "zomcom" about a pandemic of cooties that turns kids into (intelligent), adult-eating killers. Something similar was done in the British horror movie The Children back in 2008 (trailer), minus the cannibalistic aspect and on a more-local scale, but whereas that film was depressingly full-on serious horror, Cooties goes for the laughs even as it ladles out the gore and guts and kiddie violence. And while it is a far from perfect film, it is a movie that keeps you laughing and that hardly deserved its fate of flopping and falling off the face of the earth. But then, killing kids has always been a dicey topic, on screen or off, and laughing about it probably more so.
Trailer to
Cooties:
Cooties is one of the early films produced by Elijah Wood's Spectrevision production company, a company that has to date released a diverse selection of art-house or genre-bending horror like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014 / trailer), The Greasy Strangler (2016 / trailer) and Color Out of Space (2019 / trailer) — films one and all that reveal a production company that aims to do stuff differently. Or at least a little bit outside the box — though we would argue films like The Greasy Strangler never even ever saw a box.
Cooties has seen a box; many boxes, probably, and takes a lot of the familiar to come up with its funny little narrative, but it speaks loudly that little if anything (until the grand final) feels old or overused or forced. In part, it is the literalness and dryness with which everything is handled that saves the film: no matter how stupid the event, how ridiculous the verbal exchange, how sitcom-like things develop, everything is delivered with a straight face. This, in turn, makes everything twice as funny, even when in theory it probably shouldn't be.
Cooties opens by revealing the source of the virus, which later is christened "cooties", after that invisible imaginary childhood disease all American kids dread catching or having. Modified bird flu, you might say: we watch the detailed, laughably grotesque creation of chicken nuggets from the harvest to delivery, and then the little girl, Shelley (Sunny May Allison of Ouija[2014 / trailer]), that eats an infected one. (The timeline of the film is a bit dodgy, to say the least, as she eats her nuggets in the school lunchroom before the actual day has even begun… it is doubtful, after all, that she ate them the day before because the virus is later shown to spread, infect and turn virtually on contact.)
And thus cooties reach Fort Chicken Elementary, where Frodo, now a wannabe horror writer named Clint Hadson (Elijah Wood of Sin City[2005 / trailer], The Faculty [1998 / trailer], Maniac [2012 / trailer], The Good Son [1993 / trailer]), has his first day as a substitute teacher. A school filled with brats, going by his walk from his car to classroom, and neurotically normal teachers, one of which is his former high-school crush, Lucy McCormick (Alison Pill of ScottPilgrim vs. the World[2010 / trailer]), and another her current boyfriend, the dicky PE teacher Wade (Rainn Wilson of The Meg [2018 / trailer], House of 1000 Corpses [2002]). Social distancing, in any event, wouldn't have helped anyway: before the end of playtime, the motley crew of bickering teachers has to face off with a school full of murderous whippersnappers.
Most of the events that follow are hardly new for fans of zombie films or shows, but instead of being played out with dank and dull seriousness or for pure visceral gore, Cooties goes for the laughs even as the tension and danger (usually) remain real. Not very realistic, on the other hand*: how many schools have a socially stunted but scientifically minded (and dryly funny) teacher like Doug Davis (co-scripter Leigh Whannell, of Dying Breed [2008] and Saw [2004 / trailer]) at hand to explain everything as it develops? In the shortest of order, he realizes that puberty brings immunity to the virus and that the kids are brain-dead — thus, obliquely, making it okay to kill the kids, should one have to. The real goal of the teachers, however, is simply to survive and escape — something impossible without a little hand-to-hand combat with improvised weapons.
*Although, in all truth: when you're talking zombie horror (if not most "creature" horror in general), can one really complain about something not being "realistic"?
Cooties is not light on laughs, many of which are not even horror-related. The quirks of the pre-cootie kids and teachers and even Frodo's Clint's home life offers some good chuckles, as do numerous lines said in passing, some of which you hardly even catch. (Just as the defensive attack begins —Tracy [Jack McBrayer]: "I'm gay!" Rebekkah [Nasim Pedrad]: "I knew it!") But even for all its laughs, Cooties also serves up a scene or two of true tension, particularly when Clint and Lucy enter the air vents to get some candy when the uninfected kid Calvin (Armani Jackson of The Last Witch Hunter [2015 / trailer], also with Frodo) goes into diabetic shock. And when it comes to gore, most of it is practical and not for the squeamish; for that, it's almost always used in a way that gets at least a nervous laugh, if not a group-wide "Eeeeeeee" (assuming you watch the film, as we did, with a group of people). The film, in other words, is a lot of bloody fun!
Which isn't to say that Cooties doesn't have some glaring narrative and structural flaws. Aside for the previously mentioned indistinct timeline of the occurrences, for example, the movie is extremely recalcitrant about losing its teachers once the cootie kids kill the minor characters like the vice principle (co-scriptwriter Ian Brennan), his secretary, the nurse, Sheriff Dave (Matt Jones of Red State [2011 / trailer]) and a teacher so negligible in presence that when she gets killed, if we remember correctly, the other teachers ask "Who was that?" And for being brain-dead, the cootie kids are often amazingly designing in their actions — runners, not shufflers, they know how to open doors, hide in wait and, early on, consciously spread the virus.
As for the uninfected kids Calvin and Tamra (Morgan Lily of X-Men: First Class [2011 / trailer]), once they have served their singular purpose — Calvin, to give reason to danger; Tamra, as proof that the virus infects only the pre-pubescent — they pretty much get completely forgotten and shoved in the background to the point of invisibility. And the final big set piece is oddly bombastic for the film that preceded it, as if tacked on to help the film go out with a bang. Indeed, we learned later that the ending is a re-shoot, the original ending as described online probably being found way too much of a downer for the powers-that-be. (In that sense, the ending is the polar opposite of the much older but equally unknown and funny horror comedy, Idle Hands [1999], where the bombast got junked for something a bit less pyrokinetic.) But one is hard pressed to say that the open ending, perhaps up there with The Birds (1963 / trailer) as one totally lacking resolution, is really all that satisfying — although, had the film been the hit that it should've been but was not, it would've easily allowed a sequel, if not a TV series.
Complaints aside, however: Cooties is bloody and funny zomcom that should appeal both to fans of both genres. It really should've been a lot more successful than it was, and truly deserves rediscovery. It is a perfect pandemic movie for a lockdown night of blood and laughter.
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Short Film: Tom & Jerry in Magic Mummy (USA, 1933)
Let's hear it for Tom & Jerry!![]()
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Obviously enough, we're not talking about everyone's favorite cat & mouse couple, the S&M friendenemies created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera that entered the public consciousness in 1940 with the theatrical one-reel cartoon Puss Gets the Boot (full short) and has since become a permanent part of pop culture over the course of 161 animated shorts and diverse comic books, TV shows, direct-to-video or DVD releases and feature films. (They are due for yet another commercial revival in 2021 with the release of their new, feature-length live-action and cartoon mix film [trailer].) The Tom and Jerry we have in mind you have probably never heard of: we're talking about the long-forgotten cartoon bromancers Tom and Jerry, who were around almost a decade before the cat "Jasper" and the mouse "Jinx" (seen below from their debut short) stole their names.![]()
Between 1931 and 1933, the Van Beuren Studies released some 26 or 27 cartoon shorts of the vertically mismatched man couple — one (Tom) is tall, the other (Jerry) short — but the duo never achieved the popularity of such contemporaries as Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop and was eventually cancelled, some three years before the studio itself closed its doors for good. (The firm's namesake and owner, Amedee J. Van Beuren [10 July 1879 – 12 Nov 1938], died soon afterwards.) In the later 40s, after the Van Beuren film library was purchased by Leslie Winik's Official Films*, Tom and Jerry were renamed Dick and Larry so as to not be confused with the more-successful cat and mouse that stole their names. By now, November 2020, the entire Tom & Jerry / Dick & Larry library has long entered the public domain, so the shorts that still exist can generally to be found somewhere online.
*At the time, Official also purchased diverse Flip the Frog shorts, possibly including the one we present as our Short Film of the Month for February 2020, Room Runners (1932). The difference in the artistic level of the animation between Flip and Tom and Jerry is notable and noticeable, although Tom and Jerry are arguable a bit more surreal.
Cartoon Research points out that Tom & Jerry were originally a "Mutt and Jeff-like cat and dog pair" created by John Foster (27 Nov 1886 – 16 Feb 1959) and named Waffles and Don (see: The Haunted Ship [full short], released 4/27/1930, directed by Foster and Mannie Davis [23 Oct 1894 – Oct 1975]). After the artists George Stallings (9 Sept 1891 – 9 April 1963) and George Rufle (15 Feb 1901 – July 1974) joined the studios, they convinced Foster and Van Beuren Studios to change the duo into humans. The first short to feature the two as humans is Wot a Night (1931 / full short), which we almost presented as a Short Film of the Month but decided not to because of an extended scene that just doesn't sit right anymore. (The title card below, to the Tom & Jerry concept that ended up being their Amos & Andy persiflage, 1932's Plane Dumb [full short], "arguably one of the most racist cartoons ever released", indicates what doesn't sit right in Wot a Night. in fact, the bit we dislike in Wot a Night is even revisited in Plane Dumb.) In Wota Night, the duo are cab drivers, but their professions, when relevant, changes film to film — in this month's short film, for example, they are cops.
In any event, Magic Mummy is also the first Tom & Jerry cartoon we ever stumbled upon, which is another reason we chose it as the one to present as our Short Film of the Month this month.
In their article on Tom and Jerry, Cartoon Researchalso points out what makes the duo's cartoons, as primitive as they might be today, so appealing: "As the series progressed […] the films became increasingly bawdy, boozy and bizarre. Van Beuren was second only to Fleischer in depicting surreal, impossible feats on screen; Tom, Jerry, and their surroundings did it all. Inanimate objects came to life; two singers could share a single mouth. Old houses hid evil dancing skeletons; seas concealed fish rabbis dressed in spy-drag black. In Piano Tooners (1932 / full short]), Jerry flushes a humanized 'sour note' down the toilet. In A Swiss Trick (1931 / full short]), eating too much Swiss cheese causes our heroes to grow holes in their bodies." Other titles worth checking out include Pots and Pans (1932 / full short), Jolly Fish (1932 / full short), Tuba Tooter (1932 / full short) and Pencil Mania (1932 / full short). For a list and plot description of diverse Tom & Jerry cartoons, we suggest going to Dr Grob's Animation Review.
In 1933, Van Beuren, who seems to have been a bit of a hard-nosed dickhead of a businessman, "fired Foster and promoted Stallings to his position. Under Stallings, the Tom and Jerry series seemed to lose much of its earlier charm."Magic Mummy, originally released on 3 February 1933, is the last Tom & Jerry cartoon in which John Foster was involved. Enjoy.
Tom & Jerry in
Magic Mummy (USA, 1933):
Addendum: As indicated by the advertisement below, Cartoon Researchmade an interesting discovery: "Before the cat and mouse, before the humans and even before the cat and dog there seem to have been a man and a mule! While we know very, very little about these silent shorts from Arrow Films, the ad suggests that the heroes were animated puppets. It also suggests that a full series was released […]." Go here @ Cartoon Research for more info on that lost team.
Addendum II:The voice of the female mummy when she sings her song, Sing! Sing!, is generally accepted as being that of no one less than Mae Questel (13 Sept 1908 – 4 Jan 1998), the definitive voice of both Betty Boop and Olive Oil. The song The Cop on the Beat, the Man in the Moon and Me (words and music by J. P. Murray, Al Goodhart and Al Hoffman), sung oh-so-effeminately by two plump cops seen further above on this page, had been released the year previously by Phil Harris Orchestra, where it was sung by Leah Ray (16 Feb 1915 – 27 May 1999).
Original version of
The Cop on the Beat, the Man in the Moon and Me:
Lastly, if you would like to view more animated oddities from the early age of animation, let us suggest you also check out the following Short Films of the Month:
March 2010: The Skeleton Dance (USA, 1929)
Jan 2013: Bimbo's Initiation (USA, 1931)
Oct 2013: Swing You Sinners! (USA, 1930)
Aug 2014: Balloon Land (USA, 1935)
Oct 2014: Hell's Bells (USA, 1929)
Feb 2017: Der Fuehrer's Face (USA, 1942)
Jan 2019: The Snow Man (USA, 1940)
Feb 2020: Room Runners (USA, 1932)
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Scared to Death (USA, 1947)
"She was a very beautiful girl. One hates to perform an autopsy on a beautiful girl."
Autopsy Surgeon (Stanley Andrews)
(Spoilers) Filmed as Accent on Horror. Five years prior to being reduced to such fare as Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla(1952) and six to the trash classic Glen or Glenda (1953 / trailer / film), the possibly already opiate-addicted Bela Lugosi appeared in this movie here, yet another Poverty Row project, this time around a production of the little-known firm, Golden Gate Pictures. It was directed by William Christy Cabanne (16 April 1888 – 15 Oct 1950), a man with over 100 feature-film credits alone to his name and nary even a semi-classic amongst them. (He did, however, do second unit direction on a few D.W. Griffith classics.)
Scared to Death enjoys mildly more film historical importance than many of Lugosi's late-career B- and C-film productions in that it is the lone color film in which he ever had a starring role; in the only other color feature film that he appeared in, Viennese Nights (1930 / a song), he isn't even listed in the film credits. Equally interesting, historically, is that Scared to Death is perhaps the first film to be narrated by a corpse, if incompetently; the most famous film to utilize this device, Billy Wilder's classic, Sunset Blvd (trailer), didn't hit the screens until three years later in 1950.
Written by "Walter Abbott", this semi-Lugosi vehicle is based on a play by "Bill Heedle" entitled Murder on the Operating Table, which was inspired in parts by a 1933 murder case involving Dr. Alice Wynekoop.*(Both Walter Abbott and Bill Heedle, by the way, are known pseudonyms for forgotten playwright Frank Orsino.) Lugosi is the headlining star of the movie, and he obviously enjoys both his part and his humorous dialogue, but despite his star status the amount of time he's on screen is possibly equaled or exceeded by other key players, including a surprisingly competent and playing-it-straight George Zucco (of House of Frankenstein [1944]); Zucco, who plays the elder Dr. Joseph Van Ee, supposedly replaced the originally cast Lionel Atwill (of The Vampire Bat [1933] and so much more) in the role as Atwill was too ill to work — indeed, Atwill died while Scared to Death was still being shot.
*"On the evening of November 21 [1933], Dr. Wynekoop said she found the naked body of her daughter-in-law, Rheta, on the antique operating table in her basement office. She had been chloroformed and shot. Wynekoop's gun lay beside her. The doctor told the police that she had been robbed several times, and that it was probably the work of some thief looking for drugs. Then it came to light that Dr. Wynekoop, who was in debt, had recently insured Rheta for $5,000 with the New York Life Insurance company. The policy had a double indemnity clause in case of death by violence. Wynekoop was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, though there were many people who believed that Rheta's husband may have actually killed his wife. He did, in fact, confess to the murder. [Frank] Orsino's play, written under the pseudonym Bill Heedle, opened the same day that Wynekoop went on trial. [Mark Thomas McGeeinTalk's Cheap, Action's Expensive]" In the original play that became Scared to Death, the lead doctor character was a woman; other changes in the film include a final body count that got reduced from four in the play to one in the film, and two detectives that were changed into a brain-dead house detective and a fast-talking reporter.
Scared to Death:
If you bother to listen to Joe Dante's Trailer from Hellcommentary above, it must be said that the talented director makes the movie sound a lot better than it is, though he does freely admit that Scared to Death is, at best, to be considered a guilty pleasure ("It's a terrible film, but I love it"). The flaws of the film are multifarious, to say the least, and the movie is hardly a pleasure to watch. At the same time, however, it is one of those oddly terrible movies that might bore while running but keep popping up in your mind after the fact to instigate a smile or a snigger.
Nevertheless, at least in our case, the trivia and tidbits one discovers when researching the film are actually far more interesting and entertaining than the movie itself, despite its occasionally entertaining dialogue, an obliquely threatening George Zucco, an "I'm having fun" Lugosi, the oddly huggable character of Bill Raymond (former Olympic wrestler Nat Pendleton, pictured below not from the film, of The Mad Doctor of Market Street[1942 / trailer] and The Thin Man [1934 / trailer] and many of its sequels, here in his last film), and the appearance of everyone's favorite vertically challenged actor of yesteryear, Angelo Rossitto (of the infamous flicks Child Bride [1938 / trailer] and Freaks [1932 / trailer], The Big House [1930], Paul Hunt's The Clones [1973], Galaxina[1980, with Marilyn Joi], From a Whisper to a Scream [1987, with Susan Tyrrell], Dracula vs. Frankenstein [1971], the low-budget art horror short Dementia [1955] and so much more) as the relatively unnecessary and mute character Indigo.
Although the events that transpire in Scared to Death span several days and occur at all times of the day and seldom in the dark, at its core the movie is a studio-bound comedy thriller along the lines of that classic chestnut known as an Old Dark House film. Indeed, but for the opening and closing scenes at the morgue — and the regularly interspersed and poorly executed two-to-three-second scenes of the dead Laura Van Ee (Molly Lamont of Devil Bat's Daughter [1946 / full film]) lying on the morgue table and making unneeded V.O. commentary — almost all the action transpires within the almost drug-like Cinecolor-colored* Van Ee house.
Unluckily, when it comes to how the "action" is filmed, director William Christy Cabanne (The Mummy's Hand [1940 / trailer]), behind Sam Newfield (see: The Monster Maker [1944]) and William "One-Shot" Beaudine (see: Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla[1952]) one of the most prolific directors in the history of American films, lives up to his reputation of being one of the most boring directors in film history: his extremely sleep-inducing non-style is basically block, point and shoot, which does nothing in any way to enliven the proceedings. Assuming he also made the decision of how to film the unneeded interjections of Laura Van Ee on the slab in the morgue, Scared to Death reveals him to be a spectacularly untalented filmmaker incapable of infusing the film with anything that might indicate a creative eye or artistic intention.**
*"Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion-picture process, based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger, and its various formats were in use from 1932 to 1955. [Wikipedia]" William T. Crispinel, who retired from the firm in 1948, was the father of the extremely minor background actor Lee Bennett (born William Arthur Louvain Crespinel), who appears briefly in Scared to Death as Rene, the first husband of Laura, whom we learn along the way she sold out to the Nazis during her European days and who, in the film's present day, has returned for revenge. ![]()
** Untalented as he was, Cabanne, a D.W. Griffith "discovery", supposedly did assistant director work on Griffith's extremely racist but historically important Birth of a Nation [1915 / full extremely racist film] and indulgent Intolerance [1916 / full film]. More notable, perhaps, is his hair-brained B-movie drama, The Red-Haired Alibi (1932 / full film), forgotten as being the first feature film to have a not-yet-famous Shirley Temple in a credited role. Scared to Death and The Mummy's Hand were his only "horror" projects.
That the lead female, Laura, dies is a given from the start of the movie, but over the course of the narrative she reveals herself as such an unsympathetic character that her death is hardly tragic. But where she and the movie start off on a truly bad foot is the early and thoroughly inane revelation that although she is in a loveless marriage with Ward Van Ee (Roland Varno nee Jacob Frederick Vuerhrd*), she refuses to divorce him because she's convinced he and his father, Dr. Joseph Van Ee, are trying to drive her insane. (Talk about an invitation to being murdered.) The rest of the movie is about as illogical as her reason for remaining married, and ends with her being Scared to Death. Prior to that, however, new characters enter and exit the house and filmic proceedings, including Dr. Van Ee's cousin Prof. Leonide (Bela Lugosi), a former stage magician once active in Europe; a fast-talking reporter named Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley** of Flaxy Martin [1949]); and his ditzy dame Jane (Joyce Compton, seen below not from the film).
*Utrecht-born character actor Roland Varno nee Jacob Frederik Vuerhard began his career in Berlin with tiny parts on films like The Blue Angel (1930 / trailer) before fleeing Europe to play (often uncredited) Nazis in films like Hitler's Children (1943 / trailer) or tertiary characters in fare like TheMad Magician (1954 / trailer) and The Return of the Vampire (1943 / trailer). His son, Martin Varno, is the author of the rather dull 1958 Roger Corman film, Night of the Blood Beast (trailer), one of the unsung granddaddy films of Ridley Scott's classic, Alien (1979 / trailer), which recycled Blood Beast's idea of alien fetuses being hosted within the human body. A highpoint of Martin Varno's rather lackluster career was his position as makeup supervisor (as Martin Varnaud) on Bud Townsend's Nightmare in Wax (1969).
**Douglas Fowley, father of record producer and band manager Kim Fowley — anyone remember The Runaways? — was a character actor with a long shelf life whose films span from flicks like this one and Cat-Women of the Moon(1953 / trailer) to The White Buffalo(1977 / trailer). He did a once-off directorial job in 1960, the shot-in-Brazil psychotronic fave Macumba Love (trailer), which stars the pulchritude of Ziva Rodann (below, not from the film) and the legendary June "44-20-36" Wilkinson.
While some of the dialogue is witty, and the art direction definitely on the colorful side, there is little more about Scared to Deaththat is in any way commendable. Indeed, considering all it has to offer — primarily: a mostly good cast and its unique corpse-on-a-table narrator — the movie fumbles the ball in a big way. The narrative is a structural, illogical mess that at times makes it seem as if scenes were lost or left unshot, the direction is the quintessence of somnambulation, there is nary a scare to be found anywhere, and the entire proceedings simply aren't all that much fun. It might be a guilty pleasure for some, but for most Scared to Death will probably be a waste of time.
As an extra —
Bauhaus's Bela Lugosi's Dead:
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Short Film: Elvira's Very Scary X-Mas (USA, 2010)
Okay, so this month's short is an advertisement. It's not like Christmas isn't a purely capitalist exercise nowadays, an event oriented alone towards emptying your pockets and making you think you're happy and you're life is good. And it's not like we haven't presented an advertisement as a Christmas short before, either: check out our short film for December 2018: Beauty of Horror – Christmas Claymation (USA, 2018). Advertisement.
But like that claymation ad, this one here is special: it stars a claymation version one of our favorite wet dreams from the early eighties of the last century: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. (Nowadays, when looking back, we wonder how we ever managed to get past that big hair, but then we see those haunting hills and we remember.)
Should you be one of the few, the rare, who don't know who Elvira is, well, Bloody Disgusting can fill you in: "[…] Elvira's Movie Macabre started in September of 1981 and ran for five seasons, launching the B-movie queen to pop culture icon status in short order. The first horror host to be syndicated nationally, Elvira's off-beat sense of humor, quick wit, and Valley girl persona complemented the B-horror movies featured in the episodes well. While she'd continue on to reign as the Queen of Halloween for decades with multiple movies, books, shows, music CDs, and more, Elvira eventually returned to Elvira's Movie Macabre for a revival in September of 2010. This time the films chosen were in public domain."![]()
Aside from her presence on television, Elvira can be found in two highly entertaining movies, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988 / trailer)and Elvira's Haunted Hills (2001 / trailer). When Elvira isn't being Elvira, she pretends to be the actress and model Cassandra Peterson, of The Working Girls (1974 / trailer below) and a lot of nude photographs featuring something called pubic hair…
Trailer to
The Working Girls (1974):
This month's "short film" originally ran as part of Elivra's 2010 Christmas screening of the perennial Christmas movie anti-classic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964 / trailer / full film), from director Nicholas Webster (24 July 1912 – 12 Aug 2006), whose other treasured cinematic anti-classic is the somewhat less wonderfully dreadful science fiction film Mission Mars (1968 / trailer).
But to return to Webster's Santa Claus, that disasterpiece not only features the first known cinematic appearance of Mrs. Claus (played by Doris Rich [14 Aug 1901 – Feb 1980], it also features the cinematic debut of that American cultural treasure known as Pia Zadora (of Fake Out a.k.a. Nevada Heat[1982 / trailer]) playing the little Martian lass named Girmar. ["In 2000, Zadora was nominated at the 20th Golden Raspberry Awards as Worst Actress of the Century, ultimately losing to Madonna. (Wikipedia)]
Pia Zadora & Jermaine Jackson (who?)—
When the Rain Begins to Fall (1983)
Bloody Disgusting points out that the wonderful little short way above is a Chiodo Bros. Production. "The Chiodo Brothers (Stephen, Charles & Edward Chiodo) are an American trio of sibling special effects artists specializing in clay modeling, creature creation, stop motion and animatronics. [Wikipedia]" Occasionally they also produce their own movies, with Stephen as the credited director: they are the creative power behind that classic cult film that is Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988 / trailer) — for a long time a sequel, entitled The Return of the Killer Klowns from Outer Space in 3D, was trapped in pre-production hell, but it officially died when Disney took over 21stCentury Fox — and the super kiddy-friendly, 40-min Christmas toddler flick at Netfux known as Alien Xmas (2020 / trailer). They also produced the following short for an episode of a popular TV series…
Oh Pruny Night
For further Christmas fun, check out these other season-themed Short Films of the Month:
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His House (Brexitland, 2020)
"Your ghosts follow you. They never leave. They live with you. It's when I let them in, I could start to face myself."
Bol (Sope Dirisu)
Bol (Sope Dirisu)
In February of 2020, after seven years of civil war and unrest that has included outbreaks of genocide, South Sudan — which "as of 2019, […] ranks third-lowest in the latest UN World Happiness Report, second-lowest on the Global Peace Index, and has the third-highest score on the American Fund for Peace'sFragile States Index"— achieved an internal peace deal. But all that, obviously enough, came too late for the more than 1.5 million South Sudanese that have since fled the country as refugees, most in fear of their lives.
Trailer to
His House:
The two South Sudanese protagonists of His House are part of this diaspora: they want only to survive and start a new, better life away from the man-made horror and certain death of their homeland. And one day at the asylum center in Brexitland, it looks like Bol (Sope Dirisu, also seen somewhere in The Huntsman: Winter's War [2016 / trailer]) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku of I Am Slave [2010 / trailer] and Citadel[2012 / trailer]), who have survived diverse non-supernatural horrors like the sinking of their overcrowded boat and the loss of the young girl Nyagak (Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba), might be among the lucky ones who are given the chance to start anew amidst the safety of a stable country. They are removed from the refugee center with typical administrative coldness and placed amidst the general population: given an abnormally oversized, trash-strewn wreck of a suburban row house and a weekly sum of 74 pounds, they are now official asylum seekers and await final confirmation that, yes, they are good enough people to remain in Brexitland.
But what looks like a new start turns out to be as bad as the horrors that they just escaped: that which should be their house of hope quickly proves to be a house from hell. The secular horrors that have escapes are now replaced by supernatural ones, and as outsiders that dare not stand out in any way that could endanger their status, they have nowhere to turn for help. It's not like anyone in suburban Brexitland is likely to believe two not-yet-fully-approved African refugees telling, in "broken" African English, of a demon inhabiting the walls of their new abode, a demon that has followed them all the way from Africa — and thus the two strangers in a strange land are faced with the conundrum of remaining in a house of horror and danger and possible death, or making waves and surely being sent back to a war-torn homeland and probable death.
The feature-film directorial debut of Remi Weekes, who also wrote the screenplay, His House is perhaps one of the most interesting if not best horror films to come out in a long time, and that despite the (for a change both effective and affective) use of one of the great no-noes of filmic narration, the flashback within flashback.
An enthralling tale of psychological and physical fright, the movie combines the worldly terrors that drive people to desperately flee their homelands with supernatural terror of evil entities in a house of horror. The two main characters, two "good people" without any solid footing in their new country, are caught in a trap apparently without a solution — after all, what is worse: being sent back to certain death in the war-torn nation you lost everything to escape, or falling victim to an evil entity that wants your body?
Currently found on Netfux, His Housemanages to be both different and traditional at the same time. No dead-teenagers here or zombie hoards at the door, but the house is haunted; and as the demon grows fiercer, the distant neighbors, unfriendly local kids, and overworked civil servants are hardly a source of safety or retreat or helpfulness. All that, combined with well-drawn characters for whom you come to care, results in a moving and absorbing tale of ever-increasing unease and terror that keeps you riveted until its less-than-expected ending.
The horrors veer from the solidly earthly of genocide to the subtle reflection of how the back walkways of British suburbia can be as discombobulating as the maze at the Overlook (see: The Shining [1980 / trailer]) to the unnerving frights caused by bumps inside the wall (or worse: the things that come out of the wall) to the slow rot that suspicion and emotional exhaustion can engender upon the psyche, the soul, and the personal relationship. As outsiders in every way, Bol and Rial have nowhere and no one to turn to as the spiral of terror increases — and, indeed, for a time it is arguable whether the evil that has come to haunt them is truly supernatural or merely the physical reverberations of two psyches mangled by the past horrors experienced during a shared desperate journey.
His House: a movie worth watching... one can only hope that it doesn't eventually simply disappear, like so many movies, into the bottomless bowels of Netfux.
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Marilyn Joi, Part V: 1981-2019
Let's hear it for Marilyn Joi. Between 1972 and 1989, this Babe of Yesteryear made indelible as well as blink-and-you-miss-her appearances in a variety of fondly remembered, unjustly forgotten, or gladly overlooked grindhouse products. But fame is a fickle thing, especially in the nether regions of exploitation movies, and although she always exuded a memorable presence and has some notable films in her resume, she never became a "name"— heck, more people know the name Jean Bell than they do Marilyn Joi,* though Joi arguably displayed far greater thespian talent and definitely appeared in a larger number of noteworthy movies. Indeed: "Joi brought variety and a measure of depth to her big and small screen performances. She never walked through a role and she knew the meaning of nuance. She could be a bad girl, a traditional action film heroine, or a light comedienne of considerable charm. [Bob McCann in Encyclopedia of African American Actresses in Film and Television]" To that, we might add that she had a killer figure and she was sexy, and she had fabulous eyes.
* Perhaps due in part to Ms. Bell's status of being one of the first Afro-American women to get nekkid in Playboy, while Ms. Joi only did cheesecake for race-specific publications like Players, "the Black Playboy". (Although, according to Ms. Joi, "I did do some [nude] pictures, but they were never published. I'm sure they're floating around somewhere."**) Players deemed Marilyn "America's Favorite Black Poster Girl" in 1980 and, two years later, voted her one of "America's Ten Sexiest Black Women"— and she was.
* Perhaps due in part to Ms. Bell's status of being one of the first Afro-American women to get nekkid in Playboy, while Ms. Joi only did cheesecake for race-specific publications like Players, "the Black Playboy". (Although, according to Ms. Joi, "I did do some [nude] pictures, but they were never published. I'm sure they're floating around somewhere."**) Players deemed Marilyn "America's Favorite Black Poster Girl" in 1980 and, two years later, voted her one of "America's Ten Sexiest Black Women"— and she was.
**Quote taken from an informative interview published in Shock Cinema #16 in 2000, which can be found at the Internet Archives. We make extensive use of that interview in the following blog entry. For those of you who don't know Shock Cinema, it is one of the best magazines around, particularly for people who read sites like this one. Check it out, buy an issue — you'll love it!
A beautiful and bubbly Marilyn Joi interviewed:
"Marilyn Joi" was born 22 May 1945 in New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, USA. Her full real name is not general knowledge, though her real first name seems to be "Mary"; on-screen, she was at times also credited as Tracy King, Tracy Ann King, T.A. King and even Anita King. She is alive and well and (unlike us) on twitter. A true Babe of Yesteryear, her film career was much too short and she is unjustly unknown — which is why we here at a wasted life have decided to take one of our typically meandering and unfocused looks at her filmography. (If it's more meandering and unfocused than usual, well, in this day and age of corona lockdown we have more time on our hands…)
As always, we make no guarantee that anything we write is 100% correct (feel free to tell us where we're wrong — preferably in a non-trolly tone of voice). And if we missed a film, let us know…
Go here for
Marilyn Joi, Part One: 1972-73
Marilyn Joi, Part Two: 1974
Marilyn Joi, Part Three: 1975-76
Marilyn Joi, Part Four: 1977-80
Marilyn Joi, Part One: 1972-73
Marilyn Joi, Part Two: 1974
Marilyn Joi, Part Three: 1975-76
Marilyn Joi, Part Four: 1977-80
C.O.D.
(1981, dir. Chuck Vincent)
A.k.a. Snap! and, in Germany, Manche mögens Prall (more or less, "Some Like It Plump" or "Some Like It Firm"— you get the drift).
This C.O.D., starring Jack Lemmon's son Chris Lemmon, is not a remake of Michael Powell's 1932 lost crime film, C.O.D. But: the German title Manche mögen's Prall is a definite play upon the classic Lemmon/Curtis/Monroe movie, Manche mögen's heiß a.k.a. Some Like It Hot (1959 / trailer).
C.O.D. is a softcore sex comedy from the hardcore auteur Chuck Vincent (6 Sep 1940 – 23 Sept 1991), a man best known for his elegant hardcore porn films from the Golden Age of triple-X. (Oddly enough, considering that he specialized in heterosexual hardcore, Chuck Vincent was gay as the day; his career was cut short at the age of 51 from AIDS-related complications.) When Manche mögen's Präll was released in Germany, as the poster directly below shows director "Chuck Vincent" became "Sigi Krämer" and the script was suddenly by "Hartmut Neugebauer" who, the year earlier, was the "dialogue director" of Luigi Cozzi's anti-classic slice of Italo trash, Contamination (1980 / trailer), but generally only worked as a German-language voiceover actor on foreign films.
Over at the imdb, the writing credits are a bit broader: the story is credited to Wolfgang von Schiber, of the obscure German sleaze-film production house Geiselgasteig (which co-produced the movie — not to mention the mondo documentaries Shocking Asia I [1981? / trailer] and II [1985? / full film in Russian]), while the screenplay is credited to Chuck Vincent, Ian Shaw (writing as "Jonathan Hannah") and Rick Marx. Shaw never wrote another film, though he did compose the music to many no-budget and porn films (as he did for this film here); Marx, on the other hand, worked as a scribe on many a film, mostly porn (including some classics like Wanda Whips Wall Street [1982 / NSFW trailer] and Vincent's Roommates [1982 / SFW trailer]) and low-budget trash like Doom Asylum (1988 / trailer) and Roberta Findlay's Tenement (1985 / trailer).
In the book Fictional Presidential Films: A Comprehensive Filmography of Portrayals from 1930 to 2011, the authors Sarah Miles Bolam & Thomas J. Bolam use creative grammar to supply the following plot synopsis: "Screwball comedies go to new directions in C.O.D. This so-called cheesy film concerns Albert Zack (Chris Lemmon of Wishmaster[1997] and Just Before Dawn [1981 / trailer]), purportedly the son of Jack Lemmon, who works as an assistant for a lingerie company. One day, he finds himself with the unenviable and unbelievable job of signing up advertisements for bras from five lovely ladies including a movie star, a singer, a countess (Carole Davis*, below, of Project: Metalbeast [1995 / German trailer]), the President's daughter (Teresa Ganzel of Transylvania 6-5000 [1985 / trailer]), and an Olympic star. The film is a series of encounters as Zack goes through his list of lovelies. President Foster (Andrew MacMillan) is an incidental character in the attempt to get his daughter out of one bra ad and into another."
* Carole Davis, former West Coast Director of the Companion Animal Protection Society, a national non-profit organization that investigates puppy mills and pet stores, and former Penthouse Pet (January 1980, as "Tamara Kapitas") and Pet of the Year runner-up (1981), at one point actually modeled Playtex bras in real life. As a singer/songwriter and recording artist, Carole was signed to Warner Brother records in 1989. She released an album, Heart of Gold, which was produced by Nile Rodgers, and had a dance-floor hit with her single Serious Money. Speaking of Penthouse Pets of the Year, however, another cast member of this movie, Corrine Wahl, a.k.a. Corrine Alphen, of Equalizer 2000 (1986 / trailer), had that honor in 1982. Alphen now earns her rent money as a tarot card reader.
Carole looking sexy but dancing badly to
Serious Money:
Further details to the movie that we could uncover online include: the firm that hires Albert Zack is the "Beaver Bra Company", which is struggling due to the low popularity of wearing bras*; many of the "silly antics and situations" find Zack dressed in various costumes, including drag; of the two board members at Beaver Bras that always try to stop him because they stand to gain should the firm fail, one is named Lydia (Jennifer Richards** of TerrorVision [1986 / trailer]); Zack is helped and hindered by his faithful secretary, Holly (Olivia Pascal of Jess Franco's Bloody Moon [1981 / trailer]). Basically: "It's one boob after another as Albert struggles to keep abreast of the situation ... its win or bust in SNAP!"
*How we here at a wasted life miss those days here in Berlin in the 80s & early 90s when almost no woman under 30 wore a bra and nude sunbathing was common at the local park.
**A "Jennifer Richards" also had a brief career in porn in the 70s, including Teenie Tulip a.k.a. Hungry Mouth (poster below) — anyone know if it's the same Jennifer? We would guess it is, for various other, more-famous porn stars also pop up in the movie as glorified extras, the most well-known probably being: Samantha Fox (4 Dec 1950 – 22 Apr 2020), credited under her real name, Stasia Micula; Ron "Hedgehog" Jeremy, credited using his real first and last name, Ron Hyatt; hot stuff stud Jack Wrangler (11 Jul 1946 – 7 Apr 2009); and Bobby Aster (14 Nov 1937 – 7 Apr 2002), credited as Bobby H. Charles (could that be his real name?), as a witchdoctor. That people from the industry are found in the jiggle comedy is perhaps not surprising, seeing who directed the movie.
Unluckily, we were unable to find out whether Marilyn Joi's character, Debbie Winter, is the movie star "at work in a horror-parody film", the singer, or the Olympic athlete (or even someone else), but we are sure she would have filled out a Beaver bra nicely! Sadly, after this movie, Marilyn Joi pretty much stopped working: she appeared on TV once or twice to play a hooker, but she didn't appear in another "real movie" for eight years, when she showed up in 1989's Satan's Princess (see further below) to play… a hooker.
As is often the case with films, different participants get credited on different posters or VHS or DVD covers, depending on which participant is better known at any given moment. So while Germen skin starlet Dolly Dollar, a.k.a. Christine Zierl, who shows up to play someone named "Christina Werner", wasn't worth mentioning originally, she was later deemed a big enough name to be credited on the poster. As evident by the picture below, like all other women in the movie, she had more than enough to fill out a bra. But for all her lung capacity, she was a miserable singer, as evident by her so-terrible-it's-still-terrible Euro-disco song from the same year as the movie, Come A Little Bit Closer.
Dolly Dollar "sings"
Come A Little Bit Closer:
Come A Little Bit Closer:
In any event, herewith ends, as far as we can tell, Marilyn Joi's "real" career in feature film: hereafter, the appearances we could "locate" are, at best: tiny, questionable, or only via trailer or as a talking head.
Drive-In Madness!
(1987, "writ & dir."Tim Ferrante)
"A right mess of a program that only gets better the fewer times you view it."
Tim Ferrante @ Flick Attack
Tim Ferrante @ Flick Attack
Also known as Drive-in Madness Greatest Hits. Marilyn Joi via trailer! Not a movie and not made for the big screen, Drive-In Madness! is a product of its time, the day and age before the internet and YouTube and film-on-demand, when it was close to impossible to see obscure films or their trailers. But then came the VHS, and with it the rise of the trailer compellation: feature-length releases, some with and some without "themes", of obscure trailers to obscure movies. Tim Ferrante's theme was the drive-in, and this ode to the cinema dinosaur (now revived thanks to Covid) featured more than just trailers…
"Drive-in Madness! […] does do a bit more than just show trailers, as it also splices in various intermission segments from the drive-in and also has interviews with some of the biggest names in Horror and Exploitation film. […] I particularly enjoy the fact that the filmmakers went to the trouble of including the locally made trailers for a double bill, and those old intermission commercials are always fun, but the interviews make this film for without them, this is really just another ok trailer completion that while offering up some goodies, does not cut very deep into the genre. The interviews however, contain some very interesting information about the making of these films. The movie being made in 1987 plays to its benefit here as several producers were still alive to talk about these films. […] [Bad Movies for Bad People]"
"Narrated by Poltergeist real estate agent James Karen, the 84-minute quasi-documentary leans heavy on the films of Al Adamson, with six of his flicks represented with full trailers, from Satan's Sadists (1969 / trailer) to Naughty Stewardesses (1974, see Part II) — not a complaint. I don't know if any rhyme or reason were present in director Tim Ferrante's choices of what clips to include, but for the most part, it's an unpredictable bunch that touches upon sci-fi (The Human Duplicators [1965 / trailer]), mondo (Macabro [1980 / Italo trailer]), action (Girls for Rent [1974 / trailer]), comedy (The Booby Hatch [1976]) and, oddly, made-for-VHS trash that never would play drive-ins (Psychos in Love [1987 / trailer]). [Flick Attack]"
And of the Al Adamson trailers screened, Marilyn Joi is found in three: The Naughty Stewardesses (1974, see Part II), Blazing Stewardesses (1975, see Part III) & Nurse Sherri (1978, found way above) — thus the compellation's inclusion here. The talking heads include Linnea Quigley, Russell Streiner, John Russo, Samuel M. Sherman, Bobbie Bresee, Forry Ackerman, George Romero, and Tom Savini.
Full movie at
Satan's Princess
(1989, dir. Bert I. Gordon)
One sort of wonders why it took a auteur hack like Gordon — who can forget his anti-classics like The Amazing Colossal Man (1957 / trailer), Attack of the Puppet People (1958 / trailer), The Spider (1958 / trailer), Village of the Giants (1965 / trailer), Necromancy(1972)*, and the double attack of Food of the Gods (1976 / trailer) and Empire of the Ants (1977 / trailer)**? — such a long time to get around using Joi in one of his films… Oh, yeah: 'cause few of them ever feature an Afro-American character.
Bert I. Gordon is still alive today, though he hasn't made a movie since Secrets of a Psychopath (2015 / trailer), a rent-paying job of desperation for Kari Wuhrer (of Anaconda[1997] & Thinner[1996] & Berserker [2004]) and the then 93-year-old Gordon's first flick in 26 years, after … (drum role) … Satan's Princess.
*OK, this is far from one of his "good" flicks — but we reviewed it and are loath to miss the chance for inter-blog link.
**We really should also include The Beginning of the End (1957), one of our favorite after-school creature feature staples, which he only produced. Aside from the fabulous scene of the grasshopper crawling off an obvious photo of a building, it includes one the greatest scenes ever: a mute character silently screaming in terror as he meets his demise. We've long wondered why Tarentino hasn't yet appropriated that idea in a movie.
Trailer to
The Beginning of the End (1957):
The Beginning of the End (1957):
Screenplay scribe Stephen Katz (4 July 1946 — 18 Oct 2005) began his career with the far more intriguing an offbeat script to the hard-to-place Hex aka The Shrieking (1973 / full film). Satan's Princess was both his second and second-to-last feature-length film project.
The plot, as found at the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review: "Retired police detective Lou Cherney (Robert Forster [13 Jul 1941 – 11 Oct 2019] of Alligator [1980] and Uncle Sam [1996]) is pressed by a man to search for his missing daughter. Lou finds that the missing girl has been taken as the lesbian lover of Canadian modelling agency head Nicole St James (Lydie Denier of To The Limit [1995]). As he starts investigating Nicole, Lou learns that she is involved with black magic. People who provide Lou with information turn up dead and then Nicole marshals occult forces in an effort to kill him."
"Bert I. Gordon on his best day was no better than an average director, but his enthusiasm and lack of taste were generally good for an entertaining movie. Satan's Princess […] is a well-paced and very silly combination of urban crime drama and supernatural chiller. And it features Borscht Belt comic Jack Carter (of The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington [1977, see Part IV]) as a 15th-century Spanish priest. […] One thing you gotta respect about Robert Forster is that you can never catch him sleepwalking through anything. Not only does he always seem to give each project 100%, regardless of how big a turkey it is, he usually is able to jack the movie up a notch or two with his performance. Satan's Princess is dumb and laughable, but I'll be damned if Forster doesn't fill in the gaps in Gordon's screenplay and create a full-fledged character that's a joy to watch. [Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot]"
Spoilers: "There's plenty of sleaze and exploitation to the proceedings. You get a lesbian sex scene, a topless woman swallowing fire, a Robert Forster sex scene where he talks dirty and spanks, and a poor bimbo gets her tit cut off. The film is pretty consistent until the last 30 minutes when it goes over the top and spreads the cheese on thick. […] The gore is minimal and the deaths range from realistic slasher murders to the supernatural. A cop gets strangled, a woman gets blown out of her apartment window, and Satan's Princess gets torched with a flamethrower. The film's finale is pretty anti-climatic and ends with a demon trying to escape in a booby-trapped car… [80's Horror Central]"
We couldn't find a trailer for Satan's Princess online, but we did find a fan-made homage using Samantha "I Got Boobs" Fox's song Touch Me (I Want Your Body), a song typical of its time (1986) that gets virtually no airplay nowadays.
Touch Me (I Want Your Body)—
Satan's Princess Tribute:
Queen of Lost Island
(1994, dir. Donald G. Jackson)
Personally, we doubt that Marilyn Joi appeared in what is probably a senseless, white-gal silicon-tit festival starring pre-dementia Julie Strain — but, who knows: Did Joi or didn't Joi appear in this movie?
And for that matter, which movie? Queen of Lost Island, or The Devil's Pet? Much as some websites claim the two films as different films and other sites claim them as one and the same, some websites — for example, aventrix— say Joi (or Joy) is there and other make nary a mention of her name (e.g., imdb). (There is also, however, an occasional mention of a "Marilyn Deye".)
Ta-tas Trailer to
Queen of Lost Island:
The imdb, for example, gives both Queen of Lost Island and Elixir as alternative titles for The Devil's Pet, but doesn't list Joi on the cast. The INSDB (International Show Database) not only lists Marilyn Joi (as "Marilyn Joy") on the cast, but supplies a plot: "Topless model Julie (Julie Strain) becomes possessed by a demon and lures other models to a remote island, where she goes after them with a samurai sword. Filmed in 1994 as Queen of Lost Island, and screened briefly under that title, this didn't receive a home video release until 2007 when it popped up on DVD as Elixir. Most online sources claim this is the same film as The Devil's Pet, but that is incorrect."Letterbxdsays exactly the same thing, word for word.
In any event, although the likelihood that Joi is there is close to nil, for the benefit of the doubt let's take a look at this non-movie by the infamous anti-director Donald G. Jackson (24 Apr 1943 – 20 Oct 2003), a man hardly remembered by anyone for producing a steady stream of truly terrible no-budget anti-films of the kind that make that famous measuring stick for cinematic talent, Ed Wood Jr., look like Orson Welles. Jackson, who does indeed have one cult semi-classic to his name, Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988 / trailer below), was a proponent of a directorial style that he created with Scott Shaw known as "Zen filmmaking" in which no scripts are used while making a movie. For this movie here, he gave his name as "Maximo T. Bird".
Trailer to
Hell Comes to Frogtown:
Filmblitz, which was "lured in by the prospect of [Julie] Strain waving a sword without her top on", watched the movie, to their subsequent regret: "The 'plot'— and quotes have rarely ever been used more deliberately — sees a glamour photographer […] head off to an island with a bunch of models, including Strain. An antique bottle is stumbled across, containing some kind of fluid, which they inexplicably drink […]. This causes them to go psychotic, and in Strain's case, spend the rest of the film wandering the island, waving a sword without her top on. The movie consists, more or less, of three kinds of scenes, framed by a wraparound segment where the photographer is being interviewed by a journalist — which largely robs the rest of any suspense, since we know he's not going to die. These are: 1) Glamour photography sessions. 2) Softcore sex scenes. 3) People wandering aimlessly around the island*. Repeat, apparently at random, for 75 minutes. In what bizarre universe does this pass for film-making?"
*Hmmm… were you to remove the Type 3 scene description, and replace it with "People wandering aimlessly around", the description could well fit the only Strain film we've ever seen in which she is "real", the sludge that is Blonde Heaven (1994)… We say "real" because we saw and enjoyed Metal Heavy 2000 (2000), but she's animated in that. (She has one of those over-enhanced bodies that look best when fully clothed, photoshopped, or rendered in animation.)
Over at Letterbxd, Nick Weaver is a smidgeon more positive in his review of this "excuse to show as many titties in the most peculiar context available": "Elixir is about an island photography shoot gone wrong and a mystical bottle of love potion. Dumb as bricks, mindless, yet inexplicably compelling. Everything feels like its building up to something, whether it be a violent climax or the return of Robert Z'Dar's abandoned character, but it doesn't. I'd wager literally 40% of this movie is topless Julie Strain sword dancing. The rest is a mishmash of hiking, recycled flashback footage, and other people's boobs."
Producing Schlock:
The Career of Al Adamson
(2009, dir. Unknown)
A short and sweet video documentary that features producer Samuel Sherman taking about Al Adamson and their time as a filmmaking team. It is probably a "Special Feature" on some DVD release, but we don't know which one. Marilyn Joi does not appear as a talking head here — only Sherman does — but you see her in clip or two, most conspicuously a stewardess in The Naughty Stewardesses.
Adamson was already 14-years dead when this featurette was made — and oddly enough, despite his legendary status as a cult filmmaker, a feature-length documentary had yet to be made about him. (It took another ten years before one finally was, too.)
Blood & Flesh:
The Reel Life & Ghastly Death
of Al Adamson
(2019, dir. David Gregory)
Unbelievably enough, considering that he was indeed a "name" in low budget and bad film that interested people — hell, even we went to see Satan's Sadists (1972 / trailer) for the umpteenth time when, many decades ago, when he introduced the film himself, live, for a screening here in Berlin — it took an unbelievable 24 years before someone finally decided a documentary was needed. Severin got professional DVD filler-material and documentary director David Gregory, who hasn't made a fiction film since his 1995 no-budget directorial debut Scathed, to put it together — a man, in any event, who knows his genre films. (This year, 2020, has supposedly seen the release of his 17-minute documentary The Joy of Marilyn Joi, we assume as an extra on the coveted Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection— a bit out of our price range, unluckily.)
Trailer to
Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson
"Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson is an utterly mesmerising and wholly important documentary, and everybody involved should be incredibly proud. […] If you are interested in horror, exploitation and just wild Hollywood stories, this truly is the film for you. [Movie Waffler]"
"Al Adamson wasn't what you'd call a superstar filmmaker. Toiling in the world of super low budget B- and C-grade drive-in fare from the early '60s through the early '80s, Adamson was responsible for inflicting more than thirty films upon an largely unsuspecting public during his career, often recycling the same film with different titles to try to squeeze a few extra bucks out of it. Being an unknown didn't stop him from being passionate, though, and if there was anything Adamson loved, it was making movies. Then, one day, he just disappeared off the face of the earth, only to be found much later hastily buried under cement and a lovely new tile floor in his own home. [Screen Anarchy]"
Trailer to the
Al Adamson Masterpiece Collection:
And, to hear from Severin Films itself: "'Horror Film Director Found Slain, Buried Under Floor', screamed the August 1995 headline in the Los Angeles Times. But the whole truth behind Al Adamson's strange life and gruesome death reveals perhaps the most bizarre career in Hollywood history. From his early years as the son of a silent screen cowboy, through the production of some 30 lurid low budget pictures including Satan's Sadists, Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, and The Naughty Stewardesses [see Part III], to his grisly demise, the Al Adamson story remains wild beyond belief. Told through over 40 first-person recollections from friends, family, colleagues and historians, plus rare clips and archival interviews with Adamson himself, Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson is the delightful, dirty and deadly documentary of bikers, go-go dancers, aging Hollywood actors, porn stars, freak-out girls, Charles Manson, Colonel Sanders, alien conspiracies, bad contractors and 'scenes so SICK the Movies could never show them before'..."
Marilyn Joi appears as one of the plethora of talking heads…
The End
Coming soon: Babe of Yesteryear, Gigi Darlene
Coming soon: Babe of Yesteryear, Gigi Darlene
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31 Dec 2020
It can only get better from here...
Film-related fun, appropriate to the past year:
The blogspot European Film Star Postcards looks at
Victims of the Spanish Flu
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"Best of" 2020
Buy your Golden Dick here.Give one to a Rightwing Retard, Karen, or Frightened Angry White Man of your choice.
Here at a wasted life, we hear the sound of victory: it is time for our annual roundup of the "best" films we watched last year. Aren't we happy 2020 is over with?
As normal, there is no order in the presentation: this is not a countdown of tenth best to "bestest best", because the vote is fixed, and is instead but a simple list presented in a backward countdown by month (i.e., Dec to Jan). There are also two "special mentions" to this presentation, but let's get to them when we get to them.
2020 was slim in its pickings: of the 69 blog entries in 2020, only 24 were reviews of a feature film – and while more than enough got positive reviews, not all which we liked when we watched them actually had enough of that special something to earn a place on this list. Also, one too many is a Netfux film, a byproduct of this year's reduced social life and lack of the former once-weekly "Bad Film" nights with friends, something we hope will change after we and the rest of the world get Bill Gate's nano-microchip implanted and all become George Soro's sex slaves.
In any event, enjoy this year's quick selection... Click on the titles to go to the original, mostly verbose, reviews.
(Brexitland, 2020)
The horror, the horror: they all come because they want to take what's ours. Or at least that's what a lot of old friends have begun to say, when they're not now slagging off on feminists and stupid liberals or explaining how "the Jews" started both World Wars. And how the gold standard should be brought back, and the world is flat. And... whatever.
To get to this flick: an excellently made, serious horror film featuring less-than-perfect heroes that are not white. Worse, they have nowhere to turn to look for help when the past comes to haunt them. Scary, touching, effective — probably one of the best Netfux-produced horror movies ever.
Trailer to
(USA, 2014)
The only thing worse than cooties: Trumpsteritus. But let's talk about the movie, and not mental deficiencies.
Cooties is not very intelligent and definitely not groundbreaking, and suffers from a rather third-rate ending — nevertheless, this gory little zomcom delivers the guts and the laughs by the gutful. Perfect black comedy entertainment for this pandemic age, as well as for all those people out there who have always thought kids can't be trusted.
Trailer to
(Japan, 1972)
Why have we decided to add this relatively third-rate and misogynistic Japanese pink film to our list? Well, two reasons multiple times over, and they are found on the chests of most of the women featured in this movie. Badly acted, lousy plot, cringe-worthy sex scenes and nonsensical character motivation are liberally spiced with boobage and skin and blood. Piss your girlfriend off and watch this one with her — she won't thank you. (That said, the soundtrack is great.)
German trailer to
(USA, 2016)
In a Valley of Violence is one of two westerns Hawke made that year, 2016, the other being the rather unnecessary but nevertheless entertaining star-studded remake, The Magnificent Seven (2016 / trailer). Neither was a smash hit, but Valley, in all truth, was an unmitigated commercial flop. Nevertheless, Ti West's flick is definitely the better and more "different" of the two. Give it a go if you're a western-minded person, you might like — we sure did.
Trailer to
(USA, 2019)
This one was a surprise. We watched it primarily because we couldn't find anything better on Netfux that night, and because the film features the character actor Kelly Reilly, whom we find rather effective in a Patricia Clarkson / Alice Krige kind of way. It's not like the director's other film we watched, Sinister II (2015), was really all that great. But this one was — and for a change, we really didn't see the ending that came.
Trailer to
Eli:
(USA, 2009)
Never heard of the teen book series this flick is based on (the Vampire Blood trilogy), but it seems that no one who has read the books likes the movie. Well, that doesn't matter any to us: we haven't read any of the books and found the movie pretty good, despite some CGI overload. In fact, had the flick not flopped and more films followed, we would've watched them — something we didn't do for the Twilight flicks, the Hunger Games flicks or the Maze ones, even after we saw one or the other film of a given series.
That said, it seems that not very many people who hadn't read the books liked the film either... but then, why two-step with the masses? They liked the Twilight flicks, and they suck.
That said, it seems that not very many people who hadn't read the books liked the film either... but then, why two-step with the masses? They liked the Twilight flicks, and they suck.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant is campy and twisted, but in mainstream teen-angst clothes. Would've made a great franchise... The trailer, by the way, lies: contrary to what it looks like in the trailer, the young privilaged white dude didn't want to become a vampire.
Trailer to
(Canada/Spain, 2016)
Great sci-fi black dramedy, and a box office flop. To simply repeat the first lines of our review: "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."
Plot: The monsters accidentally come out, which leads to an alcoholic loser privileged white girl having to square off against an alcoholic angry white man who feels, as they often do, that the world owes him more.
Or, as Ella Mae Nuyles said some three years ago at YouTube: "A surprisingly mature film about addiction, toxic friends, and giant monsters!"
Trailer to
(USA, 2017)
Written and directed by Eli Craig, son of actress Sally Field (of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure [1979 / trailer]) and man behind the far better horror comedy Tucker & Dale vs Evil (2010), which made our Best of 2011 list. But just because Tucker & Dale is better doesn't make this enjoyably fun farce any less worthy to be mentioned here. One wishes Craig were a bit more productive filmmaker...
Plot: Dude marries dream woman, woman mother of anti-Christ, Sally Field is a devil worshipper.
Trailer to
First Special Mention —
Our Short Film of the Month for July 2020:
Dementia / Daughter of Horror
(USA, 1955)
In general, we don't like to put a short film from our monthly presentation on this list simply because: alone the fact that the a given short was chosen to be presented here at a wasted life as a Short Film of the Month means that it is already, in our eyes, in possession of that "special something" that makes it worth watching.
But we also sort of cheated when we presented Dementia / Daughter of Horror as a short film. At 58 minutes in length, it might not be as long as people are now used to when it comes to a feature film, but in the day it was made, it was long enough to be considered one — if, basically, only in presentation with another film as part of a double feature.
Some people view Dementia (and its re-release form, Daughter of Darkness)as a bad joke, others see it as art — as does the BFI, which explains: "Stripped of dialogue and using only sound effects and an unnerving score by George Anthiel, in Dementia (director) John Parker combines horror, film noir and expressionist methods to depict a mind descending into madness. Shocking audiences upon its original release, the film was initially banned by the New York State Film Board, who deemed it 'inhuman, indecent, and the quintessence of gruesomeness'."
The film, in any event, is definitely noteworthy enough to warrant a Special Mention.
Trailer to the BFI DVD:
Second Special Mention:
(USA, 1947)
Okay, we panned this flick — and rightfully so, cause it's pretty bad. But sometimes bad films get better in hindsight. Scared to Death is seriously a guilty pleasure at best, and hardly that. But it does have its historical significance to it, which is a plus — and face it, even lousy films, when they are as old as this one is, are a lot more fun than new or newer lousy films.
You could do worse on a rainy afternoon...
Trailer to
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Shadow of Fear (USA, 2004)
(Sorta spoilers – but who cares?) We wasted our time so you don't have to. Shadow of Fear is oneof those kind of movies that we're happy get made because they help underused and underappreciated or going-downhill actors pay the rent, buy new cars, or get that Brazilian. That said, if you're looking for a good thriller, this overly complicated and far-fetched (not to mention in parts badly acted and poorly shot) flick is not what you want. You might stay awake to catch everything that transpires in the hope that it all makes sense in the end, but staying awake will be a battle from the start. Shadow of Fear, for all its delusions of being a real movie (if only D2V and/or D2DVD), is TV-movie caliber in all respects – though the average TV movie usually has better cinematography, and probably more action.
Trailer to
Shadow of Fear:
The narrative takes place amidst a well-to-do McMansion-dwelling social sphere that makes many of the figures difficult to connect to or sympathize with, including the movie's rather bland young upwardly-mobile professional"hero", Harrison French (Matthew Davis of Below [2002], BloodRayne [2005 / trailer] and Wasting Away [2007 / trailer]). Having failed at a big (and needed) sale, he drives home on a rainy Spokane night and because he's a typical dick who can't keep his eyes on the road he ends up hitting and killing some dude standing in the middle of the deserted road.
Like any good contemporary person, McMansion-dwelling or not, Harrison hits and runs, but not before dragging the body into the woods and covering it with branches and leaves. Oh, wait! Could it be that he killed Chris (Andrew Harris), the junkie brother of his loving wife Wynn (the always intriguingly attractive Robin Tunney of The Craft [1996 / trailer], End of Days [1999 / trailer], Looking Glass [2018 / trailer], and Monster Party [2018 / trailer]), whom everyone assumes just robbed the local bank? (The bro, that is, not the wifey.)
Oh, no! Dt. Scofield (Aidan "Blue Eyes" Quinn of Haunted [1995 / trailer], In Dreams [1999 / trailer] and The Eclipse [2009 / trailer]) thinks Harrison did! Luckily, there's his father-in-law's fix-it-all lawyer William Ashbury (James "Somnambulant" Spader of The New Kids [1985 / trailer], Jack's Back [1988 / trailer], Supernova [2000 / trailer], and Alien Hunter [2003 / trailer]) on hand to turn to for assistance — if only the good lawyer wasn't so fixated on collecting men-with-secrets for his depressing Tuesday night get-togethers...
Shadow of Fear is more slow-going than it is confusing, but even if everything sort of ties into an implausible knot at the end, the narrative thread has major holes in it. Unluckily, the lead also doesn't have enough charisma for one to ever be able to root for him, while the bad-guy lawyer, as played by James Spader, is less threatening or scary (accepting when he walks onto the lawn and talks with the wifey Wynn) than he is a man angry for having major hemorrhoids. The big showdown also overlooks one major thing: all the photos that are in the lawyer's car would see our hero not pass go, and go directly to jail, instead of buying himself a cane and taking up (?!?) the lawyer's odd penchant for collecting men-with-secrets.
Again, films like Shadow of Fear are needed and appreciated for giving our favorite B-stars their needed rent money, but we really can't help but wonder how a movie can take a character actress of the caliber of Alice "Borg Queen" Krige (of Gretel & Hansel [2020 / trailer], Silent Hill [2006 / trailer], Stay Alive [2006 / trailer], Solomom Kane [2009 / trailer], Sleepwalkers [1992], Lonely Hearts [2006] and Habitat [1997 / trailer]) and basically do nothing with her. Sure, she seldom has big parts nowadays, but she's a great actor and is convincing as always in the few mini-scenes she shows up in — but she must have 3-4 minutes screen time at most, and that's bunk. Much like the film.
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Film Fun: Music from Movies – The Black Klansman (USA, 1966)
"Get control of myself?! Who the hell are you, white woman, to tell me to get control of myself?!"
Jerry Ellsworth (Richard Gilden)
Let's take a meandering, diffuse look at the title track to a movie a.k.a. Brutes and I Crossed the Line: the B&W exploiter The Black Klansman, which has relatively little to do with Spike Lee's "serious" film from 2018, BlacKKKlansman (trailer). About the only thing they share is a similar name.
Trailer to
The Black Klansman (1966):
This flick here, a product of the great, legendary "incredibly strange filmmaker" Ted V. Mikels, born Theodore Vincent Mikacevich (29 Apr 1929 – 16 Oct 2016), is a relatively straight exploitation movie, if with slightly more serious intent than the average Mikels film.
The fourth directorial project of Mikels and his last B&W film, The Black Klansman was preceded by Mikels's sexploitation titles One Shocking Moment (B&W / 1965 / full film) and Dr. Sex (color / 1964 / full film / French poster below), and his dull directorial debut, Strike Me Deadly (1963 / trailer).
When The Black Klansman was released as I Crossed the Line in NYC, it got paired rather oddly with the even older Japanese color film, Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman a.k.a. Zatoichi on the Road(1963 / trailer), the 5th of a series of 27 Japanese Zatoichi films starring Shintarô Katsu (29 Nov 1931 – 21 June 1997) as the titular blind, itinerant swordsman and masseuse.
As Talking Pulp puts it, "The Black Klansman isn't Blaxploitation, it's half a decade too early and it doesn't have the wisecrackin' street slang of those pictures or the sweet style. However, it does feel like a sort of proto-Blaxploitation film. At its core though, it is a Civil Rights era thriller in a similar vein to Roger Corman's The Intruder(1961). This falls more on the exploitation side though." Indeed, it is pretty much a full-blown entry of what Mondo Digital refers to as "racesploitation", which "became a movie mainstay in the '70s, [but] ... was too hot a topic in the volatile '60s to get much traction on the big screen.*"
*Other films of the time that pushed the buttons of "anti-miscegenation"-minded individuals and other Republicans include I Spit on Your Grave a.k.a.J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1959 / trailer), Les tripes au soleil a.k.a.Checkerboard (1959 / scene), My Baby Is Black (1961 / trailer), I Passed for White (1960 / trailer), Born Black a.k.a. Der verlogen Akt (1969) and the decidedly non-exploitive, Oscar-nominated message movie, One Potato Two Potato (1964 / scene).
The Department of Afro-American Research Arts Culturehas the plot to The Black Klansman: "This melodrama exploits racial tensions with the tale of a light-skinned African-American (Richard Gilden, of The Unknown Terror [1957 / trailer / full film]), as Jerry Ellsworth] who impersonates a Caucasian and joins the notorious Ku Klux Klan to get revenge on the bigots who bombed a church and killed his daughter. Soon after joining, the vengeful father begins having sex with the clan leader's daughter (Maureen Gaffney)." Harry Lovejoy, above, plays the KKK daddy.
Film trivia: Richard Gilden was "a white man playing a Black man playing a white man" [Grindhouse Database]. Maureen Gaffney (b. 1 July 1943), also found in the nudie-cuties Pardon My Brush [1964 / poster above] & Hawaiian Thigh[1965], the latter of which was distributed by Harry Novak, "is now the artist Maureen Gaffney Wolfson, and she now swings a paintbrush instead of her boobs". The image below is a print of one of her paintings, Celestial Concerto of Love, and can be purchased directly from the artist.
The Black Klansmanwas shot in 21 days near Bakersfield, CA – and NOT"in complete secrecy in the Deep South". "In addition to executive producer Joe Solomon, the approximately $80,000 budget was supplied by Richard Gordon and distributor Jerry Solway of Astral Films, Ltd. [...] The Black Klansman was an entry at the 1966 Cannes International Film Festival, and marked the screen debut of actor Max Julien [the co-scriptwriter & co-producer of Cleopatra Jones(1973)], and James McEachin. [AFI]"
The script of The Black Klansman was supplied by Arthur Andrew Names Jr. (25 July 1925 – 9 Aug 2015) and John T. Wilson, who later joined forces to write Mikels's Girl in Gold Boots (1968 / trailer) and Names's only known directorial credit, Snakes a.k.a. Fangs a.k.a. Holy Wednesday a.k.a. Snakelust (1974). Jerry's white girlfriend in La La Land, Andrea, whom he later saves from lynching in Alabama, is the only known film role of Rima Kutner* (photo below), a "queen of non-reaction".
*Rima Joy Kutner (14 Jan 1936 – 5 Oct 1988), the model/actress and 1958 Northwest University-graduate daughter of "Luis Kutner, lawyer, author, lecturer, artist, entrepreneur, poet, athlete, and musician, [who] was born in Chicago on June 9, 1908, the son of Paul Kutner, a house painter and decorator, and Ella Kutner. Kutner's religious background was Jewish, and he described his ancestry as 'mixed French, English, Spanish, German, and Russian.' An inveterate romantic, he liked to tell newspaper reporters that when his mother was a young Russian-Turkish girl she was kidnapped at the age of 11 and forced to become a dancing girl in the harem of a Turkish pasha. She was rescued from her captivity at age 15 by some Russian sailors who took her to the Crimea where she was protected by a young painter and opera student, Paul Kutner, whom she later married."
Okay, but enough about the movie and other tangents, let's get to the soundtrack – but not the film music by the great Bolivian-American composer Jaime Mendoza-Nava (1 Dec 1925 – 31 May 2005), who also scored such masterpieces as Orgy of the Dead(1965 / great trailer), The House Near the Prado (1969) & The Hanging of Jake Ellis (1969), both with Charles Napier, The Cut-Throats (1969) & The Midnight Graduate (1970), both with The Great Uschi, Grave of the Vampire (1972 / trailer), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976 / trailer), Vampire Hookers (1978 / trailer) and so much more.
No, let's give a listen to and then look at the title track, entitled (Surprise!) The Black Klansman, by Tony Harris, which even had a one-sided 45-rpm release back when the film came out (somehow we doubt it got much airplay). You can't really dance to this one, which starts with the stanza:
"The Ku Klux Klan killed my little Girl.
Now I'm alone in this hostile world.
My plan for vengeance may seem odd,
but with the help of God,
I will destroy them from within...
disguise myself and be the Black Klansman!"
Yeah, the lyrics are a hoot and basically explain the plot of the movie, a movie which tends to generate pure denegation and rare praise. ("Stark, violent and stuffed with upsetting imagery, The Black Klansman is just as distressing in 2018 as it was in 1966. [BirthMoviesDeath]") But the song is pretty good, particular if you're into classic garage rock like that found on the fabulous Nuggetscompilation LPs of the 80s. In this case here, the song has an intriguing, almost proto-Californian country garage rock appeal – hardly a surprising tone for the song, once you hear some of the other music Tony Harris was doing around the time.
Tony Harris's title track to
The Black Klansman:
Tony Harris was an active man in the 60s and early 70s, as is revealed over at West Coast Fog, but then he disappeared. So we checked our attic, and found out that there is a guy out there named Anthony Harris who, just like Tony Harris, is the son of the American film producer and distributorJack H. Harris (28 Nov 1918 – 14 Mar 2017), the man who brought us The Blob (1958), Master of Horror (1965 / trailer) a.k.a. Obras maestras del terror (1960), and his own and only directorial project, Unkissed Bride a.k.a Mother Goose a Go-Go (1966 / trailer). Dare we assume that Anthony and Tony are one and the same person? (Anthony, b.t.w., is married to an Alizon; if you look them up online you'll notice that some people seem to not like them or the recording studio, Power Studios Inc, that they run [ran?] from their pleasant-looking, 97-year-old home on Orlando Ave in West Hollywood.) Anthony, in any event, supposedly helped script Larry Hagman's Beware! The Blob! (1972 / trailer) and possibly produced some of the music, including the theme Son of Blob, by Mort Garson (20 July 1924 – 4 Jan 2008).
But years ago, way back in 1965, when Anthonywas still only Tony, the young Harris released an interesting "psychedelic acoustic garage" single, Scorpio, backed with the even better psychedelic garage rock ditty, Honey. He followed them with a decidedly "raw and snotty folk-rock ode to the superhero in the vein of the Turtles best work", a novelty garage rock song entitled Super Man (below), backed by the far-better slice of psychedelia, How Much Do I Love You. The how and why he ended up doing the title track to The Black Klansman is unknown to us, but all of Tony Harris's early work (i.e., 60s to the 70s) is worth a listen.
Tony Harris sings
Super Man:
To connect the dots to a title track we recently covered here at a wasted life, and as evidence of how incestuous regional music scenes tend to be, one of Harris's earliest known songwriting credits is for the surf instrumental Carmen P., first recorded by the totally unknown LA group The Citations, a songwriting credit he shares with John Marascalco and Richard Delvy (20 Apr 1942 – 6 Feb 2010). Delvy "might be remembered by some as one of the founding forces of Surfer music: as a drummer, he began his career in music with The Bel-Airs (listen to 1961's Mr. Moto) and The Challengers (listen to 1962's Surfbeat)." He was also the arranger (and we presume the drummer) on the great title track to The Green Slime (1968), as we mentioned here at Film Fun: Music from Movies – The Green Slime (USA/Japan, 1968).
Last but not least, Tony Harris was, like Anthony Harris, extremely active as a music producer. The same year that he was playing in Pacific Ocean, a psychedelic band now remembered primarily as an early footnote in the career of its vocalist, actor Edward James Olmos, he also lent his talents as producer and arranger to...
Milton Berle's "truly wretched"
Yellow Submarine (1968):
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Short Fim: The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (UK, 1973)
A.k.a. Lonely Water. This two-minute chiller is actually public information cum safety warning broadcast on TV in Great Britain. (PIF in British English, PSA in American English.) "It was commissioned by the government's Central Office of Information (COI) in response to an increase in child drowning accidents: written and produced by the COI official Christine Harmon and directed by Jeff Grant, who bloggedabout his experience. [The Guardian]"
Lonely Waters "played on British television throughout the 1970s and terrified an entire generation of kids who not only steered clear of 'lonely water' but also stopped swimming. Some probably stopped bathing. [Coming Soon]"
Within the 90 seconds of this masterful short, astute viewers can find reverberations of films ranging from The Seventh Seal (1958 / trailer) to Don't Look Now (1973 / trailer). The wonderfully chilling voiceover is supplied by everyone's cult fav, the great Donald Pleasance (5 Oct 1919 – 2 Feb 1995) of way too many films to bother mentioning any. His final line — "I'll be back... back...back..." went on to become a lasting, instantly recognizably saying amongst British kids long before Arnie made "I'll be back" internationally popular with The Terminator (1984 / trailer).
Interesting tidbit: amongst the kiddies of the short is the Afro-Brit Terence Anthony "Terry" Sue-Patt (19 September 1964 – circa May 2015); he's got a rather entertaining look on his face during the first accident. He went on to enjoy some success and renown on British TV. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that by news sources that "whilst his body was found on May 22, 2015, it is possible that he had been dead for nearly a month before discovery". And how long do you think it'll take till your body is found? (Fellow Brit Joyce Carol Vincent [15 Oct 1965 – 21 Dec 2003] puts him to shame, though: it is estimated she lay dead in her flat for two, possibly three, years before discovery. See the docudrama Dreams of Life [2011 / trailer].)![]()
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Time Trap (USA, 2017)
It is perhaps close to impossible to make a movie set in a cave featuring a group of non-adults that doesn't end up having, at least for a few seconds here and there, an almost Goonies (1985 / trailer)-like feel. And so it is with Time Trap, if only for a second or two now and then, an independent sci-fi movie that should appeal to younger folks looking for something that doesn't scream "kiddy film" (most of the kids are post-pubescent) but also doesn't fixate on adult themes or aspects that might turn the narrative too far in an unpleasantly serious direction. Luckily, however, as adolescently safe as Time Trap is, it never becomes as annoying as the puzzlingly-labeled "classic" of the last century — which isn't to say, however, that the movie overcomes all its flaws well enough to truly be recommendable, or that it truly offers a satisfying resolution.
Trailer to
Time Trap:
For the first ten minutes or so of Time Trap, the focus of the narrative indicates to be on an archaeologist named Hopper (stud-muffin Andrew Wilson, the forgotten and better-looking brother of the more-famous Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson) and his dog, who are out searching for some hippies that went lost some decades earlier.
Wait! They aren't just any hippies: they're his parents and younger sister, who disappeared when he was a wee lad. He finds their van, and a cowboy seemingly frozen in position inside a cave, and before you can say "Let's go spelunking," he goes and does just that — followed a few days later, after no one hears from him again, by his faithful students Taylor (Reiley McClendon of The Mine [2012 / trailer]) and Jackie (Brianne Howey of Viral [2016 / trailer]), inexplicably augmented by the ragtag trio of Cara (Cassidy Gifford of The Gallows [2015 / trailer] and Ten: Murder Isalnd [2017 / trailer]), her younger sis Veeves (Olivia Draguicevich), and an annoying pubescent chub named Furby (Max Wright). Of course they lie to their parents about where they are off to, and in no time flat do the stupidest thing in the world: rappel down deep into the cave they think Hopper entered. And thus the adventure starts...
Okay, now the big spoiler: the interior of the cave system is a time trap, a nether-region that exists outside of the time continuum of the rest of the earth, populated by Neanderthals and Conquistadors and cowboys and the whole Hopper family and more (basically: anyone who ever entered the cave), where a mere moment is the equivalent of years outside — a fact that the spelunking quartet needs more than an hour to figure out. In other words: everything they ever knew above on the surface of Earth (parents, friends, hometown and country) is long dead, buried, turned to dust, evolved into almost a new life form.
A rather shattering concept, if you think about it, that gets brushed aside with one teary hug between Cara and Veeves and, in the final scene, glossed over even more with a few choice lines of laughable dialogue, including "Well, it's not quite home, but at least were all together" and "A lot's changed, but... we're kind of a big deal around here."(Dunno if most people would be as unaffected as the kids in this film by the concepts of never seeing anyone they knew ever again and spending the rest of their lives amidst a future form of humanity that neither looks nor speaks like they do and, if a reference made earlier in the film is true, breathes a different atmosphere than they — and that in all likelihood sees them as an earlier and inferior step in the human evolution. Human zoo time.)
Okay, don't think and the film is enjoyable enough for what it is. Time Trap is much more a young-adult-cum-kiddy sci-fi adventure flick than it is a serious movie, science fiction or otherwise. As such, it is also a surprisingly well-shot and good-looking for a low budget, independent feature, and is far from boring. The narrative also follows a certain logic that (assuming you can even accept the concept of a "time trap" on Earth and in a Texan cave instead of in Ted Cruz's brain) verges on believable for a while, although, in all honesty, the quickness with which the kids are willing to rappel down into the cave (the first four and, later, Furby alone) makes them all viable candidates for the Darwin Awards. The special effects are in general pretty good, tension is there on occasion, and a few people even die — at least for a time.
But the film also reveals an inability on the part of the filmmakers to follow their concept to the logical and tragic outcome that the plot actually demands. Instead, as might be expected of a kiddy flick, they wimp out and offer a flawed deus ex machine that doesn't hold any water. The sudden appearance of the save-the-day futuristic technology of what can only be called "magic wires", for example, renders the whole interlude with the appearance of the "future man" (Sabin Smith [?] of Bigfoot Wars [2014 / trailer]) illogical, as the wires could have been sent down into the cave from the start instead of the future man. Indeed, one can only wonder why those who control the wires choose to save all our characters but not their own man...
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Short Film: Let's Go Potty! (Japan, 2006)
The title says it all. Enjoy!
"Shimajiro: Toilet Training is a three-part episode from a cartoon in a correspondence education materials aimed at teaching preschoolers about various social manners, etiquette and life skills. In this particular episode on potty training, the kiddie tiger learns how to properly use the toilet all by himself ... with a little bit of help from the talking toilet. [Know Your Meme]"
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Escape Room (USA, 2019)
Not to be confused with the somewhat similarly plotted, yuppie-heavy Escape Room from 2017 (trailer), which isn't as much fun as this more inclusive tale.
(Spoilers) One would think that the main lesson of the movie, that one should never accept an invitation sent in a Hellraiser (1987 / trailer) puzzle box, is something that everyone already knows. But not, obviously enough, the six main protagonists of Escape Room, who take the bait (which is, admittedly, peppered by a promised prize of a million bucks). And so the six desperate types find themselves suddenly thrown together in a series of escape rooms — but whereas in real-life, the worst that usually happen in an escape room (outside of Poland) is that one might die of boredom, in this flick here, failure to escape the given room means certain death. Imagine, if you may, an American retooling and simplification of the basic plotline of the Dutch cult sci-fi thriller Cube (1997 / trailer) in a contemporary setting and with a larger budget, if smaller cast. Cube is a good film... and, actually, so is Escape Room.
Trailer to
Escape Room:
Less a horror film than an edge-of-the seat suspense flick, Escape Room is nevertheless 100% bodycounter, so you know from the start that most (if not all) of the six, if not also some other character(s) possibly introduced at a later point, will be dead by the time the final credits roll. As typical of today's franchise-driven cinema world, however, Escape Room not only allows a very select number of the original six to survive, but even ends with a scene revealing the unknown baddies of the flick, the mighty capitalists behind the whole escape room project (most likely Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson, maybe Peter Thiel) preparing the next escape-room situations for the sequel that is in development even as we write these lines.
In all truth, this epilogue ending presaging the further tribulations of our select survivors is perhaps the weakest and least-satisfying aspect of the entire movie, and director Adam "I Party with Bryan Singer" Robitel (a.k.a. Lester in both 2001 Maniacs [2005 / trailer] and 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams [2010 / trailer] — see R.I.P. H.G. Lewis Part VII& VIII, respectively) really should've ended his movie without it. (In today's world, a sequel is generally a given if the first movie succeeds, so why tease it?) But up until then, Escape Room is a nail-biting blast.
Escape Room opens with a real hook: the character later introduced as Ben Miller (Logan Miller of Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse[2015 / trailer] and The Good Neighbor[2016 / trailer]) drops, worse for wear, into an escape room and is immediately confronted by certain death as the seconds tick by and he attempts to get out. Does he? Well, before that is fully revealed comes the time jump to where the tale begins, with the introduction of the extremely shy physics student Zoey Davis (Taylor "Judy Robinson" Russell of Suspension [2015 / trailer] and Down a Dark Hall [2018 / trailer]), and her casual mention of a physics theory of later importance, not to mention the successful securities trader Jason (Jay Ellis) — who really should have had a nude scene — and the previously mentioned Ben. Soon thereafter, at the location of the game, we meet the remaining fodder: truck driver Mike (Tyler Labine of Tucker and Dale vs Evil [2010] and Cottage Country [2013 / trailer]), Iraq War veteran Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll of the Mother's Day remake [2010 / trailer]), and escape-room nerd Danny (Nik Dodani). Guess — without watching the trailer — who dies first?
Needless to say, Escape Room disperses with any realistic reflection of how long it takes to find and put together the clues required to find the correct method of escape in real-life escape rooms. (Were that in any way realistically presented, the film would have a running time of days and be unremittingly boring.) But for that, the strongly resonating visualization of the threat of death that each room offers definitely heightens the tension of the tightly shot and edited searches for the individual solutions.
But a film like this would not work if some people did not die, so the number of protagonists dwindles even as we learn more about each of them. Indeed, it is the individual back-story of each, we learn, that serves as the basis of the individual rooms. (Interestingly enough, not one character dies in the room inspired by their own story.) It must be said, a definite plus point of Escape Room — and unlike many films of its ilk —is that the tension of the narrative keeps the viewer far more interested in the movie than in who's gonna die next and how.
↧
Harry Reems, Part VIII: Addendum I (1969-71)
But recently, while trying to distract ourselves from the Covid-related death of our paternal parent, we cleaned house in corners we have never cleaned before — and low and behold! The stick was found, probably where the cat kicked it.
And so, seven years later to the month but not the day, here is our typically meandering and unfocused Addendum Part I. Much like delayed ejaculation: better late than never...
Not that we actually plan to finish the Addendum(s): merely to finally put online what we had already finished way back then, mildly updated. (Way back when, we lost interest in the undertaking as of the films around 1985.)
We dedicate these rediscovered Addendum(s) to our departed paternal parent, who inadvertently introduced us to Harry Reems when we, as a late teen, stumbled upon his VHS copy of Deep Throat (1972, see Harry Reems Part II) hidden in the VHS box for Key Largo (1948 / trailer).*
*He also had The Resurrection of Eve (1973 / Purple Skies and Butterflies) hidden in his To Have and Have Not (1944 / trailer) box, but the 1973 film wasn't funny enough to keep us watching until the end.
From the soundtrack of Deep Throat—
La La La:
Go here for Part V (1980–84)
Go here for Part VII (1986–2013)
The Corporate Queen
(1969, writ. & dir. John & Lem Amero)
![]()
Commonly given a.k.a. titles includes La reina Corporativa, Essayez-moi and Das Haus der 1000 Perversionen. The last title was also later used in Germany for a 1979 X-rated comedy originally entitled Frat House (full film, German poster below), a.k.a National Lamporn's Frat House.
In all truth, it is highly doubtfulthat Harry Reems really appears in The Corporate Queen: we found only one website online, the French film site Encyclo Ciné, that currently (19 March 2015 [& 27 Jan 2021]) lists Harry Reems as a featured actor. That website, however, also lists an a.k.a. title as Every Inch a Girl, which leads us to think that they are confusing this film here with the 1975 Amero Brothers' porn movie Every Inch a Lady, which does indeed feature Harry Reems (see Part IV) as well as some of the other stars listed at Encyclo Ciné (most notably Andrea True) not found in Corporate Queen.
Both movies, in any event, feature the never-well-known prowess of another mustachioed, hirsute actor named Tony Vito (possibly a.k.a. Ron Skideri and Ron Scardera), seen below with co-star Janet Banzet, and mustaches are easy to confuse. (BTW: We were unable to locate a Tony Vito or Ron Skideri anywhere, but Ron Scardera, who like Vito & Skidera worked with the Ameros, has since retired with his wife Roberta, who also worked with the Ameros, to a nice house in the Hollywood hills.)
That said, including The Corporate Queen here gives us another opportunity to present some photos of the tragic star of the movie, Janet Banzet (17 May 1934 – 29 July 1971), credited in the movie as "Marie Brent", seen below with the movie's director, John Amero. Her full story can be found at the great website whence we took two images, The Rialto Report.
Janet Banzetdancing in
A literal translation of the German title (Das Haus der 1000 Perversionen) is "The House of 1000 Perversions." The German book Das größte Filmlexikon der Welt at the website Zweitausandeinssays that the film features more dialogue than perversion, and foregoes a plot description. Unlike TCM, where they offer the following plot description: "Elegant Crystal Laverne (Renay Clair), who rules over one of the largest prostitution empires in the country, dismisses her followers from the plush New York City penthouse where she holds court and relates the story of her success to her efficient, man-hating private secretary, Edna (Banzet): Suffering financially from a police crackdown, Crystal picks up Chino (Tony Vito), a handsome young man who has been sleeping near her door. He has nothing to offer her but his bounteous sex drive, and they pool their talents to open a massage service. Chino accepts clients of both sexes, and business booms. [Like many early sexploitation movies, though the The Corporate Queen was meant for a heterosexual audience, it nevertheless included some guy-on-guy action. — awl] They move to new quarters, expanding the facilities to serve men and women of every sexual inclination, including clients seeking sexual experiences with lesbians, nymphomaniacs, and foot fetishists. Crystal falls in love with Chino and showers him with gifts, but he devotes less of his time to his work. She momentarily suspects him of infidelity, but he allays her suspicions, and she takes him out for a night on the town which ends up in a private club where they watch an erotic show. Chino proposes marriage, and Crystal gladly accepts. Crystal leaves for an appointment with a real estate agent in preparation for her forthcoming marriage, and Edna climbs into her employer's bed to make love with Chino, demanding that he perform a variety of sex acts. Crystal returns unexpectedly to retrieve some papers and watches through her two-way mirror as Edna and Chino plot to murder her by causing a gas explosion. She turns the tables on her perfidious lover and secretary and laughs sadistically as the bedroom explodes."
If that plot description isn't detailed enough, we suggest the one found at the One-Sheet Index.
Find Janet Banzet in this trailer to
the debut film of Sylvester Stallone:
Also found in the movie, the unknown Germans Ula Kopa(of School Girl Bride [1971 / trailer] and The Erotic Adventures of Siegfried [1971 / trailer]) and Alon D'Armand (of Das gelbe Haus am Pinnasberg [1970 / music] and The Terror of Doctor Mabuse [1962 / trailer]).
The film's NYC premier was held, as revealed above, at the since-demolished World Theatre, the same place where Deep Throat (1972 / soundtrack / see Harry Reems Part II) eventually had its NYC premier. Renay Clair(e) was there, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. The co-feature, Copenhagen Open City, is either now lost or an unknown a.k.a. title for some other movie. (Off the top of heads, how about Sexual Freedom in Denmark[1970 / see: Uschi Part III] or Alex de Renzy's Pornography in Denmark [1970], the latter of which even used a travelogue format.)
When screened the now-closed Cinema Art in Troy, NY, in January 1971, The Corporate Queen was paired with Interplay(1970), a lesser feature of the lettered man Albert T. Viola (16 June 1919 – 21 Feb 2007), a year before he made his most commercially successful movie, Preacherman (1971 / trailer). Interplay, a B&W X-rated flick that probably wouldn't qualify for an R-rating today eventually got an R-rated re-release as Part Time Girls a.k.a Part Time Virgins— under any name, in 2013 it became Case File #128 on Temple of Schlock's Endangered List.
Changes
(1970, dir. Gerard Damiano)
While Reems is not found in any of the cast lists to this film that we could find, Changes supposedly got re-released at a later date as This Film Is All About…, and both rame.net and the iafdlist Harry Reems as an un-credited performer in that film. If this is true, then we must assume a loop or film scene featuring his talents is featured somewhere within this "documentary" or got added for the re-release.
In any event, in the This Film Is All About… version of Changes, "we get to see 2 loops … The Plumber Cometh and The Pick-Up.* They were shot silent on full-color 16mm film, and the voices and other sounds were dubbed in later. They were both less than 12 minutes long, and Harry Reems was featured in both of them. [rame]" If Changes and TFIAS are indeed one and the same film, the inclusion of the two loops would indeed indicate a re-cut because, at least according to that great purveyor of porn lor, in Changes"Damiano [only] crosses the line into hardcore footage for less than a minute, showing fellatio between husband-wife team Patrick & Tally Wright (who both provide interesting voice-over commentary on their careers in porn) and several models' masturbating far more explicitly than usually presented in this era. [imdb]"
*A good title seldom dies: this Plumber Cometh should not be confused with the 1985 Helga Sven movie, Pipe Dreams a.k.a. The Plumber Cometh. Likewise, The Pick-Up here is a loop, not the 1968 feature film (trailer) directed by Lee Frost (14 Aug 1935 – 25 May 2007), nor the seventies' sexploiter Pick-up (1975 / trailer).
That said, Gerard Damiano's later documentary Sex U.S.A.(1971)— supposedly released in Sweden as Inbjudan till gruppsex (poster above) — definitely includes Harry Reems (see Part II), and while we used to think that documentary was indeed an independent film project all of its own, we cannot help but notice that the cast list for Sex U.S.A as found at the imdbis far closer to the cast list given for This Film Is All About… found at aifdthen to any cast list given anywhere for Changes. Ergo: we now tend to think that This Film Is All About… might not be an alternative title for Changes, but for Sex U.S.A. (Having not seen any of the films yet, we present this only as a hypothesis and nothing more.)
That (not) settled, let's nevertheless take a look at Changes, the first "documentary" Gerard Damiano (4 Aug 1928 – 25 Oct 2008) ever made. Over at Something Weird, Don the Deviate of America Moralia says: "A pre-Deep Throat Gerard Damiano informs us that the Sexual Revolution ushered in 'Changes that have come too soon for some, not soon enough for others... Changes that will liberate or destroy.' Following this ominous pronunciamentoare a series of interviews conducted by Damiano himself, intercut with sex scenes on the bodacious border of hardcore. [...] A psychiatrist discusses censorship; a porno shop clerk (actually skinflick actor Larry Hunter [of The Headless Eyes (1971 / trailer) and The Amazing Transplant (1970 / trailer)]) fills us in on perversions; a theater manager talks about sex in the cinema (during which we get to see a marvelous trailer for a [Damiano] movie called Teenie Tulip [a.k.a. Hungry Mouth, poster above and below]); and ecdysiast Carol Barr [a.k.a. Candy Barr] speaks about stripping. Damiano also interviews a feminist member of N.O.W. on women's lib; the owner of a 42nd Street 'model studio' who talks about 'tipping'; the editors of a homo magazine; and gay activist Arthur Bell, here billed as Arthur Irving. Best of all, Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley of Screw magazine are interviewed about... well, just about everything under the sun. [...] Then we get to see them in action during a Screw photo shoot with Kim Pope and Alex Mann (of The Defiance of Good[1975 / trailer], I Drink Your Blood [1970 / trailer], and more). Via a hidden camera, we then visit the set of a peep show in the making, then onto the stage of a live sex show in a private club where Tally Wright [a.k.a. Lillian Rose 'Tallie' Cochrane (7 October 1944 — 21 May 2011) of Five Loose Women (1974 / trailer below), Girls for Rent (1974 / trailer), The Centerfold Girls (1974 / trailer), The Candy Tangerine Man (1975 / trailer, see Marilyn Joi Part III) and more] gets it on with a blonde dude while a black chick has fun with a huge white dildo. Speaking of dildos, we next meet 'Nancy,' a sculptress who creates her own dildos and discusses the importance of shape rather than size.* Finally, Damiano's own son, 7-year-old Gerald Jr., talks about religion with his dad. A powerful, informative, nostalgic, lewd, funny, sex-filled documentary that, as a special bonus, also includes vintage shots of the old 42nd Street in its wonderfully sex-crazed, pre-Disney heyday. Another truly remarkable collector's item for deviates everywhere."
*Nancy and her work made appearances in other movies, including Pornography in New York (1972), which we look at further below. But another movie in which she appears (possibly reusing material from the films we look at here) is the Yugoslavian art film by Dusan Makavejev (13 Oct 1932 – 25 Jan 2019), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971 / trailer), in which we see "Nancy Godfrey in New York sculpting a plaster-cast replica of Screweditor Jim Buckley's erect penis". (Whatever happened to Jim Buckley?) Nancy has since disappeared from the art world, though there is a Nancy Godfrey working at an art school in Florida (probably unrelated: "Nancy Godfrey" is not exactly rare name).
Trailer to
Five Loose Women a.k.a. Fugitive Girls:
While more than one website mentions that the song Reflections of My Life(by The Marmalade) is used throughout the movie, probably without permission, the actual opening song commissioned for the documentary is Getting Off, written and sung by Monti Rock, and while Monti doesn't mention the song in this interview, the interview is a fun read. We mention Monti because even if you don't know him under that name, if you're old enough you might remember him as Disco Tex...
Disco Tex & His Sex O Lettes
singing Get Dancin':
Making the Blue Film
(1971, dir. Jerald Intrator)
A.k.a. Making the Blue Movie. In his book Sexuality in World Cinema, James L. Limbacher offers a terse description of the film: "Some porno loops are strung together with some interviews with sex actors to make a sort of 'documentary' under the direction of J. Nehemara." Going by the cast supplied at the imdb, the loops probably feature Harry Reems, Tina Russelland her husband Jason Russell (3 Dec 1942 – 26 Oct 2005), and Shaun Costello. Supposedly, outtakes were used to create Sensuous Vixens (1976), a film we look at later...
"Jeraldo Stuarti" (name on the Blue Movie poster), like "J. Nehemara" (name offered by Limbacher), is actually the filmmaker Jerald Intrator (24 Sept 1920 – 28 Oct 1988), the director of the classic B&W sexploiters Orgy at Lil's Place (1963, poster above) and Satan in High Heels (1962 / full movie); Making the Blue Film is currently his last known directorial project.
In any event, though the poster is easy enough to find online, no one has bothered to write about Making the Blue Film anywhere — could it be a lost film?
If so, before it got lost it was screened, even outside of New York City: the first advert above is from the now holy Trans Lux Krim of Highland Park, MI — that would be Detroit to outsiders like us — while the second is from a double feature with Mona (1970 / full NSFW film) at since burnt-down Art Cinema of cosmopolitan Binghamton, NY.
While Deep Throat generally gets all the credit as opening the Golden Age of Porn as the first porn film with a plot to get a theatrical release, Mona the Virgin Nymph, which also has a similarly mild plot, hit select theatres two years earlier. ("One could say that Mona launched the money shot heard 'round the world.") The first theatrically released film to feature real sex is Warhol's Blue Movie (1969 / full NSFW art film) a.k.a. as Fuck (despite the fact that there's only around 10 minutes hardcore sex).
Trailer to Jerald Intrator's first film,
Striporama(1953):
The Gang That Could!
(1971, dir. Still Unknown)
The same year Al Pacino made his name in Francis Ford Coppola's classic mafia film The Godfather (trailer), Robert de Niro replaced Pacino in a now forgotten mafia comedy entitled The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a movie based on a novel of the same name and that has the added distinction of being considered by many as the "real" feature film debut of Hervé Villechaize (23 Apr 1943 – 4 Sept 1993, of Seizure [1974, with Jonathan Frid], Forbidden Zone [1980, with Susan Tyrrell] and Zalman King's Two Moon Junction [1988]), whose speaking voice was supplied by "The Man of a Thousand Voices", Paul Frees (22 June 1920 – 2 Nov 1986).
Trailer to
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight:
Perhaps it would be a bit much to call 1971's X-rated The Gang that Could!a "mockbuster", but the title is obviously an intentional play upon the at the time well-known book and subsequent film version. To what extent the plot of The Gang that Could! in any way references the inspirational source of its title is open to conjecture, as the movie is apparently lost. Online sources are rare — it isn't even found at the iafd— and the few that exist only repeat the information found at the website of the film's original distributor, distribpix, which is unable to supply a director's name but claims that the film features the talents of Cindy West & Harry Reems... and both are actually discernable amidst the field of flesh found on the poster, most noticeably at the lower right. (Anyone know who the blonde dude is?)
Going by the Getty poster, we here at a wasted life would assume that the basic plot involves a gang that bangs and shoots and bangs and shoots and bangs and shoots and bangs and shoots and...
By the way: among the various pre-Golden Age and G.A. porn films in which white chick Cindy West (a.k.a. Susan Sands, Lori Lake, Terry Ruggiera, Cindy Travers, Helen Highwater, Tammy Twat, Tania Tittle, Linda Terry, Cherry Aims, Laura Bentley, Joy Otis, Terri Scott, Teri Reardon) is found are Lialeh (1974), the first predominantly "Black" (as in "Afro American) porn film,* and Devil's Due (1973), poster above, a rare excursion into semi-horror porn dealing with Satanists in which she had the lead female role and the classic line is uttered: "Kiss the cock of Satan!" Cindy West disappeared from porn circa 1976, never to be heard of again.(Again, good titles never die: in 2014, there was a non-porn horror Devil's Due [trailer].)
*For more info on Lialeh, we suggest looking at our review of Christmas Evil (1980), which was directed by Lewis Jackson, Lialeh's associate producer.
Opening scene of
Lialeh (1974):
His Loving Daughter
(1971, dir. Still Unknown)![]()
An obscure film that infers incestuous shenanigans, but though the film does toss in a scene or two of a geriatric Daddy (Daniel Harin) getting it on with women of all ages, he never does his daughter.
We were unable to locate either the director or original poster to this film, but the DVD covers to the re-releases are easily found (see the images above and below).
The delectable Tina Russell, so prominently displayed on the above cover, is not in the film — were she, perhaps we would try to make it past the scene between Daniel Harin (pictured below) & Dolly Sharp (a.k.a. Helen Wood) described in the plot description below.
The plot explanation as compiled between the DVD's backside and the website Video Zeta One: Daughter Claudia and her 18-year-old Tina (Gina Fox) peeks through a keyhole into Claudia's dad's office and watches Ray Edwards (Harin) get his client (Sharp) drunk and take advantage of her. This gets Tina all hot and bothered, so Tina calls her boyfriend, Chucky, for some sex. The problem is: he can't get it up! "Tina breaks the fourth wall and stares directly at the camera and says that anyone in the audience would have performed better." Later, after complaining to Claudia, Tina seduces the pool man (Paul Matthews) who "is able to provide her what Chucky could not". Claudia then gets it on with her boyfriend, Freddy (Reems, seen below), while her daddy gets it on with another client, Elizabeth (Barbara Grumet). Claudia suddenly pops in with her high-school biology teacher, Mr. Carter, who gets it on with Elizabeth, and when Claudia and Tina show up, Elizabeth teaches them all about girl-on-girl action.
"What can be said? It's so much like a cheesy early seventies porno, that it almost seems like a parody of one. I like that they kept a light-hearted vibe throughout, with the characters frequently breaking the fourth wall and cracking wise. [Video Zeta One]"
Daddy Daniel Harin had a brief career as a studly old man (usually un-credited) in the early days of hardcore sexploitation, can also be found in a few other films, including The Debauchers (1971 / scene— that's him on the poster above) and Professor of Sex Ed (1973 / NSFW) and Sexual Customs in Scandinavia (1972 / poster below).
Aside from Video Zeta, the only other person we could find who seems to have ever watched His Loving Daughter to the end — despite the ease with which it can be found online for free — is lorof NYC, who says the film is "by-the-numbers porn" and "slapdash and sloppy": "Its title intentionally misleading, His Loving Daughter does feature a father and daughter as characters but never the twain shall get it on. [...] The father is good ol' Daniel Harin, [and...] I suspect it gave the older demographic of the adult movie theater audience somebody to identify with, but it's a bit disconcerting, sort of like Walter Huston getting the girl. The daughter is an unidentified actress as Claudia, but it is actually the daughter's best friend Tina who has the hots for Claudia's daddy. Dolly Sharp also appears as a wealthy widow who gets it on with old Harin, who is her financial adviser. Continuing the 'mature' theme, Harin has another client, a busty redhead played by Barbara Grumet, who gives both young girls a 'sex education class' in lesbian lovemaking. [...]"
Helen Wood a.k.a. Dolly Sharp dancing with
Debbie Reynolds and Marge Champion in
Give a Girl a Break (1953 / trailer):
Oh Brrrother
(1971, dir. Still Unknown)
Another one-day wonder about which absolutely nothing is known, including the names of all performers other than a recognizable and moustacheless Harry Reems, who is also seen on the poster.
Plot:"A young nympho visits a shrink (Harry Reems) to talk about her masturbation and illicit fantasies involving guess who? Her fantasies involve sucking, fucking, riding, lesbians, and threesomes in every single position! This is a true fantasy come true and our lovely shrink Harry will make every single second of the session count. [Hot Movies]"
Thus, Plotwise, Oh Brrrother could be an a.k.a. of any number of movies, including the just as obscure flick we mention further below, Love Shrink... Shrinks, psychoanalysis and sex have been a favorite plot device for porn, well, probably since sex films started having plots. Shrinks and sex also play heavily in Shaun Costello's 1974 sex film, Lady on the Couch, which we mention here primarily because we have an advertising image to it, found directly above.
Sensuous Vixens
(1971 or '76, dir. "Freddie Williams")
If truly from '76, then the "movie" may well be the last "feature" porn film release to star Tina Russell (23 Sept 1948 – 18 May 1981). The originally credited director is the unknown "Freddie Williams"; according to the International Adult Film Database, he also supposedly directed one other film entitled Violated (1971) which, unlike Sensuous Vixens, is not in general circulation.
In turn, according to Jason S. Martinko's book The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, which dates Sensuous Vixens as from 1976, Violated and Sensuous Vixens are actually one and the same movie, a concept that gains weight when seeing that both supposed films feature the exact same cast. (Still, going by the plot description further below, Violated seems rather far-fetched for an a.k.a. title.) Martinko also credits Shaun Costello as the movie's director and co-scriptwriter with Barry Smith, a name also generally credited as a.k.a. Shaun Costello.
According to imdb, which also lists the film as a 1976 release, "Freddie Williams" and "Barry Smith" are indeed that Renaissance Man, Shaun Costello, who no longer makes films but occasionally blogs. Costelloalso appears in the movie, if we are to believe the imdb which, like Martinko, also claims that Sensuous Vixens and Violatedare one and the same movie, Violatedbeing merely the video-release title. Both the iafd and imdb claim that the movie uses a scene from Cheri (1974), while the imdbadds that "outtakes [from Making the Blue Film (1971)] were used to create Sensuous Vixens"— indeed, Sensuous Vixens does play out very much like a cut & paste job utilizing loops and scenes from other movies around new narrative footage.![]()
The back cover of the DVD re-release gives the plot of the film as follows: "Tina Russell[below] leads us through the tumultuously sexy New York City searching for modeling opportunities. After a series of long days and no results, she takes an offer to model in some 'artistic photographs'. When she arrives, she quickly learns what art means in the shady underworld of Manhattan. Tina quickly moves from tame, softcore photography to hardcore fuck films, embracing her pornographic urges while feeding her lust for the camera. Sensuous Vixens is the classic tale of a good girl releasing the nympho beast inside while exploring her own sexual urges. Filmed on location in 1970s New York City, Sensuous Vixensis a landmark piece of work that all XXX connoisseurs must see."
According to X-Critic, "Sensuous Vixens is a pretty solid early seventies entry that delivers some nice New York City location footage and some very healthy doses of steamy sex. Tina Russellis in very fine form here, looking beautiful throughout and performing with some pretty sincere enthusiasm. Top-billed Harry Reems is only in the movie for a few minutes, but it's fun to see him pop here without his trademark Deep Throat moustache. Russell's narration is campy and the soundtrack, made up of some pretty familiar numbers, is fantastic. The film's biggest flaw is that the sex scenes were obviously shot without live sound and the same guy makes the same 'ooo' noises over top of each scene, regardless of how many guys actually appear in it. It's possible this was put together from a bunch of loops and that the narration was added as an afterthought to give it some sort of context, but either way, it's entertaining enough and Tina Russell's fanbase will enjoy seeing her featured prominently."
By the way, search as we could, the only movie entitled Violated that we could find that was released in a timeframe related to Sensuous Vixens is an Albert Zugsmith (24 Apr 1910 – 26 Oct 1993) production with a completely different cast…
Trailer to Albert Zugsmith's
Violated (1974):
Curious Women
(1971 or '73, dir. Still Unknown)
Though it's easily available on DVD, as a download or free on any number of porn movie sites, we couldn't find out much about this one-day wonder other than that it features Davey Jones, Harry Reems, Jamie Gillis, Cindy West, Barbara Benner and Darby Lloyd Rains... and a few other unknowns.
Cinema Headcheeseseems to have found the movie entertaining, going by their film description: "Uncle Hans is an overalls-wearing, German-speaking, Hitler-saluting farmer who loves his nieces — one a cute blonde (Cindy West), the other a frumpy, hairy brunette (Barbara Benner). In possibly the most oddly disturbing scene on the set, the furry brunette is shown fantasizing Uncle Hans urinates in the yard. Like most red-blooded women, she diddles away on her giblets at the sight of Hans draining his pecker. Yeck! If that's not crazy enough, there's even a murder by wine bottle at an orgy. This one is just crazy, but it's a whole lot of fun. Watch out for Jamie Gillis briefly yanking it on a lazy-boy while viewing a couple screwing."
Harry Reems, without 'stache, shows up to ball one of the girls in a cheap-looking hotel room, he on the floor and Davey Jones in the bed.
Not to be confused with the earlier movie The Curious Female (1970), a sci-fi exploiter starring Angelique Pettyjohn (11 Marc 1943 – 14 Feb 1992), of Biohazard(1985).
Trailer to
The Curious Female (1970):
Love Shrink
(1971, dir. Still Unknown)
A film that we could find nothing about, other than it did at least get released in New York in 1971, where the tiny advertisement (second from the bottom, left) of the Sept 17th issue of the Daily News indicates a screening at Cine Orleans (Off Broadway), one of the many now-lost grindhouses of the formerly great city: "Located on Broadway at W. 47th Street, the Mark Strand Theatre was opened on April 11, 1914, with the photoplay The Spoilers (full film) starring William Farnum July (4 July 1876 – 5 June 1953). […] After dropping stage shows on July 3, 1951, the Strand Theatre was renamed Warner Theatre, and opened with Strangers on a Train (1951 / trailer). [..] On July 31, 1968, the theatre was twinned, becoming the Warner Strand Theatre. A third 450-seat theatre was built on the old Strand Theatre's stagehouse, named Cine Orleans (Off Broadway), which had its own entrance on W. 47th Street. On June 3, 1971 […] it reopened as the RKO Warner Twin Theatre. […] The former balcony became the 1,200 seat Penthouse Theatre. Unfortunately, on February 8th, 1987, after a long and eventful life, one of the greatest movie palaces of New York City closed and was demolished. [Cinema Treasures]"
In 2013, the original Ronnie Cramer's Cult Film Site was selling the video, but the current site only features Cramer's own products. But way back in 2013, the site offered the following two-line plot description: "Finally — a doctor who has what it takes to cure 'physical' ailments as well as mental ones. Needless to say his couch sees plenty of action." Long ago (2013), we wrote Ronnie Cramer — the director of such masterpieces as Back Street Jane(1989 / trailer) and Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend (1992) — at rcramer@ix.netcom.com asking for more details, but nadda was the response.
According to iafd, the flick features the muff of some gal named "Betty Boston" and a brunette and a blonde, plus an additional penis of some guy. Anyone out there know anything about the movie?
Mondo Porno
(1971 or '72, dir. Still Unknown)
Not to be confused with the close-up and splooge-filled D2V Mondo Porno from 2002 "directed" by Anthony R. Lovett (13 May 1961 – 26 Jan 2014). And also not to be confused with the 1972 West Coast "documentary"Porno Mondo, which "looks behind the scenes of pornographic film production in Los Angeles", although it often is (which is why we'll look at that film here, too, a few paragraphs down).
No, Mondo Pornois an East Coast production, as is obvious by its featured wieners and hotdog buns... but if there is an original poster of it still in existence, it has yet to find its way online. As for Beyond the Commission Report's Report on Obscenity and Pornography, the poster of which is presented above, online there is general disagreement about whether that movie is a re-release of Mondo Porno or Porno Mondo... anyone out there know for sure?
In any event, "Beyond the Commission's Report on Obscenity and Pornographypremiered in New York in August 1971. Advertisements stated: 'This film covers the full spectrum of sexual experiences. After viewing it you will be given an IBM card to register your reactions … All data will be processed by a computer and the findings will be made available to the commission …' (Screw magazine, no. 127, August 9, 1971). Even a classic exploitation roadshow man would have been proud of the IBM card gimmick, offering the audience the chance to make their views known to the commission (though it had stopped sitting almost a year earlier). [Bright Lights]"
In turn, Mondo Porno was released either in 1971 [iafd] or 1972 [imdb]. Both sites list Dolly Sharp and Harry Reems as appearing in this white-coater of sorts. At imdb, lorof NYC, one the few who has seen this flick, writes that Mondo Porno is "clearly inspired by the 1971 Presidential Commission's Report on Obscenity" (italics ours) and that it "adequately covers various sexual topics": "An annoying on-camera filmmaker keeps emphasizing 'You be the judge', and then shows us vignettes covering material surveyed in the report. Harry Reems demos the usual in & out with a lovely girl in the opening scene, minus a money shot. Dolly Sharp and a cute brunette (Suzy Mann) give a lesbian routine featuring vibrator and dildo. [...] What is unusual about this film is that it also includes a homosexual threesome, in which the fellatio is explicit while the anal sex is only suggested, perhaps in deference to the target audience. Instead of loud music, this particular sequence features insightful interviews voiced over by the three guys, one of whom expresses a liberated attitude and approach to living that still sounds fresh nearly 40 years later."![]()
Over at Something Weird, they have the right film, Mondo Porno, in the product description but use the trailer to the West Coast Porno Mondo— go figure. There, homophobic Mike Accomando (the gay scene caused him "to pull a hamstring sprinting for the fast-forward button") of Dreadful Pleasures writes "Mondo Porno presents us with a hodge-podge of segments hosted by a filmmaker who urges us to 'judge for yourself what should be labeled obscene.' [...] With the sincerity of a game show host, our guide introduces us to a series of 'case studies.' The first is a standard mating ritual where Harry Reems introduces himself to his girlfriend's clitoris. [...] Dolly Sharp and some chick in a headband do the Macarena on each other. [...] Three sissy-looking dudes ('Evan, Vinnie and Henry') mince around and snap naked photos of each other's boymeat [...]."
But let's now to turn our attention the film Something Weird's trailer is of: Porno Mondo: An In Depth Study of Porno Films (1971). As the trailer voiceover says, "Direct from the Jenkins Film Festival in Hollywood comes the most sensational motion picture of the decade, winner of the coveted Kraft Award: Porno Mondo. An in-depth study of pornography in the making, this picture is not for the squeamish. It tells all the truths about adult motion pictures..." Well, about the West Coast scene at least.
Directed by an unknown "Federico Schwartz", with cinematography by "George Gentilia Jr.", Porno Mondo is a 100% heterosexual (and triple-X) documentary on the making porn films on the West Coast. As to be expected, it has a lot of hairy close-ups, bad hair and bad wigs and features, among others, the great Rene Bond (11 Oct 1950 – 2 June 1996), above, the spunky San Diegan girl-next-door adult actress who appeared in an untold number of exploitation and sexploitation and hardcore films and loops — including a number of Ed Wood / Stephen Apostolof films, such Fugitive Girls (1974 / trailer above at Changes), and a variety of Harry Novak productions.
Rene Bond's last known appearance
was not on film:
BTW: The Mood Mosaic is a multiple volume music compellation series from Italy that focuses on obscure lounge and chill-like music. It began in 1997 and is still releasing compellations today. Somewhere along the way (2007?), they released the compellation Mondo Porno— and on it, not from the film, is a great song entitled Mondo Porno by the one-song wonders The Blow Jobbers. And so, for your aural pleasure:
The Blow Jobbers —
Mondo Porno:
Klute
(1971, dir. Alan J. Pakula)
A serious film by a serious filmmaker, Klute brought its star, Jane Fonda, her first Oscar. Plot? Well, with Fonda's former radicalism in mind, let's look at what TV Guide, the bastion of Middle American taste, says: "Along with Barbarella (1968 / trailer) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969 / trailer), one of the best things the highly variable Jane Fonda has ever done. When a research scientist turns up missing, his best friend, John Klute (Donald Sutherland, of Hollow Point [1995] and so much more), a small-town police detective, goes to New York City in search of Bree Daniels (Fonda), a prostitute to whom the missing man had written letters. Bree, who is trying to switch professions, tells Klute that she has been getting threatening phone calls from a violent former client who she also thinks has been following her. In the process of his investigation, Klute falls for Bree, though she has difficulty returning his affection. After another prostitute who had contact with the sadistic caller is murdered, Bree finds herself alone in a dark warehouse in the exciting finale. [...] Sutherland is either an excellent sounding board for [Fonda's] nuanced portrait or he's a big zero, probably both. Fonda, however, transcends her limitations, making the most of her often forced quality as an actress. Bree emerges as likably strong yet dangerously weak, refreshingly intelligent yet searching and confused."
Trailer to
Klute:
And where does Harry appear? Well, he worked as an uncredited extra, and it is almost a joke to list it here because, as Newsweekput it, "The eagle-eyed viewer could spot him — or, more precisely, his knees." He plays a patron at the disco, as did, supposedly, some unknown NYC actor by the name of Sylvester Stallone.
Someone noteworthy who had more time than both of the two studs combined (but not by much) is Shirley Stoler (30 Mar 1929 – 17 Feb 1999), in her second feature-film appearance after her co-lead performance in the low-budget masterpiece that is The Honeymoon Killers (1970).
Trailer to
The Honeymoon Killers (1970):
Addendum II to come one day...
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Jessabelle (USA, 2014)
Naw, the flick's entitled Jessabelle probably to make people think of the better Blumhouse flick of the same year, Annabelle (2014 / trailer), or simply 'cause it's one of the myriad of ways the name (meaning"Wicked, Wealthy, Beautiful") is spelt in the USA, a land where you're free to spell names any ol' way since most people can't really spell all that well anyway. And going by what transpires in this movie, some people can't write horror movies, either.
Trailer to
Jessabelle:
A Deep South horror flick, Jessabelle, as directed by Kevin Greutert (Visions [2016 / trailer] and Jackals [2017 / trailer]), one of the progenitors of the dead-horse-flogging Sawfranchise, and written by Robert Ben Garant (Hell Baby [2013 / trailer] and The Veil [2016 / trailer]), has enough plotholes that if it were a sieve your pasta would fall through it. The nicely nasty opening scene, in which the saccharine-sweet declarations of love between pregger Jessabelle "Jessie" Laurent (Sarah Snook of Predestination [2014 / trailer] and Brother's Nest [2018 / trailer]) and her daddy-to-be fiancé Mark (Brian Hallisay of Hostel III [2011 / trailer]) come to an abrupt car-crashing end is probably the most horrifyingly effective scene in the movie, and the ending is unexpectedly downbeat and thus commendable, but the problem lies in everything in between. (And that, if you get down to it, is roughly 85 minutes of the 90-minute running time.) The scares are generic and almost always expected, and should you actually start to question the developments in the narrative or the actions of the characters, you might find yourself scratching your head so hard that you reach your brain.
The basic premise of a young woman who has lost everything and is now stuck in a wheelchair returning home to a father she hardly knows only to be confronted with ghosts of the past is, well, as much a realistically horrifying idea as it is the fodder of TV movies, which this film sometimes feels like. Here, of course, since it's a horror movie, the ghosts of the past are not of a figuratively speaking kind, but real spirits in the night (and day, actually). The concept that ghosts age, however, is pretty bat-shit out there — does that mean they grow old and die, eventually? (Where do dead ghosts go, we wonder.) But aging ghosts is a peripheral (and never mentioned) aspect of the tale told in this movie: a murdered, mixed-race baby born the same day as white-gal Jessie obviously has aged year for year within the walls of Jessie's dad's home and in the waters of the adjacent lake, matching Jessie's growth in the corporal world.
Oddly enough, however, going by how they look when they finally appear in the final scenes of the flick, the ghosts of Jessie's "mom" Kate (Joelle Carter of Cold Storage [2009 / trailer]) and Kate's former Afro-American lover Moses (Vaughn Wilson) don't age a day in the afterlife. Not only that, Moses the Ghost can obviously teleport, for he is the only ghost to appear far away from the location where he died, rather unlike the now young-adult Dead Girl with unnaturally immobile boobs (Amber Stevens West, seen below not from the film), who can take solid enough physical form to beat the shit out of Mr. Former Hometown Boyfriend Preston (Mark Weber of 13 Sins[2014 / trailer], Uncanny [2015 / trailer], Green Room [2015 / trailer] and Antibirth [2016 / trailer]) but keeps her appearances only to the backwater homestead. (Of course, could all the ghosts of the flick teleport like Moses, then Jessie would never have to had come home to start experiencing the supernatural.)
The ghosts have other powers, too. Not only can they smash whiskey bottles while unseen, they can regenerate the bottles as well, so that for whatever reason, the bottle is back at the bedside again later on. And they can close doors and latches, the latter particular handy when it comes to taking an exceedingly late revenge upon Jessie's "dad", Leon (David Andrews of Cherry 2000 [1987 / trailer] and Graveyard Shift [1990 / trailer]).
Most amazingly, with a blink of an eye they can miraculously clean a flooded and ruined bathroom and fully re-dress Jessie, who seconds before was fighting for her life nekkid in the tub. (Even odder, not only is she suddenly dressed when the ghost pulls her from the tub, but no one notices that she somehow got dressed and dry while she was having her screaming fit behind the mysteriously locked bathroom door, not even the caretaker who had helped put her get nekkid into the bathtub.) And the ghosts obviously like to clean, too, because when Jessie moves into the old room of her "mom", which has obviously been closed off since mommy's death almost two decades earlier, the room is spotless — something neither she nor Leon find in any way odd.
These and many other sloppy non-details, combined with the general predictability of the movie (but for its opening and closing scenes) make Jessabelledefinitely non-essential viewing when it comes to the genre of horror films. On the plus side, the acting is mostly okay (the actor playing Jessie is actually and unnoticeably from The Land Down Under), the locations great, and the direction perfectly competent. In the end, however, both the talent and the location are basically wasted in Jessabelle, a movie so narratively stunted and lazy that one wonders how it ever got made, much less released. Really, we love how, towards the end, Jessie the Rocket Scientist suddenly realizes everything behind everything and tells it all out loud so that the slower (as in most) viewers can finally catch on to the what, why, how, when and where of the events.
One mildly interesting inference of the flick that is less poorly developed than simply dropped in the viewer's lap for a few moments during the big closing showdown is that the haunting and ghosts could all be the manifestations of Jessie's own guilt for surviving the crash that killed her beau and unborn babe as well as for being unable to help her father when he gets stuck and dies in the burning shed. But the final scenes beneath the waters of the lake and her last words to Sheriff Pruitt (character actor Chris Ellis of way too much to mention) pretty much render that interpretation a big "Nope". Them there be ghosts, and them ghost don't be nice.And this movie don't be good none, either.
Not from the movie –
Edith Piaf's 1951 version of
Frankie Laine's #2 hit from 1951, Jezebel:
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Short "Film": The Sleep Fairy (Germany, 2019)
"Success has many fathers. But particularly in highly disruptive markets, communication plays a central role in determining whether the brand succeeds or not. So seize the opportunity, analyse the competition's TV advertising and create something unique."
A.k.a. Don't Worry, Sleep Happy, this short here is actually an advertisement — as in commercial — of a European mattress company. Where and when this advertisement was ever screened or broadcast, we know not, but obviously enough it can be found on YouTube.
The advert is an attempt by the mattress firm to follow the concept explained above by The Restless CMO. Success when doing so can lead, in the best case, to internet success: a meme that gets spread all over the place, reaching an audience far beyond that which simple screenings on TV or in cinemas ever do — and that, free of additional charge. (Example: the Volkswagon terrorist commercial, which supposedly VW did not authorize and was never officially screened on TV or in cinemas.)
The Sleep Fairy didn't quite do that, and still remains obscure today. The Restless CMO's review of the advertisement also functions well as a possible explanation why it never 'memed': "Lukewarm. Good idea, good story, but implemented too long-windedly and conventionally. With a braver narrative structure this spot would have made the top of my list. Too bad. Frank had more in him, the old sleep fairy."
But much of what the Restless CMO sees as flaws are what we like about this well-made commercial: the leisurely pace helps remove the "advertisement feeling" and makes the production seem more like a "real" short film, something the conventional filmic style also underscores. The humor is always present, but never overstated. And while it might be "long" for a commercial, its length is perfect for a short film.
In any event, to quote the creative agency that made the commercial, MOTOR Kommunikation: "Let us introduce you to Frank, professional sleeping fairy. A real professional. How 'Emma' first changed his job, and then his life, is best told first-hand."
The Sleep Fairy a.k.a Don't Worry, Sleep Happy:
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Bad Faith / Ond tro (Sweden, 2010)
(Spoilers.) A cold, glacially paced and alienating movie that is more interested in conveying a mood of isolation and all-encompassing inability to communicate than presenting a functional, solid thriller even halfway interesting enough to not put the viewer to sleep. The excruciatingly long opening scene in which the camera maintains an interminably prolonged long shot with a minuscule glide as two women never stop talking (mostly off screen) about a needed form on the company computer pretty much sets the pace for everything that follows. (The next scene, of the workers leaving the office building, uses the exact same visual style — indeed, the director resorts to snail-paced moving camera shots so often that one gets the feeling the cinematographer was on Quaaludes while filming and, later, the film editor was on vacation for much of the post-production.)
Trailer to
Sleeping Pill:
Bad Faithtells the tale of Mona (Sonja Richter of The Substitute a.k.a. Vikaren[2007 / trailer], When Animals Dream [2014 / trailer] and The Homesman [2014 / trailer]), a single woman with a notable inability to communicate or connect who has moved from Denmark to some Swedish town populated by people with a notable inability to communicate or connect. The narrative plays with the basic structure of an Italian gaillo, in which someone sees something and then spends the film trying to solve the crime: one evening after work, Mona stumbles upon the victim of the locally active serial killer and, as it seems to make her hot and bothered, she decides to pursue and expose the killer.
Just who the killer is, however, is way too easy for the viewer to figure out, as there are only three main characters to the tale: her, the obvious red herring (Kristoffer Joner of Next Door [2005 / trailer], Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead [2014 / trailer], Hidden a.k.a. Skjult [2009 / trailer]), and the logical killer (Jonas Karlsson). Assorted tertiary characters get introduced along the way — the inspector, the single-mother neighbor and her nosy little girl, the male co-worker who couldn't give a fuck about #MeToo, the stakeout cop in the car — but their given presence is way too negligible for any of them to function as an alternative red herring or viable real killer.
The unnamed Swedish port city in which the film transpires seems to be a big one, one of concrete and multi-story buildings, but it is nevertheless small enough that the woman, red herring and logical killer constantly cross paths. The earnest dialog, often punctuated by long pauses, is generally delivered with the solemnity of a junior high-schooler revealing the existential realities of life, while the subtitles reveal that the production firm didn't bother to get a native English speaker to do the translating of the deeply riveting statements of intelectual transcendence. (Really, not having a native speaker do it might be excusable in, dunno, places like Miramar, Borneo or even China, but not in Western Europe.)
The singular sex scene is perhaps the best scene in the movie, but not because it's hot — it isn't — but because it truly conveys all the warmth that two people with a notable inability to communicate or connect would have were they to get naked and exchange body fluids. The second most effective scene is a short scene where the male co-worker tries to get much more physically close to Mona than she wants, for it reveals her to be anything but a pushover.
And thus the dankly shot Bad Faith / Ond tro slowly (like at a snail's pace) advances to its brain-bashing showdown and subsequent final scene of inferred twisted suburban happiness which, if reality or logic were of concern, would indicate that the couple might someday in the future, should there ever be a sequel, become the next Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Ian Brady And Myra Hindley, or Gerald And Charlene Gallego.
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