Dirty War (Spain, 1984)

April 26, 2013, 2:14 am

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(Spoilers.) Aka Guerra sucia and Schmutziger Krieg. 

We pulled this DVD out of our"DVDs from Hell" pile: a (much too high) pile of cheap DVDs that we have no idea how they ever even got in our possession. Many we simply and literally found, others were given to us by people who know our penchant for crappy flicks, while some seem to have materialized from nowhere. Like this one. War films aren't exactly our thing, and the DVD's title pretty much implies that the film would be one. In any event, we pulled it out of the pile simply 'cause we were in the rare mood for anything but a horror flick, as the last couple of horror flicks we'd seen were such disappointments we wanted a genre break. And what do you know: the film was a pleasant surprise.

Which isn't to say Dirty War is any good. It's a crappy, trashy piece of shit, actually. But not only is it not a war film, but it is also a wonderfully entertaining piece of flotsam that occasionally verges on surrealism. It kept us giggling till the end. Later, when we had the chance to do a little Internet research on this unknown and little-seen movie, we were less surprised to find out that Cannon once released the film in US grindhouses than we were to discover that hiding behind the director's pseudonym "Alfredo Casado" is no one less than the great Juan Piquer Simón, the auteur of directorial incompetence who made that craptastic classic of horror, Slugs: The Movie (1988) — which was actually Simón's follow-up project to this one. Suddenly, the enjoyable unprofessionalism and scatter-shot approach found in Dirty War made total sense.

Dirty War opens with the film's manly hero Paul (Pierre Oudry of Village Girls [1975 / sex scene] and Saint-Tropez Vice [1987 / trailer]) and some broad (Lone Fleming of The Possessed [1975 / full film in Spanish], Evil Eye (1975 / soundtrack),  Return of the Evil Dead [1973 / trailer], It Happened at Nightmare Inn [1973 / full film] and Tombs of the Blind Dead [1972 / trailer]), the latter of whom we later learn is the secretary to the  big bad guy, poking their heads out from under a bed where, in the middle of a war zone, they've been having some afternoon delight. He expresses his dreams, she talks him into working for her boss, and then we cut to a few scenes of Paul as an international man of mystery blowing up some refinery — a scene that looks like the worst of any Roger Moore James Bond climactic shootout scene but reshot using paper-mâché sets — and saving Pope John Paul II from being assassinated by assassinating the assassins.

The first ten minutes of the movie, like the whole film, jumps all over the globe between Africa, Europe (Madrid, Milan and Munich) and the USA. In the US, Paul uses a European payphone and in Europe, he has an old US pushbutton phone in his chic Munich apartment (and, oddly enough, has the same green vintage-70s kitchen that we have in real life — we bought ours on eBay). The film hops around so much that it gives the impression of being shot to accommodate the given location where the actors might be at any given time, or that the events were written around the given stock footage available (like that of the Pope in his Popemobile) and the exterior shots of the given cities.

Things don't change much in this regard after Paul, tired of his violent life, wants out. As to be expected, it ain't easy to leave the organization. Paul's boss, Mr Fox (Mariano Vidal Molina of El aullido del diablo (1987 / soundtrack), The Devil's Possessed (1974 / trailer), Una libélula para cada muerto (1974 / trailer), The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973 / full film), Curse of the Devil (1973 / trailer), Scream of the Demon Lover (1970 / trailer) and El vampiro negro(1953 / first 40 minutes in Spanish), refuses to let him leave and applies pressure by having his heavies kill Paul's tasty one night stand (Alicia Príncipe of the Jess Franco films ¿Cuánto cobra un espía? [1984], Amazons in the Temple of Gold [1986] and Night of 1,000 Sexes [1984]) and, we originally think, his girlfriend Virginia (Carol Fulijames of Beaks: The Movie [1987 / fan trailer] and The Sea Serpent [1984 / Spanish trailer]). Luckily for Paul, however, the dead nude on the floor at his gal's pad is actually a visiting friend of Virginia. To save Virginia's perky breasts, Paul sends her off to NYC to stay with some Afro-American friends of his (Bob and Annie, the latter of whom is SEXY!) and then he joins Mr. Fox's next job, the robbery of uranium...

In the course of the film we get, among other fun stuff, a hilarious car chase between a VW bug and a rent-a-wreck, an exploding house that kills the Afro-American dude, and a wonderful shootout between the bad guys and a helicopter that ends up with an exploding boat. A true highpoint is without doubt the "daring" robbery of the uranium that is, for some inexplicable reason, shot at a sped-up speed and in which, just as inexplicably, all the guns sound like rayguns when shot. And then, to round the film off, we finally get to see Paul do the logical thing that he should have done at the very beginning of the film: rub Mr Fox out — an act that would have saved him a lot of trouble, not to mention the lives of friends and casual fucks, had he only done it 15 minutes into the film instead of waiting, for some unknown reason, until the end.

The events and plot of Dirty War are under-developed and badly executed, but for that the movie moves at a quick enough pace and shows a lot of delectable naked skin — the latter in almost ironic excess, as in the long stripper scene that precedes the delivery of some documents, a scene so gratuitous that it becomes laughable (Paul seems to find it funny, too, as he looks as if he's having a hard time not laughing). The death of Paul's Afro-American friend Bob, who suffers some of the worst dialogue imaginable, is also entertaining in its idiocy: Paul cold have just as easily shot the bad guy and then helped Bob escape instead of high-tailing and leaving his pal to blow up himself and the gunman. And let's not forget the car chase with its exploding rent-a-wreck and VW with automatically re-inflating tire or, for that matter, an earlier chase scene in which Paul runs back and forth to get away from the car driven by Mr. Fox's nastiest minion, Bruno (the recently departed Frank Braña [24 February 1934 – 13 February 2012] of La mansión de los Cthulhu [1992 / trailer], The Rift [1990 / trailer], Pieces [1982 / trailer], Hannah, Queen of the Vampires [1973 / trailer], The Butcher of Binbrook [1971 / trailer], The House That Screamed [1969 / trailer] andDjango Kill... If You Live, Shoot! [1967 / trailer]).

Those are but few of the many visual and narrative tidbits of dilettantism that help make Dirty War enjoyable in that special, unexplainable way that director Juan Piquer Simón was such a master of. Yep, the movie might not be exciting or thrilling or suspenseful in any way, but it is fun in its own stupid way and we recommend it heartily — though we must also admit, in all honesty, it isn't quite as superlatively ding-batty as Slugs: The Movie.

One really wonders how any of the actors involved with Dirty War could keep a straight face while the movie was being made...

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Short Film: Dead Man's Lake (UK, 2012)

April 30, 2013, 6:14 am

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Can you add a new twist to the old dead-teenager chestnut of annoying teens trespassing to camp out next to some distant lake and the terrible fate that awaits them? Ben Franklin, the co-writer and director and producer of this little live action short tries to — and succeeds.

This little bloody and nasty flick is the sixth in an on-going series of on-line horror shorts that make up the on-line anthology known as Bloody Cuts. It is being presented here as our Film of the Month for April not because it is the best of the Bloody Cuts shorts — there are others that are just as good or perhaps better — but because it is the first of the excellent horror shorts of the planned 13-episode anthology that we had the pleasure of stumbling upon.
The dry humor present in Dead Man's Lake brings to mind Tucker and Dale vs Evil(2010) but is a tad nastier and, in the end, the laughter sticks a lot more in your throat. Filmed entirely on location, Dead Man's Lake marks the directorial début of Ben Franklin, who (alongside Anthony Melton) usually fills the shoes of producer at Bloody Cuts. We here at A Wasted Life say "Well done, mate!" — but then, we would say that to all the directors of all the shorts we've watched on their website.
Based on an "original story" by Joel Morgan, the gory little tale has a small cast but plenty of violence once the time-worn situation of two horny campers and a redundant third wheel is set. And like so many of the classic slasher flicks that Dead Man's Lake casts its post-modern eye upon, the short is "Based on true events" (this time around, those that supposedly "took place in 1984, in Norfolk, England..."). 

On hand for the mayhem are Nick the Stud (James Powell of Resurrecting the Street Walker [2009 / trailer]), Grace the Babe (Caroline Haines of Black Tower Temptation [2009 / trailer]), Pete the Annoying Third Wheel (Lewis Osborne), Maya the Tragic (Sarah Jane Honeywell of The Eschatrilogy: Book of the Dead [2012 / trailer]) and, last but not least, Will the Wildman (Jon Campling of Tales of the Supernatural [2013 / trailer], The Zombie King [2013 / German trailer], Zombie Massacre [2012 / trailer] and Penetration Angst [2003 / trailer]).

R.I.P.: Harry Reems – Part II (1969-1972)

May 6, 2013, 6:55 am

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Harry Reems
August 27, 1947 — March 19, 2013

On 19 March 2013, Herbert Streicher — better known under his later name Harry Reems — went to the great porn shoot in the sky. The following is the first instalment of a review of some of the films he was involved in from 1969 to 1972. 

Crack-Up
(1969, dir. Michael Findlay)

"She flew to the sky by the seat of her pants!" Was Harry Reems in this film? If so, then not under that name, as he didn't go by "Harry Reems" until after Deep Throat (1972). But this film, like so many New York exploitation and sexploitation films of the 60s and 70s, was produced or distributed or somehow linked to Distribpix Inc., "the leading sexploitation film house of the east coast" of the timeand on their website they claim that Harry Reems is part of the cast. Seeing how little they actually know about many of their films — they often don't even credit a director, or even credit a wrong director, to their films — they seem hardly to be the definitive source for film credits... But, hell: their posters are always so freaking groovy that we like the excuse to reproduce them here for your visual pleasure. Among other things, co-producer of this film was Jack Bravman went on to direct the sexploitation film Janie (1970), the horror film Zombie Nightmare (1987 / music) and the horror comedy Night of the Dribbler (1990 / trailer). In regard to Crack-Up, as imdb likes to say: "This film is believed lost. Please check your attic." We would tend to think this film was for the raincoat crowd... although, in truth, at this stage in the game the films were probably as much for the raincoat crowd as they were for hipsters and artists: the films should be seen in a light comparable to that given to the underground Comix that flourished at the same time. They, like the "alternative" films of the period such as this one,were pretty heavy on sex and were aimed at breaking down the barriers of the bourgeoisies...

 

I Wish I Were In Dixie
(1969, writ & dir. Tommy Goetz)

Aka Dixie. Was Harry Reems in this film? If so, then not under that name, as he didn't go by "Harry Reems" until after Deep Throat (1972). But this film, like so many New York exploitation and sexploitation films of the 60s and 70s, was produced or distributed or somehow linked to Distribpix Inc., and they claim that Harry Reems is part of the cast. Seeing how little they actually know about many of their films — they often don't even credit a director, or even credit a wrong director, to their films — they seem hardly to be the definitive source for film credits... But, hell: their posters are always so freaking groovy that we like the excuse to reproduce them here for your visual pleasure. And the dude on the red poster here to the left does look an awful lot like a moustacheless Reems.The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Film beginnings, 1893-1910 (Vol. 2) explains the plot: "During the Civil War, Dixie (Abigail Clayton), a young and innocent Southern Belle, comes north to find her lover, who has fallen into the hands of the Yankees. Dixie can't find him, however, and takes employment in a brothel, Where one of her regular customers, Freddy, teaches her about sex." Director Tommy Goetz, who died March 20, 1997, made eight (possibly lost) sexploitation films between 1969 and 1970 with catchy titles like A Bride for Brenda (1970) and Around the World in 80 Ways (1969) and then moved on to do art direction on TV.

The Cross and the Switchblade
(1970, dir. Don Murray)

Well, everyone has to start somewhere — and where is a better place for a future porn star to begin his career than as an uncredited extra (as a gang member) in a film like The Cross and the Switchblade? The film is based on the ubiquitous thrift-store book about Paster David Wilkerson's first five years in that city of sin, NYC. The movie also features the screen debut of Erik Estrada as the teen gang member that Pastor David Wilkerson (played by Pat Boone) helps save from a wasted life. The big boss in the sky obviously decided Wilkerson had done enough good work and deserved an early retirement, for the good man died in a car crash east on US Route 175 in Texas on April 27, 2011. Director Murray was actually far more active as a character actor than director and can be found in films such as Radioactive Dreams (1985 / German trailer) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972 / trailer).

The soundtrack to the movie: 

The Art of Marriage 

(1970, dir. Sean S. Cunningham)

A white coater presented by "the Nevada Institute of Family Studies", otherwise known as Sean S. Cunningham. This time capsule is his directorial début and was made on a budget of $3,500. As Cunningham says in the book Filmmakers on the Fringe, it's the type of film in which "You know, a guy comes out in a white coat and says 'In the interests of better marital harmony we'd like to show you these sleazy people with dirty feet rolling around in bed," then you cut to the sex." A hit when released, Cunningham took half of the profits to produce his next film Together (1971), another white coater that is basically a remake of Marriage as well asthe first movie he made with Wes Craven, which in turn was followed by The Last House on the Left (1972 / trailer)... and film history was written. Across the web, The Art of Marriage is listed as featuring Harry Reems, and who knows, maybe he (or at least his member) does or did appear in it (once), but over at imdb, lor of New York City, who seems to be one of the few to have seen this film (it is not currently available on DVD), insists that Reems is not in it and says of the soft-core film he viewed: "[...] 40 years later it offers nothing at all to the porn fan, amateur film historian or mere curiosity seeker. That's because Marriage is one long cheat, bilking a sex-starved public and failing to deliver the goods." A Wasted Life presents it here primarily because we like the poster... Narrated by "Howard J. Brubaker", the trailer can be seen here at Something Weird.

Bacchanale
(1970, dir. & writ. by John Amero & Lem Amero)

Censored excerpt from Bacchanale:

Soiled Sinema says "Often regarded as the greatest film ever created by the anomalous auteur-pornographers Amero brothers, Bacchanale is most assuredly one of the most unprecedented and preeminent works in porn film history." The website goes on to explain: "As an individual that is relatively disinterested in pornography as both an 'art form' and a pathetic masturbation aid, I cannot think of a greater hardcore flick than the dreamy celluloid LSD trip Bacchanale directed by John Amero and Lem Amero. A virtual remake and cultural update of the exquisite cult flick Dementia aka Daughter of Horror (1955 / trailer / full film), Bacchanale follows the seductive spirit of a lonely blonde beauty as she meets faceless 'all-knowing' phantoms, revisits the more surly anecdotes of her licentious youth, and engages in phantasmagorical free love with a variety of anthropomorphic beings." At Rovie, Dan Pavlides explains the surreal plot as follows: "This erotic exploitation film uses a dream-fantasy sequence to stage the sex scenes. A woman fantasizes she is the top model and the corpse at a fashion-show/funeral combo. The obligatory lesbian scene involves her going to the cave of a high priestess for some hands-on healing. She also strips in a graveyard and sees the ghost of her brother who was killed in Vietnam. In an unusual move for general-release sex films, this one also contains a substantial amount of male-to-male sex." The Amero Brothers were New-York-based sexploitation filmmakers and contemporaries of the Findlays, Doris Wishman, Joe Sarno and Barry Mahon; Uta Erickson, the star of Bacchanale, was a popular Norwegian actress active in NYC sexploitation and grindhouse art films of the 60s and 70s who disappeared with the advent of hardcore. Herbert Streicher, the man who would become Harry Reems, is an uncredited extra in the film — or at least his slab o' meat is: his weenie is one of the stunt doubles active in the hardcore inserts the Amero Brothers later added to the movie. Over at Vimco, Sam Zimmerman says: "The smattering of pansexual scenes take a back seat to the narrative, following the heroine through a winding dreamscape of low-budget surreal situations. This creative tact was originally designed to provide enough of a veneer of artistic merit to keep the censorship boards at bay. With the passage of time, Bacchanale now can be seen as a piece in full dialog with the cinematic trends of the day, maybe a grimy Seventh Seal (1958 / trailer), a gutter-dwelling Satyricon [sic] (1969 / trailer) or outsiderartist Rosemary's Baby (1968 / trailer). Too kind? You be the judge. Shot in several (but not all) colors, and concerning fashion, dreams, death, discos, calliopes, spiral staircases, water, war, hell, and, of course, sex."

 
Full NSFW film with new soundtrack at Vimco:
 
Bacchanale (2006) from Sam Zimmerman on Vimeo.

Sexual Freedom in Brooklyn
(1971, dir. Don Walters as "Arlo Shiffen")

 

Not to be mistaken with The Lords of Flatbush (1975 / trailer), which was originally also entitled Sexual Freedom in Brooklyn so to imply it was a porno film and therefore not have to pay union salaries. "Arlo Shiffen" was an oft-used pseudonym in the late 60s and early 70s in the New York exploitation scene and seems to have been used by Don Walters — whose biggest above-ground credit is as assistant director for The Incredible Melting Man (1977 / trailer) and, as "Howard A. Howard", as associate producer of The Nesting / Massacre Mansion (1981 / trailer) — as well as by Ron Wertheim (The Spy Who Came [1969 / trailer]), among others. No one online seems to have ever seen this movie, but the poster is readily available. Most list this film as having been released in 1975, but logic says that were that so, Reems would've been a big enough name to get some poster credit.

Kiss This Miss
(1971, dir. Unknown)

 

Was Harry Reems in this film? If so, then not under that name, as he didn't go by "Harry Reems" until after Deep Throat (1972). But this film, like so many New York exploitation and sexploitation films of the 60s and 70s, was produced or distributed or somehow linked to Distribpix Inc., and they claim that Harry Reems — and Jamie Gillis, for that matter — is part of the cast. Seeing how little Distribpix actually know about many of their films — they often don't even credit a director, or even credit a wrong director, to their films — they seem hardly to be the definitive source for film credits... But, hell: their posters are always so freaking groovy that we like the excuse to reproduce them here for your visual pleasure. And: You may notice, a young and recognizable but facially clean-shaven Harry Reems appears on the poster at least twice. In regard to Kiss This Miss, a film so obscure that it isn't mentioned anywhere other than at Distribpix, as imdb likes to say: "This film is believed lost. Please check your attic." We would tend to think this film was also for the raincoat crowd.

Sex USA
(1971, dir. Gerard Damiano)

Contrary to what many say, this "documentary" is not simply a re-titled re-release of Damiano's previous "documentary" Changes (1970 / trailer) but is rather a film of its own, another one of countless sex films of the times that masked themselves as documentaries so as to get past the censors by having social relevance. Over at World Cinema, they explain the later video release of the movie: "This documentary-style video captures the porn scene right at its very beginnings. The format is straightforward, with a panel of 'experts' who discuss various issues related to censorship and sex. Their rather dry analysis is then illustrated by a series of searing clips depicting their ideas. And that's where this flick really takes off. The clips feature some of porn's earliest stars, from shapely Tina Russell [who wrote an autobiography once upon a time] to leggy Darby Lloyd Rains. These feverish flower children prove once and for all that there's nothing new under the sun. They do a little bit of everything with sultry smiles on their faces. Fantasy becomes reality in this eye-opening look at hippie-era hi jinx." Harry Reems is one of the working stiffs in the film (alongside Fred J. Lincoln [8 January 1938 – 17 January 2013], second unit director of Terror Night / Bloody Movie [1987 / trailer]), while the talking heads include the director himself as well as the early gay rights activist and Screw Magazine columnist Jack Nichols, and Ron Wertheim (director of The Spy Who Came [1969 / trailer]).

Sweet Savior
(1971, dir. Robert L. Roberts)

Aka The Love Thrill Murders. The plot, as given by All Movie: "This film exploits the more unpleasant features of the Sharon Tate tragedy. In an interesting bit of casting, the charismatic cult leader Moon is played by Troy Donahue in what is clearly an attempt to 'broaden' his wholesome image. In the story, a pregnant starlet has called upon the hippyish cult/family led by Moon to organize an orgy in her home. With the help of lots of drugs, they do this with gusto, rounding off their evening by brutally killing all the rich guests, whom they think to be 'pigs.' The most notable difference between the circumstances of this story and the Tate/LaBianca killings is the location; this film is set in a suburb of New York City." Reems appears, uncredited, as one of the cult members — as does Lloyd Kaufman.

 Trailer:

Dark Dreams
(1971, dir. Roger Guermantes)

Trailer:

The plot, according to Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings: "Two newlyweds have a flat tire while on their way to their honeymoon. They stop at a house for help, unaware that the old woman is a witch. She drugs their tea, and then...well, it is an adult film." (In regard to this film, Frank Henenlotter, the director of many a great film including Basket Case [1982] says: "And the point of all this? Virginity is dangerous. Put a stop to it now.") Perhaps the first porn film in which Herbert Streicher/Harry Reems gets screen credit — as "Tim Long", doubtlessly a play upon the physical qualities that eventually formed the basis of his career, he plays one of the leads, the (facially) clean-shaven Jack. The other half of the young couple is played by the now mostly forgotten (and dead) but once very popular porn star Tina Russell (born Linda Marie Mintzer in Williamsport, PA), seen in both screen shots above, who died at the age of 33 from "a combination of Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Pancreatitis, Renal Failure and Alcoholic Liver Disease" at the Tri-City hospital in Vista, CA, on May 18, 1981. Over at imdb, lor of NYC describes the movie as "Sort of Police Academy (1984) meets Satanic Porn — not a very good idea. [...] This is sloppy filmmaking, with scenes and portions of scenes assembled randomly and even repeated (uh-oh, the stretch/loop/padding of the '80s videos is just around the corner) ad nauseum. Russell is beautiful as ever but it is impossible to buy her playing a virgin bride, as the film builds towards a Rosemary's Baby (1968) climax. False ending is poorly done and trite in the extreme." Director "Roger Guermantes" seems never to have made another film.

Azziza by John Berberian, which was used in Dark Dreams:

Vice or Versa!
(1971, dir. Michael Findlay)

Aka Vice Versa! A mid-career film from the Findleys, who made the infamous roughie with Yoko Ono, Satan's Bed (1965 / trailer), directed by Michael Findlay, who went on the make the infamous flick Snuff (1976 / trailer) and eventually lost his head on 16 May 1977, during a helicopter accident on the roof of the Pan Am Building in New York. Vice or Versa, as is said at imdb, "This film is believed lost. Please check your attic." The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures says: "No information about the precise nature of this film has been found, but press material indicates that it contains scenes of sexual intercourse, lesbianism, and troilism." Below, a trailer to another earlier film by Findlay that has nothing to do with Vice or Versa.

Trailer to Findlay's 1966 roughie Honey:

The Weirdos and the Oddballs
(1971, writ & dir. Eduardo Cemano)

Aka Zora Knows Best. Director Cemano (a pseudonym for Ed Seeman) was an associate of John Cassavettes who, according to Robert Cetti (in his book Eduardo Cemano & Birth of the NYC One-Day Wonder), had "a cultural background in Borscht Belt comedy [and] developed a reputation as a pornographer's answer to Woody Allan." The movie, financed by the legendary Doris Wishman, was supposedly shot in one day with a budget of $3,000; Reems is there as "Peter Long" to play the part of David, who seeks help with his wife for premature ejaculation. Wider Screenings says: "Cemano was fascinated by the possibilities of including explicit sexual imagery into a narrative feature — or, more specifically, introducing plot and character into an explicit sex film — and when approached [...] to make some original one-day wonders in New York to compete with the material sent over from California, Cemano eagerly directed two of the first porno feature films to emerge from New York: Millie's Homecoming aka Lady Zazu's Daughter (1971) and The Weirdos and the Oddballs aka Zora Knows Best. [...] With the zest expected of genuine screwball comedy, The Weirdos and the Oddballs is an immoral satire. Here director Cemano actually takes a complex theme — sexual liberation and sex therapy — and exposes the ambivalent morality he sees underlying it. The couples who contact the bogus sexologists (Fred J. Lincoln and Dolly Sharp) are undeniably exploited, their vulnerabilities plundered by Sharp in her nymphomaniacal desire for sexual fulfillment. But they are also liberated by this exploitation." The less intellectually inclined website SexGoreMutants says: "It's all up-close camera zooms, smelly-looking cast members, and people pulling ridiculous faces — the whole event seems to have been pulled off just for kicks. [...] Both films benefit from candid camera-style voyeurism that at times achieves levels of minor delirium. The acting equals this, ranging from the comical to the manic. While never contrived, there's no mistaking that all of this is very stylized. Cemano had a distinctive vision, pushing for something more than run-of-the-mill. The sex scenes are not too well shot in terms of explicit detail, but they do evoke humor and warmth — two things you won't find in your typical Vivid production. This is human sex — all the sucking and fucking is enjoyed by real people (not plastic), totally into each other (not themselves), while Cemano's camera simply observes the intricacies with clumsy verve." Aside from his porno work, Ed Seeman (Cemano), who now lives in Florida with his wife Amy, was a successful painter, experimentalfilm-maker, animator and glamour photographer — a regular Renaissance Man, in other words. His production company Gryphon Productions also produced a slew of TV commercials, some of which are found below.

Ed Seeman's Animated Commercials from the 1960s-80s:
ED SEEMAN'S ANIMATION CLASSICS 1960'S-80'S from ED SEEMAN on Vimeo.

The Altar of Lust
(1971, writ. & dir. Roberta Findlay)

This time around "Stan Freemont" (aka Harry Reems) plays the part of Don in this film from Roberta Findlay, the female half of the infamous Findlays; among her many films is the horror film The Oracle (1985). In an interview she gave in 1978, Ms Findlay said that this film here is the first one she made alone and without the collaboration of her (then ex-) husband Michael Findlay. One Sheet Index demurely explains the basic set-up: "Viveca Hansen [Erotica Lantern, dubbed by Findlay] is a young, beautiful German girl living in. Europe. Her mother has died and she is forced to live on her stepfather's luxurious country estate in the mountains of Austria. As the film opens we see young Viveca troubled and distraught, lying on a psychiatrist's couch. This is no ordinary psychiatrist [no, it's porn mainstay Fred J. Lincoln, who gets his weenie bit off in the original version of Last House on the Left (1972 / trailer)]. He is the darling of the young, rich society girls that frequent analysts in this country...." Over at Amazon, they use a different vocabulary to explain things: "A woman's session with a psychiatrist leads her to recall her past sexual experiences — being raped as a teen by her father, moving to swinging New York and having sex with a man in the woods, joining him in a ménage-a-trios with another gal, and realizing her lesbian desires." The trailer to The Altar of Lust can be found here at Something Weird.

A Time to Love
(1971, dir. Harold Kovner)

Aka Hard Stuff. The plot, according to the BFI: "Two university friends, meeting at a party for the first time in ten years, reminisce about their sexual experiences since their college days." One of the friends, John, is played by "Herb Stryker", aka Harry Reems. Golden Sin Palace praises the film: "Time to Love is a film with a story, of course it is not the most complex ever written [...]. The story begins with a meeting of former university students where Ned (Howard Blakey) and John, two good friends, remember their past. John is a steady man with a wife (Tina Russell) and two young children, while Ned taking advantage of the many trips he made for his journalist job collects the female conquests. These trips are illustrated with an abundance of stock footage giving an impression of movement. It is interesting to note that this movie uses almost no cum shot (there is one) and some scenes are very quick. [...] This film is a perfect example of the early Golden Age productions with an ambience more erotic than pornographic, just wait for the love scene between the couple played by Reems and Russell and you will understand. We even have a pro-ecology speech at the end (the good old socially redeeming value) and you can also recognize the theme song from Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)."

 
Has nothing to do with Reems,
but here's the trailer to Doris Wishman's
Bad Girls Go to Hell:

All About Sex of All Nations
(1971, dir. Kemal Horulu)

All About Sex of All Nations appears to be a lost film, for like its filmmaker but unlike Kemal Horulu's other films, little can be found about it on the web. In general, people assume it to be a white coater, though its tagline might indicate more mondo approach than the average Dr. Greased Palm film: "For two years they filmed sex acts around the World. The normal, the abnormal, the forbidden, the primitive. A world of sex you have never seen." According to DVD Drive-in director Kemal Horulu "was responsible for some of the most pretentious adult films of the Golden Age, namely because he was so occupied with soap opera dramatics that not only did the sex suffer, but the films themselves simply bit off way more than they could chew. One had to hand it to Horulu, the man did try to make real films and break free from the restraints of the porno genre." All About Sex of All Nations seems to have been an exception in his oeuvre, which started off with roughies like Some Like it Violent (1968) and ended with triple-X melodramas like When She Was Bad (1985), the latter of which featured among its many penises that of Robert Kerman, the star of the classic non-porn Cannibal Holocaust (1980). While no on-line source offers a date or location of death, more than one claims that Kemal Horulu was actually the pseudonym of Karl Hansen, the credited director of the white-coater Sex Practices of Sweden (1970), among other films. Other sources claim he is retired and living in Pasadena, CA. According to imdb, Harry Reems appears in All About Sex of All Nations as "Himself", but which "himself" they do not say — he still had a year to before being christened "Harry Reems".

Eroticon

(1971, writ & dir. Richard Franklin)

 

Harry Reems shows up as "himself" in another "documentary", this time directed by Richard Franklin as "Richard Lacey" and produced by Bernard L Sackett, who plays the husband in Wishman's craptastic classic Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965). At Rovi, Clarke Fountain says: "It is difficult to tell whether the tail is wagging the dog or not in this pornographic documentary which is also a documentary about pornography and what is considered to be obscene. In addition to its sado-masochistic and other hardcore footage, which is a small proportion of the whole, this film features a number of interesting interviews. Dr. Albert Ellis discusses his ideas on puritanism and guilt. Cartoonist Tommi Ungerer is interviewed about his 'sex machine' drawings, and there are humorous interviews with Screw Magazine editor Al Goldstein, and publisher James Buckley." Over at One Sheet Index, they supply the text to two radio ads for Eroticon, the first of which goes as follows: 1. "There is no word in the English language to describe this motion picture so we made our own. Eroticon... This extraordinary film is a powerful expose on this country's sexual morality, hang-ups, beliefs, customs and strange behaviors. Eroticon... Unlike any other motion picture you will see. The people in Eroticon are as real as your right to know the truth... And then to decide for yourself. Eroticon... One step beyond experience. In Eastmancolor."

Selling It
(1972, dir. "Arlo Shiffen", aka Don Walters)

Aka Prostitution Around the World. To once again use the popular phrase at imdb: "This film is believed lost. Please check your attic." Written by "Ron Wertheim", whom we personally think could maybe also Don Walters, who in turn supposedly produced this film as "Don Walters". (Walters also made Sexual Freedom in Brooklyn [1971].) Laura Cannon, "the first porno star to appear in Playboy" and supposedly an ex-girlfriend of co-star Harry Reems, is the headlining (and only) name on the poster. One Sheet Index says: "Selling It is a completely fresh look at an old line of work — Prostitution. Told from the viewpoint of a former hooker. This film digs deep into the motivation, technique and practice of the women make a living Selling It. It's all there, the 'Johns' just begging to be taken, the fast talkers and slow payers, the goons with the very weird hang-ups ... and most of all, the girls. Watch the working girls at work. There's no cheaper way to get an intimate first hand view of a pro when she is Selling It." Under whatever name he was (or was not) credited, Reems appear in the film not as "John" but as a john.

The Abductors
(1972, writ. & dir. by Don Schain)

Harry Reems, credited as "Herb Stryker" — of no relation to Jeff Stryker, who has less body hair and is both shorter and longer — appears a cop in this, the second of Don Schain's classic exploitation trilogy from the early 1970s built around the female James-Bond-like crimefighter named Ginger. The three films — Ginger (1971 / trailer), The Abductors (1972) and Girls Are for Loving (1973) — all stared Cheri Caffaro in the title role of Ginger McAlister. Schain not only later married Caffaro (for a short time), but also featured her in his equally trashy grindhouse products A Place Called Today (1972 / scene) and Too Hot to Handle (1977 / scene). Schain now lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and mostly produces crap for Disney. The Illustrated Journal of Cinematic Diversions says: "The Abductors: 8 out of 10: Let us face it, some bad movies age better than others. From the wonderfully horrible fashion and hair worn by the leads; to decor including shag carpets (that they actually shag on) and chintzy coconuts holding push-pins (in the bank presidents office no less); The Abductors is simply filled with seventies kitsch. The Abductors also has an attitude towards woman so politically incorrect they would burn down the theater today. [...] Like any good exploitation film, there is a ton of nubile flesh on display. [...] In addition, the girls are silicone free, with tan lines to boot [...]." Robert Firsching at Rovi offers the following plot synopsis: "Don Schain directed this second instalment in the Ginger series starring Cheri Caffaro as the blond heroine. In this episode, Ginger must rescue three cheerleaders who have been forced into white slavery. The usual sexual and violent escapades ensue. Cult-film devotees will recognize one of the cheerleaders as Jeramie Rain, then-wife of Richard Dreyfuss and star of Last House on the Left (1972)."

 Cheri Caffaro dances in The Abductors:

Deep Throat
(1972, writ. & dir. Gerard Damiano)

Love Is Strange from Deep Throat:

The film that, back when we were all of 15 years old, introduced us to one of our favorite songs, Love Is Strange. In any event, Deep Throat: the film, the legend — 61 minutes of bad puns and massive meats swallowed until the pubes tickle the inner-depths of Linda Lovelace's nostrils. Reems was originally hired as one of the film crew, but when the actor hired to play Dr Young didn't show up he sprang in as the replacement, playing the doctor that finds out that Linda Lovelace's clitoris is in her throat and not between her legs. Lovelace née Linda Susan Boreman (10 January 1949 – 22 April 2002) was rather vocal in her later years (unlike what she wrote in her first two biographies) that she had been forced to make the film by her abusive then-husband Chuck Traynor, but as bad as her acting is in the movie, one would be hard pressed to say that she comes across as either unwilling or as having a bad time. (That Traynor was a woman-beating asshole, however, cannot be doubted.)

 Title sequence (SFW):

The plot, as explained in Wikipedia: "A sexually frustrated woman (Linda Lovelace, credited as playing herself) asks her friend Helen (Dolly Sharp) for advice on how to achieve an orgasm. After a sex party provides no help, Helen recommends that Linda visit a doctor (Harry Reems). The doctor discovers that Linda's clitoris is located in her throat, and after helping her develop her oral sex skills the infatuated Linda asks him to marry her. He informs her that she can settle for a job as his therapist, performing her particular oral technique — thereafter known as 'deep throat' — on various men, until she finds the one to marry. Meanwhile, the doctor documents her exploits while repeatedly having sex with his nurse (Carol Connors). The movie ends with the line 'The End. And Deep Throat to you all'." (Want that? Go here to learn how.) Herbert Streicher only found out after the fact that he was credited as "Harry Reems", but he kept the name from that day on — even after he found God and retired from the business. Carol Connors, the nurse seen briefly in the scene below, in case you don't already know, is the mother of actress Thora Birch — pulchritude seems to run in the family. One of our favorite lines of the movie: "Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?" And we found the twist at the end pretty funny, too, but we can't remember the exact wording of how much could be cut off.

 

Edit of the scene in which her clitoris is discovered:

Forbidden Under Censorship of the King
(1972, writ & dir. Barry R. Kerr)

 

At Rovi, Clarke Fountain supplies the plot outline that everyone on the web uses: "Forbidden under the Censorship of the King is a softcore porn sex comedy which makes fun of necrophilia, among other things." Aka The Flasher, the original name is a play on a certain Latin word that never goes out of popularity: Forbidden under Censorship of the King. Little seems to be known about the film, which was described as a "spoof of pornographic movies" in Vol. 8 of the Sound Engineering Magazine (1974) and was called "a satire on abnormal sexuality" by the director himself in Billboard (12 Aug 1972). The basic plot, from what we could find out, concerns a college student who, while studying the abnormal sexual behavior of those around him, gradually becomes more and more abnormal himself. The film, according to vol. 6 of Filmmaker's Newsletter (1972), is narrated by an animated character, Spencer the Sperm, while the now supposedly popular cult soundtrack by "Pooh-Pah, a New York rock group" — released under the film's aka title, The Flasher— was produced by Michael Wright and arranged and conducted by Rupert Holmes. Prior to this film Barry R. Kerr made The Deviates, a lost "documentary" for which, according to Wikipedia, Eduardo Cemano (see The Weirdos and the Oddballs above) pulled in Harry Reems / Herb Streicher to be the stunt penis when hardcore inserts were added ("a body painting sex scene that Herb later described as his most painful sex experience since the tempera paint used began to dry and crack"). Director Barry R. Kerr seems to have disappeared after The Flasher, not to return until 2009, when — assuming it's the same "Barry R. Kerr" — he helped produce the independent romantic comedy Love Conquers Paul (trailer). Imdb credits Harry Reems as playing "Mervin Continually" in the movie, but no one else — not even half-way contemporary publications like John Willis's Screen World (1974) — does so. Still, he gets main credit on the poster above, so it is safe to assume he must be somewhere in the movie. Over at Delirious Music, which credits Reems as "the narrator" (vs. "Billy Arrington" as "the voice" in Screen World and on the LP back cover), they praise the film's music: "Pool-Pah — The Flasher an obscure sexploitation score from 1973 taken from an X-rated gonzo flick [...] set around a bearded, Jesus-looking pervert flashing people in NYC and features some tasty orgiastic sex scenes with all kinds of food involved. Weird, weird, weird … and so is its soundtrack released on the tiny Green Bottle label and performed by the unknown US band Pool-Pah with assistance from the group Ralph and their ARP synthesizer." The cast is interesting: No one less than the future ABC/NBC news correspondent Herbert Kaplow plays the student, while Marshall Anker, the plump sheriff in the original Last House on the Left (1972 / full film) appears as a flasher and the ever-present Jamie Gillis is also on hand.

 

Pool-Pah — Sour Soul:

So Sweet, So Dead

(1972, dir. Roberto Bianchi Montero)

 Credits to So Sweet, So Dead— without Reems:

SO SWEET, SO DEAD 1972von le-pere-de-colombe

We looked at So Sweet, So Dead— aka Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile, Bad Girls, Penetration and The Slasher is the Sex Maniac— in the career review of Farley Granger. Director Roberto Bianchi Montero is an unsung master of eurotrash in the midst of rediscovery whose directorial career goes back to the 40s; he even directed Boris Karloff (in the abysmal Island Monster / Il mostro dell'isola [1954]). Other credits of note, among many, include Le calde notti di Caligola aka Caligula Erotica (1977 / opening credits), the westerns Durango Is Coming, Pay or Die (1971 / trailer) and Two Faces of the Dollar (1967 / scene), numerous the mondo documentaries, including Mondo Balordo (1964 / trailer) and Africa Sexy (1963), and numerous violent giallo and crime films. So Sweet, So Dead is an exploitive and misogynistic giallo slasher with a lot of naked babes — do we want them any other way? Plot: Inspector Capuana (Granger), who is investigated a series of killings in which unfaithful wives are murdered and mutilated by an unknown man wearing (surprise!) a black fedora, gloves, and trench coat. When So Sweet, So Dead finally reached the USA during the heyday of Porno Chic, the film obviously wasn't considered sleazy enough because it was re-edited with inserted hardcore footage featuring Harry Reems and Tina Russell and released as a porno flick entitled Penetration "featuring" Farley Granger. Granger got the film pulled from the US, but supposedly the version is still available in Europe — if so, it ain't on the shelves at the local DVD store. The normally easy-to-please blogspot Ninja Dixon is not too enamored by the original cut, saying "The Slasher is the Sex Maniac isn't the most original giallo ever made. Actually the total opposite. It feels quite cheap and is packed with nudity and sleaze, and less gore and violence. The American cut, they say, had inserts of hardcore. I don't know if that's true, but it would fit the cheap style and flat cinematography. The story itself isn't bad, it's just very unimaginative. What makes it interesting is the kinda unexpected ending, who [sic] has an extra dark twist in it. Which is also the best thing with this giallo. In the end it might be only for us, the fanatics, but give it a try if you feel bored and need Farley Granger to spice up your boring evening."

Altered trailer to Bad Girls:

Cherry Blossom
(1972, writ. & dir. Jonas Middleton)

 

What a groovy poster! Possibly a lost film, the only plot description of Cherry Blossom that we could find was on one of those illegal downloading sites that do nothing but fill your computer with trojans and worms: "Cherry (Cindy West) lives with her aunt Sena and uncle George. When they separate, Sena starts to examine new ways to fulfill her sexual needs, together with Cherry." On the other hand, in 2009 Distribpix, the original distributors of Cherry Blossom and untold East Coast sexploitation, exploitation and porn classics and non-classics of the Golden Age and pre-Golden Age announced that the original soft-core version of Cherry Blossom would be released in HD with Jonas Middleton's acknowledged arty hard-core classic Through the Looking Glass (1976) — but since then, nothing seems to have happened in this regard. Harry Reems is somewhere in the film, but who knows where... "Jonas Middleton", by the way, was born "Joseph Middleton" but gained his pseudonym when an interviewer incorrectly referred to him by the name of the production company he shared back then with one Chris Jonas. Middleton, who currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, left filmmaking some time after writing his only non-porn film, the cult backwoods killer slasher starring George Kennedy, Just Before Dawn (1981). Currently he runs his own entertainment company, Mid Carolina Media, which specializes in instructional videos and video games. Under his real name Middleton has recently begun once again to dabble in no-budget films: aside from directing the direct-to-DVD Teen-Aged (2008 / trailer), a teen dramedy written by and starring his son Lane Middleton and featuring Mrs. America 2009 Maureen MacDonald as a "busty nurse", he has also co-produced the direct-to-DVD Forbidden Woods (2010 / trailer).

 Just Before Dawn (written by Jonas Middleton):

 

Meatball
(1972, writ & dir. Gerard Damiano)

Edited trailer on YouTube:

Meatball was Gerard Damiano's follow up to Deep Throat, though the direction was credited to one "D. Furred"— which none of the actors, male or female, were. Harry Reams and his body fur and appendage are there again playing the character of Dr. Schmock; other participants of note include Andrea True (credited as "Singe Low"), Tina Russell (playing "Miss Carridge"), her husband Jason Russell (credited as "G.I. Kann"), and the almost forgotten porn legend Marc "10½" Stevens (credited as "Al Packer"). Other credited names include "Lotta Semen", "Les Hassel" and "Hadda Climax". The plot, to paraphrase an on-line porno site: "In this slap-happy film, a zany mad scientist accidentally discovers 'Preparation X', a formula that can make an ordinary hamburger swell to twice its normal size. But whenever a guy eats it, it also has a similar effect on his weenie! The good doctor tests his discovery and ends up with an erection that even his sexiest assistants can't get down. Not that he's going to stop them from trying! A goofy, fun-filled porn film that never takes itself too seriously..." Over in the UK, ninjaalexs says the film is "funny but not great", adding: "The film is clearly based on old sci-fi/horror movies like Frankenstein (1931 / trailer). Harry Reems gives an eccentric but quality performance. The supporting actresses also put on equally over-the-top but decent performances. The best thing about the film is the humour; like Deep Throat the film features ridiculous but funny lines. The tacky props also add to the humour. The film looks cheap compared to Damianos' other works like The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat. The film also appears to take place in one location. The cinematography is good featuring nice camera-work but it is conventional and lacks creativity. [...]" In case you don't know: Reems's co-star Andrea True (July 26, 1943 – November 7, 2011) followed her successful career as a name porno star to become a disco singer, her biggest hit being the eternally popular song More, More, More.

Andrea True Connection — More, More, More (extended version):

 

Deep Sleep
(1972, dir. Alfred Sole)

 

The début film of Alfred Sole, who went on to direct three more memorable (non-porno) films — the excellent Hitchcockian horror Alice Sweet Alice (1976), aka Holy Terror, the infamous soft-core zoorastic turkey Tanya's Island (1980 / trailer) and the "horror" comedy Pandemonium (1982 / trailer) — before becoming a successful and in-demand production designer. The title of Deep Sleep, Sole freely admits, was inspired by Deep Throat, and much like Deep Throat got Harry Reems busted in Tennessee on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines, Alfred Sole eventually faced the same charges in Oklahoma and Jersey; Hollywood came to the rescue of Reems, Hugh Hefner came to that of Soles — but the film nevertheless got him excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Deep Sleep seems to be a lost film as a whole; there is a 30-minute version (in German) and a 58-minute fuckfest floating around, but the original final cut was actually around 74 minutes long. There is a great interview of Alfred Soles done by Joseph Stargensky over at Cult Movies which reveals, among other things, that Soles literally financed his almost guerilla-made film from (but not by winning) poker games and that he basically had everyone from his home town of Patterson, NJ, in the movie ("I had the mayor's wife in it. I had my mother in it. All my relatives were in it"). The movie became a comedy because: "I went to all these X-rated movies, and I got really depressed. Then I decided, [...] I was going to make the prettiest X-rated movie ever made. And the funniest. I decided it should be a comedy. So, I made it." According to word of mouth, a black comedy of questionable taste — as might be expected when a film includes sex scenes in a mortuary. The plot concerns a man, Uncle Harry Black, who can no longer get it up (Viagra wasn't around yet, after all). So first he kills his niece (Kim Pope of The Amazing Transplant [1970 / NSFW trailer]) and her lover Rick (Anthony Dema) before seeing Dr Harvey, who sends him to a maharishi and, and, and... Well, we really don't know. Does Harry Reems appear in the movie? Who knows for sure. Imdb says he's credited, but he doesn't show up in the versions circulating (for that, the omnipresent Jamie Gillis [as Gary Paris] and Marc "10½" Stevens do). Nevertheless, Sole admits that when writing the movie he "interviewed all these X-rated movie people like Harry Reems" and later, when the distributor insisted on more sex scenes, he added inserts ("You'll notice the pubic hairs change a lot. It would go from blonde to brown on all the actors"). Thus, it is possible that Reems was there, if only as a stunt pylon.

The trailer to Sole's follow-up film,

Alice Sweet Alice / Holy Terror (1976):

Follow the link to Part III.

R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen

May 8, 2013, 12:42 am

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Ray Harryhausen

June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013

The master American stop-motion animator and highly influential film maker Ray Harryhausen was born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen in Los Angeles to Martha L. (née Reske) and Frederick W. Harryhausen, parents of German descent, on June 29, 1920. He died at the age of 92 on May 7th 2013 in London, England, his home since 1960. His death was announced by his daughter Vanessa and his wife Diana Livingstone Bruce, the latter of whom he had married in 1963.
Inspired by the early stop motion films of Willis O'brien — namely, The Lost World (1925 / trailer) and King Kong (1933 / trailer) — Harryhausen already began experimenting with puppets of creatures as a child. As an adult, his sci-fi, fantasy and adventure films — films From Mighty Joe Young (1949) to the original version of Clash of the Titans (1981) — lit the imagination of generations of children and have been far more influential than their oft lowly B-roots would ever have promised. Harryhausen's stop motion creatures and special effects often transcended the low budgets and questionable acting of his movies to create true movie magic, making his productions both unforgettable and eternal favorites to those who have seen them. There are few contemporary filmmakers working in genre filmmaking today that would not admit to the influence and inspiration of Harryhausen's creativity and creatures.
The following career review is made in fond remembrance of the man and his films, the latter of which we here at A Wasted Life are always happy to re-watch when given the chance. Wherever you are, Mr. Harryhausen, we thank you for all that you leave behind: magic, pure and simple.

 Go here for Part II.

The Horde (France, 2009)

May 13, 2013, 3:30 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 22, 2013, 11:11 am

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Harry Reems
August 27, 1947 — March 19, 2013

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

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

 

The Female Response

(1973, dir. Tim Kincaid)

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

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

 

Roughly 7 Minutes of Fleshpot on 42nd Street:

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

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

 

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

 

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

Radio report on It Happened in Hollywood:

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

 

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

Theme to Iron Man (1966):

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

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

Trailer:

 

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

 First NSFW 7 minutes:

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

 Soundtrack:

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

Trailer to the remake (2005):

 

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

 

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

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

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



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

 

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

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

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

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

Trailer to Fight for Your Life:

 


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

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

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

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

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

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

Carter Stevens talking about making porn:

 


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

 

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

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

 


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

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

 
Scene from Case of the Full Moon Murders:

 


College Girls
(1974, director unknown)

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

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

COLLEGE GIRLS sex comedy sexploitation 1968...von chikungfu

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

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

 


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

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

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

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

Trailer:

 


The Love Witch
(1974, dir. Mort Shore)

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

Deadly Weapons
(1974, dir. Doris Wishman)

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

 

Trailer:

Deadly Weapons (1974)von bmoviebabe
 

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

 

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

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

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

Wet Rainbow
(1974, dir. Duddy Kane)

 

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

Ape Over Love
(1974, dir. David Sear)

 The Kinks — Apeman:

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

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

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

R.I.P.: Jim Kelly, Part II

July 22, 2013, 8:16 am

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Jim "The Dragon" Kelly

May 5, 1946 - June 29, 2013

 

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

For Part I, go here.

Black Samurai
(1977, dir. Al Adamson)

Also known as Black Terminator and The Freeze Bomb. So, what's left for an actor after an Oscar Williams film? Well, how about an Al Adamson movie? We love Al Adamson movies — they're absolutely terrible! (See, for example, our review of his instant non-classic Dracula vs. Frankenstein [1971].) If you don't know Adamson's films, believe us, they are true eye-openers. Yes, Virginia, you do not need any notable directorial talent to become a director, you just need to be an auteur.

It is literally impossible to talk of the great filmmaker without making some mention of his memorable (if tragic) demise, but we've done it so often we'll let Teleport City tell the tale: "In June of 1995, legendary (some would counter with 'infamous') b-movie kingpin Al Adamson was murdered by a handyman he'd contracted to complete some work on his ranch. The body was discovered entombed beneath a newly poured concrete slab that occupied the space where Adamson's hot tub once stood. The producer-director's disappearance piqued the curiosity of friends, and one in particular became suspicious of the concrete slab, noting that Al loved his hot tub perhaps more than anything else he owned and never would have had it removed. And indeed that’s where they found his body. The handyman, Fred Fulford, was arrested and, in a trial that dragged on until March, 2000, finally convicted and sentenced to 25-to-life."

 

Adamson's flick here, by the way, isn't one of his many cut-and-paste jobs but is based on the first of a series of pulp novels by the Afro-American author Marc Olden, who died in 2003, featuring Robert Sand, the "Black Samurai" of the title. Olden's Samurai series lasted eight titles between '74 and '75, the first title of which is the basis of Adamson's film adaptation here. Black Samurai was Adamson's fifth but perhaps only second "true" attempt at Blaxploitation. (His first, Mean Mother [1974 / trailer], is actually a recut conversion of León Klimovsky's Run for Your Life / El hombre que vino del odio [1971]; his second, Dynamite Brothers [1972 / trailer], is more a cheesy multiculti [Chino-Afro-American] chopsocky exploiter than straight Blaxploitation; and his Uncle Tom's Cabin [1976 / full film] is actually more a B&D/S&M movie aimed towards those who like seeing naked, buff Afro-Americans get punished. But just before Black Samurai, Adamson made Black Heat [1976 / full film], a 'serious' attempt at true Blaxploitation.)

Film Father, which if of the opinion that "everything in Black Samurai is second-rate", explains the plot as follows: "Special agent Robert Sand (Jim Kelly) is asked by the CIA to save his girlfriend Toki (Essie Lin Chia) after she’s kidnapped by a voodoo cult led by the evil Janicot (Bill Roy). It turns out Toki is also the daughter of a top Eastern ambassador, and Janicot's ransom demand is top-secret information for a new weapon, the 'freeze bomb.' Sand's search takes him from Hong Kong to California to Miami, facing bad men, bad women, and bad animals (Janicot's pet is a killer vulture!)." Of the film's sexpot Synne, otherwise known as Marilyn Joi, with whom Sand (Kelly) is playing tennis at the start of the film, Adventures in Nerdliness says: "I only knew about [her] from one thing; the Cleopatra Schwartz faux trailer in Kentucky Fried Movie (1977 / trailer). Turns out she did a lot more films. She was in Hammer (1972) with Fred Williamson. Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976 / trailer) with Dyanne Thorne as one of Ilsa's sidekicks, 'Velvet'. [...] As well as Nurse Sherri (1975 / trailer), Blazing Stewardesses (1975 / trailer), The Candy Tangerine Man (1975 / TV spot) and Detroit 9000 (1973). She also had an uncredited appearance in Coffy (1973) with Pam Grier. [...] She also made many appearances in the men's magazine Players." (The cleavage shot of  Marilyn Joi below comes from Temple of Schlock.)

 

The Cleopatra Schwartz faux trailer from Kentucky Fried Movie (1977):

The Tattoo Connection
 (1978, dir. Tso Nam Lee) 

Trailer:

AKA E yu tou hei sha xing. After Hot Potato (1976), the second film that at one point was sold as a sequel to Black Belt Jones (1974) — one of its AKA titles is Black Belt Jones 2— despite the fact that the name of the ass-kicking Brother Kelly plays is "Lucas." Hong Kong director Tso Nam Lee is an unjustly underrated independent chopsocky filmmaker whose best known film is probably the Bruceploitation movie Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (1976 / trailer), starring Bruce Li. (Dig the swinging title music  to the credit sequence of his 1976 film The Hot, the Cool and the Vicious.)

Opinions to the film vary greatly, ranging from David Knight's statement "The Tattoo Connection is worth checking out for Jim Kelly fans as his fight scenes are among the best that he has ever been in" at Firefox News to The Video Vacuum's disparaging opinion that "in this inept but sporadically amusing Kung Fu flick [...] Kelly isn't given much to do and the plot is slow moving but the action isn't bad and the dubbing is fairly hilarious." Kung Fu Connection, which says "Considered a sore spot on the respective careers of all involved [...] and you will find it hard to fathom how the director of Eagle's Claw [1978 / trailer] could stoop this low), The Tattoo Connection is a Z grade exploitation quickie armed with the IQ of a walnut," gives the plot as follows: "Lucas (Kelly) is sent from the States to investigate a diamond racket on the streets of Hong Kong, only to find flash bastard Lu (Chan Sing) pimping hos and Tin-hao (Dorian Tan) kicking people in the head. [...] You could argue this is a fine example of the East meets West culture clash highlighting society's ills whilst tackling some uncompromising truths without flinching or thinking. But then it might also just be a cheap and hideous turd of a film. You decide." The soundtrack was first film soundtrack ever composed by the US-born Swedish ex-pat musician Anders Nelsson, who went on to do music for the anti-abortion film Xin jiang shi xian sheng / Mr. Vampire 1992 (1992 / fan-made trailer), Meng gui cha guan / The Haunted Copshop (1987 / trailer) and  Jiang shi jia zu: Jiang shi xian sheng xu ji / Mr. Vampire II (1986 / trailer), among others.  He also did non-film music, like the psychedelic tune below.

Anders Nelsson — Black Ode to Jill (Where's Jack?):

Death Dimension
(1978, dir. Al Adamson) 

 

Trailer:

 

Aka Black Eliminator, Freeze Bomb, Icy Death, The Kill Factor and Death Dimension. The "Freeze Bomb" of Adamson's Black Samurai (1977) becomes the MacGuffin of Death Dimension, the script of which was provided by the German-born and forgotten Z-level drive-in director / producer / scriptwriter Harry Hope (26 May 1926-6 Nov 1988), who also brought us such treasures as Hateman (1989 / rape scene), Doomsday Machine (1972 / full film), Smokey and the Judge (1980 / they sing) and Enter Another Dragon (1981).

 

As Eat My Brains explains, "Death Dimension is a very strange little film indeed and a mad mixture of many genres. It's Blaxploitation, it's Kung-Fu, it's an action flick and it's also a sci-fi flick, but by the end the film seems to be far worse than the sum of its parts and makes little sense." Beardy Freak figured out the plot: "Dr Mason (T.E. Forman) has created a 'Freeze Bomb' for initially good weather controlling reasons (!) but the project has been hijacked by the evil criminal mastermind 'The Pig' (Harold Sakata, he of James Bond, 'Odd Job' fame) who wants the bomb as a weapon (shown during an unintentionally funny scene where four men have snowflakes exploded over them, supposedly freezing them to death!) to sell to the highest bidder. But crafty Dr Mason has put all the specs for the bomb on a microchip which he has inserted into the scalp (!) of his assistant Felicia (Patch Mackenzie of Graduation Day [1981 / trailer / full film] and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive [1987 / trailer]), who has run away. Martial Arts operative Detective John Ash (Jim Kelly) is brought in on the case by Capt. Gallagher (ill fated ex-Bond George Lazenby [of Who Saw Her Die? (1972)]) and with his Chinese Kung Fu friend Li [...] (the hysterically monikered Myron Bruce Lee) they are told to find Felicia before 'The Pig' and his henchman do and stop him selling the deadly 'Freeze Bomb'…"

An early highpoint of the movie, as Bad Movies explains: "At one point Ash visits the Mustang Ranch to look for clues. To hide his real reasons for coming, he has to pick out a prostitute. Looking at that lineup, I think that he was choosing the lesser of multiple ugly prospects. Those can't be the same girls that made the ranch famous, or were standards much lower back then? Well, Ash does not seem to find the prostitute attractive either. He bails out of the room and snoops around until he encounters several toughs who he defeats with his martial arts." In regard to the acting — something not usually found in an Al Adamson film — Film Critics United says: "Some of the worst acting known to man. Mr. 'OddJob' Sakata could theoretically be the worst actor ever. Myron Bruce Lee might be a close second. Jim Kelly looked like Paul Robeson compared to those two. But he did revert back to Jim Kelly whenever George Lazenby or Bob Minor was on the screen [...]." FCU was also not taken by the ladies at the ranch, complaining instead: "Truly, the women playing the whores in this masterpiece are the most tired, most beat-up, most dilapidated women ever to play whores in motion picture. Real live crack whores are insulted by them." Death Dimension proved to be the last film to feature Jim Kelly in a part of note... perhaps he decided that he couldn't sink any lower and that life as a tennis instructor pays better than acting in Z-films.

 

Mr. No Legs
(1979, dir. Ricou Browning)

 

Trailer:

Let's talk about names for a moment, using two Afro-American as examples: Barack Obama and Jim Kelly. In the US, at least, the former is surely a rare name and the latter much more common. Thus, you can pretty much be sure that if you see the name "Barack Obama" written somewhere, the person in question is probably the highly disillusioning President of the United Stasi of America. In turn, if you see the name "Jim Kelly" written somewhere, you really cannot initially be 100% sure that the man in question is the handsome, ass-kicking but thespian-challenged actor from the seventies — shit, if you get down to it, going by just the name you really can't be sure that the man in question is Afro-American at all.

All the more so when the "Jim Kelly" mentioned should be found in Florida, a state where — as the George Zimmerman case just once again proved — one is more or less allowed to harass and then shoot innocent black people for no reason (other than their being black) and get away with it, because as long as you yourself are not black you are only standing your ground. Thus, we here at A Wasted Life have serious doubts that the "Jim Kelly" of all the previously mentioned films above is the same "Jim Kelly" listed somewhere in the credits of this movie — but, what the heck, imdb (alone) lists it as one of his credits and that gives us an excuse to present it, so here it is: Mr. No Legs, one of the low points of the careers of everyone involved. Imdb fails to list which character Kelly plays, so whichever "Jim Kelly" is really there, it would seem that he didn't play any role of note. But what a film: Mr No Legs is a "classic" of crappy grindhouse trash that swerves from no-budget regional flotsam into what-were-they-thinking exploitation of the kind that brought us Terror of Tiny Town (1938 / full film) and Chained for Life (1951 / full film), to name two much older similar "classics". (As is evident by the poster below, the name of the movie was later changed to take advantage of the exploitive aspect offered by the secondary character.)

Director Ricou Browning began his film career playing (uncredited) the Gillman in the water scenes of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954 / trailer), The Revenge of the Creature (1955 / trailer) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956 / trailer) before finding his rent-paying niche as producer / writer / director of Flipper... but he occasionally delved into less admirable but more entertaining affairs, such as the horror film Island Claws (1980 / scary scene [not]), which he co-wrote, and this unique specimen of a movie, which is to date his final directorial credit. Cult Movies explains the plot: "[...] Buddy detectives Andy (Ron Slinker) and Chuck (Richard Jaeckel of The Green Slime [1968 / trailer], Chosen Survivors [1974 / trailer], Grizzly [1976 / German trailer / full film] and The Dark [1979 / trailer]) become embroiled in a gangland drug running scheme following the death of Andy's sister, whose boyfriend seems to have been dealing drugs for notorious crime lord D'Angelo (Lloyd Bochner of The Night Walker [1964 / trailer] and The Dunwich Horror [1970 / trailer]). However, Chuck and Andy's investigation soon places them in the firing line of D'Angelo's chief henchmen Lou (aka — Mr. No Legs [Ted Vollrath]) a homicidally violent mob enforcer, who despite having lost both his legs in an explosion, still dispenses death via a combination of his uniquely modified wheelchair and his surprising martial arts skills. However, it appears that Lou has his own designs on taking over D'Angelo's crime empire; meanwhile a new danger presents itself to Chuck and Andy when it gradually becomes clear that someone in a senior position within the police force is feeding insider information to D'Angelo. [...]" Cult Movies rather likes the movie and goes on to say: "[...] Browning's film as a highly entertaining and unjustly ignored low budget seventies exploitation number. The plot is simple and is kept moving at a spirited face as Browning generously lays on the action which includes numerous shootings, death by samurai sword, a riotous barroom brawl involving women, fat black bartenders, a drag queen and women which culminates in a double stabbing and an extended climactic car chase which wouldn't seem out of place in a much higher budgeted mainstream picture." Perhaps, however, it should be pointed out that despite the title and the poster, Mr. No Legs is a secondary character and, unlike the later advertising would have you believe, is not the focus of the movie.

Stranglehold

 & 

Ultimatum
(1994, dir. Cirio H. Santiago)

 

Stranglehold Trailer:

Assuming that the "Jim Kelly" seen somewhere in Mr No Legs is indeed the karate master himself, after Florida Jim Kelly seems to have left the film business: according to imdb, but for a brief appearance in 1985 on TV as a reporter in an episode of Michael Landon's Christian-themed TV series Highway to Heaven (1984–1989), Kelly was out of the business for 15 years. In 1994, however, he suddenly and inexplicitly reared his head again and appeared in a totally unimportant small part as an "Executive" in two Cirio H. Santiago films, Ultimatum and Stranglehold, which were shot in tandem and are pretty much the same film but with certain actors exchanged: Ultimatum was meant for the Philippine market, and has mostly Filipino actors, while Stranglehold was meant for stateside direct-to-video release, and has direct-to-video calibre actors.

Philippine-born director/producer Cirio H. Santiago (18 January 1936-26 September 2008), of whom Quentin Tarantino is said to be a big fan, was an extremely prolific producer and director of low budget films; he made his first films, straight Philippine projects, already in the 50s, and by the 70s he was working for Roger Corman. Among his numerous projects of varying quality are TNT Jackson (1974 / trailer / full film), Ebony, Ivory & Jade (1976 / trailer), The Muthers (1976 / trailer), Vampire Hookers (1978 / trailer), Firecracker (1981 / trailer), Stryker  (1983 / opening), Naked Vengence (1985 / trailer) and Equalizer 2000 (1987 / trailer) and many, many more — he was, to put it simply, a prolific maker of crappy and craptastic films. Ultimatum, like Stranglehold, is more of the former than the latter.

 Cirio H. Santiago does Blaxploitation: Savage! (1973) —

Jim Kelly ain't in the flick:

The plot of Stranglehold, as given by Concorde — New Horizons at imdb: "Deep inside the nation's top chemical weapons facility, a brilliant terrorist (Vernon Wells  of Silent Night, Zombie Night [2009] and a lot more) takes a Congresswoman (Jillian McWhirter of Progeny[1999]) hostage. The Navy can't stop him. The Air Force can't reach him. The Coast Guard can't kill him. Only one man can do the job: special agent Ryan Cooper (Jerry Trimble of Skeleton Man [2004]). He's in a race against time to save the world, facing his greatest challenge yet!" Direct to Video Connoisseur says: "This was a huge waste. Jerry Trimble, amazing kickboxer, and the director has him running around with an assault rifle the whole time. Trimble tried valiantly to pull it off, but that's not how he gets down. He looked like a fish out of water. Now, with Trimble in an extremely limited martial arts capacity, we're stuck with a low-rent Die Hard ripoff. For a film with a 70-minute running time, it felt like I was watching it for three hours."

Ultimatum Trailer:

Undercover Brother
(2002, dir. Malcolm D. Lee)

 "Today is a great day for black people of all races."
The Chief (Chi McBride)

Trailer:

Eight years after Kelly's brief appearance in two sub-standard Cirio H. Santiago movies, he popped up in a cameo in this fantastic comedy here — sorta. His scene with Undercover Brother (Eddie Griffin) ended up getting deleted and is only to be seen as an extra on the DVD release. What the fuck, watch the film anyways, it's not just super funny but has one of the greatest soundtracks around. The plot of this Blaxploitation parody, as mentioned earlier, is based on an idea already explored in an early and real and classic Blaxploitation film featuring Jim Kelly, Gordon Parks Jr.'s Three the Hard Way (1974). 

The plot, in short: "The Man" has discovered a secret formula to rob Brothers of their soul and the secret agency the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. calls on Undercover Brother (Eddie Griffin) to stop him. Denis Richards (of Valentine [2001]) plays one of the Man's secret weapon White She Devil ("Black Man's kryptonite"), Chris Kattan (of Undead or Alive: A Zombedy [2007 / trailer], Santa's Slay [2005 / trailer] and House on Haunted Hill [1999 / trailer]) plays the Man's evil flunky Mr. Feather, and the beautiful Aunjanue Ellis kicks butt and catfights as Sistah Girl. Undercover Brother gets hearty recommendations from us here at A Wasted Life, and it is even fit for mixed company... or at least the kind of mixed company we get at home.

 

Undercover Brother— General Fried Chicken:

Baadasssss Cinema
(2002, dir. Isaac Julien)

Jim Kelly appears in some of the archive footage used in this 60-minute documentary on Blaxploitation by the London-born Afro-English artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien. Movie Mania explains the flick: "Baadasssss Cinema is a documentary that discusses the Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, and particularly looks at the post popular films such as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song [1971], Shaft [1971 / trailer], Black Caesar [1973 / trailer], Superfly [1972 / trailer] and Coffy [1973]. People interviewed include Fred Williamson, Mario Van Peebles, Quentin Taratino and the lovely Pam Grier, who talk about the impact that the films had on the black community and on popular culture. [...] Baadasssss Cinema also briefly goes into detail about the Blaxploitation crossovers that happened as well, such as the Blaxploitation/horror films like Blacula (Dracula's black soul brother) and also the Blaxploitation/kung fu crossovers. It was very interesting and gave me a hunger to see more of these incredible Blaxploitation films." To Movie Mania we can only warn: "Better watch out! Once you black, you don't comeback."

First 14:12 minutes:

Macked, Hammered, Slaughtered and Shafted
(2004 writ. & dir. David F. Walker)

Jim Kelly appears for real as one of the "I was there" talking heads on this documentary by independent filmmaker David F. Walker about not just Blaxploitation, but the history of blacks in US American motion pictures. The film, though screened at various festivals, seems to have fallen between the cracks somewhere as it is hard to find. Brown PaperTickets the film: "Popular and controversial, outrageous and profound, few film genres are as misunderstood as Blaxploitation. Examining the meaning and the history of black films of the 1970s, David Walker's documentary Macked, Hammered, Slaughtered & Shafted seeks to give the Blaxploitation film its proper place in cinematic history. Featuring interviews with crucial players like Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Ron O'Neal, Rudy Ray Moore, Jim Kelly, and many more, Walker's film offers an insightful look at a pivotal moment in American popular culture that would forever change how black were portrayed in film."

First nine minutes:

Afro Ninja

 (2009, dir. Mark Hicks)

 

Aka Afro Ninja: Destiny.  The directorial debut of stuntman Mark Hicks, who has been taking other people's bruises since 1988; among the many films he' worked on are Spawn (1997), From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (1999) and Hatchet (2006 / trailer). Somewhere along the way, he tried out for a Nike commercial and fell flat on his face while executing a backflip; the video of the event went viral.

Afro Ninja Does a Backflip and Fails:

Somewhere along the way Hicks decided to make a film around the viral video, and the result is his directorial début, this direct-to-DVD homage to Afro-American ass-kickers — and, going by his hair and abs, to Jim Kelly as well. Kelly even makes a rare brief guest appearance in the movie, his last as it would be, as the ghost of Afro Ninja's father.

The plot, according to DVD Verdict, which is of the opinion that Afro Ninja "is a barely competent misfire, but a misfire shot with limited means and its heart in the right place": "The movie tells the tale of sadsack postal worker Reggie Washington (Mark Hicks), who becomes a national joke/folk hero when video of his clumsy martial arts battle against a gun-wielding, shell-shocked crackhead hits the internet and late night talk shows. Soon after, an encounter with an aged Japanese woman and a pair of glowing nunchucks endows the formerly flabby Washington with washboard abs, a giant 'fro, and astounding fighting abilities. When local thug and sneaker pimp Black Lightning (James Black of Zombie Cop [1991 / trailer]) shakes down Washington's soul food restaurant-owning Aunt Mary (Marla Gibbs of Sweet Jesus, Preacherman [1973 / trailer]), the Afro Ninja must spring into action to protect his neighborhood." Film Critics United says: "[...] We're not saying that Afro Ninja was perfect as there was some inconsistent pacing on occasion [but...] Afro Ninja was a pretty darned entertaining little film with some nicely choreographed fight scenes [...]. A very well crafted, low bud homage to a pair of genres that time has long forgot that I think seriously needs to be brought back."

 Trailer:
 

Jim Kelly — May He Kick Butt in the Sky

Short Film: Sock 5: Three Skins without Men (Great Britain, 2012)

July 31, 2013, 2:37 am

≫ Next: Bloodrayne III: The 3rd Reich (USA, 2010)

≪ Previous: R.I.P.: Jim Kelly, Part II

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"I'd describe [my work] as strange, dark, surreal comedy cartoons. Some have a dreamlike feel, some of them are nightmarish, some satirical, and some silly. But most of them are strange." 

David Firth

 

So much in the world slides by like a slug on greased glass. The short films of David Firth, like the electric mood music he makes under the moniker Locust Toybox, are totally up our alley. But for all the man's popularity — particularly due to his hit of Flash cartoon series Salad Fingers, which has been oozing across the web since 2004 — we'd never heard of him until Boing Boing linked a documentary about him sometime last week. A short search on the web later and we clicked on something called Dog of Man (2008 / full short), and now, a week after that, we're already scratching the crotch of our arm in desperation for or next fix of Firth. Thank god there's so much of it out there...

Not the Film of the Month, but a music video —

Locust Toybox's Through my head at night:

Born 23 January 1983 in that land of sunshine, England, we were unable to find out when the "English animator, video artist, amateur filmmaker, and musician" (pictured below) began making his obscurely disturbing filmlets, but by 2009 he had already produced work for clients as diverse as the BBC and Playboy. And while the level of disconcertion may vary from film to film, the underlying tone of depression and grey skies is never absent, even when glazed with a notable sheen of dark humor. Stylistically, his films bounce all over the place, but the inherent flavor remains the same.

Firth is a modern master of the surreal; someone who, going by what one sees in his short films, would probably feel at home living in an Hieronymus Bosch painting. He has, to quote what Paul Neafcy says in the documentary, "An innate ability to reach into your brain and pull out nightmare you didn't know you had."

Sock 5: Three Skins without Men is one such film that gives you the feeling that Firth did exactly that. From start to finish, the film moves along like a Robert Altman film from hell, segueing from one interlude to another, narratively intertwined by a variety of luridly disquieting characters that both reappear and disappear and cross paths in situations that seem dredged from the deepest recesses of an insane mind. The mind, it seems, is his own: the films of Firth's Sock Series are supposedly based on his dreams...

We, in any event, are happy our dreams are a bit less disturbing and, instead, filled with a bit more T&A. But we are also happy that we have discovered the films of David Firth: the world is a better place with them.
Enjoy — if that's even a word you can use when talking about Firth's films — Sock 5: Three Skins without Men.

 Sock 5: Three Skins without Men

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Bloodrayne III: The 3rd Reich (USA, 2010)

August 8, 2013, 9:40 am

≫ Next: R.I.P.: Haji

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(Spoilers.) OK, we admit we're a glutton for punishment — otherwise how can anyone justify watching an Uwe Boll film by choice? But, to tell the truth, we (sometimes) sort of enjoy his films — they're a bit like Jochen Taubert movies (see Zombie Reanimation  [2009] or Ich piss' auf deinen Kadaver [1999]) but a smidgen more professional and with bigger budgets and real stars, even if the "has-beens" and "never-beens" and "never-will-bes" do, normally, outnumber the "bes".

 

We will admit that Alone in the Dark (2005 / German trailer) did make us pull our hair out at the roots, but In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2006 / trailer) entertained us well enough and we really found Postal (2007 / trailer) rather funny. We can't help but think that, one day, Uwe Boll will no longer be the brunt of so much hate but rather the focus of a certain level of pop cult popularity ala Ed Wood. Like Wood, Boll has a vision (of sorts), and like Wood, he's convinced of his vision, and also like Wood, he doesn't give a fuck what anyone else thinks... unlike Wood, naturally, Boll's film are not only never really all that off-the-wall, but he himself is enjoying enough success that the films keep rolling while he still alive.

Which brings us to this film here, one of his many, the third BloodRayne film, a direct-to-DVD follow-up of the first two movies, BloodRayne (2005 / trailer) and BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007 / trailer), both of which he also directed and neither of which we have seen. Indeed, the only reason we watched Bloodrayne III: The 3rd Reich was because we were in the mood for a 3-D movie and it was the only non-XXX 3-D movie our buddy Fritz-Helmut still had on his computer. And as we do not belong to the kind who likes watching the gynaecological in-and-out and spurting body fluids in the company of those we wouldn't want to do the same thing with, Bloodrayne III: The 3rd Reich was chosen as the evening's entertainment. 

 

But somehow we should have expected it: the 3-D of Bloodrayne III: The 3rd Reich was not only obviously converted after the fact, it's a true disaster and painful to the eye. Should for some inexplicable reason you ever chose to watch this film, watch the 2-D version, as it is surely less painful — but as it was, we couldn't turn the 3-D off, so like the true masochists that we are we suffered to the end.

 

Luckily, the film was sort of fun in a truly terrible way, so we more or less enjoyed it even if we would be hard pressed to even recommend the film to anyone — it's about as stupid as it is crappy. Of great help was, of course, the presence of Clint Howard, the talented brother of untalented director Ron "Opie / Richie" Howard, as scene-stealingly over-the-top and atrocious as ever, and of course the eye candy that plays the title character, Natassia Malthe (supposedly also seen somewhere in Disturbing Behavior [1998]), is also pleasant — even if she seems only truly capable of glaring and can't even really overact. Her mandatory nude scenes help prove once again that inverted nipples are hot, too. Speaking of hot and, in turn, all the eye candy of Bloodrayne III: The 3rd Reich — and all other Boll movies — we really gotta say that Boll has a much better taste in women than that other similarly talented and productive director of direct-to-DVD flotsam, Jim Wynorski; Boll actually gets gals that look cowabunga and have individuality, whereas Wynorski seems to simply like Hollywood bimbos with excess silicon. But then, one is from Europe and the other from Long Island... 

But we digress... as if that matters when talking about a Boll movie. In any event, Boll manages to work in a totally logical lesbian scene into the movie — nothing like a woman beating up Nazis to get that lubricant flowing — that we guess could be called one of the highpoints of the movie, a movie that in all truth never really aims for any high points. As normal for a Boll film, the script is often somewhat disjointed and nonsensical, but the narrative development nevertheless zigzags more-or-less semi-comprehensibly to a finish, often leaving one with the feeling that either a lot has been cut out or the scriptwriters earned more money the less time they spent on the script. But seeing how desperately Boll sometimes pads the running time — the opening credit sequence, for example, takes forever — we find it doubtful that anything filmed was cut from the final film.

The plot? Oops! Did we forget to mention it? Well, it's not like it's really all that important, or? Simply put, in Nazi Europe a half-human half-vampire (a "Dhapmir", in other words) named — Duh! — Bloodrayne spends her time killing Nazis with the underground resistance led by her current fuck Nathaniel Gregor (Brendan Fletcher of Blubberella [2011 / trailer]) when she isn't busy killing vampires or having sex. Unluckily, one nasty Nazi Commandant Ekart Brand (a very puffy-looking Michael Paré, of Blubberella [2011 / trailer]) gets a sip of her blood along the way and goes vampire, and between bouts of megalomania decides to go to Berlin to make Hitler a vampire and the Third Reich eternal... Helping him is the mandatory Nazi mad doctor, named Dr. Mangler (Clint Howard, of Blubberella [2011 / trailer]), and a bunch of Nazis. Can they be stopped? What do you think?

Next to Howard's overacting and the babes, the best things about the film is the location shoot in Croatia — the scenery looks real enough for the time period — and the background music of the film, which sounds like it should belong to a better film; you get to hear a lot of it during the interminably stretched-out opening scene at the train station in which deported Jews and other undesirables (most of the young ladies of which are wearing perfectly made-up eye-liner and lashes to match their period deportation rags) get off the train to start their death march. (Wait! Do we see some high heels, there?)

But aside from that, the film offers a lot of less-than-convincing fight scenes, a lot of belly laughs and an occasional "yuck" scene; the cinematography is professional, the editing less so. Although at one point Dr Mangler does pontificate about what kills vampires, the rules are pretty much ignored and the vampires die by sword, gunshot and even a big rock, the last of which plays an important role in the highly anti-climactic final in which the über-böse Ekart Brand, who throughout the film is presented as getting stronger and eviler to the point of being seemingly unstoppable, is negated in a bloody death that is so quick it has the intensity of a sneeze.

Do we recommend the film? Of course not. Do we regret seeing it? Well, not really — it really is more entertaining than the average Nora Ephron film, after all. But like an Ephron film, there is really no pressing reason to watch it... but if you do, be aware that there is no difference between the rated and unrated versions, so you can watch either.

As an extra: the opening scene of Postal (2007):

R.I.P.: Haji

August 12, 2013, 1:02 am

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Haji

 (January 24, 1946 – August 10, 2013)

Haji, the Canadian-born actress who most famously starred (with Tura Satana and Lori Williams) in the classic cult movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! passed on August 10, 2013, at the age of 67 from an unexpected heart attack. 

The LA Weekly gives her "real" name as "Barbarella Catton", but popular consensus says that she was born Cerlet Catton, either of Quebec or Halifax. Her stage name, Haji, was supposedly a term of endearment originally from her brother. Going by this interview here, Haji seems to have been born a Breatherian of sorts. By the time she was 14 she was an exotic dancer, but at the age 21 she decided to give a stab at acting and moved to California where Russ Meyer discovered her talents in a topless club and put her in one of his less-respected roughies, Motor Psycho (1965). She went on to appear in a total of five of his films, thus appearing in more of Meyer's films than any other woman, including his third wife Eve Meyer and his longtime main squeeze, Kitten Natividad. 

Haji had long since removed herself from the limelight, even the limited amount that cult stardom offers, but even as she retreated to the trees and ocean of Malibu, CA., where she last resided, she remained a fond memory of many a person, including us here at A Wasted Life. 

A career review will follow, eventually, but in the meantime enjoy this video that we discovered thanks to Video Watchdog:

 Brian Hyland singing Gypsy Woman

(visual source Russ Meyer's Good Morning & Goodbye!):

Hardgore (USA, 1974)

August 16, 2013, 1:49 am

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We came to this triple-X film by way of our research for our blog entry They Died in September 2012, Part X: Addendum: while gathering info on the segment on Hal David (25 May 1921–1 Sept. 2012), we came across the grimy porno film 1976 Linda & Cheri— director unknown — which, among the various working slabs of sausage, featured the reliable rod of 1993 XRCO Hall of Fame inductee (as a "Film Pioneer") and 2007 AVN Hall of Fame inductee John Seeman. Seeman — aka Jeff Box, Jon Seeman, Rolf De Vrees, Robert Koll, Nag Analf, Jay Seemon, Roy Stells, John Simon, John Semen, John Reynolds, John Seemen, John Siman, Bob Stern, John Semany, John A. Seeman, John Seaman, John Toland, John Ocean, John Shipley and Jethro Brunel — was one of the numerous perennially active circumcised penises of the Golden Age of Porn, but like most reliable hard workers of the time he never achieved the legendary status of, say, other hard-working stiffs such as Harry Reems (whom Seeman directed in Ten Little Maidens [1985]), John Leslie (with whom Seeman appears in at least 24 films, including Ultra Flesh [1980 / opening credits]), Jamie Gillis (with whom he worked in at least 14 projects, including the previously mentioned Ultra Flesh and Ten Little Maidens as well as For the Love of Pleasure (1979 / 8 NSFW minutes), or the massively unattractive John C. Holmes* (with whom he worked in at least 17 projects, including Spirit of Seventy Sex [1976 / 1 hairy NSFW minute] and several Johnny Wadd flicks).

Seeman, a 1965 B.S.B.A. graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, probably entered the film business in the Uschi Digard flick Heads or Tails in 1973, a good three years after the then-creditless** Mona the Virgin Nymph ala Mona (1970 / full film) — the first straight, hardcore "feature-length"*** porno film with a plot — hit the screen and helped make the floor of hundreds of cinemas across the US dangerously slippery.

By the time swordsman Seeman retired his seven inches in 1985, he had splattered loads in over 100 films, including this one, Hardgore, which is undoubtedly one of the most bizarre no-budget porno films of the era. Aka Horror Whore and Sadoasylum, the film is the only known film project of the most likely pseudonymous director "Michael Hugo." Along with Shaun Costello's Forced Entry (1973 / trailer), the only film Harry Reems has gone on the record as having regretted taking part in, Hardgore is one the earliest porn films to merge violence and triple-X sex, but whereas the overtly misogynistic Forced Entry takes its inspiration from psycho-on-the-loose films, Hardgore mines the lower depths of cheap, grindhouse horror and gore. Needless to say, it is also one crazy, messed-up and unforgettable film.

Originally released by Tarot Productions, a fly-by-night and long-gone production and distribution company, Hardgore is generally available for free viewing on any number of websites on the internet, all of which use the same scratchy, messed-up copy. The film clocks in at a quick 63 minutes, with all credits savagely edited out of the opening but for the title Hardgore, which jumps around as much as the music and the background it is superimposed upon. Like all porno films and all gore-for-the-sake-of-gore films, Hardgore follows the classic pattern of alternating between a little plot development and a sex or gore scene, with the emphasis being only naturally more on the latter two aspects.

The situation is quickly established: an unidentified and typically overweight (for the USA) man brings Maria (Dianne Galke, whom we here at A Wasted Life recognized from a couple of cards in our 1979 deck of Color Climax Delux Playing Cards— considering the hair of the guy doing her on the 8 of Diamonds, the penis in both cards she's on might actually be that of Seeman) to Fox Hollows Sanitarium to have her masochistic and nymphomaniac tendencies treated. (The plot of course, but for the maso-nympho part, is straight from "Basic Horror Plots 101", almost as equally overused as the broken down car and house on a hill set-up used in the earlier, far less bloody adults-only "horror" flick, Dark Dreams [1971 / SFW trailer] — which features Harry Reems as the lead saber — or that great underground masterpiece, Thundercrack! [1975 / 37 seconds].)

The director of the sanatorium, Dr. George (John Seeman, among whose other cult-worthy porn films aside from those previously mentioned are the porn western Sweet Savage [1979 / full NSFW film] and — ever see a KFC chicken leg used as a dildo? — the grubby House of Kinky Pleasures [1975 / NSFW trailer]), says Fox Hollows is the place for her, and soon she is shown to her room by the relatively hot, brunette nurse (Bunny Savage — who was even given headlining credit on the poster of her only other known film, Lollipop Palace [1976]). Following few sexy shots for the panties-and-garters crowd as the nurse makes the bed, the two babes first play scissor-sisters and moan and groan to the sounds of some sax-and-drum free jazz going batty in the background, and then they take a shower together and the nurse goes heartily for Maria's tuna taco. Could it be the start of a wonderful relationship? Hardly: not long after Maria takes advantage of a dildo she happens to find in her room, the sexy nurse shows up at her door as a dead nurse with a slit throat...

The effects here — the first "gore" scene — are hardly all that gory, the blood neither plentiful nor the slit even half as graphic as the sex scenes earlier, but the next sex/gore highlight that follows is a true jaw-dropper, a true masterpiece of "What the fuck were they ever thinking?" freakishness: when Maria goes running down the hall in terror, she promptly gets pulled into a room and a nightmarish orgy (in which masked women stroke Maria's legs as she blows the rods of two masked men) that is edited less to make you hot than to leave you disoriented. As Maria gives her full oral attention to the more admirably-sized of the two shafts, a hand comes in from the dark recesses and chops the lengthy rod off at its root with a knife; in a perverse travesty of a money shot, blood spurts all over Maria's face as the masked man screams in pain instead of pleasure — and then, suddenly, the room empty. A dream? A nightmare? Was it all even real?

Dr. George and his new nurse Lucy (Justina Lynne of the similarly odd XXX Femmes de Sade [1976 / full NSFW film]) seem concerned, stating as the boom mike hangs well into the frame: "Maria, you were running and dashing about wildly down the halls, screaming at the nurses, insulting the other patients, disrupting the hospital. Just relax, everything's gonna be alright." Maria believes him about as much as we do, but is promptly distracted by the new nurse Lucy, who is more than happy to give Maria her treatment — which seems to consist of getting her off with sex toys and more lesbian sex... but damn! In the midst of all that fun, the new nurse ends up burning her beaver box with an electrified dildo**** — screaming "Help me. It's ruined! Call my mother! Hurry! Call the doctor! Call the fire department!" — when a mysterious hand ups the amps. Talk about coitus interruptus...

But then, most scenes in the entire film end in a form of interruptus, simply cutting to the next scene as if the preceding one never even happened. This is also the case with the electro-dildo scene, which promptly segues into a nighttime scene of Maria being awoken by a deep, distant demonic voice which, as all people are apt to do, she promptly follows — and ends up in yet another sex orgy cum demonic mass overseen by a man dressed in red and wearing a plastic Satan mask. And if you think the tastelessness of the first orgy would be hard to be trumped, well, it isn't: Lucy, theoretically already dead, is put in a guillotine and gets a big boner from behind — from Turk Lyon (1947-1990), aka Bob Angelo | Todd Grinder | Bob Lash | Milton Lewis | Turk Lynn | Robert Lyon | Turk Lyons | Robert Magatoney | Bob Migliano | Bob Migliette | Heinz Russo | Willy Weber, of 7 Into Snowy (1978 / 1 NSFW minute) — which spews its never-ending load all over her rump as she is beheaded...

 

And thus the film continues, with every rare two minutes of narration or plot development followed by a longer sex sequence that either ends in gore or is set in gore, finally ending after 63 minutes not with a boner but a downer. But then, the only erections involved with this film are all in the film, for there is no way this depraved slab of sleaze is going to make any male viewer's willy even twitch slightly — except, perhaps, for one single sex scene that is so arty, so cinematically superior in comparison to the rest of the movie, that its almost seems to be beamed in from another film: a midnight wander reveals the truth to Maria, that she is intended to be sacrificed and that the men there kill those they screw and then pile the dead bodies up in "the room." Neither the news of her impending death nor the bloody sight of "the room" seems to damper her nymphomania any, however, for she promptly screws Dr. George while his well-hung colleague bonks a corpse (!), a scene intercut with close-ups of blood and gore that suddenly edits into an 8-minute-long hardcore and totally vanilla body-tango scene in a clean white room done in a long, single uncut circular shot similar to that used by Brian DePalma in Carrie (1976 / trailer) when Carrie (Sissy Spacek) and her date (William Katt) are dancing. Though hardly the most graphic of shared-body-fluids scenes, other than for the opening oral activity, the two go at it with such gusto and the circular pan is so lulling that for a moment one almost forgets just how grotesque the rest of Hardgore is — at least, that is, until the scene cuts back to the gore-filled sex scene in "the room" and the money shot of the guy having his way with the corpse. Talk about incongruity...

The corpses, by the way, don't really stay corpses, but whether this is due to the budget or an artistic decision is hard to say: all of the dead nurses are suddenly alive and active again for the big final orgy. Their sudden liveliness is a bit strange, of course, but half as strange as, well, the talking cock that suddenly tells Maria "You were a bad girl Maria," or the little rocket-ship dicks flying through the air spewing cum by the bucketload, or the scene in which Maria's face is literally lathered by a massive, non-stop and creamy cum shot. Whoever wrote this flick must have had some pretty nifty drugs at hand, that's for sure... or at least a bizarre sense of humor. They also seemed to have had problems coming up with an ending, for the downbeat finale may be bonkers but it is also so abrupt it almost seems tacked on, as if after all the weirdness that preceded it they couldn't figure out how to tie things into a neat bow, so why bother?

 

In regards to the cast, though none would probably ever be given the lead in a college play, they fair well enough as sex-film performers. Seeman's balding Jew-fro and glasses don't really make him good looking, but he is agreeably zit-free and slim and fit and like most of the men in the film pleasantly hung. The girls, in turn, are all surprising naturally attractive, if somewhat unexceptional, and more clean than skanky. The nurses do appear a bit more hardened than "Maria" (Dianne Galke — aka Diane Glanke, Dy Anne, Darla Phillips, Dianne Galke, Diane Galke, Diane de Leigh), who looks as if she could easily be the collage-age daughter of your (circa-74) next-door neighbor. Of course, as to be expected of the times, body hair is rampant and the boobs are all pleasantly silicone free.

To what extent the version of Hardgore we saw is uncut we are unsure, for the editing is both primitive and savage, but then the general quality of the film itself indicates that probably none of those involved ever thought that the movie might be deserving posterity. Sex scenes are often way too dark, but whether due to age or bad lighting cannot be told. The look / body language / music (mostly) / everything about the film screams American-made, but the irrational feel of the film is closer to Jess Franco's much, much, much better-made arty films like Succubus (1968 / trailer) or Virgin among the Living Dead (1973 / German trailer) than the average hardcore porn movie, despite all the close ups of lollipop licking and taco munching and the corresponding cream geysers. The background music, by the way, is as all-over-the-place as the film, moving back and forth from annoying free jazz noise to music that might well have been swiped from some Italo western to generic TV music.

Sleazy and incoherent, un-erotic and bloody, hairy and downright weird, Hardgore actually sounds better in description than it really is. Still, though the film fails on the whole both as a porn film and a gore film, it is such an incongruent and grotesque amalgamation of no-budget triple-X porn and grindhouse gore that, in the end, it nevertheless achieves a bizarre, surreal otherworldliness that makes it inexplicably fascinating. It would seem that in the case of Hardgore, the lunatics didn't just take over the asylum, they decided to write and shoot a film as well... 

* A sad note to a sad life: Though he made a number of gay loops, Holmes only made one triple-X gay feature film, the oddly repulsive Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes (1983 / 6.5 unappetizing, NSFW minutes). According to (straight) porn director Bill Amerson, all the male stars of the film, including Holmes, eventually died of AIDS or AIDS-related complications. (Answer.com is more reserved and says that only the "four principal actors ultimately died of AIDS.") Holmes, although aware he had HIV, continued his swordsman career for another five years after testing positive without letting anyone know he had the virus. He was obviously a man of high morals.

** At the time of its original release, Mona was released without credits due to legal concerns — making porn was illegal in California — but today it is common knowledge that film was produced by Bill Osco and directed by Michael Benveniste & Howard Ziehm, the same trio that brought out the classic soft-core comedy, Flesh Gordon (1974).

The Uncensored Trailer to Flesh Gordon (1974):

*** It should be perhaps noted that many of the early "feature-length" porno films, like Hardgore, were actually closer in length to a second-feature film — i.e., hardly more than an hour — than a feature production. Perhaps the first porno film to truly have the length of a feature film — 118 minutes in this case — is also the first one to feature on-screen (mostly pseudonymous) credits for its cast and crew, the first one to parody the title of a mainstream movie, the only X-rated gay porn film to be reviewed by The New York Times, and one of the first theatrically released gay porn films ever (if not actually the first): Wakefield Poole's The Boys in the Band (1971), starring the ever-popular Casey Donovan aka Calvin Culver (of L.A. Tool & Die [1982 / original NSFW trailer], "Henry Paris's" The Opening of Misty Beethoven [1976 / SFW trailer], Radley Metzger's Score [1974 / trailer], the lost Andy Milligan project Dragula [1973], Some of My Best Friends Are [1971 / trailer] and Ginger [1971 / trailer]). Poole went on to make one of the great semi-lost mondo films high on our "Must-See List," the 1974 art film Bible! (scene). (The name "Henry Paris" above is put in quotation marks because, as any mildly informed film fan knows, it is the pseudonym Radley Metzger used for his triple-X outings.) 

**** This deadly weapon, and a similar death, later occurs in Seeman's 1985 directorial effort Ten Little Maidens.

The Return of Superfly (USA, 1990)

August 21, 2013, 1:15 am

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Crappy video of the title track to The Return of Superfly (Curtis Mayfield + Ice T):

 

Well, we really should have known better...

Director Sid Shore (13 May 1919 – 17 Aug 2006) was on hand way back in 1972 to produce the first Superfly which, according to his obit at The New York Times, "cost less than $100,000 and grossed more than $30 million". Superfly, as everyone knows, was an early Blaxploitation film directed by Gordon Parks Jr — the son of Gordon Parks Sr, who had directed another early Blaxploitation classic, Shaft (trailer), the year previously — starring the inimitable Ron O'Neal as Youngblood Priest, a smooth African American cocaine dealer out to retire from the biz. (Even if you don't know the film, you surely know the title tune from Curtis Mayfield [hear it here], which is just as much of a classic as Isaac Hayes' title tune to Shaft [here it here].) Superfly was followed in 1973 by Superfly T.N.T. (opening credits), this time around with O'Neal as the star, co-scriptwriter and director; it is not quite the classic that the first film is and, in fact, still hasn't had a DVD release. This flick here, made a good 18 years later, is the second sequel, and it is not without reason that it more or less is a completely forgotten film, despite being available of DVD: it sucks.

Trailer to the original Superfly (1972):

 

O'Neal was still alive when this film was made — he died ten years later from pancreatic cancer in 2000 — but the 18 years that had passed since the first film probably made him too old for the film, or maybe he just had the good judgement of not taking part in this listless milking of a dead cow that screams "no budget" much more loudly than it does "low budget". Instead, some unknown dude named Nathan Purdee — a future soap opera actor — slipped into the role of Superfly/Priest and, while not slipping and landing flat on his face, he sure the hell doesn't manage to convey any magnetism or anything memorable. Sure, he's good-looking with nicely broad shoulders and his threads are fashionably 80s synthetic, but he never manages to stand out in a film that is as flat and dull as it is narratively unexceptional, if not simple-minded and often illogical.

In all truth, the first minutes of the film do manage to convey the promise of cheap, enjoyable, violent sleaze, but of that promise only "cheap" is followed through to the end. A group of dealers rubout a bunch of other dealers and then go on to rubout the head honcho Eddie (Rony Clanton [Def by Temptation (1990 / trailer)], replacing Carl Lee [Werewolves on Wheels (1971 / trailer)] of the first film), who is too busy bonking his babe (Lisa Andoh) to pay attention to a warning. Yep, the opening scene has it all: drugs, cools cats with gats, escape and chase, blood, sex and a naked babe — but once Eddie lands on the floor and Priest sees the need to return from Europe to avenge his friend, the movie becomes a meandering and aggravating snoozathon with way too many laughable and "what-the-fuck?" moments to be any good, but not enough laughable and "what-the-fuck?" moments to truly be an enjoyable as a bad film.

Of course The Return of Superfly has the obligatory sexy ladies, one of whom (Patrice Ablack) is dispatched quickly enough after showing her perkies and the other, Francine (Margaret Avery of  The Psychopath [1973 / first ten minutes]* and Terror House [1972 / trailer]); Francine keeps her perkies covered but (seriously) simply disappears midway in the film only to reappear to tiptoe through the tulips in Paris with Priest as the final credits roll — a more than unexpected sight, as the events leading up to her highly noticable disappearance definitely infer an off-screen death.

*The Psychopath is another unsung craptastic masterpiece by director Lawrence Brown, aka Larry G. Brown, who began his very short directorial career with an undeniable psychotronic movie, Pink Angels (1972):

Aside from the dearth of blood and violence and sleaze, the movie also lacks any narrative tension or any evidence of cinematic know-how, the visuals being as lifeless as the progression of events is slow, illogical and dull. A tighter script with less characters, less talk and more action might have lifted The Return of Superfly to the quality of a TV movie, but the film as Sid Shore made it is, at best, little more than a prime example of how not to make a crime thriller. Dull chase scenes, excessive dialogue, diffuse characters that do little and offer nothing, poorly staged and poorly shot action sequences, bad acting across the board (with the possible exception of the now top-billed but less than tertiary present Samuel L. Jackson looking and acting as if he ain't acting that he is on drugs), inept editing and a less-than-gripping story ensure that The Return of Superfly never becomes anything more than an easy to forget and 100% non-essential viewing displeasure...

The sound track is groovy, though; we'd totally forgotten what great music Ton Loc once made.

Ton Loc — Cheeba Cheeba:

Short Film: Quest (Germany, 1996)

August 27, 2013, 2:50 am

≫ Next: R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part V (1980–84)

≪ Previous: The Return of Superfly (USA, 1990)

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Here's an interesting möbius-like stop-motion puppet animation short from Germany; produced and animated by short-film maker ThomasStellmachand directed and photographed by Tyron Montgomery at the Art Department of the University of Kassel, Quest took four years to make and upon its release raked in the awards, including the 1996 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. The short tells the tale of a sandman in search of water who, often more by accident than by plan, travels from one world to another to find a way to quench his thirst, each world being more dangerous and nightmarish than the one before...

R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part V (1980–84)

September 2, 2013, 4:13 am

≫ Next: R.I.P.: José Ramón Larraz

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27 August  1947 – 19 March  2013

Go here for R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part I

Go here for R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part II I (1969-72)

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

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

 Demented
(1980, dir. Arthur Jeffreys)

 

Trailer:

This much maligned horror flick seems to be the debut and last directorial effort of Arthur Jeffreys. It was written by Alex Rebar, an actor who appeared in Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion (1970 / opening credits) and had the lead role in the craptastic The Incredible Melting Man (1977 / trailer), and also wrote a few films like this one here and David Hess's To All A Good Night (1980) and Mario Azzopardi's Nowhere to Hide (1987 / trailer). Harry Reems has an important role as the unfaithful husband Matt Rodgers, but oddly enough he is credited as "Bruce Gilchrist" — we would guess name recognition was not important to the filmmakers. 

The plot, in its barest bones, is explained by Torrent Butler: "A woman (chestacular Sallee Young of Home Sweet Home [1981 / full film]) is gang-raped in a horse's stable, and even though the rapists are caught and imprisoned, she is harassed many moons later by ghastly visions of her tormentors, while her husband philanders and every little thing frightens her out of her wits."

At the Cult Movie Forums, jacksmith1983 calls the film "an obscure and largely forgotten entry to the familiar rape & revenge cycle of seventies and eighties exploitation filmmaking" and says: "Aficionados of trash cinema will know where they are at with Demented, which spins what was already by 1980 a rather predictable yarn of a young woman who is savagely raped only to later snap and take brutal revenge upon various unsavory men folk. [...] Demented, unlike its contemporaries such as Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972) and Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave (1978 / trailer) makes no pretence at a moral argument or message, instead pitching itself as a straightforward exercise in exploitation all the way. [...] All in all Demented is not an especially good film to say the least. Thanks mainly to a dreadful central performance and a dopey, predictable, uninvolving script, Demented completely fails to engage the viewers emotional and gut responses on the same level as the more famous not to mention much more effective exploitation pictures it tries and singularly fails to emulate. Ultimately the name of the game proves to be paint-by-numbers exploitation with no ambition beyond serving up an unpleasant dish of graphic rape, topped off with seedy sex and nudity and finally dressed with a modest welter of vengeful brutality. While Demented does in fairness at least deliver upon its sleazy promise, the end results are pretty forgettable at best and not in anything like the same league as the likes of Last House On The Left, I Spit On Your Grave, Death Weekend (1976 / trailer) and Savage Streets (1984 / trailer)."

Full film while it lasts:

To All a Goodnight
(1980, dir. David Hess)

For the second time in 1980, Harry Reems appears in an Alex-Rebar-scripted slasher, this time directed by no one less than David Hess, the legendary star of such cult faves as the unavoidable Last House on the Left (1972), House on the Edge of the Park (1980 / trailer) and Bodycount (1986 / trailer). And again, as in Demented, Reems is credited under a different name: "Dan Stryker". He's a tertiary character, in any event, and really doesn't have all that much screen time.

To All a Goodnight was shot in Santa Barbara, CA, on a budget of $40,000 in ten days. At imdb, Jean-Marc Rocher (rocher@fiberbit.net) gives the plot as follows: "It's Christmas break at the Calvin Finishing School for Girls, and the students are planning a big party while the president of the school is away. A group of boys show up and the fun begins, until mysterious killer starts bumping off couples one by one. The police show up and promise to keep everyone safe, but they prove ineffectual against the crazed psycho. Could the killings have anything to do with the girl who was killed in an initiation stunt at the school a few years earlier?"

The ever-affable Ninja Dixon says about this generally panned slasher flick: "Personally I love this genre [slashers]. It's not especially complicated, like candy for the brain. Often no complicated message or to advanced character developments, just attractive people getting killed by either a known lone maniac or a lone unknown killer that's unmasked in the end. To All a Good Night is no exception from the rules. This is just a movie where a bunch of horny school kids want to do some extra partying in a big house and a killer-Santa shows up, killing them one by one with axes, knifes, big stones, airplanes and other things that happens to be around. Everything is set up with a frantic pace, with the 'two years earlier'-scene over and done in a couple of minutes and after that there's hardly any establishing of the characters. This might sound a bit negative, but I actually am quite fond of this early Christmas-slasher. It has a huge bodycount over a short period, some impressive gore and the actors are absolutely not bad. What hurts the movie is the way too generic screenplay and that it's too dark most of the time. That last thing can have to do with the transfer to video, because I think that beneath that video-version there's a very atmospheric and well-shot movie. [...]"

Video Junkie, on the other hand, is less appreciative of the film: "Hitting right at the peak of the stalk-and-slash boom, this film appears to have never actually gotten to theaters in the U.S. and debuted on video by Media Home Entertainment. This is understandable when you realize this film is the movie equivalent of a stocking full of coal."

While it lasts — the full film online:

 

Les chiens chauds
(1980 , writ & dir. Claude Fournier)

Aka Cops and Other Lovers, The Cleanup Squad, Under the Cover Cops, Hot Dogs. Claude Fournier is actually a respected director in Canada, though this comedy is probably not one of his prestige projects.

At Rovei, Mark Deming explains the plot: "In this French-language comedy from Canada, Mr. Clean (Harry Reems) is a police detective who heads a special task force of the vice squad. Clean's by-the-book attitude makes him none too popular with his underlings, so they try to fake a sex scandal that will cause him to be fired from the force." Over at Why Do They Exist?, they say: "Deep Throat made Harry Reems a highly unlikely star, but by 1980 his alcohol and drug abuse had pretty much killed his porn career. The obvious move was, of course, to go to Québec and take the straight-man role (no pun intended) in [...] Hot Dogs. Basically an even more sophomoric and plotless proto-Police Academy (1984 / trailer), Hot Dogs is so bored with its own identity that it barely has jokes and treats even its copious nudity as an afterthought."

 

At imdb, William (williamnorton316@hotmail.com) of Seattle, Washington, who finds the movie "pretty low on nudity and filled with bad Canadian humor", says that Hot Dogs is a "very unfunny comedy with surprising good funny performance by Reems. Reems who admitted to being 'out of it' in most of his films in his later career, seems to be having fun giving a great performance." Over in Tokyo, Japan, haildevilman finds the movie OK: "This movie should not be taken seriously at all. [...] Just crack a beer, check your brain, and hope you're not one of those sensitive types. Then you'll have a blast with this one. Sure it's dirty and raunchy. [...] This is clearly not a date film. Lots of nudity, innuendo, dirty (and I mean DIRTY) jokes, and sexual candor. But we're all adults here, right?"

 

 

Dream House
(1981, dir. Joseph Hardy)

Who knows how Harry Reems got into this TV movie, but there he is somewhere playing "Phil Billings", probably on screen for mere seconds. (Anyone know for sure?). This TV movie is less a family film than a woman's film and not the kind of stuff we would watch here at A Wasted Life.

Over at imdb, GotchaPhoto from California explains the film: "John Schnieder plays a carpenter who meets and romances this lady played by Marilu Henner (of Vamps [2012 / trailer], Hammett [1982 / trailer] and Cannonball Run II [1984 / trailer]). She is only in town to give conferences on construction for 4 days. They date for four days and she goes back to NY. John (Charlie) loads up his truck and goes to NY to find her and make her his wife. Although this city girl is not convinced, Charlie has a lot of patience. He buys a small strip of land in the ghetto that is wedged between two buildings: a spot where his love interest needs to build new condos. Charlie is against all odds trying to convince the girl that he loves to give him the shot that he needs and to build a house in the middle of the ghetto where the gangs go to great lengths to show him he's not welcome."

John Schneider, seen here to the left with a noticeable bulge in a scene from Dukes of Hazard, went on to appear is in much better movies than Dream House, such as Return of the Killer Shrews (2012 / trailer), Conjurer (2008 / trailer), Shark Swarm (2008 / trailer), Ogre (2008 / trailer) and Lake Placid 2 (2007 / trailer). Oddly enough, in none of those films did he ever again display the same noticeable bulge that was so integral to the appeal of his Dukes of Hazard character....and that would so indiscriminately change sides scene to scene.

 National Lampoon's Movie Madness
(1982, dir. Bob Giraldi & Henry Jaglom)

 

Once upon a time there was a humor magazine called National Lampoon, and they made a flick called Animal House (1978 / trailer) and it was such a big hit that they thought they could shit gold. So they shat this film out and had, well, shit.

Originally a four-segment film meant to satirize popular film genres, the movie was trimmed down to three segments upon release. Music video and commercial director Bob Giraldi did the segments "Growing Yourself" and "Success Wanters", while Henry Jaglom, who hasn't made an interesting film since his mildly interesting début hippy-film oddity A Safe Place (1971 / trailer), directed the other two, "Municipalians" and the cut segment "The Bomb".

The praise for this film is fairly consistent, always of the same tone as over at Reel Film, which says "The folks at National Lampoon have released some awful movies over the years (i.e. Van Wilder [2002 / trailer], Gold Diggers [2003 / trailer], etc), but this is surely the worst." Blogger Jerry Saravia, who admits not making it through to the third and final segment (the one with Reems), says: "[...] I cannot imagine a single soul finding anything of comedic value in National Lampoon Goes to the Movies, which is the worst comedy I've ever seen. Let me make that painstakingly clear once more: it is the WORST COMEDY I'VE EVER SEEN. EVER. In the history of the comedy genre, nothing is WORSE than this movie. NOT ONE!"

Bad Movie Planet, which says the movie us "is a poorly conceived anthology that falls flat on its face early on and stays there", is particularly put off by the episode in which Harry Reems flits by somewhere playing a Vice Squad Cop: "As bad as the previous segments are, nothing can prepare you for "Municipalians." Not a moment goes by in which it this section doesn't make you feel like someone is shoving a dead possum in your face, and this is mostly director Henry Jaglom's fault. [...] Jaglom's whiny, navel-gazing autobiographical style doesn't lend itself to the silly excesses of a low brow comedy. Jaglom has no comic timing and keeps the film moving at a snail's pace. [...] "Municipalians" also boasts the film's worst performances." And, according to Uncle Scoopy, the final segment of this "totally unfunny movie performed with desperation by people begging the audience to laugh [...] doesn't even have the gratuitous nudity which spiced up the other two vignettes." A crappy film, in other words, and not exactly a stepping stone to a career in films that doesn't focus on your meat lolipop.

Trailer:

Mae West
(1982, dir. Lee Philips)

Ann Jillian as Mae West singing CC Rider:

Harry Reems is the narrator of this TV biography directed by actor (Violent Midnight [1963 / scene]) turned director (The Stranger Within [1974 / full film) Lee Philips. Ann Jillian stars as the title figure; unlike in Mae West's autobiography, in which West presents herself as the one with the desire to go show business, the movie makes her mother Matilda West (Piper Laurie of The Faculty [1998 / trailer], Trauma [1993 / trailer], Ruby [1977 / trailer] and Carrie [1976 / trailer]) very much an early "Hollywood Mom". There is disagreement whether the character Rene Valentine (Roddy McDowall of Shakma [1990], Cutting Class [1989 / trailer], Dead of Winter (1987 / trailer], Fright Night (1985 / trailer], Arnold [1973 / trailer], The Legend of Hell House [1973 / trailer] and his only directorial project, The Devil's Widow [1970 / trailer]) is based on true life drag queens Bert Savoy or Julian Eltinge.

Bridgette Andersen, the child actress that played the young Mae West — later also seen in one of the segments of Nightmares (1983 / trailer) — became a Hollywood causality on May 18, 1997, at the age of 21 and died of an "accidental overdose of alcohol and heroin".

As an extra, here is Ann Jillian's home recipe for "Jumpin' Jilly's Chili":
3 tablespoons salad oil
1 onion
1 pound ground turkey (in Kitchen Bouquet)
1 clove garlic
1 16-ounce can peeled tomatoes
2 30-ounce cans kidney beans
1 tablespoon chilli powder
1 small can tomato paste
1 1/2 ounces sun-dried tomatoes
1 ounce dry red wine
1 pinch curry powder
Paprika and salt to taste
Marinate turkey in Kitchen Bouquet before browning for a few minutes. In skillet, heat salad oil; add diced onion. Cook for 2 minutes until translucent. Add marinated turkey and garlic; cook 5 minutes. Add peeled tomatoes, kidney beans, chili powder (more or less to taste), tomato paste, sundried tomatoes, dry red wine, and curry powder. Cover and simmer on low/medium heat for one hour. Season to taste with paprika and salt. Remove garlic clove and serve. Serves six.

Society Affairs
(1982, dir. Gary Graver)

 

Harry Reems may have been an important person is the fight for freedom of speech, but it did cost him an "above-ground" career: in the 70s and 80s, "Porno Chic" aside, a porn past pretty much was the kiss of death for a mainstream future, a few non-names aside (such as George 'Buck' Flower and to a lesser extent, seeing that they, too, are no longer active as actors, Sonny Landham or Robert Kerman — the last of whom works hard in this movie here, too). Harry was not a non-name, he was the name that everyone knew, even if they had never seen a film of his, but his fame was of no help when it came to crossing over to a half-way "mainstream" film career.

In 1982, after a few years short of a decade of trying to make it outside of porn and four years after suffering the career-killing expulsion from Grease (1978), Reems returned to triple-X with this movie here, Society Affairs, a burlesque of the then-popular late-night soaps like Dallas (1978-91) and Dynasty (1981-89). The plot? Well, according to 3X Update: "Harry Reems [returns] after an eight-year hiatus from adult films, and Harry comes back with a characteristic bang. Playing two roles — a crass, lascivious crook and a polite, boring rich guy — Harry also puts in double time when he discovers in the middle of a caper a house full of really horny women. Turning in an amazing Olympic-caliber sexual performance, the incredible Mr. Reems first thoroughly boffs each gorgeous young woman in succession, and then in a torrid clustering. Great acting and blistering sex abound in this killer return for Harry Reems, which also features Veronica Hart (of One-Eyed Monster [2008 / trailer], Parasomnia [2008 / trailer], Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh [1991 / trailer] and Sexbomb [1989 / trailer]) in a pair of mind-blowing fornication scenes."

Awarded the "Best Film of the Year" by Adam Film World— over Cafe Flesh (1982), if you can believe it — Society Affairs was directed by the prolific Hollywood cinematographer and director Gary Graver, aka Robert McCallum (20 July  1938 - 16 Nov  2006). Graver worked for everyone from Orson Wells to Disney to Paul Hunt and a yitload of other names, many of whom weren't connected to porn. He was primarily active in B-movies and porn since, as he put it, "I knew how to make a movie without much money." Among his unknown and decidedly trashy non-porn credits as director: The Hard Road (1970 / trailer), Erika's Hot Summer (1971 / Erika Gavin naked), Texas Lightning (1981 / sleazy scene), Trick or Treats (1982 / trailer), Party Camp (1987 / trailer), Evil Spirits (1990 / trailer), Roots of Evil (1992 / trailer), Angel Eyes (1993 / trailer) and Sexual Roulette (1996 / trailer).

Graver's credits as cinematographer are a bit more noteworthy, and he pointed the camera for a number of anti-classics, including: Satan's Sadists (1969 / trailer), The Mighty Gorga (1969 / scene), Blood Mania (1970 / trailer), Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973 / full movie), Bummer (1973 / trailer), The Naughty Stewardesses (1975 / trailer), Black Heat (1976 / full film), Grand Theft Auto (1977 / trailer), The Toolbox Murders (1978 / trailer) and Mortuary (1983 / trailer).

Graver, who worked regularly with Roger Corman and such greats as Al Adamson, was last in the news in the 1990s for trying to sell Orson Welles's 1941 Oscar for Citizen Kane (1941 / trailer) which, according to Graves, Welles gave it to him in lieu of cash for shooting The Other Side of the Wind (1972-?). Welles' daughter Beatrice Welles went to court to stop him and won both the case and the Oscar — the latter of which she promptly sold herself.

 Trailer to Gary Graver's directorial debut, The Embracers (1966):

Wolf Cubs
(1983, writ. & dir. Joseph W. Sarno)

Aka SS Operation Wolf Cub. This obscure Sarno non-porn production, a good ol' sleazy naziploitation flick, seems never to have reached the American shores. Indeed, who knows if it was ever released anywhere theatrically, though it did get a VHS release in Europe.

 

The Swedish website filmipset has the balls to say "SS Operation Wolf Cub is one of the most remarkable ever made," but they seem to be alone in this opinion... not that all that many people seem to have ever seen this movie. Over at the forum on AV Maniacs, Tommy K says: "SS Operation Wolf Cub [...] has got Harry Reems fighting neo-nazis in Sweden. Not really a good film." Elsewhere someone adds that Reems is an ex-mercenary and that the actors all "have an ability to both sound and look completely retarded." At the Cinehound Forum, there is an exchange regarding the film that is probably right on the mark, with one guy saying the movie "is an amazing slice of undefendable Eurotrash and extremely entertaining for all the right (wrong?) reasons [that] I still wouldn't watch or recommend anybody to watch it without the aid of at least one mind-altering substance. [...] It also has one of the most offensive sex scenes I've ever seen committed to celluloid, make's everything in Enema Bandit (1976) seem like prime jerk-off material in comparison."

Sister Dearest
(1984, writ. & dir. Jonathan Ross)

The movie Sister Dearest is basically illegal nowadays and thus relatively hard to cum over. Why? 'Cause it's one of Traci Lords' early films, released when Lords (born Nora Louise Kuzma on May 7, 1968) was but a sweet 16, so once her age came out it was pulled as kiddy porn. It was later re-cut and re-released as Back to Class, sans Lords, and in that form is relatively easy to find. Harry Reems, in his small part as "the Professor", has sex with Susan Hart in both versions.

Sister Dearest is one of the early straight films of former gay porno star Matt Ramsey (A Matter of Size [1983 / NSFW film] and The Bigger the Better [1984 / NSFW scene]), better known today as Peter North, whose formable wurst (at 56 years of age) still gushes gallons in triple-X videos today. (Unlike for Reems, porn has made North a millionaire.)

The incestuous plot of Sister Dearest, according to 3X Update: "When Randy Jennings (Tom Byron) visits his old fraternity during Alumni Day at State U., he suddenly flashes back to his days (and nights) as a naive college freshman. His education begins the night he first arrives. During a wild frat party, he inadvertently stumbles onto his sister, Vicky (Traci Lords) while she is earning her reputation as the campus nymphomaniac. That's only the beginning: there’s the beautiful black co-ed (Sahara), who's a pushover for total honesty; an art student (Susan Hart), who is driven to get something straight between her professor and herself; Vicky's roommate (Ginger Lynn), who has an extra-curricular activity with an off-campus tattoo artist; and a couple of exotic dancers (Sondra Stillman and Breeze), who can't help but get caught up in the heat of the moment. Still there is something missing in Randy's education and, in the end, neither his college nor his fraternity can help him … only his sister." 3X Update also offers a somewhat less detailed description to the re-release version, Back to Class (1987): "The boys are back in school — and into the coeds. The Gamma Gnu gang is back to class — and wilder than ever. Get set for the ride!"

Traci Lords acting in a non-sex scene from Sister Dearest:

 Girls on Fire
(1984, dir. Jack Remy)

An X-rated riff on Some Like It Hot (1959 / trailer). Harry Reems has a "special guest appearance" as a jogger on the beach that ends up shagging a girl on the beach (Shaun Michelle [1953-2002])....

Porno Classic explains the plot: "Two investigators (Jamie Gillis and Robert Bullock), assigned to uncover insurance fraud, also find trouble when a hood (John Alderman of Love Camp 7 [1969 / trailer], The Hard Road [1970 / trailer], Pink Angels [1972 / trailer], Hannah, Queen of the Vampires [1973 / trailer], Cleopatra Jones [1973], Black Samson [1974 / trailer], Drive-In Massacre [1977 / trailer] and New Year's Evil [1980 / trailer]) comes home to find them in bed with his delectable wife (Kimberly Carson) and their hands on his incriminating 'little black book'. They're chased into the middle of a lingerie fashion show rehearsal, overflowing with a bevy of gorgeous models — all willing to help them out (in every way!). Our heroes and the hoods dress in drag to hide and pursue in a comedy filled with the hilarity and the hottest sex with the most beautiful girls in adult films."

Adult DVD is of the opinion that "Girls on Fire, while being a well-done porn film, is also a fun silly comedy. Although it ends up being nothing more than your standard men on the run film, the script is written so the sex scenes fit the film instead of it being the other way around as the majority of adult films are. The end result is a really fun erotic comedy. There are many corny lines throughout the film, but they just add to the fun. [...] The acting in the film is strangely good for an adult film. John Holmes is hilarious running around the fashion show in drag. [...] The women in the film are good looking. Most of the males could have been better picked though." The full, naturally NSFW movie can be watched here at Mr Snake.

Those Young Girls
(1984, dir. Myles "Miles" Kidder)

In all truth, Harry Reems returned to porn just as the Golden Age was having its last dying gasps — its last films of note could arguably be Chuck Vincent's 1981 porn drama Roommates (trailer) or the oddly anti-sex porn flick Café Flesh (1982 / "Rats & Babies") — and the contemporary direct-to-video age was rising. Porn films simply got less interesting, and while this one here still has bit more going for it than most that were to follow, it doesn't really stand out as anything spectacular. Those Young Girls is, however, one of Harry Reems last true porn-star turns; the main cast is a name cast, and all names are still known today: Reems, John Holmes, the under-age Traci Lords and Ginger Lynn, who wrote the script (supposedly based on real-life experiences).

Rame.net manages to make the film seem very, uh, un-sexy in its blow-by-blow review of the European release (Lords isn't underage by European standards, so the film is still legal to sell there): "The infamous Those Young Girls [...] is not a great movie. Traci plays the role of the porn veteran to Ginger Lynn's aspiring newcomer. For the first scene, Traci takes part in a nude photo shoot. Traci gets fucked by Harry Reems by the poolside. He comes on her tits. Ginger and Traci innocently play around in a sunny garden, hosing each other down and getting each other wet like the carwash scene in Debbie does Dallas (1978). John Holmes plays the sleazy agent that Ginger Lynn hooks up with, she sucks off Holmes till he comes on her face. Ginger then appears in a nude photo shoot. Ginger and Harry appear in a music video, then they fuck on a bed. Ginger and Traci get in a Jacuzzi then move onto a bed where they proceed to do a 69 with good close-ups. They then tie up Harry and suck him for a while before leaving him tied up. Distinctly average, even though both Ginger and Traci look incredibly cute."

 Trailer to Traci Lords' 1st non-porn film, the remake Not of this Earth (1988):

 The Cartier Affair
(1984, by Rod Holcomb)

Harry Reems is here somewhere as a state trooper in the background of this TV movie directed by Rod Holcomb, who still does TV today; the high-point of Holcomb's career is probably the hilarious Melissa Sue Anderson vehicle, the TV horror Midnight Offerings (1981 / full film).

We took a quick look at this film here at the R.I.P. career review of Charles Napier, where we said: "A TV movie and 'star' vehicle for Joan Collins and David Hasselhoff! Plot: Joan Collins as Cartier Rand, an American TV star, with Napier as her unsatisfying long-time lover Morgan. Rand needs a new assistant after her old one trashes her house; in comes young, gay Curt Taylor (David Hasselhoff). Actually, he's an ex-jailbird who owes prison top-dog Drexler (Telly Savalas) money, and he's been installed in Rand's house to steal her jewellery. But he turns out to be less gay than he initially seems... Someone at Amazon says: 'This movie tries to be a blend of comedy, thriller and erotic drama. It doesn't really work out.' Who cares if this film is any good; with a cast like this, it has to be included on this list!"

 Actors at work:

R.S.V.P.
(1984, dir. Lem Amero)

As far as we can tell, this comedy is the last non-hardcore of Harry Reems as well as the last directorial effort of Lem Amero of the Amero Borthers, the auteur sleaze merchants with whom Reems previously made Bacchanale (1970) and Every Inch a Lady (1975). Lem died of AIDS-related illness five years after making this movie, in 1989.

 

The story to R.S.V.P. was supplied by Joel Bender, the scriptwriter of Roberta Findley's ridiculous Tenement (1985 / trailer), who began his career as the writer/director of the cult comedy Gas Pump Girls (1979 / fan-made trailer); Bender, also active as a director, has a number of trashy horror flicks to his resume: The Cursed (2010 / trailer), Midnight Kiss (1993 / trailer), The Immortalizer (1989 / Spanish trailer), and The Returning (1983 / full film).

 

The New York Times describes R.S.V.P. as follows: "This R-rated gem is about an author who produces a novel with characters inspired by real-live Hollywood stars. When the book is turned into a film, the producers throw a party and invite all the films' real-life 'characters' to celebrate its release and learn that they are featured in the film. All's well until a body turns up in the author-party host's swimming pool. However, there are plenty more bodies to be seen in this one — the kind with hearts still beating — because this comedy is loaded with nudity." Over at imdb, "djelvis2" of the United States was less impressed, saying: "This movie was made a half-decade too late; it would have been perfect before movies like Porky's (1982 / trailer) and Zapped! (1982 / trailer) raised the bar... I was watching for Veronica Hart, back in her redhead days, and she still comes off as the smartest, most capable actress in the room. Alas, the film's an hour-and-a-half of naughty one-liners that would be perfect if Reader's Digest ever had an adult-rated Laughter is the Best Medicine. [...] It attempts to bring a sense of burlesque back to motion pictures, but with nothing that really pulls the audience in. The jokes wouldn't past muster on a Fox sitcom, the plot's thin as a thong, and the performances are community theater level. [...]"

Harry Reems plays "Grant Garrison," alongside such luminaries as Playboy Playmate Lynda Wiesmeier (photo above); Lola Mason, of the classic film The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962); Katt Shea, the director of Carrie II: The Rage (1999); Steve Nave, of The Doll Squad (1973 / trailer); and Michael Pataki, of Dracula's Dog (1978 / trailer)

 A mini-scene without Reems:
r.s.v.p. | sinemalar.com

For Your Thighs Only
(1984, dir. Jerome Tanner)

The second directorial effort of Jerome Tanner, who already evidences the direct-to-video aesthetic he went on to cultivate in over 200 subsequent "movies". Harry Reems shows up for one scene to bonk Angel (born "Jennifer James" — seen here from her 1985 Penthouse pictorial), who plays "Agent Vacuum". The back cover blurb of the video says: "Holy headlines of horror! They, the religious right, want to outlaw sex for recreation and limit it to purposes of procreation. What is a wanton lover of sexual entertainment to do?" Over 3X Update they add "[A] group of fearless and beautiful agent in skirts stand up for traditional American values." Needless to say, "beautiful" is relative... Big hair and bad acting, as seen in this NSFW sex scene. Reportedly one of George Bush's favorite films.

Girls of the Night
(1984, dir. Ned Moorehead)

We can't help but think that someone was having fun when they managed to get the director's name listed on imdb as "Ned Morehead", a name far more appropriate for a porn filmmaker than the "Moorehead" given in the film's credit sequence.

Classic Archive explains the plot: "Enter the carnal world of high-powered Washington D.C. sex where Amber Lynn (of the hilariously terrible 'horror' films Things [1989 / trailer] and Evils of the Night [1985 / trailer]) stars as a promiscuous young call girl. She caters to the perverse desires of an up and coming Senator, Harry Reems and other sexually insatiable heads of government. Along with her willing and wanton girlfriends; Colleen Brennen, Renee Tyfani, and the black sensation, Sahara, these girls of the night haunt in the smoke-filled rooms and the corridors of power in search of passion, and nonstop hot-blooded lust."

 

The full NSFW movie can be found here at Red Tube. Colleen Brennen, by the way, aka Sharon Kelly, appeared (as "Super Cherry") in Russ Meyers' masterpiece Supervixens (1975) and can also be seen in such fine films as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975 / trailer) and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976 / trailer).

German trailer to Russ Meyer's Supervixens (1975), with Colleen Brennen:

 R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part VI will follow... eventually.

R.I.P.: José Ramón Larraz

September 5, 2013, 9:44 am

≫ Next: 5 Minutes to Live (USA, 1961)

≪ Previous: R.I.P.: Harry Reems, Part V (1980–84)

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1929 (Barcelona) — 03 Sept 2013 (Málaga)

"José Ramón Larraz (born 1929 in Barcelona) is a Spanish director of exploitation and horror fims such as the erotic and bloody Vampyres (1974). Larraz began making films in England, then in 1976 apparently relocated his operations back to Spain. He made many different types of films, but is best known for his horror films. His last few horror films were Spanish/ American co-productions. He apparently retired from filmmaking in 1992 at age 63." (Wikipedia, retrieved 05.09.13)

It was José Ramón Larraz's great film Vampyres (1974) that first even made us conscious of the concept of "Eurotrash". Years ago, in La La Land circa 1984, on a stoned late-night jaunt with some friends downtown on Broadway, the neon marquee of the now long defunct grindhouse Cameo Theatre sang a Circe song of a two-buck quadruple screening. While we no longer remember all the titles, one was "The Voyage of Tanya" and the other Vampyres...

In all truth, it was the sexy sounding "The Voyage of Tanya" that drew us into the theatre, which at night was less a grindhouse than a flophouse where the unified snoring of the homeless sometimes drowned out the dialogue up on screen, but the decidedly sexy-sounding title turned out to actually be a kiddy film originally titled Paddle to the Sea (1966 / first 10 minutes). We sat through it anyway — at less than 30 minutes, it's a relatively short film — and then were confronted with Vampyres, perhaps the first Eurotrash film we ever saw outside of a Hammer film on TV (if Hammer even counts as Eurotrash).

It bowled us over: so stylish, so arty, so full of strangely sexy ladies, so bloody. To simply quote Pete Tombs at Fangoria: "[His] early, low budget, quickly shot works have the unmistakeable stamp of an 'auteur' [...]. Like all his best work, they share a slim scenario, a small cast, an isolated rural location, and the atmospheric woods and misty 'golden hour' landscapes that nurture his dream spaces. There's something old fashioned about many of Larraz's films (it's no surprise to discover that one of his favourite US movies was the 1946 Robert Siodmak chiller The Spiral Staircase [trailer]) and yet there is something almost indefinably modern about them too. It's in the way they are framed, the way the shots are cut, the camera angles: that's where his artist's eye comes in and it's what makes the best of his films special and timeless."
In a later conversation with friends, the term "Eurotrah" popped up, and from then on we knew one of our favorite "genres", if one can even call Eurotrash a genre...
In any event, Vampyres was a film from José Ramón Larraz, and though we have never seen another film by the good man, we hold him dear in our heart for the experience he gave us and the horizons he opened... And now he has died. 

We take our hat off to him — may he Rest In Peace.

A career review shall follow at a later date.

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5 Minutes to Live (USA, 1961)

September 11, 2013, 10:09 am

≫ Next: Short Film: Boys Beware (USA, 1961)

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(Spoilers.) If we are to believe the article found in the Saturday, 21 January 1961 issue of the Toledo Ohio Blade, the movie seems to be the end result of a wife's need for occupational therapy: Bel-Air housewife Mrs. Ludlow Flower Jr., aka Cay Forester, a former actress found mostly in B-films (such as Queen of the Amazons [1947 / full movie], Strange Impersonation [1946 / full movie], Blonde Savage [1947] and the classic noir D.O.A. [1950 / trailer / full movie]), asked for and received the permission of her husband, real estate executive Ludlow Flower Jr, to write a movie; by dinnertime that day she had the plot, and six months later 5 Minutes to Live was finished and ready to be made.* And once the film actually went into production — produced by hubby Ludlow Flower Jr — Mrs. Ludlow Flower Jr. even ended up taking over the main female role, thus returning to drive-in screens after a ten-year absence as the third headlining star behind the lead credit of "Johnny Cash as Johnny Cabot."

 

Full Movie — Cay Forester in Blonde Savage (1947):

Personally, we find it a bit odd that 5 Minutes to Live is so thoroughly unknown; we know tons of Cash fans, and not one of them had ever heard of the film when we asked them about it — a film that if nothing else is of note for being Johnny Cash's feature-film debut and first starring role. Hell, Cash doesn't even mention it in the only autobiography of his we have on our bookshelf — Man in Black (Warner Books, 1975) — but then he was in the midst of his pill-popping speedfreak days when he made the movie, so perhaps he couldn't really remember it all that well in his cleaner years. Or perhaps it was simply an unpleasant memory for him; according to Michael Streissguth in his book Johnny Cash: The Biography, Cash wasn't paid cash up front but was forced to take a percentage deal... seeing that the film wasn't exactly the biggest hit, it probably hardly brought in the money. Likewise, it really didn't help him break into Hollywood, either: despite Cash's own desire to break into the movies, it was another ten years before he had another feature film role, alongside Kirk Douglas, in the western A Gunfight (1971).

 

Whatever the reason the movie has been relegated to obscurity, however, it is not that the movie is absolutely terrible: hardly a masterpiece in many ways, it nevertheless moves quickly enough, even has one or two shocks, and age has given it a nice patina. Hardly imperative viewing, but good enough for a rainy afternoon — and face it, it's got Johnny Cash in it! (Watch it now before the remake comes out: Jan de Bont, who hasn't made a decent film since Speed [1994 / trailer], is set to remake it as a John Cusack vehicle within the near future.)

The plot is relatively simple: Johnny Cabot (Cash), a guitar-playing psycho hiding out in a sleazy motel with his curvaceous, rent-paying babe Doris (Midge Ware of Untamed Women [1952 / trailer: see below]), is hired by Fred Dorella (character actor Vic Tayback of Mansion of the Doomed [1976 / trailer] and Blood and Lace [1971 / trailer]) to take a bank manager's wife hostage so as to force the manager to empty the bank's safe. A "fool-proof" plan, as Fred calls it, but as we all know, "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley." (Robert Burns, 1785.)

Trailer to Untamed Women, with Midge Ware:

That 5 Minutes to Live is low budget is pretty obvious in both the almost threadbare production values and the less-than-fully-developed script, but director Bill Karn (Ma Barker's Killer Brood [1960 / trailer / full movie]) does a good job with what he has. He handles the action scenes rather well and takes everything as far as he probably could at the time, thus the visuals often borderline on the sleazy and the situations the tawdry. 

Despite all that and an occasional shock and/or surprise as well as an overall solid framing and visual composition, however, he can't really do all that much about giving 5 Minutes to Live any real suspense because most of the movie is told as a flashback by an arrested and overly loquacious Fred, so long before Mrs. Wilson (Cay Forester) is even taken hostage we already know that the robbery is doomed to fail. As a result, the supposedly suspense-building twist, that Mr. Wilson (Donald Woods of 13 Ghosts [1960 / trailer], The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [1953 / trailer] and Dimension 5 [1966 / trailer]) is having affair and planning to leave his wife anyways, is hardly the narrative sucker-punch that it is supposed to be. One can only wonder why they ever chose the framing device for this movie, for it adds nothing but running time (Ah-Hah!) and the movie would have been a lot more nerve-wracking and tense without it. And thus far better, of course.

 

Johnny Cash sings 5 Minutes to Live:

Cash's casting is an obvious gimmick playing upon the singer's bad boy image, but he does well with his one-note character: beady-eyed, stone-cold, unemotional and sadistic, it is just as easy to believe that he wouldn't blink an eye when shooting the woman he shares his bed with as it is that he would terrorize his hostage just to ease his boredom and make the time pass more quickly. What is much harder to believe, however, is that he would ever have a soft spot for kids; this convenient point plays a key role in the climactic events but never comes across as anything other than superficial and contrived. Still, for most of the movie, Cash exudes a psychotic placidness that literally seethes with simmering violence and emotional disregard, and this helps carry the movie far more so than the sometimes almost contrived acting style of the lead female, Cay Forester... if you get down to it, she is actually out-acted by the 8-year-old playing her son, no one less than Ron "Opie/Richie" Howard. Indeed, many of the secondary and tertiary characters — for example, both country singer Merle Travis as the spineless lackey Max and Pamela Mason (of The Navy vs. the Night Monsters [1966 / trailer] and Wild in the Streets [1968 / trailer]) as Mr. Wilson's surprisingly frumpy mistress Ellen Harcourt — make a better thespian impression than the stiltedness of Cay Forester as Mrs. Wilson.

 

The true flaw of 5 Minutes to Live is the script, which displays a little bit too much no-budget sloppiness — starting, of course, with the self-castrating framing sequence. At one point close to the end, for example, a cop gets shot dead and not even his partner seems to care enough to even take note that he's left the world of the living. Likewise, Cabot's decision to eliminate his girl, despite the fact that she's followed him on the run and is paying his way, purely due to the disparaging accusations of a man he just met (Fred, the head of the robbery plan) that she's the one who fingered him in New Jersey, is a little less than understandable. It does, however, do well to underscore just how ruthless Cabot is — which in turn makes it thrice as hard to believe that he would have such moral compunctions when it comes to kids.

 

As for the extended period of time that Cabot and Mrs Wilson spend together at her home, the sadistic head games he plays with her are disturbing, but nevertheless it eventually gets hard to believe that he would sexualize everything so much and then never actually rape her.** Likewise — though this is surely simply a by-product of the time, when housewives were housewives and unlike today were not expected to ever take the bull by the horns — Mrs. Wilson not only lets one-too-many chances of escape flit by unnoticed, but she is also unbelievably maladroit with a fire poker. (One can only assume that in all cases she was worried she might break a nail.) At least the final revelation made by Mr. Wilson at the end of the movie is a pleasant twist, turning as it does the movie's implausibly timely dues ex machina into a clever solution to buy time.

In the end, however, despite the narrative flaws and uneven acting, 5 Minutes to Live remains an interesting film (in no small part due to Johnny Cash) that not only chugs along at a decent pace but also keeps the viewer riveted. The movie is far from a masterpiece, but hardly a waste of time — particularly if you're a fan of Johnny Cash.

 

As An Extra — Johnny Cash Sings I Walk the Line in German:

* A fine public interest story, but it fails to take into consideration that the credit sequence states that the movie is based on a story by Palmer Thompson and adapted by Robert L. Joseph.
** According to the American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures, when the movie was re-released as Door-to-Door Maniac in 1966 by Robert L. Lippert (a producer of The Last Man on Earth [1964], among others), new footage — including a rape sequence — was added. The public domain version found everywhere — and reviewed here — has all the sadistic foreplay but not the actual event... unless, of course, it was conveyed so "decently" that we missed it. But if the latter is true, then one can only say that Mrs. Wilson sure never shows any emotional scars from the event and smiles away into the sunset at the end of the movie...

 
 

The Full Movie — 5 Minutes to Live:

Short Film: Boys Beware (USA, 1961)

September 26, 2013, 9:32 am

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"What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick; a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious; a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual: a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex."

This month's Short Film of the Month has been chosen less because we find it good — which we don't — but because we find it upsetting and jaw-droppingly idiotic. And as it "shocked and awed" us so much, we thought we would share it. Rest assured, this is a as much of a hate film as, say, Fritz Hippler's infamous anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew / Der Ewige Jude (1940 / full film), but whereas Hippler's "documentary" focuses on the filth that is the Jew, who we all know want to do nothing other than murder and eat Christian children and then screw their mommies so as the degenerate the purity of the race (when they aren't busy bringing financial ruin to the Western world), this "educational" film here focuses on the sick pervert that is the homosexual, who of course is only interesting popping your son's cherry and converting him into one of his own.

"One never knows when a homosexual is about. He may appear normal and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill."

 

Perhaps somewhere in the film there is a glimmer of a valid message that one should be wary of strangers, but this scrap of a legitimately educational message is lost in the vitriol of the hate-mongering viewpoint of the filmmaker, Sid Davis (1 April 1916 — 16 October 2006), pictured above, who makes a rare appearance in one of his own films here in Boys Beware as the man at the beachside public restroom who is hot for the joystick of "Bobby".
Davis, called by one online source "the Roger Corman of educational films", supposedly began his filmmaking career as a child stand-in (and even appeared in the Our Gang series) and continued doing stand-in work into the fifties, particularly for his personal friend John Wayne, for whom he was a regular stand-in for almost a decade (1941-1952). Wayne even supposedly lent Davis the money to make his first educational scare film, The Dangerous Stranger (1949 / full film). The short film was a big success, and over a period of some 27 years Davis went on to make estimated 150-200 "educational" films of varying veracity and pedagogic usefulness but that nevertheless enjoyed great popularity amongst the teachers of the American Way. These films, and real estate, made him a millionaire.

"The decision is always yours, and your whole future may depend on making the right one. So no matter where you meet a stranger, be careful if they are too friendly."

Davis's films, which were seldom written with the involvement of any specialists on the topic at hand, were morality plays that played on the fears of his audience, the American youth, warning them against any form of misbehavior, for that would surely lead to death. To quote the NY Times, his "movies are squarely in the tradition of cautionary literature for children, whose best-known example is probably Struwwelpeter, the German tale of the dreadful fate of a dreadful child, which has been traumatizing young miscreants since the mid-19th-century. Mr. Davis's films, most live-action, some animated, are 16-millimeter equivalents. They are small mirrors of postwar anxiety in an age when juvenile delinquency [and drugs and sex and any form of breaking the norms or being an individual or different] was perceived as a looming threat."

"Public restrooms can often be a hangout for the homosexual."

Shot in that hotbed of homosexual activity, Inglewood, California, USA, Boys Beware has been referred to by some as the Reefer Madness (1937 / full film) of homosexuality films, and indeed its technical finesse and excessive hammering of its misinformation is comparable to that classic and entertaining anti-pot film, but Boys Beware is far more hateful in its unabating ignorance and self-righteousness than that earlier Poverty Row exploitation-cum-morality play. And as such, it is also a bit harder to laugh at — for while it would be nice to think that bigotry and hatred and simple lack of knowledge that it so loudly espouses is a thing of the past, we all know it is not.
For a well-written and thoughtful commentary on Boys Beware— in other words, exactly that which you do find here — we recommend Movie Magg's discussion of the short film found here.

"The companionship, the praise, the friendly attitude dispelled any misgivings Mike might have had about going with a stranger. He probably never realized until too late that he was riding in the shadow of death, but sometime that evening, Mike Merritt exchanged his life for a newspaper headline."

Personally, we would love to do a modern version of Boys Beware, but change the white homosexuals out recruiting chicken into blackface Negroes who, in turn, are in pursuit of the virtue of the white-skinned virginal...
Oh, wait a minute! D.W. Griffith sort of already did that in Birth of the Nation (1915 / full movie), didn't he?
Davis, like Roger Corman ever a man to cut corners where he could, saved the time and expenditure of a new idea or script or music by remaking Boys Beware in 1973 as Boys Aware, which we have embedded below as an extra.

Boys Aware (USA, 1973)

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

October 1, 2013, 4:07 am

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Ray Harryhausen: 29 June 1920 — 7 May2013

Go here for R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part I

Go here for R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part II



The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

(1958, dir. Nathan Juran)

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad includes one of our favorite Harryhausen scenes: the dancing cobra woman who almost strangles herself to death. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is Nathan Juran's second film with Harryhausen, and Harryhausen's first full-length feature in full color — as well as the first of an eventual three Sinbad films he would end up making for Columbia. Fifty years later in 2008, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and inducted into the United States National Film Registry. Despite its title, however, the film does not narrate Sinbad's 7th (and final) voyage as told in the Persian tales, which deals with bird people, devils and Allah.

 

The plot of Harryhausen's film, as explained at the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review: "Sinbad the sailor (the gay Kerwin Mathews [8 Jan 1926 – 5 July 2007] of The Pirates of Blood River [1962 / Trailer from Hell], Panic in Bangkok [1964 / French trailer], Un killer per sua maestà [1968 / groovy score], Barquero [1970 / trailer] and Nightmare in Blood [1977 / trailer]) and his crew come upon the island of Colossa, where they meet the sorcerer Sokurah (Torin Thatcher of Affair in Trinidad [1952 / trailer]). They are attacked by a giant cyclops. Sokurah saves them from the cyclops but in doing so loses his magic lamp. Back in Baghdad, Sinbad plans to marry his beloved, the Princess Parisa (perky Kathryn Grant, who left the film biz after marrying Bing Crosby). When the Caliph (Alec Mango of The Strange World of Planet X (1958 / trailer), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967 / trailer) and Ken Russell's Gothic [1986]) refuses Sokurah's entreaties to mount an expedition to return to Colossa to get his lamp, Sokurah secretly casts a spell that reduces Parisa to a few inches tall. When asked for his help, Sokurah says he needs roc egg shell to reverse the spell and so Sinbad is forced to mount a return expedition to Colossa. However, once the expedition is underway, Sinbad faces the perils of a mutinous crew, Sokurah's treachery, and, once on the island, the cylops, the roc and a dragon."

 

If the cyclops looks slightly familiar, it's because he's half-Ymir. The scene of Sinbad swordfighting a skeleton was so popular, Harryhausen ended up expanding it for his later film Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Composer Bernard Herrmann supplied the excellent score to the film, the first of four Harryhausen films in total that he would work on.

Alt Film points out the fact that "There is no logic to much of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, but it is a hoot — without an ounce of pretension in it. Who cares if the magician, who can animate skeletons, would seem to have no real use for a genie? Who cares if the genie could have wiped out the monsters and magician easily, if commanded, since he so easily moves the prolific cyclops' treasure? Who cares if the Princess' father is ready to declare war on the Caliph of Baghdad for shrinking his daughter, when clearly the magician is to blame? And who cares if the acting is all 100% cheeseball?"

For all the faults in the script and acting, we here at A Wasted Life agree with TV Guide when they say that "Stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen's first color film is also one of the greatest achievements in fantasy filmmaking [...]."The 7th Voyage of Sinbad may be an obvious kiddy film, but for that it is also the first of Harryhausen's truly magically bewitching films — see it as a child, and it will always remain one of your favorite films.

  

Trailer:

The Three Worlds of Gulliver
(1960, writ & dir. Jack Sher)

Charles H. Schneer and Harryhausen's next project was this loose adaptation of Jonathan Swift's book and, like most adaptations, the movie is aimed primarily to kids, the satire set aside for humor, and only half the story is told. And though the title infers three lands and adventures, there are really only two — the land of Lilliput and the land of Brobdingnag — while the third world is that of simple, ol' England. (The movie itself was filmed in Spain.) Director Sher wrote the script with screenplay author Arthur A. Ross, whose notable credits includes the guilty pleasure The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock (1959 / trailer) and such favorites as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954 / trailer) and its forgotten second sequel The Creature Walks Among Us (1956 / trailer).

 

The plot of The Three Worlds of Gulliver, as explained at Video Vacuum: "Kerwin Matthews (of Maniac [1963 / trailer], OSS 117 se déchaîne [1963 / French trailer] and Octaman [1971 / full movie]) stars as Gulliver, a struggling doctor who leaves his materialistic fiancée (June Thorburn, who died in a plane crash on 4 Nov 1967) behind to go on a seafaring voyage in search of wealth. In the land of Lilliput, he's tied up on the beach by a race of tiny people before being hailed as their savior. Eventually he's used as a pawn for war and has to make tracks when the idiot king (Basil Sydney of The Hands of Orlac [1960 / trailer]) accuses him of treason. Gulliver then heads off to the island of Brobdingnag which is populated by nothing but giants where he is reunited with his fiancée, who lives in the king's dollhouse. Gulliver is the pride of the king's court until he is branded as a witch by the king's indignant sorcerer (Charles Lloyd Pack of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell [1973 / trailer], The Man Who Haunted Himself [1970 / trailer], The Reptile [1966 / trailer] and Curse of the Demon [1957 / trailer]) and has to battle an enormous squirrel (!) and a giant crocodile in order to escape."

 

Glumdalclitch, the Brobdingnag peasant girl who first finds Gulliver and then helps the tiny couple escape, is played by Sherry Alberoni of the abysmal Sisters of Death (1972/77 / full film) and Cyborg 2087 (1966 / trailer). The Three Worlds of Gulliver features very little of Harryhausen's trademark stop-motion effects (only two scenes, one of which really isn't all that top notch), but for that there is a lot of for-its-time excellent effects when it comes to the scaled cinematography and interplay of differently sized characters. Too bad about the musical interludes, however...

 Trailer:




Mysterious Island
(1961, dir. Cy Endfield)

Based loosely on Jules Verne's novel Mysterious Island, Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen's next film was shot in Spain and England, and unlike The Three Worlds of Gulliver, features a fair share of Harryhausen's trademark stop-motion effects. Among those who worked on the script were Crane Wilbur, whose career began as the lead male in The Perils of Pauline (1914 / Chapter 1); he went on to write the screenplays to, among others, Crime Wave (1954 / trailer), He Walked by Night (1948 / full film), The Mad Magician (1954 / trailer / full film) and House of Wax (1953 / trailer), as well as to direct the scandal film Tomorrow's Children (1934 / full film) and the Vincent Price fave, The Bat (1959 / trailer / full film).

A Wasted Life already took a look at Mysterious Island in our career review of Herbert Lom, where we wrote: "Cy Endfield was a US director who made his directorial debut on Poverty Row at Monogram with Gentleman Joe Palooka (1946), but his two socially critical film noirs The Sound of Fury (1950) and The Underworld Story (1950) espoused some sentiments that drew the attention of the HUAC, which even denounced the former of the two films as Un-American. Named as a 'sympathizer,' Endfield decided to resettle in the Old World, where he continued his career and, among others, directed this movie inspired by the Jules Verne book of the same name. The third known film version of the book, Endfield's version features the always enjoyable special effects and stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen, while Herbert Lom is on hand as Captain Nemo. The World of Mr Satanism [a website now defunct] offers the following synopsis: 'Some Civil War cats swipe a balloon, but they end up blowing clear across the U.S. and landing on — that's right — a mysterious island. They get attacked by a giant crab, giant bees, and an... emu... or something. What's really weird though is that everything they need — a compass, tools, guns, a telescope, even pussy — just keeps washing up on shore. Finally it turns out it's all the work of Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom), the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954 / trailer) guy! Well except for the pussy, that was just dumb luck. In the end Captain Nemo outfits everybody with scuba gear (Made out of giant seashells. Duh.), laser rifles, and high-speed internet access so they can raise a sunken pirate ship and get the fuck outta Dodge before — what else — the volcano erupts. This movie's kind of ridiculous if you stop and think about it, but between all the kick-ass monsters and the main chick's amazing legs chances are you probably won't.'"

 

The "main chick" is played by Beth Rogan (pictured below), who pretty much disappeared after Mysterious Island, while the MILF is played by Joan Greenwood, also found in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949 / trailer), Tom Jones (1963 / trailer), The Uncanny (1977 / trailer) and Paul Morrissey's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978 / trailer).

Trailer:

Jason and the Argonauts
(1963, dir. Don Chaffey)

"Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane... I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made!"
Tom Hanks, 1992

The plot, as according to the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review: "King Pelias (Douglas Wilmer of The Vengeance of Fu Manchu [1967 / German trailer] and The Brides of Fu Manchu [1966]) invades Thessaly, putting King Arista (Jack Gwillim of The Monster Squad [1987 / trailer] and The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb [1964 / trailer]) and his two daughters to the sword. Arista's son Jason (Todd Armstrong) survives and sets out to regain his father's throne. Because one of Arista's daughters prayed to Hera (Honor Blackman of Cockneys vs Zombies [2012 / trailer], The Cat and the Canary [1978] and Fright [1971 / trailer]) before she was killed, Zeus (Niall MacGinnis of Torture Garden [1967 / trailer] and Island of Terror [1966 / trailer]) decrees that Hera may come to the aid of Jason — but only five times. Jason decides to go forth on a quest for the Golden Fleece, which has the power to bring peace and rid the land of sickness. With Hera's help, Jason builds the ship The Argo, holds a games to select a crew and then sets forth on a journey to the island of Colchis. It becomes a journey through which Jason and his crew encounter many amazing creatures."

 

Is there anyone in the world who saw this movie as a child who does not hold it in high esteem? Those who didn't see it as a kid often tend to find the film less impressive, but for us here at A Wasted Life, Jason and the Argonauts is pure movie magic — and an insanely influential film as well.

It is also the first of Harryhausen's films that was not part of a double film; in the US, Columbia managed to release it as an A-feature in better theatres. Filmed in Italy and England, the handsome but second-rate Todd Armstrong who played the tile hero ended up being dubbed by British actor Tim Turner (of The Haunted Strangler [1958 / trailer] and The Mummy's Shroud [1967 / trailer]), while Nancy Kovak (of Diary of a Madman [1963 / trailer], seen in a bikini above), who played the hubba-hubba Medea, was dubbed by Eva Haddon. (The young and sexy Medea of this movie, needless to say, is still a far cry away from the vengeful and bitter Medea of later years who, dumped by her husband Jason in favor of Glauce, the young and sexy daughter of the King of Corinth, kills not only Glauce but her own two sons fathered by Jason, Mermeros and Pheres.... but then, Harryhausen's whole take on the story of the Argonauts is nothing if not a rather free adaptation of the myth.)

As popular and as fondly regarded as the movie is nowadays, the initial critical reaction was not all that positive, as can be seen by what the NY Times had to say: "The Argo, carrying Jason and the Argonauts, splashed into Loew's State yesterday in the wake of H.M.S. Bounty, and for our money, it sank. This absurd, unwieldy adventure — if that's the word — is no worse, but certainly no better, than most of its kind. The ingredients are the usual color, milling hordes of warriors, royal hanky-panky laced with historical or mythological footnotes, monsters, magic and carefully exposed limbs and torsos. [...] The fleece-minded hero, played by Todd Armstrong, and the heroine, Nancy Kovack, stay pretty well draped throughout. Mr. Armstrong in fact, seems spindly compared to some 'beefcake' predecessors. To the drone of some bleak dialogue, the scenes shift from one hairbreadth crisis to another. Most of them involve miniature settings and magnified props. Some scenes, such as the one where the tiny Argo is menaced by a towering giant, are effective. [...] In one comic interlude Jason and his pals battle some rickety sword-swinging skeletons. [...]"
Personally, we think that the critic at the NY Times was having hemorrhoidal problems the day he saw the film.

 Trailer:

 

First Men in the Moon
(1964, dir. Nathan Juran)

 
"My concern is with the men of violence, the men who kill. Soon others will be coming from Earth. Our galleries will be strewn with dead."
The Grand Lunar 

Harryhausen's only film in widescreen. Another film, so typical in its attitude, in which foreign creatures that desire to preserve their life are the bad guys simply because the threat they face is human. It seems it is OK for us to kill that which threatens, but not for others to do so, especially if we are the ones who are the threat.

Also typical of the time, though the first group to go from earth to (and into) the moon consists of two men and a woman, the mandatory female interest isn't worth acknowledging in the title. Nathan Juran, of 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), returns to direct his third and last Harryhausen film, this time based on one of H.G. Wells' lesser-known science fiction novels, which is actually also the first of his novels to ever have been directly adapted for film: The First Men in the Moon, made way back in 1919 by the long forgotten Bruce Gordon and the unknown J.L.V. Leigh. That ancient B&W silent is now considered lost, and is even listed as one of the British Film Institute's 75 Most Wanted lost films.

 

To use the plot synopsis to the Harryhausen film written by Lee Horton (Leeh@tcp.co.uk) at imdb: "The world is delighted when a spacecraft containing a crew made up of the world's astronauts lands on the moon, they think for the first time. But the delight turns to shock when the astronauts discover an old British flag and a document declaring that the moon is taken for Queen Victoria proving that the astronauts were not the first men on the moon. On Earth, an investigation team finds the last of the Victorian crew — a now aged Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd of Island of Terror [1966 / trailer]) and he tells them the story of how he and his girlfriend, Katherine Callender (Martha Hyer of Picture Mommy Dead [1966 / German trailer] and Abbott and Costello Go to Mars [1953 / trailer]), meet up with an inventor, Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries of Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? [1972 / trailer] and The Revenge of Frankenstein [1958 / trailer]), in 1899. Cavor has invented Cavorite, a paste that will allow anything to deflect gravity and he created a sphere that will actually take them to the moon. Taking Arnold and accidentally taking Katherine they fly to the moon where, to their total amazement, they discover a bee-like insect population who take an unhealthy interest in their Earthly visitors..."

 

While some people tend to find the film less than exceptional — Ozus's World Movie Reviews: "A flat schoolboy sci-fi adventure film [...that...] relies on the Ray Harryhausen special effects to overcome the absurd plot and the only serviceable acting by the bland thesps. It's directed at a slow clip and without any fire [...]"— most tend to find it (or at least its second half) enjoyable. To quote Cult Reviews: "I was already preparing for a vastly entertaining and completely relaxing sci-fi adventure. What I didn't expect or even secretly hoped for, actually, was that First Men in the Moon would be this much shameless fun! Literally from start to finish, this over-enthusiast British adaptation of Wells' novel is a fast-paced, comical, exhilarating and unpretentious camp fest. Every aspect about this film simply provokes a big fat smile on your face, whether it's Lionel Jeffries' over-the-top nutty scientist performance, Harryhausen's stupendous moon caterpillar creation or just the complete negligence of all the most basic laws of science."

 

Trailer:

One Million Years B.C.
(1966, dir. Don Chaffey)

 

Trailer

The director of Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, Don Chaffey, returns for his second and last Harryhausen project, the classic we all love featuring the beautiful Raquel Welch, One Million Years B.C., which also just happens to be Harryhausen's only film ever for Hammer. It was a huge hit and Hammer, ever one to milk a cow dry, eventually went on to do three more cave girl films, Prehistoric Women (1968 / trailer) with Martine Beswick, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970 / trailer) with Victoria Vetri, and Creatures the World Forgot (1971 / trailer) with Julie Ege; the last film was likewise directed by Chaffey.

 

One Million Years B.C. itself is a remake of a 1940 American film of the same name (aka The Cave Dwellers [5 minutes]) starring Victor Mature, Carole Landis (who O.D.ed on purpose in 1948) and Lon Chaney, Jr (of The House of Frankenstein [1944] and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein [1970]). Both versions totally cast aside scientific fact and not only have the cave babes wear make-up and have shaved pits and legs, but also put dinos and cave babes on the planet at the same time; the later version, without doubt, has both a better cast and better effects and bathing suits.

For the US cinema release, a full nine minutes were cut so as not to offend the prudish masses, including the mandatory cave girl dance, here performed by the exotic Martine Beswick (of Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde [1971]). Interesting pieces of trivia: Raquel Welch was not the first choice to play "Loana the Fair One"; Hammer went for Ursula Andress first, but she turned it down. As for Raquel, her grunts in the film are dubbed by someone else, namely voice actress Nikki Van der Zyl.

 

A Full Tank of Gas explains the film's appeal: "One Million Years B.C. is one of those movies that holds a place in the hearts of men of a certain age. We came to it as small boys, enthralled by Ray Harryhausen's dinosaurs, but on repeated viewings [...] we came to appreciate more the luscious Raquel Welch (of Hannie Caulder [1971 / trailer]) running around in the manufactured shadows of those make-believe monsters, her ample bosom heaving within the confines of her fur bikini. It's an outfit that's achieved almost iconic status, and there were few women who could fill it out in quite the way that Ms. Welch could…"

 

The plot, as explained by TCM: "In prehistoric times, Tumak (John Richardson of Eyeball [1975 / trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbB0u8Fc0Sk], Torso [1973 / trailer], Frankenstein 80 [1972 / German trailer] and Black Sunday [1960 / trailer]) of the Rock People violently quarrels with his father (Robert Brown of Demons of the Mind [1972 / trailer] and The Masque of the Red Death [1964]) and is banished from his tribe. After escaping from an attack by a giant lizard and a brontosaurus, he reaches an ocean and collapses on the beach. He is found by the Shell People, a tribe considerably more advanced than his own. They nurse him back to health, and when he kills an allosaurus, they treat him as a member of their tribe. But he fights with the leader and is once more banished. Loana (Welch), a young woman who has fallen in love with him, decides to accompany him into the desert. After witnessing a fight between a triceratops and a ceratosaurus, they make their way to the caves of the Rock People. While Loana is teaching Tumak to swim, she is carried off in the claws of a pterodactyl and then dropped into the sea when the huge bird encounters another of its kind. She makes her way back to the Shell People and persuades some of them to return with her to Tumak's tribe. But they are attacked by the Rock People, and the fighting ends only when a giant volcano suddenly erupts. As the earth cracks and molten lava pours over the rocks, many members of both tribes are killed. Loana and Tumak join the other survivors in beginning a new life as the shadow of a huge mushroom cloud darkens the horizon."
For the first and only time, Harryhausen supplemented his stop-motion dinosaurs with an occasional real creature (iguanas and a spider).

 As an extra: Raquel Welch — Space Girl Dance:

The Valley of Gwangi
(1969, dir. Jim O'Connolly)

Trailer:

Harryhausen's last dinosaur film, and proved to be rather unsuccessful — perhaps, in part, because it was released as part of a double bill with a biker film and thus never found its true audience: The Valley of Gwangi is very much a kiddy film.

Of its three main stars, James Franciscus, Richard Carlson and Gila Golan, the movie was the feature-film swansong for Golan and the penultimate for Carlson (his final film, the ridiculous Elvis Presley vehicle A Change of Habit [1969 / trailer], was released in the USA two months after this one). Director Jim O'Connolly was originally a producer of low budget English crime programmers, but by 1963, with The Hi-Jackers, he took up direction as well; his best known directorial efforts are probably this Harryhausen film here; Berserk (1967 / trailer), with Michael Gough; Horror on Snape Island (1972 / trailer), with Jill Haworth; and his last, Mistress Pamela (1974).
Nominally a "weird western" flick, we here at A Wasted Life were not bowled over by The Valley of Gwangi when we finally saw it as an adult, as you can tell by our review here.

The plot, according to TV Guide, which is the opinion that this "movie contains some of the most breathtaking stop-motion sequences ever put on film": "[...] Set in a small Mexican town in the year 1912, the story places circus promoter Franciscus in a strange valley where time has stopped and prehistoric creatures still live — creatures that he and his men stumble across while trying to capture a tiny horse (believed extinct 50 million years ago), which has turned up in the village. What the little animal leads them to is a giant, ferocious allosaur which the cowboys try to lasso (this scene stands among Harryhausen's finest moments). After several run-ins with the beast (and other prehistoric creatures, including a pteranodon and a styracosaur), Franciscus and his men eventually subdue the dinosaur and take it back to the circus to display. Of course, the monster escapes [...] and wreaks havoc on the Mexican town before meeting its doom in a burning cathedral. [...] Well worth a look."

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
(1974, dir. Gordon Hessler)

 

Trailer:

"You pace the deck like a caged beast, for one who enjoys the hashish you should be more at peace."
Sinbad (John Phillip Law)

After 15 years and the flop that is The Valley of Gwangi, Harryhausen returned with a reduced budget (not that one sees it) to Sinbad for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which we here at A Wasted Life simply think is one fucking fabulous film — and not just because we still sometimes fantasize of a three way with John Phillip Law and Carolina Munro in their prime. No, their hotness alone is not the reason we love the movie: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is simply an excellently made kiddy film that truly transcends all ages and that is a total hoot to watch and that also just happens to feature some of the best Harryhausen effects made. We're particularly partial to the battle with the boat figurehead and the six-armed statue of Kali, the latter of which Violet Books says "is one of the best things Harryhausen ever created."

 

Not that everyone agrees, however; the Video Vacuum, for example, is of the opinion that "All in all, the best special effect in the film was Munro and her heavenly bosom." And her bosom is indeed an ever-present aspect of the film... Of the rest of the cast, Tom Baker (of The Mutations [1974]) excels as Koura, the main villain of the film, and those with good eyes might recognize an uncredited Robert Shaw as the Oracle of All Knowledge.

Director Gordon Hessler, who eventually went on to do the hilariously culty TV movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978 / credits), might have seemed an odd choice to direct a kiddy film as most of his prior films had primarily been horror — among others, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971 / trailer), with Herbert Lom; Cry of the Banshee (1970 / trailer); Scream and Scream Again (1970 / trailer) and The Oblong Box (1969 / trailer) — but as Ferdy on Film says, "[...] his subtly oneiric take on Harryhausen's visions is loving and rich."

 

Miklós Rózsa — Prelude (The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad):

The plot, as explained by Foster on Film: "Sinbad (John Phillip Law of Night Train to Terror [1985]) finds himself in possession of a golden tablet, which combined with one held by the Vizier of Marabia (Douglas Wilmer of The Vampire Lovers [1970 / trailer]), forms two thirds of a map to great riches and magical powers. The two set out to claim these treasures, along with a beautiful, tattooed slave girl, Margiana (Caroline Munro of Captain Kronos — Vampire Hunter (1974 / trailer) Maniac [1980 / trailer] and Starcrash [1978 / trailer]), and Sinbad’s loyal crew. Complicating the mission are monsters, savages, and the evil sorcerer Koura (Tom Baker), who wants the items for himself."

In his review of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Foster also points out the following: "So many filmmakers fail to understand that the villain is more important than the hero. A good villain makes a film, and Koura can join the ranks of Dracula (Lugosi's), Sir Guy of Gisbourne, Darth Vader, Hans Gruber, Hannibal Lector, and Agent Smith at the top of their profession."

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger 
(1977, dir. Sam Wanamaker [14 June 1919 — 18 Dec 1993])


"I've never seen a black man turn white before."
Hassan (Nadim Sawalha)

The success of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad made Columbia Pictures salivate, so even while the movie was still in the theatres work began on the next Sinbad film, which had the working title of Sinbad at the World's End. Originally, it was even planned that John Phillip Law should return as Sinbad, but the Duke's son Patrick Wayne (Beyond Atlantis [1973 / trailer] and The People That Time Forgot [1977 / trailer]) wound up playing Sinbad instead. The babe factor was supplied by the only slightly less delectable Jane Seymour (of Live and Let Die [1973 / trailer]). As director, Sam Wanamaker was pulled in, a man that we here at A Wasted Life are more familiar with as an actor in such films as Death on the Nile (1978 / trailer) and Voyage of the Damned (1976 / trailer); as a film director, he did primarily TV and an occasional film such as Catlow (1971) and The Executioner (1970). A US American by birth, he made the "mistake" of briefly joining the Communist Party in the 40s and thus got blacklisted; in England filming Mr. Denning Drives North (1952) when he got the news, he decided to stay there and went on to have a long and productive and successful career as a director and producer and actor (all on stage and screen).

 

The last of Harryhausen's three Sinbad films, we here at A Wasted Life must admit it is the only one we haven't yet seen. In general, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad seems to be the runt of the litter and the least popular. While The Midnight Monster Show may say that Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger"is way more than an effects curiosity; it's 113 minutes of monster-filled, swashbuckling awesomeness [... and] the monster roll call is just as great: a giant evil clockwork minotaur, a chess-playing baboon, a horned giant, a giant wasp, ghouls, a gryphon and a giant saber-toothed cat — all rendered lovingly in stop motion, which while not totally realistic, does have more character and heft than CGI", most people who have seen the movie tend to echo what the blogspot For It's A Man's Number says: "There is just something lacking from almost every aspect of this movie. The direction from Sam Wanamaker is pretty flat and lifeless, despite the fantastical premise and the bright colors on display, while the script from Beverley Cross limps from one weak set-piece to the next, giving the distinct impression that all of the better ideas had already been used up in the previous two movies."

 

The plot, as given by TCM: "Sinbad (Wayne), daring sailor and Prince of Baghdad, sets sail towards Charnak seeking permission from Prince Kassim (Damien Thomas of Grave Tales [2011 / trailer] and Twins of Evil [1971 / trailer]) to wed his sister, Farah (Seymour). But Sinbad discovers that Kassim has been placed under a spell by their fiendish stepmother, Zenobia (Margaret Whiting). To break the wicked spell, Sinbad must set forth on a journey unlike any ever travelled."

 

Trailer:

Clash of the Titans
(1981, dir. Desmond Davis)

Trailer:

Harryhausen's most expensive film ever would also end up being his last, despite it being a huge financial success (it was the 11th highest grossing film of the year). At one point a possible sequel entitled Force of the Trojans was bandied around — a title, in all truth, that sounds like a gay safe-sex movie — but like the few other feature-length film projects Harryhausen infrequently proposed after this one, it went nowhere.

The plot of the movie is an amalgam of several ancient Greek and Roman mythologies tossed together like a mixed salad, but despite the wooden presence of a young Harry Hamlin the film is a rather enjoyable kiddy film, though it does often slide a bit close to being a guilty pleasure. Like all Harryhausen films, the true stars of the movie are his stop-motion creatures, but nevertheless Clash of the Titans possesses the largest group of recognizable "star" names ever brought together for a single Harryhausen film. This is due, it is often said, to the helping hand of the screenwriter Beverley Cross, who was both married to Maggie Smith and able to convince some of the big names to take part — including the sickly Lawrence Olivier, who at the time was hard at work at fattening the trust funds of his descendents and willing to take any half-way decent project that came his way.

Some of the big names really didn't do all that much, however; the luscious Ursula Andress (of The Mountain of the Cannibal God [1978 / trailer] and The 10th Victim [1965 / trailer]), for example, has a total of two lines in the movie. Of the other, much-older respected thespians to parlay their refined accents to small parts in the movie, Clash of the Titans proved to be the final feature-film performances of three character actors: Donald Houston (of A Study in Terror [1965 / trailer] and Maniac [1963 / trailer]), Flora Robson (Dominique Is Dead [1979 / trailer], The Beast in the Cellar [1970 / trailer], and Eye of the Devil [1966 / trailer]) and Freda Jackson (Die, Monster, Die! [1965 / trailer] and The Brides of Dracula [1960 / trailer]).

Clash of the Titans is movie #36 at the blogspot 2,500 Movies Challenge; they give the plot as follows: "Clash of the Titans transports us to the days of Ancient Greece, a time when the Gods ruled the world from atop Mount Olympus. Perseus (Harry Hamlin), a noble warrior and the son of Zeus (Olivier of Dracula [1979]), falls in love with Andromeda (Judi Bowker), a beautiful princess who is being tormented by her former love, Calibos (Neil McCarthy of The Monster Club [1981 / trailer]), a criminal physically deformed by Zeus as punishment for his crimes. Perseus defeats Calibos in battle, yet spares his life in exchange for the Princess's freedom. But Calibos is also the son of an Olympian; the Goddess Thetis (Maggie Smith), and as revenge for her son's humiliation, she commands that Andromeda be sacrificed to the Kraken, a powerful sea monster, in 30 days time. Only the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, which can turn a man to stone with a single glance, can save Andromeda from a watery grave, and only a hero as mighty as Perseus can deliver it."

The late Roger Ebert liked the movie, gushing "Clash of the Titans is a grand and glorious romantic adventure, filled with grave heroes, beautiful heroines, fearsome monsters, and awe-inspiring duels to the death. It is a lot of fun. It was quite possibly intended as a sort of Greek mythological retread of Star Wars (it has a wise little mechanical owl in it who's a third cousin of R2-D2), but it's also part of an older Hollywood tradition of special-effects fantasies, and its visual wonderments are astonishing."
Warner Bros let the bit about "special-effects fantasies" go to their head and went into 3-D CGI overkill for their 2010 remake, which proved also to please the masses, which was even followed by a sequel two years later, Wrath of the Titans (trailer), which we here at A Wasted Life failed to notice had been made — but then, we never made it to the end of the DVD of the remake, either.

 Clash of the Titans— The Remake (2010):

Go here for R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part IV: Addendum

Hollow Gate (1988)

October 7, 2013, 1:50 am

≫ Next: R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part IV – Addendum

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(Spoilers.) As dedicated purveyors of filmic flotsam, we here at A Wasted Life can say with authority that truly crappy films that are nevertheless good due to their very badness are a lot rarer than one might believe. Mediocre bad, like mediocre normal, reigns the day, only surpassed in number by that which is really shitty in a non-entertaining way, which in turn is overshadowed by Hollywood bland. Thus logic would say that if a film is truly prime celluloid feculence and thoroughly career-destroying fun, as in 100% jaw-dropping in its total incompetence, it would gain a certain reputation. Not true, as this film here proves. Indeed, we can't help but wonder how it is that films like Slugs (1988) or Trolls II (1990 / trailer) have gained such a large reputation as enjoyable craptastic cheese and a film of almost equally bizarre inability like this one here can languish in obscurity.

Hollow Gate seems to be piece of regional filmic failure from the state of Oklahoma, a state we for one only ever remember because it's named after a musical (1955) we saw as a kid — a pretty stupid film, too, if you get down to it. (What? The state came first? Surprise, surprise, surprise!)

Trailer to Oklahoma:

Hollow Gate is, without a doubt, if not an example of limited scriptwriting talent on the part of the scriptwriter, then a prime showcase of a total lack of directorial talent on the part of the director. As it is, Hollow Gate was written and directed by one and the same person, an unknown named Ray DiZazzo, "a communication specialist, [who] teaches seminars on improving communication skills in both corporate and personal relationships", and who, as far as we can tell, has yet to write or make another movie. He should probably change his name if he ever plans to do so. The only true saving grace of the movie is that someone actually hired actors of less talent than the director/author and also hired a special effects person (Judy Yonemoto?) for the blood and guts and gore that seems to have more-or-less known what (s)he was doing — though the emphasis here does lean lightly towards "less" and not "more". The resulting concoction is as an unbelievable piece of total incompetence that would be a total bore were it not for the occasional sloppy gore highlights and the constant bombardment of unbelievable ineptitude. True, the film does have many deep points that tend to drag, but really, it also has rather a few enjoyable highpoints that instigate truly deep belly laughs. And as we all know, laughter is good for the soul...

Any way you look at it, Hollow Gate plays out a bit like a color Jerry Warren film (see Teenage Zombies [1959] for a prime example of his product); had that Great Talentless Master Hack ever made a body-counter, one could imagine it might have the pacing and appearance of Ray DiZazzo's movie. Thankfully, however, though DiZazzo evidences little directorial talent in this movie, the little he seems to have is still more than that which Warren ever had.

As is typical of the slashers of the day, Hollow Gate begins with an interlude from the past to explain the planting of the seeds that give birth to the maniac of the film. In this case, poor young Mark (Bartholomew Bottoms) is not just dressed in a dorky clown costume for a Halloween party, but when he proves to be incapable of bobbing for apples his alcoholic dad (Richard London of Freeway Maniac [1989 / trailer]) dunks his face deep into the barrel and almost drowns him. Alki dad who hates him and a shitty clown costume — combined, this of course turns the boy into an unhinged killer as an adult. 

And we promptly see him action as the film jumps forward ten years: when a totally average American high-school couple tease him by — as all normal, American high-school couples are apt to do — screwing in the front seat of their car while gas-station-attendant, young adult Mark (now played by Addison Randall) fills the tank, and then even have the gall to give him the gal's panties as a tip, he blows up their car. Go, Mark, go!

Unlike most slasher films of the era, the ten-years-later scene is not the beginning of the body count; no, first the film jumps forward another two years to a scene in which a bitchy gal who likes neither ice cream nor movies get terrorized — Mark being a firm believer of "No" means "Yes"— and then Hollow Gate finally jumps forward to the main section of the movie, in which Mark basically confronts what looks like a live-action version of the Scooby Doo gang without Scooby: You got Shaggy (Richard Dry as "Allen") and Thelma (Katrina Alexy as "Kim") and Fred (J.J. Miller as "Billy") and Daphne (Patricia Jacques as "Mandy").

But unlike in an episode of Scooby Doo, where all's well that ends well, in Hollow Gate most of them die. (Here Hollow Gate most be given some points for originality: for the first time that we can ever remember, the fat chick is the Final Girl.) Not surprisingly, it would seem that not one of the four young non-thespians has since had a speaking part in another film, for they are one and all obvious flunkies from whatever acting school they might have ever attended. We are talking about four pieces of putrefied walking gorgonzola without a convincing facial expression between them.

Be what it may, such a total lack of talent can be fun to watch, particularly when it is matched by a total lack of directorial talent — we're talking about some truly boring framing and shots and anything that might be regarded as relating to the visuals — and a script that was plotted by the mentally impaired. Add some gore as spice and you have a film that can be a lot of fun — if you're in the right state of mind. (Beer and drugs might help here.)

So what is the main set-up of the film? Well, four dislikable idiots on their way to a rave spend all their money on lunch and, to earn some wigs (seriously), deliver four costumes to Hollow Gate, where crazy Mark lives with his granny (Pat Shalsant). (By this point in the movie, "lived" is actually the proper tense.) Once there, he locks them onto the expansive grounds of the estate and, taking up a personality appropriate to the given costume he dons, hunts them down one by one — and they, of course, facilitate his endeavor by being totally stupid. Some of the murders are really entertaining, as the level of gore almost matches the blandness and slowness of the camerawork and action, which in turn is only surpassed by the previously mentioned incredible lack of any notable thespian talent on the part of the teen victims.

 

As previously mentioned, they are not very intelligent, thus they make so many "What-the-fuck-?" choices that never once does the film in any way manage to get the viewer to hope that they might survive. Personally, our favorite demise is that of Fred, who gets ripped to pieces (Not!) by two terrifying (Not!) Golden Retrievers that wag their tails happily as the lick him bloodily to death. A scene as breathtaking as it is stunningly inept... but equal in its cinematic affect as to when Mandy simply stands there for minutes on end until she finally gets shot and then mowed over by a super-slow threshing machine.

Killer Golden Retrievers:

As the adult Mark, the killer of the movie, Addison Randall, the grandson of Hal Roach, is sort of entertaining to watch despite being way too old for the part. The baby-faced actor, who began his limited career in Al Adamson films (namely Girls for Rent aka I Spit on Your Corpse [1974 / trailer] and The Naughty Stewardesses [1975 / trailer]), fares fairly well when he slips into the role of the given killer, at one point even doing a relatively fey John Wayne imitation. The most talented actors of the entire movie, however, are the two cops Bill (George Cole) and John (Robert Gallo of To the Limit [1995]) that finally show up to save the overweight Final Girl. Regrettably, they don't show just show up late to do the job but, instead, appear a couple of times throughout the movie for extensive scenes obviously meant to pad the running time in which they tell their respective life stories. Boring — but without them, Hollow Gate wouldn't have a feature-length running time.

Hollow Gate: an asinine and totally unsuccessful body counter that, when viewed as a straight horror film, deserves its obscurity, but when viewed as a bad film, arguably deserves a wider rep. It is truly one unbelievably crappy film.

R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part IV – Addendum

October 14, 2013, 1:47 am

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Ray Harryhausen

29 June 1920 — 7 May 2013

Go here for R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part I

Go here for R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part II

Go here for R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part III

With Clash of the Titans (1981), Ray Harryhausen made his last feature-length film. Thereafter, he was pretty much in retirement, possibly in part forced because he couldn't get the financing for any of the subsequent feature projects he initiated (Sinbad and the Seven Wonders of the World, Sinbad Goes to Mars, People of the Mist, Force of the Trojans and The Story of Odysseus all never went past the planning stage.) But even if the day and age of the Harryhausen Film had come to an end, he stayed active: a short film here, a commercial there, an occasional appearance as a Talking Head, and now and then even a guest appearance of varying size in the films of others, particularly those of younger filmmakers that had grown up with his earlier movies.

Here, in Addendum, we take a look at some such projects — as well as a few in which there was no Harryhausen connection at all, other than a subtle complement or obvious homage to Harryhausen the Filmmaker that influenced so many a generation of directors and scriptwriters. The selection is far from complete, and purely arbitrary....

DairlyLea Dip Commercial

(1998)

Dairylea Dunkers Dino Timevon Jayspain

OK, it's an advertisement — but Harryhausen made it. A fun spoof of One Million Years BC... Wonder who the babe is; without or without Dairylea Dip, we here at A Wasted Life wouldn't mind eating her, too.

The Story of 'The Tortoise & the Hare'

(2002)

Way back in the 1950s, this short was originally intended to be one of Harryhausen's Storybook Review films, but when the financially lucrative feature-film projects began to happen The Tortoise & the Hare was put on the back burner — for a full fifty years. But the day did come when, thanks to the assistance of the animators Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh, the team behind The Old Man and the Goblins (1998 / full short) and Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose (1999 / full short), Harryhausen's stop-motion version of tis Aesop's fable was completed. The version found above on YouTube loses its sound at the end, but as it is we all know the story... The narration, while it lasts, is supplied by the professional voice-over artist Gary Owens, whose rare bodily acting jobs includes a turn as the sheriff in the hilarious First Blood (1982) / Most Dangerous Game (1932) rip-off, Kill Crazy (1990 / trailer).

Flesh Gordon

(1974, dirs. Michael Benveniste [15 April 1946 — May 1982; suicide] & Howard Ziehm)

"Ooh, the pain! The humiliation! The hemorrhoids!"

Monster (Craig T. Nelson), after being shot in the butt by Flesh Gordon.

Uncut trailer:

The legendary campy spoof of the Flash Gordon serials was, of course, made without the participation of Ray Harryhausen, but his influence can be seen in the monsters and some of the staging of certain scenes. The special effects for Flesh Gordon were done by a group of up-and-coming special effects artists including Rick Baker, Jim Danforth, Dave Allen, and Dennis Muren, and they were so aware of their debt that the monster, addressed as the "Great God Porno" in the movie, was supposedly nicknamed "Nesuahyrrah" off-screen, nothing less than Harryhausen spelt backwards. On film, by the way, Nesuahyrrah / The Great God Porno is voiced by an uncredited Craig T. Nelson, whom most of us might know from films such as The Return of Count Yorga (1971 / trailer), Scream Blacula Scream (1973 / trailer), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986 / trailer) and Poltergeist (1982 / trailer).

The duo behind the film, Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm, along with producer Bill Osco, hold a special place in film history: their first joint film project, from 1970, Mona the Virgin Nymph aka Mona (full NSFW film), is the first feature-length hardcore pornographic film with a "plot" to ever receive broad theatrical release in the USA, a good two years before the far more famous heterosexual classic Deep Throat (1972 / title track) and a year before the gay porn classic Boys in the Sand (1971) spurted and splattered across the silver screen. Mono was screened without credits back then, as porn was still illegal to make, but the profits the filmmakers gleaned from their historically notable film (and, of course, their first follow-up porn, Harlot [1971]) went into the financing of Flesh Gordon.

Flesh Gordon, as is already obvious simply by the sheer endless amount of names on the cast that have a porn past and/or future, was originally shot in XXX and, as is not unheard of in porn films of the time, was to include both straight and gay scenes — but this time around Benveniste & Ziehm ran afoul of the authorities (as making porn was still illegal in LA at the time) and had to "surrender" all the hardcore footage to the Vice Department, who surely enjoyed it but also lost it. (Therefore, don't expect anything too hardcore in the supposed "uncut" version now easily available on DVD.)

Producer Bill Osco, by the way, has had his fingers in many an interesting if cheap pie, including the cult films of his former wife Jackie Kong, the director of Blood Diner (1987 / trailer) and The Being (1983 / trailer). As "Januse Alucard Stellof", he even directed the rare and incompetent Gross Out (1990) and Urban Legends (1998), while under his real name he acted in (among other films) Cop Killers (1973 / trailer) and, under any number of other names, helped produce films as diverse as the XXX documentary Hollywood Blue (1970), Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy (1976 / trailer) and the exploitive Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer (1993 / first 10 minutes).

Of the two directors, Howard Ziehm (aka Hans Johnson, Albert Wilder, Lynn Metz, Linus Gator, Howard Johnson, L Metz, Harry Hopper and Lester Romano) waved his weenie in front of the camera a few times (in the feature-length Miss Passion [1984], for example, as well as in an occasional loop like those edited into Ginger Lynn Non-stop [1988, also featuring Harry Reems] and Rachel Ashley Collection [2005]), but he preferred to direct X-rated loops and poverty row porn such as the corn-porn Seeds of Lust (1971), The Incredible Body Snatchers (1972), Sexteen (1975 / NSFW scene), Star Virgin (1979 / NSFW trailer) and Naughty Network (1981 / full NSFW film).

The plot of Flesh Gordon? A storyline somewhat reminiscent of the real thing, of course: Emperor Wang the Perverted (William Dennis Hunt), the illegitimate ruler of the planet Porno aims his mighty 'Sex Ray' weapon towards Earth, which turns everyone into sex maniacs. Football player Flesh Gordon (Jason Williams of Time Walker [1982 / trailer]), along with his girlfriend Dale Ardent (Suzanne Fields — aka Sandra Dean, Judi Lawson, Cynthia Westcott, Susannah Fields, Cindi Adams, Cindy Stokes and Cindy Hopkins — of My Little Sister [1971 / trailer], Street of a Thousand Pleasures [1972 / entertaining NSFW trailer], Run, Jackson, Run [1972 / full NSFW film], Virgin Hostage [1972 / full NSFW film), The Stewardesses [1969 / trailer] and Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana [1971 / full film]) and Professor Flexi-Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins), set off towards Porno to destroy the Sex Ray and save Earth's virtue — and face dangers such as the Great God Porno and the evil Chief Nellie (Candy Samples of Superchick [1973 / trailer], Prison Girls [1972 / trailer], and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979 / trailer]) and find help from Amora, Queen of Magic (Nora Wieternik — aka Me Me, Nora, Paula Principe, — of The Geek [1971 / trailer]) and a very gay Prince Precious (Lance Larsen of The Psychopath [1973 / scene]).

Flesh Gordon ends with the promise of a sequel — "Don't miss the next exciting episode: The Perils of Flesh"— but despite movie's success, it didn't materialize. Instead, some 15 years later director Howard Ziehm pulled together an almost all-new and notably non-porn cast to make Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders, which hasn't met the same cult popularity yet...

Trailer to the sequel:

Starcrash

(1978, dir. Luigi Cozzi)

Trailer:

Cool Cinema Trash is 100% right when they say, "It's easy to lump Starcrash in with the countless space operas that followed in the successful wake of Star Wars (1977 / trailer). Starcrash is more than an imitator. It manages to establish its own set of rules (logic be damned) in a wacky, low-budget, fantasy universe." Of course, Ray Harryhausen had nothing to do with this much-loved guilty pleasure, but watch the trailer and you will see more than one cheesy and cheap homage to the filmmaker's classic films of yesterday in this wonderful piece of entertaining trash featuring the slumming Christopher Plummer — all his scenes were supposedly shot in one day — and the not-slumming former faith healer Marjoe Gortner (of Mausoleum [1983 / trailer] and The Food of the Gods [1976 / trailer]), Caroline Munro, David Hasselhoff (of Piranha 3DD [2012] and Witchery [1988 / trailer]), and Joe Spinell (of The Undertaker [1988 / trailer] and Vigilante [1982 / trailer]). Starcrash was released onto the unsuspecting public by the great Roger Corman, who picked up the film when the normally not-so-choosy American International Pictures turned it down; the movie was written and directed, as "Lewis Coates", by the under-appreciated Italo trash director Luigi Cozzi, the talented man who also brought us The Killer Must Kill Again (1975 / trailer), Contamination (1980 / trailer), Hercules (1983 / trailer) & Hercules II (1985 / trailer), Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989 / trailer), Paganini Horror (1989 / trailer) and a some other fine flotsam.

All Movie explains the plot: "The story begins familiarly enough, with a huge spaceship tracking through an extremely colorful space scene while under attack by some kind of unknown and deadly force resembling a lava lamp. Being no match for the '60s acid-flashback rays, they manage to jettison a few escape pods just before being blown to kingdom come. Fast forward now to the other end of the galaxy, where we find the best smugglers in town — gorgeous Stella Star (Munro) and space-pimp Akton (Gortner) — outrunning a band of cops on their tail. Eventually, they're caught, taken into custody, and sentenced to intense Labor Camps [...]. A break-out ensues, and in the intense laser shoot-out, Stella manages to escape, only to be captured again by the semi-green-skinned Thor (Robert Tessier of Nightwish [1990] and The Velvet Vampire [1971 / trailer] and Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell [1990 / trailer / full film]) and his annoying southern-drawled robot, Elle (voiced by genre veteran Hamilton Camp, of Wishcraft [2002 / trailer] and Evilspeak [1981 / trailer, the latter film alongside character actor R.G. Armstrong]). Brought in front of the Emperor of the Galaxy (Plummer) and reunited with Akton, the sexy duo find themselves suddenly in charge of finding Prince Simon (Hasselhoff). Thus begins the heroes' amazing adventure through space and time as they search for Hasselhoff and end up fighting Amazons, Cavemen, and the Evil Count Zarth Arn (Spinell) along the way."

Piranha

(1978, dir. Joe Dante)

Trailer:

We here at A Wasted Life love this classic Joe Dante film, as can be gleaned from our review of the movie, which can be reached by clicking on the title above. Even Steven Spielberg likes it, and once even christened the movie "the best of the Jaws rip-offs".

The plot, as explained by Derek O'Cain at imdb: "A young couple stumble across an abandoned US Army test site on a mountain, in which is a huge pool. Thinking it's an ordinary swimming pool, they jump in. But this pool is home to the piranha, and the couple are eaten alive. A young woman P.I. (Heather Menzies-Urich — seen below from here Aug 1973 Playboy pictorial) is hired by the father of one of the missing kids to find them, and she meets up with an alcoholic outdoorsman (Bradford Dillman) who lives on the mountain. The two of them find the test site and drain the pool to see what's in it. As they do they are accosted by Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) — the sole resident of the test site — who informs them that the inhabitants of the pool were the products of a gene-splicing experiment called 'Operation Razorteeth', designed to produce a mutant strain of piranha fish for deployment in the Vietnam War against the NVA. The fish could live in cold water and breed at a high rate. Realizing that a children's summer camp and the Lost River Lake Resort downriver are in the piranhas' path, they set out to try to stop it. The piranha are well ahead of them, and they kill several people on their way downstream. When they try to warn the camp director and resort owner of the danger, they are arrested. Thanks to the woman's ingenuity they escape custody and race down to the camp in a state police car to warn them. But the piranhas have already struck — and there are others who want to keep the danger of the piranha a secret..."

Not long after Paul Grogan (Dillman) & Maggie McKeown (Menzies-Urich) break into the science facilities, there is a few-second-long "What the fuck?" interlude in which, unnoticed by the couple, a baby Ymir (originally from Harryhausen's 20 Million Miles to Earth [1957]) is seen hiding behind things in the lab. The Ymir really has nothing to do with the movie and is never seen again later in the movie; it's appearance is merely an off-the-wall tribute to the Harryhausen from the filmmakers. 

Piranha was re-envisioned in 2010 as — Duh! — Piranha 3-D.

Spies Like Us

(1985, dir. John Landis)

Trailer:

Like that similarly unfunny comedy and legendary flop Ishtar (1987 / trailer), Spies Like Us is an homage to the unbearable Bob Hope & Bing Crosby Road to Wherever films — thus the Bob Hope cameo. Ray Harryhausen (seen briefly as a surgeon in tent sequence) is one of the many other names — including Terry Gilliam, Sam Raimi, Joel Coen, B. B. King, Martin Brest and Frank Oz — to make a cameo appearance somewhere in this flick, yet another of John Landis's many, many, many lesser efforts. As to be expected, Spies Like Us was a hit. As was the title track by Paul McCartney, who unbelievably enough was once a member of a music group called The Beatles and actually made good music; reaching number 7 on the US charts, the song is to date his last solo hit in the US.... and considering the quality of the crap he has been doping for years now, let's hope  it remains so.

TV Guide tells it like it is: "Austin Millbarge (Dan Aykroyd) and Emmett Fitz-Hume (Chevy Chase) are a pair of bumbling government workers handpicked by the CIA to be decoy agents in a highly secretive mission. The two end up in the camp of some Afghan rebels, where a volunteer medical team mistakes them for a pair of important doctors. When the error is uncovered, the two are off on the road to nowhere trying to find out about this unnamed mission. Karen Boyer (Donna Dixon), one of the doctors at the rebel camp, hooks up with the boys, for she is actually a "real" CIA agent who seems to know what this mysterious mission entails. [...] The nature of their mission is kept hidden from both the bumbling spies and the audience until the movie's climax, but the buildup is so tedious and unfunny that the payoff just isn't there. Landis' direction is indulgent, to say the least, with big landscapes, big crashes, big hardware, and big gags filling the screen. What he forgets is character development, that all-important factor that must exist for comedy to work well."

Paul McCartney — Spies Like Us:

The Puppetoon Movie

(1987, dir. Arnold Leibovit)

In '87, Arnold Leibovit followed up his 1985 documentary on George Pal, The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (trailer) with this collection of some ten of his shorts presented within a wrap-around story featuring other, better-known stop-motion characters such as Gumby and Pokey and the Pillsbury Doughboy. As was already mentioned in R.I.P.: Ray Harryhausen, Part II, one of Harryhausen's first jobs was working for George Pal doing Puppetoons — and thus we use this opportunity to present another two Puppetoon shorts that Harryhausen worked on and that were also presented in this compilation film.

Hoola Boola (1941):

The DVD Review is all praise for the project, saying: "Before he conquered space or whizzed us through time, filmmaker George Pal created animated short films such as the world had never seen before nor seen since. Like the alchemists of old, he transmuted pieces of wood into fluid, moving beings. Arms undulated, legs arched, feet shuffled, and faces bloomed in eight-minute bursts. The era of sharing his gift, a complex and painstaking process known as 'replacement animation,' unfortunately came and went, as do all Camelots. Thanks to the new Image release of Arnold Leibovit's The Puppetoon Movie, we have a chance to once again experience not only Pal's mastery of that lost art but regale in his gentle pleas for tolerance, compassion and love."

The Little Broadcast (1943):

TV Guide, on the other hand, may see Hoola Boola as one of the best shorts of the compilation, but is nevertheless less fawning in its opinions: "There's a very brief prologue and epilogue in which tribute is paid to Pal by more recent, better-known stop-motion characters, like Art Clokey's clay-animated Gumby [...] and Speedy Alka-Seltzer. If that gesture is meant to make the Puppetoons interesting for modern children, it's largely futile. With a few exceptions [...], Pal's Puppetoons seem stodgy and antiquated, interesting from a technical standpoint but very much grounded in attitudes and aesthetics of days gone by. Presented in their entirety, these shorts definitely come off poorly compared to the timelessly lively Disney, Warner Bros., and Fleischer studios animation from the same period. Furthermore, many Puppetoons trafficked in the offensive racial stereotypes of yesteryear."

Evil Dead III / Army of Darkness

(1992, dir Sam Rami)

 

Per say Ray Harryhausen had nothing to do with this film, but we here at A Wasted Life would dare to say that had there never been a Harryhausen, there would also never have been this film. We love the movie, which we are always ready to see again and again and again — with or without smoke. 

The plot, as described by the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review: "Ash (Bruce Campbell) is thrown back to the 14th Century by the demonic timewarp. There he is captured by the troops of Lord Arthur (Marcus Gilbert) but awes them into thinking that his chainsaw and shotgun are magic weapons. To return home he must retrieve a copy of The Necronomicon from a graveyard. However, his bumbling ends up creating an evil doppelganger of himself and raising an army of the dead. As the undead army marches on Lord Arthur's castle, Ash is reluctantly persuaded to teach the peasantry chemistry and steam power to defend against the onslaught."

Trailer:

Beverly Hills Cop III

(1994, dir. John Landis)

Hmmm, we here at A Wasted Life are tempted to accidentally overlook this turd here, yet another typically sub-standard John Landis and Eddie Murphy cinematic turkey, but like most Landis films a variety of big names appear in the backgrounds of various scenes, including (once again) Ray Harryhausen in a bar scene. (Other names seen somewhere include Martha Coolidge, Joe Dante, Arthur Hiller, George Lucas, Peter Medak, Barbet Schroeder, George Schaefer and John Singleton.)

Trailer:

The plot, as explained by Todd "Mainstream Taste" Baldridge at imdb: "One night in Detroit, during a shoot-out at a chop shop, Detroit cop Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) sees his boss, Inspector Douglas Todd (Gilbert R. Hill), getting killed by a well-dressed man. Using his last breath, Inspector Todd tells Axel to get the man who shot him, and Axel says that he will do that. Axel does some looking around, and finds the killer's vehicle at Wonder World, a theme park in Beverly Hills, California. In Beverly Hills, Axel is reunited with his friend Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), who tells Axel that John Taggart (John Ashton) is now retired and living in Arizona. Billy is now the deputy director of operations for joint systems interdepartmental operational command (JSIOC). Billy also has a new partner named Jon Flint (Hector Elizondo of Turbulence [1997]). Axel checks out Wonder World, which is owned by Dave 'Uncle Dave' Thornton (Alan Young). At Wonder World, Axel rescues two kids who are stuck on a ride that broke down, and after this, Axel is taken to see the park's head of security, Ellis DeWald (Timothy Carhart of Red Rock West [1993] and Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh [1995]), and Axel recognizes DeWald as Inspector Todd's killer. Jon refuses to believe this, because DeWald is one of Jon's friends. Ellis runs a counterfeiting ring that uses the theme park as a front. Axel is also falling in love with Janice Perkins (Theresa Randle of Spawn [1997]), who works at the park. When Dave gets shot by DeWald's men, Axel is accused of being the man who shot Dave. With the help of Billy and Jon, Axel sets out to prove his innocence and get revenge on DeWald."

During the shoot, the bloated film bloated from an estimated at $55 million to an excess of $70, but as Peter Travis at Rolling Stone points out, it didn't help any:  "Whatever juice is left in the Cop franchise or in the once unstoppable career of Eddie Murphy peters out ignominiously in this poor excuse for a sequel. If Murphy feels energized by returning (after seven years) to the role of Detroit cop Axel Foley, a fish out of water in the hills of Beverly, you can't tell it from his slapdash performance. The clown prince who exploded in [...] the first Cop in 1984 (trailer) is now the preening fat cat who squanders his gifts [...]. As directed by Martin Brest in the original Cop, Murphy created a real character in Axel. This time, as directed by John Landis — whose talents seem equally exhausted — Murphy merely paints Axel on."

The mandatory pop song, Keep the Peace, was supplied this time around by the Aussie band INXS, the hunky lead singer of which, Michael Hutchence, died three years later of either (depending on which source you choose to believe) depression-induced suicide or auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong.

INXS sings Keep the Peace:

Mars Attacks!

(1996, dir. Tim Burton)

"I want to thank my Grandma for always being so good to me, and, and for helping save the world and everything."

Richie Norris (Lukas Haas)

Trailer:

We will admit that we weren't quite thrilled by this movie the first time we saw it — the star power turned us off — but Mars Attacks! has aged well and gets more entertaining with each passing year. Still, it was a bit of a flop when it was released in the shadow of the much more seriously commercial and unintentionally stupid Independence Day (trailer), which gets more annoying as each year passes — once, we at least liked the first half of Emmerich's hit, but now we find the whole overblown turd a gagger.

As everyone knows, Mars Attacks! is based on a series of Topps trading cards from 1962 drawn by the great artist Wallace "Wally" Wood (an example of which is seen above). A class-A black comedy, a satire of the USA, and a loving parody of the great sci-fi flicks of the 50s, it includes more than one obvious nod to past projects of Ray Harryhausen — most obviously, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Originally, Burton intended to do the aliens in stop motion, but budget considerations made him change to CGI.
The plot, as according to the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Review: "Hundreds of flying saucers from Mars near the Earth. It is presumed they must be peaceful because they are an advanced species. However, upon landing, the Martians incinerate the envoy that peacefully greets them and then start gleefully slaughtering humanity en masse."

Among the many faces to appear in the film were Lukas Haas (as Ritchie, who you may guess from the quote above survives), who once starred in one of the great overlooked horror films of all time, Lady in White (1988 / trailer); his Grandma was played by the great Sylvia Sidney (of  Damien: Omen II [1978 / trailer] and God Told Me To [1976 / trailer]), in her last feature-film appearance.

The Slim Witman songs that saves the world in Mars Attacks!— Indian Love Call:

Mighty Joe Young

(1998, dir. Ron Underwood)

Once upon a time director Ron Underwood even made a truly excellent genre film — Tremors in 1990 — but then he made City Slickers (1991 / trailer) and since then everything has been downhill. This remake of the 1949 film of the same name, the first feature film that Harryhausen worked on, was as big of a flop as it was unneeded. It earned back little more than half its budget upon its original release, and is pretty much already forgotten by everyone. The movie didn't seem to damage the career of its lead female, Charlize Theron, but has anyone seen Bill Paxton lately? Ray Harryhausen appears somewhere in the film alongside the female lead of the original version, Terry Moore, for a very short exchange. (Terry Moore, as Jill Young [Theron] walks by: "She reminds me of somebody, but I can't think who." To which Harryhausen replies: "You, when we first met.")

Trailer:

The plot, according to John Sacksteder (jsackste@bellsouth.net) at imdb: "The movie opens with poachers attacking a group of gorillas. Animal preservationists fight the poachers, which ends with one gorilla and a young girl's mother (Linda Purl of Fear of the Dark [2003]) dead. In the melee, a particularly large gorilla baby attacks the head hunter (Rade Serbedzija of  Snatch [2000 / trailer]) and bites his thumb and forefinger off. The film immediately passes into the future and the young girl has grown up to be Charlize Theron and the gorilla has grown to be 15' tall and weighs 2000 pounds. The two are best friends who play together. When poachers again appear, a representative (Bill Paxton) of a California wildlife refuge convinces her to transfer the gorilla she has named Joe Young to the refuge. Of course, once there the former hunter shows up seeking revenge. Terrorizing the gorilla without letting his human handlers know, the gorilla goes on a rampage across Los Angeles." All's well that ends well.
Ron Underwood went on to direct the much better movie, The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002 / trailer), perhaps the only "Eddie Murphy film" since 48 Hours (1990 / trailer) that we here at A Wasted Life actually enjoyed.

Monsters, Inc.

(2001, dir. Pete Docter, David Silverman and Lee Unkrich)

Trailer:

OK, so Harryhausen had nothing to do with this totally sweet Pixar/Disney film, but the filmmakers do throw in two obvious homages (and probably more lesser obvious ones) to the great special effects master, so we see it as OK to present the movie here. And in case you don't already know, the obvious homages are: the sushi restaurant where Mike and Celia are at is called Harryhausen's and, in a reference to It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), the bartender has only six tentacles. 

The plot, according to the German website Uncut: "Das große haarige Monster Sulley (John Goodman of Red State [2011 / trailer]) und sein kleiner einäugiger Freund Mike (Billy Crystal) sind Mitarbeiter der Monster AG. Ihre Aufgabe ist es, in der Nacht kleine Kinder zu erschrecken, um aus der Energie ihrer Schreie Strom zu gewinnen. Was die Kinder aber nicht wissen ist, dass sich die Monster selbst noch viel mehr vor den Menschenkindern fürchten. Dementsprechend groß ist der Schreck bei Sulley, als er entdeckt, dass sich das kleine Mädchen Boo (Mary Gibbs) in ihrem Paralleluniversum eingeschlichen hat."

Elf

(2003, dir. Jon Favreau)

Trailer:

For some odd reason, Ray Harryhausen supplies the voice to the polar bear cub seen somewhere in this movie. Almost everyone involved in this flick has made better films... 

Corpse Bride

(2005, dir. Tim Burton & Mike Johnson)

Trailer:

The homage paid to Harryhausen in this wonderful stop-motion masterpiece is slim, but we love the film so we'll take advantage of any excuse to present it. There is a scene in this film in which Victor (Johnny Depp) plays the piano; look close when he leans back and you can see the nameplate reads "Harryhausen".
Corpse Bride is the first feature-length animation film that Burton himself "made"— contrary to popular opinion, he only produced A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993 / trailer), which was actually directed by Henry Selig (the director of Coraline[2009] and James and the Big Peach [1996]). Since this film here, Burton has gone on to do another stop-motion masterpiece Frankenweenie (2012 / trailer).

The plot of Corpse Bride, as explained by Urban Cinefile: "The penniless but dustily aristocratic Everglots (Joanna Lumley, Albert Finney) want — need! — their son Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) to marry the crass social climbers' dowry-endowed sweet daughter Victoria (Emily Watson). The shy Victor fumbles his wedding rehearsal and stumbles into the woods to practice, where he accidentally vows to marry a bride who is not only jilted at the altar, but ... deceased (Helena Bonham Carter). Dragged into the world of the dead, Victor tries to get back to Victoria, who is hurriedly married off to Lord Barkis (Richard E. Grant), but the wedding is yet to finish when the world of the living and of the dead briefly collide."

Corpse Bride, by the way, also features a nice homage to the public domain Walt Disney animated short The Skeleton Dance, which we happened to choose as our Short Film of the Month for March 2010, and also has a slight similarity to the wonderful Mexican stop-motion short Hasta los huesos / Down to the Bone (2002), which we happened to choose as our Short Film of the Month for July 2009.... In Hasta, however, the young man is dead but doesn't know it yet.

Burton's co-director for Corpse Bride, Mike Johnson, long ago made the music video to Primus's cover version of The Charlie Daniels Band's song, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, which we present below just for the heck of it... 

Primus — The Devil Went Down to Georgia:

Primus - The Devil Went Down To Georgiavon Dan_of_the_Land

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

 (Directors: Steve Box, Nick Park)

The real trailer:

Released the same year as Corpse Bride, and also even featuring the voice of Helena Bonham Carter as the lead female character, the stop-motion feature film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit also features the exact same homage to the great Ray Harryhausen as in Corpse Bride: the nameplate of the piano reads "Harryhausen". Likewise, probably not unintentional in a film as full of movie references as this one, there is a scene reminiscent of Mighty Joe Young (either version) in which the creature falls from great heights and then appears dead only to open its eyes... This, the "first vegetarian horror movie" ever made, went on to beat Corpse Bride and win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

 

The plot, as supplied by The Media Nook: "In The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace (Peter Sallis of The Night Digger [1971 / trailer], Taste the Blood of Dracula [1970 / trailer] and The Curse of the Werewolf [1961 / trailer]) and Gromit are the owner-operators of Anti-Pesto, a humane pest-control company. When we join the action, the town is preparing for the annual Giant Vegetable competition, hosted by Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham-Carter). While Anti-Pesto has no trouble dealing with regular rabbits, a monstrous rabbit who feeds by moonlight poses a bit more trouble. Will Anti-Pesto be able to tame the beast or will Lady Tottington be forced to turn to her suitor and avid hunter, Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Finnes)?"

The better, fake trailer:

The Boneyard Collection

(2006, Edward L. Plumb & L.J. Dopp)

Trailer:

We could find little info about producer, director, screenwriter and actor Edward L. Plumb, but since around the turn of the century he's been an active man: more or less totally under the radar, he's produced any number of direct-to-video genre films of varying lengths, many of which also feature any number of cult names of times past and present. The Boneyard Collection is a compellation film of four tales plus the framing host segment (featuring "Dr. Acula", or rather, the late Forrest J. Ackerman); the individual segments, filmed over a period of five years, are entitled Her Morbid Desires, which seems to have been given a solo release two years later; Cry of the Mummy, which was directed by L.J. Dopp; and Boogie with the Undead and The Devil's Due at Midnight.
We know nothing about movie, but Trash City Review says: "The most amazing thing about these is the horror star-power accumulated by Plumb, with the names appearing, albeit mostly briefly [...]: Tippi Hedren, Barbara Steele, Robert Loggia (we thought he was dead), Brad Dourif, Kevin McCarthy, Ken Foree, Susan Tyrell, even Bobby 'Boris' Pickett (we were sure he was dead. Hang on. Yep, April 2007). On that side of things: wow. Simply, wow. Unfortunately, most of the content doesn't live up to the fire-power [...]. The film starts off with the lengthiest sequence, 45 mins or so, entitled Her Morbid Desires, about a film-shoot making a Dracula movie, which is plagued by mysterious deaths. Outside of the parade of celebrities — one party scene includes Brinke Stevens, Elvira, Ray Harryhausen and, bizarrely, Rod McKuen — there's very little memorable here. The next section is [...] Boogie with the Undead, in which an all-girl band takes on an army of zombies. While not a bad idea, it outstays its welcome, and would have been better off at 90 seconds in length. The third part, Cry of the Mummy is the best, telling the tale of Egyptian mummy Shep (Rees), who wants to make it big in Hollywood, but refuses to do horror, because of the typecasting. [...] It's got plenty of nicely-satirical jabs at LA and its culture, or lack thereof. The film finishes with [...] The Devil's Due at Midnight; as with its predecessor, it's too long, though I enjoyed Foree's turn as a witch-hunter. Overall, it's more miss than hit, and those who might appreciate the plethora of horror references, will likely turn their noses up at the PG-natured approach, which seems about forty years out of time."
Her Morbid Desires— the segment with a guest appearance of Harryhausen, among others — was released as a solo DVD two years later in 2008. 

Ray Harryhausen Presents: The Pit and the Pendulum

(2007, dir. Marc Lougee)

 Trailer:

The Pit and the Pendulum Logo Design by Ghoulish Gary Pullin. According to SexGoreMutants, "The story goes that [director] Lougee was invited to make a short film in honour of Harryhausen's 80th birthday bash in 2000. The pair struck up a friendship that day after Harryhausen enjoyed Lougee's effort, and agreed to make a short film together. Harryhausen suggested doing something based on the work of Poe and Lougee set about preparing an adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. However, this proved to be too large in scale and so the project was altered to accommodate an adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum."
And thus Harryhausen became the producer of this stop motion short. The plot, as Where the Long Tale Ends explains it, is relatively faithful to Poe's tale: "The Pit and the Pendulum follows a victim of the Spanish Inquisition as he is brought to trial and sentenced to a fate in the dreaded dungeon. Locked in darkness and struggling to maintain his faith and sanity, he begins to realize the terrible fate his captors have in store for him."
Zombie Closet is of the opinion that "While Poe's story is required reading for many college kids, this visualization of the torments suffered by the unnamed prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition would be a welcome addition to the curriculum. While a bit of license is used for dramatic visual effect (the prisoner doesn't have a metal helmet locked around his head in the original story), the short seven-minute film adheres to and captures the essence of terror with vivid detail in its CG-enhanced miniature sets and stylized puppets."

Burke and Hare

(2010, dir. John Landis)

Trailer:

Momentarily the last feature-film directorial project of Landis, made 12 years after his previous feature film project, the unknown comedy  Susan's Plan aka Dying to Get Rich (1998 / trailer). In Burke and Hare, Harryhausen appears in the background as a "distinguished doctor".
The synopsis, as found at Urban Cinefile: "William Burke (Simon Pegg) and William Hare (Andy Serkis) are barely scratching out a living in 1820s Edinburgh. After yet another failed scam, they return to Hare's lodging house where his wife Lucky (Jessica Hynes of Shaun of the Dead [2004 / trailer]) tells them that a tenant — a rare source of revenue — has suddenly died on rent day. As the boys decide how to dispose of the body over a drink, they discover that a corpse can fetch a good price from Dr Knox (Tom Wilkinson) studying and demonstrating anatomy, in the city that leads the world in the subject. Encouraged, they begin to turn it into a business, while Burke falls for aspiring actress Ginny (Isla Fisher of Swimming Pool [2001]) who is looking for investors in her all-female production of Hamlet."
The blogspot Alone in the Dark says "With the subject matter [...] and the fact it's from the director of An American Werewolf in London (1981 / trailer), you might be going in to Burke and Hare expecting a horror. [Huh?] In actual fact it's a knockabout black farce, and a reasonably funny one at that. Considering they barely scratch the morality of the situation, it's probably the only way to make the material palatable." The movie is, of course, inspired by the true story of Burke and Hare, which has already inspired or been worked into any number of movies, including Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher (1945 / trailer), with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; Oswald Mitchell's The Greed of William Hart (1948 / trailer), starring Tod Slaughter (of Sweeney Todd [1936]); The Anatomist (1956); John Gilling's The Flesh and the Fiends aka Mania (1960 / trailer), starred Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence; Vernon Sewell's Burke & Hare (1971 / trailer) and Freddie Francis's The Doctor and the Devils (1985 / trailer), with Timothy Dalton. They also show up in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) as employees of Dr. Jekyll, and undoubtedly served as the inspiration for the grave-robbers Willie and Arthur in the funnier 2008 comedy horror I Sell the Dead (trailer).
In Landis's Burke and Hare, by the way, the final steadicam sequence through the real-life Edinburgh University Medical Museum ends on the real skeleton of William Burke.

Ray Harryhausen — May he rest in peace.