Blood Voyage (1976)

Mindless horror/thriller schlock that may or may not have slithered through theaters on its way to an ‘80s video release, Blood Voyage tells the dull story of a sailboat cruise during which crew members and passengers get murdered one by one. At no point do any survivors consider calling for help or turning the boat around, and for that matter nobody ever seems particularly concerned about what’s happening until the requisite climax during which the killer stalks the final victim. Yawn. If you must know the particulars of the plot, middle-aged shrink Dr. Craig (John Hart) sails from LA to Hawaii accompanied by his decades-younger fiancée (Laurie Rose), his buxom daughter (Mara Modair), and a sexy patient with severe mental illness (Midori). The narrative function of these ladies is to model swimsuits, participate in nude scenes, and shriek when attacked. Three macho seamen run the ship for Dr. Craig, and the one who gets the most screen time is Andy (Jonathan Goldsmith), a Vietnam vet tormented by PTSD. Andy, by the way, is sleeping with Dr. Craig’s daughter, who wants him to kill her father before his impending marriage so the daughter can inherit Dad’s wealth. Listing the reasons why Blood Voyage is awful would be exhausting, but to name just one, a sailboat is an iffy setting for this sort of whodunnit—if you want to determine the killer’s identity, maybe just congregate on deck and wait for someone to reach for a knife? Although the acting in Blood Voyage is as bad as the storytelling, two players are somewhat notable—Hart briefly played the Lone Ranger on TV, and Goldsmith later achieved notoriety by playing “The Most Interesting Man in the World” in beer commercials.

Blood Voyage: LAME

7.5 Million Views!

Hey there, groovy people! Last time I posted one of these updates about viewership milestones, I offered my hope that readers had not grown bored with reports of this nature. And while I still hope that’s true, the process of watching the numbers increase over time has not lost its novelty for me, hence this message of gratitude for everyone out there diggin’ on the signals I’m sendin’. Of late, I’ve taken some time to revisit movies that were reviewed for this blog years ago as a means of reconnecting with reasons why the cinema of the ’70s is so endlessly fascinating. Whether I’m taking a fresh look at a stone classic (how’s it hangin’, The Exorcist), a minor hit from back in the day (lay it on me, Jesus Christ Superstar), or a cult favorite (gimme five, Time After Time), it’s been a kick to remind myself of the wonders associated with the New Hollywood era. Notwithstanding the much-discussed consideration of how tricky it is to lay my retinas on ’70s movies I haven’t yet reviewed, I feel like I’ve got a fresh tank of gas in the engine for the next leg of this trippiest of trips. So hang loose, because there’s more to come—and, as always, hope endures that I’ll discover some masterpiece that’s been unfairly overlooked since the ’70s. Until next time, thanks for reading, and keep on keepin’ on!

Lapin 360 (1972)

Watching a movie as muddled as Lapin 360, one can only marvel that anyone ever thought the piece would hold together. After all, it’s not as if Lapin 360 is some no-budget experiment by counterculture outsiders—this was rendered by experienced Hollywood professionals including a director with legit TV credits and a supporting actor with an Oscar on her mantlepiece. Here’s the head-scratcher of a story. Young rocket scientist Bernard Lapin (Terry Kiser) works for a military contractor. Returning home after a business trip, he discovers that attractive stranger Delia (Peggy Walton-Walker) broke into and stayed at his place while he was away. They become romantically involved. Bernard soon learns that Delia and a group of nefarious men are plotting some sort of illegal activity. Before the nature of that scheme is revealed, viewers learn that Bernard is the key man for a nuclear-missile project at work and that recurring migraines are driving him mad. Neither of those subplots goes anywhere. As for the mysterious scheme, the gist is that Delia carried a baby for a rich benefactor, and now she’s enlisted thugs to kidnap the baby—the thugs expect to collect ransom, but Delia wants to keep the kid. What does Bernard have to do with any of this? You guessed it—nothing! Aside from providing assistance during the climax, Bernard doesn’t matter to Delia’s narrative, and Bernard’s narrative is so underdeveloped that his positioning as the main protagonist feels arbitrary. Sure, the idea of Delia using a dude to get her baby could have made for an interesting-ish noir, but as executed, Lapin 360 is confounding and frustrating—or at least it would be if it elicited strong enough reactions for viewers to feel confounded or frustrated. Kiser, later to achieve notoriety playing a corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), gives an overly earnest performance while Walton-Walker bangs against the limitations of her skill set. As for the aforementioned Oscar winner, she’s Anne Baxter of All About Eve (1950) fame, and, wow, is she terrible in her scant screen time—by comparison, Norma Desmond seemed less desperate for attention. Lastly, details are murky on whether Lapin 360 played theatrically in the ‘70s, though the film’s final resting place (as of this writing) was a VHS release with the new title Always the Innocent.

Lapin 360: LAME

Pets (1973)

          Not too many T&A-driven grindhouse flicks stem from legit theater, but Pets has exactly that pedigree. However, it’s useful to note that the stage experience upon which Pets is based premiered in 1969—if not the white-hot center of the Sexual Revolution, then close enough—and that “legit” had an expansive meaning at the time. After playwright Richard Reich debuted an evening of three one-act plays called Pets at the Provincetown Playhouse, filmmaker Raphael Nussbaum directed (and co-wrote with Reich) a film adaptation converting the stage show’s thematically linked stories into a contiguous narrative. All of this is somewhat novel, but the movie of Pets suggests the source material was titillating at best, trashy at worst. The film’s first vignette concerns sexy hitchhikers robbing a dude with a little dog; the second vignette depicts a lesbian artist who becomes jealous when her female model gets hot for a man who breaks into the artist’s house; and the third vignette centers an art collector who lures women into his basement and keeps them as, you guessed it, “pets.” The connection between the first two sections is tenuous. Worse, because the third section is the most unusual, the movie should have gotten to the spicy stuff faster—and gotten more out of it than one extended scene.

          Pets is neither admirable nor awful. The scenarios mostly hinge on lengthy scenes of leading lady Candice Rialson displaying her breasts, so it’s difficult to perceive higher aspirations beyond the leering. Concurrently, the dialogue (credited to three writers!) is so arch and obvious and stilted that that the film’s sociocultural elements receive clumsy treatment. The movie primarily expresses a theme of people trying to possess other people, and only the first vignette—with the hitchhikers and the little dog—has anything resembling surprises and subtext. Adding to the general blandness of Pets is lethargic pacing, which makes the movie feel much, much longer than its 103-minute running time. Still, those who can’t resist should be advised what awaits them. Rialson, though charming in other B-movies (such as 1977’s outrageous Chatterbox!) is largely decorative here, while swaggering costar Teri Guzman flits in and out of the picture too quickly. Occupying the showiest role is prolific film/TV actor Ed Bishop, who plays the perverse collector—his performance approaches camp but always seems a bit too reticent, even when he’s abusing Rialson’s character with a whip.

Pets: FUNKY 

The Daredevil (1972)

          Watching The Daredevil, it’s tricky to parse whether the people involved with the project thought they were making a real movie. On the surface, the story of a stock-car racer whose life unravels after his involvement with a crash that kills another racer is a compendium of high-velocity episodes, from daytime races to nighttime chases. Yet the picture also tries, weakly, to present a character study of its self-destructive protagonist, a nasty jerk who treats everyone he meets with contempt. As a result, it’s hard to determine the intended audience for this thing. By the time this picture was made, the drive-in demographic’s appetite for stories about hard-charging rebels sticking it to the man was well-established, and The Daredevil does not scratch that itch. Similarly, downbeat tales of everyday people meeting grim fates for the temerity of expressing individualism were familiar to devotees of arty counterculture cinema, but The Daredevil lacks the sophistication needed to satiate that appetite. And while some distinctive flicks found a sweet spot between these extremes—the previous year’s Vanishing Point comes to mind—that’s yet another niche into which The Daredevil does not fit. For all these reasons and more, The Daredevil deserves its obscurity. Bad ’70s cinema gets much worse than this, but The Daredevil neither tries to do enough nor excels at what it actually attempts.

          Faded ’40s/’50s he-man actor George Montgomery plays Paul Tunney, an asshole with a winning record on the Southern stock-car circuit. Returning to his home track, he faces off for the first time against a Black racer, who dies during the event. (Adding to his charm, Paul is casually racist.) The dead man’s sister, Carol (Gay Perkins), puts a sort of hex on Paul, who starts losing races not long after the fatality. Then Paul starts a distasteful involvement with Julie (played by ’50s pinup Terry Moore) even though Julie is dating Paul’s friend Huck (Bill Kelly), a one-armed mechanic. Once Paul’s racing career hits the skids, he takes a gig running drugs for a local crime boss. These slender threads intertwine predictably as the picture zooms toward its bummer climax. Had the premise of Robert Walsh’s script found its way to a more adept filmmaking team and stronger actors, The Daredevil could have become something interesting—not only is the downward spiral of the leading character a serviceable plot device, but developing the idea of Carol employing supernatural means to exact revenge could have lent novelty to the endeavor. As is, the picture is a cheap-looking affair riddled with flat dialogue, stilted performances, unpleasant characters, and way too much stock footage.

The Daredevil: FUNKY