The Headless Eyes (1971)

First off, never mind this picture’s amazing poster, which promises a sci-fi shocker about disembodied eyeballs preying on victims. The Headless Eyes is a cheaply made horror flick about a deranged artist attacking people in New York City. In the opening scene, Arthur (Bo Brundin) breaks into a woman’s apartment to steal from her, and the only weapon she can find for self-defense is a spoon, so she stabs him in the face and knocks his left eye out of its socket. Some time later, eyepatch-sporting Arthur has become obsessed with eyes, murdering people so he can remove their eyes and feature the orbs in his avant-garde artwork. Predictable subplots ensue, with police trying to learn the identity of the serial killer stalking their city’s streets, and a young female artist approaching Arthur about an apprenticeship. Even though writer-director Kent Bateman makes some ham-fisted attempts at delving into his protagonist’s psychology, listing the shortcomings of The Headless Eyes reveals why it doesn’t merit close inspection. The filmmaking is atrocious, with many shots out of focus and poorly lit. The performances are just as bad, though Brundin struggles to put emotion into melodramatic declarations: “I am twisted!” “I’m trying to forget you and your phony sincerity!” “I am twisted!” (He says he’s twisted a lot.) Many scenes are simply pointless, shots of Brundin wandering the streets while twitchy music plays on the soundtrack. And then there’s the whole gore factor, which earned the movie an X-rating during its original release. Even though the special-FX makeup isn’t especially convincing, the way Bateman lingers on shots of Brundin driving instruments into people’s faces and then plucking eyes from sockets is so repugnant as to render the film’s artistic aspirations meaningless.

The Headless Eyes: LAME

Lady Snowblood (1973)

          Yet another ultraviolent saga that made a deep impression on Quentin Tarantino, who borrowed heavily from this film for his epic Kill Bill project (originally released as two parts in 2003 and 2004), Lady Snowblood is among the most pictorially beautiful action films ever made. Not least among its visual wonderments is leading lady Meiko Kaji, who plays an immaculately dressed assassin with a sword blade hidden inside the handle of her ever-present umbrella. Adapted from a Japanese comic strip, Lady Snowblood tells a patently ridiculous story about a vengeance mission handed down from one generation to the next, and the way director Toshiya Fujita fills the screen with artfully staged dismemberments, geysers of blood, and impalements is not for the faint of heart. (Released unrated in the U.S., the picture almost certainly would have received an X-rating for gore.) Incredibly, Fujita manages to tell a fairly compelling story without benefit of realism and restraint, getting by on sheer intensity and style.

          Although events are presented in a jangled mosaic, a linear narrative emerges. In late 19th-century Japan, the government orders a military draft, and a band of criminals roams the countryside, pulling a vicious scam on gullible villagers. The criminals claim they can sell draft exceptions for cash. Occasionally, to create the illusion of governmental authority, the criminals attack and execute persons for “illegally dodging” the draft. One such innocent victim is a schoolteacher with a wife and a young child. The criminals kill the teacher and his son. His widow, Sayo (Miyoko Akaza), declares revenge, hunting down and killing one of the criminals. Captured and imprisoned for the murder, she has sex with every man in prison until she’s impregnated, then declares her daughter, Yuki, an “asura demon” with only one purpose in life—killing the remaining criminals. Sayo dies in prison, and her child finds a new home with a priest who teaches her subterfuge and swordplay. Upon reaching adulthood, Yuki (Kaji) begins her vengeance mission, but complications ensue.

          The film is structured into chapters with florid titles (e.g., “Bamboo Wives and Tears of Death”), and because Yuki befriends an illustrator who agrees to tell her story in book form, the screen occasionally fills with the panels from the comic that inspired the movie. It’s all very meta, sometimes absurdly so. Yet somehow Fujita pulls the disparate elements together, creating a crazy-quilt pattern of varied storytelling modes. Momentum sags during Act Two, but Fujita rights the ship for the outrageously violent climax.
          Nearly everything that makes Lady Snowblood interesting is visual, so it’s a uniquely immersive cinematic experience. Many battle scenes and even some important emotional moments are presented without dialogue, putting the emphasis on composition, editing, and sound design. All of Fujita’s collaborators bolster this approach with exemplary contributions; the costuming, production design, and special effects are gorgeous. In particular, a scene of Yuki attacking a victim in an alleyway while snow falls transforms savagery into a kind of horrific choreography. (Kill Bill features an homage to this scene.)

          As for how leading lady Kaji fits into the mix, she provides more than just her beauty, though her looks are an important aspect of the film’s visual splendor. Whether she’s summoning intensity for a fight or thrilling with adrenaline after vanquishing a foe, Kaji imbues the notion of a character bred only to kill with something resembling credibility. She returned for Lady Snowblood 2: Song of Vengeance (1974), again directed by Fujita; in that one, the title character goes to prison for her crimes in the first picture, then gets an offer of clemency in exchange for working as a government agent.

Lady Snowblood: GROOVY

Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

All the worst aspects of grindhouse sludge appear in Mardi Gras Massacre, a sexed-up horror picture with so much nasty gore that it received an X-rating during its original release. We’re talking closeups of women’s torsos getting sliced open so their hearts can be yanked out. Telling the story of a psychopath luring New Orleans prostitutes back to his lair so he can sacrifice them in weird rituals—maybe it’s Satanism or maybe it’s voodoo, but the end result is the same—Mardi Gras Massacre offers crappy filmmaking, exploitive nude scenes, and rotten acting. Worse, it drags on for nearly 100 minutes thanks to slow pacing and the presence of two long interludes: a documentary-style sequence featuring on-the-street footage of Carnival celebrations, and a dance number. More specifically, a disco dance number. Because, you see, instead of proper local flavor for a picture set and shot in New Orleans, Mardi Gras Massacre is driven by a soundtrack of thumping, upbeat disco numbers, and at one point the picture stops dead so leading lady Gwen Arment can swirl and twist her way through several minutes of generic gyrations. As can be said of so many other bad movies made for the grindhouse circuit, Mardi Grass Massacre has nowhere to go and isn’t in any hurry to get there. The plot, such as it is, concerns a detective (Curt Dawson) and his hooker girlfriend (Arment) getting mired in the search for a dude preying on the Big Easy’s working girls. From start to finish, this is a reprehensibly bad film, so it’s only of interest for the most masochistic viewers. That said, scuzz-cinema freaks may dig some weird elements, including the opening scene, during which the killer solicits his first victim by searching for the “most evil” prostitute in New Orleans. Also worth mentioning is the occasionally disquieting score, a bizarre mixture of bouncy dance tunes and creepy electronic noises.

Mardi Gras Massacre: LAME

Mansion of the Doomed (1978)

          Fast-moving shocker Mansion of the Doomed has the shape of a classic mad-doctor movie from the ’30s or ’40s, though the gruesome makeup FX and shadowy cinematography are unquestionably modern. The simple story concerns Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart), an eye surgeon who goes around the bend when his beloved adult daughter, Nancy (Trish Stewart), loses her sight in a car accident. Aided by his compliant wife, Katherine (Gloria Grahame), Dr. Chaney drugs Trish’s fiancé, Dan (Lance Henriksen), surgically removes Dan’s eyes, and places them into Nancy’s head so she can regain her vision. Dr. and Mrs. Chaney then lock Dan in their basement dungeon—because, really, doesn’t every good home in an affluent suburb have one of those? When Dan’s eyes fail, Dr. Chaney abducts a succession of people, repeatedly replacing the eyes in Nancy’s head while telling her that each time her vision fades and revives, it’s the result of some mysterious procedure he performed while she was anesthesized. You can figure out where it goes from there. The eyeless prisoners in the dungeon plot an escape, and Dr. Chaney becomes more and more reckless as his mental state deteriorates. Although Mansion of the Doomed is highly formulaic, it’s an enjoyable little thriller, more cartoonishly spooky than genuinely frightening.
          Plotwise, the film bears more than a little resemblance to French director Georges Franju's cult-favorite thriller Eyes Without a Face (1960), which concerns face transplants instead of eye transplants. Even the main setting of a mansion was lifted from the earlier picture. Mansion of the Doomed has energy, but it's a shameless enterprise on virtually every level.

          Hollywood veteran Basehart gives an entertainingly twitchy performance that’s forever verging on camp, and it’s a kick to see this early performance by Henriksen—later to become a cult-favorite star of fantasy-oriented films and television—even though he delivers most of his performance from behind a Stan Winston-designed makeup that obscures his eyes. Producer Charles Band applies his signature veneer of low-budget cheesiness, borrowing every stylistic trick he can from the Argento and De Palma playbooks with nary a trace of artistry, while director Michael Pataki (better known as a C-list Hollywood actor) powers through scenes with clumsy but relentless efficiency. There’s even a friendly nod to the sort of old-school fright flicks after which Mansion of the Doomed is patterned, since the main character’s name abbreviates to Dr. Len Chaney (read: Lon Chaney). All in all, a fun serving of empty calories for horror fanatics. FYI, this picture’s myriad alternate titles include Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood, Massacre Mansion, and The Terror of Dr. Chaney.

Mansion of the Doomed: FUNKY

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) & Torture Dungeon (1970) & The Body Beneath (1970) & Guru, the Mad Monk (1970) & The Man With Two Heads (1972, US) & The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972) & Blood (1973)

A prolific independent filmmaker and theater professional best known for the low-budget exploitation movies he made from the late ’60s to the late ’80s, Andy Milligan was spectacularly devoid of cinematic talent. His shameless use of excessive gore ensured that he found outlets for much of his work on the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, his microscopic budgets kept him productive, and, in the years following his ’70s heyday, he developed a small cult following. A colorful and tragic life story contributes to his current infamous status, because the openly gay director enjoyed S&M, lived for a while in England, spent much of his working life operating out of grungy locations throughout Manhattan, and was a pauper at the time he died from AIDS. Viewed in the abstract, he’s a fascinating subject for further study.

Viewed up close, at least through the prism of his ’70s movies, not so much. Taken as camp, the features Milligan released from 1970 to 1978 might pass muster for purely ironic consumption. Taken at face value, they’re as bad as first-year student films, with dopey dialogue, incoherent storylines, pathetic production values, stilted acting, and terrible camerawork. Editing is a special problem, because scenes start and stop abruptly, continuity and screen direction are chaotic, and Milligan was consistently incapable of generating proper logic, momentum, and pacing. Yet perhaps Milligan’s most egregious cinematic offense is padding his movies with interminable melodrama. Characters in these flicks talk and talk and talk, bombarding each other with repetitious lines that exist on a level below the worst soap-opera chatter. Whenever someone gets a cleaver to the head—a favorite mode of killing in Milligan’s movies—it’s a relief because it means at least one character will shut the fuck up.

So why do some people find Milligan fascinating? According to Jimmy McDonough’s biography The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan—as well as countless online tributes—Milligan was artist in extremis, using independent filmmaking as a form of therapy to work out psychosexual problems. The idea is that watching the incessant deviance, hatred, and violence in Milligan’s movies provides a window into a troubled soul. Fair enough. But since most of us will never find the time to watch all the films made by skilled filmmakers whose work sprang from complex psyches, why waste time parsing the output of someone without talent? Oh, well. To each their own.

After getting his movie career going with releases including The Degenerates (1967), The Filthy Five (1968), and Gutter Trash (1969)—one senses a theme—Milligan entered a new decade at full throttle, releasing five movies in 1970. The pace of his releases gives a good indication of the quality control, or lack thereof, defining Milligan’s output. Bloodthirsty Butchers offers a scuzzy take on the familiar story of Sweeney Todd, a fictional horror character whose exploits are set in Victorian England. As always, the so-called “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” kills customers, then gives the body parts to a baker who uses the human remains as ingredients in pies. Actors ranging from awful to merely mediocre recite florid dialogue in ugly locations amid garish lighting. Something nasty happens every so often, but the FX makeup is laughable. Attentive viewers may detect traces of Milligan’s S&M interests, though even the sex scenes suffer from amateurism; actors seem as if they’re giving each other airport-security pat-downs instead of heavy petting. The film’s most amusing moment involves someone peeling the crust off a pie and discovering a woman’s dismembered breast inside, nipple inexplicably erect.

Torture Dungeon finds Milligan loosely adapting Shakespeare, because the story is a riff on Richard III, with an English nobleman killing people ahead of him in line for the crown. Although he’s playing a duke, leading man Gerald Jacuzzo gives a performance best described as queeny, all bulging eyes, flamboyant gestures, and sing-song vocalizations. The following rant, uttered by the duke in a reflective moment, should suffice as a demonstration of Milligan’s problematic dialogue style. “Let me explain something to you, my dear. I live for pleasure. Only second to power, of course. And I’ll try anything. I’m not a homosexual. I’m not a heterosexual. I’m not asexual. I’m try-sexual. Yes, that’s it. I’ll try anything for pleasure.” Clumsy verbiage aside, you begin to see why some folks perceive deeper meanings in Milligan’s work, but it’s difficult to justify close readings of a 77-minute trash opus with people getting decapitated and impaled at regular intervals.

The Body Beneath is one of myriad vampire pictures in the Milligan oeuvre. (It’s also one of many flicks in which he brazenly steals elements from Bram Stoker, since the estate where most of the action takes place is called Carfax Abbey.) Compared to the director’s other pictures, The Body Beneath is relatively coherent and slick, telling the story of an undead priest who rules a family of vampires that procreates through incest and the use of love slaves. As the flick grinds through quasi-softcore sex scenes and the usual amateurish gore, two elements stand out, but not in a good way. The priest’s vampire brides often appear in ghoulish makeup, but the makeup is so cheap as to be silly rather than sinister—lots of blue gunk slathered across women’s faces. Milligan also goes wild with the old-timey effect of smearing Vaseline across a filter over the camera lens, thereby blurring the edges of the frame. That gets old fast. While The Body Beneath may be Milligan’s best ’70s flick, that’s not saying much.

            Presumably, Guru, The Mad Monk was inspired by movies including Witchfinder General (1968), the disturbing Vincent Price thriller about a monstrous man tasked with rooting out occultists. Like that picture, Guru, the Mad Monk concerns an evil official who uses his position for personal advantage. Specifically, the plot involves prison guard Carl, who falls for Nadja, a peasant woman unjustly accused of murder. Carl enlists the help of Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) and a witch named Olga, who contrives potions that allow Nadja to simulate death and thus escape imprisonment. For her part, Olga wants the prison guard to let her seize blood from freshly executed prisoners because she uses blood in rituals. Meanwhile, Father Guru wants political power of some sort. (The script is so inept that it’s not worth parsing.) In laughable scenes, Father Guru looks into mirrors and talks to himself, turning his head whenever the “voice” of an alternate personality takes control. Predictably, the movie’s gore is goofy. To suggest that someone’s eyes were impaled, Milligan cuts to props that look like ping-pong balls fused with chopsticks and slathered with ketchup. Oy.

            Milligan’s final 1970 release was the X-rated melodrama Nightbirds, a black-and-white picture about counterculture angst featuring lots of explicit sex (putting it beyond the scope of this survey). After disappearing from the marketplace for many years, Nightbirds resurfaced in the 2010s when hip Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn purchased and distributed an old 16mm print. His online remarks to the effect that family members and friends think he’s mad to champion Milligan make for interesting reading.

            Despite hitting screens just months after American-International’s The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971), Milligan’s first 1972 flick, The Man With Two Heads, does not depict a character with dual craniums. Rather, it’s a deranged take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” After about 20 minutes of dull chitty-chat, Dr. Jekyll (Denis DeMarne) finally transforms into “Danny Blood,” a De Sade-quoting brute who gets his kicks torturing a prostitute named April (Julia Stratton). In the film’s longest and most unpleasant scene, “Danny” punches and slaps April, forces her to crawl on the floor and bark like a dog, burns her face with a cigar, and stops just short of raping her, the better to prolong his twisted arousal. “You shouldn’t be allowed on the face of this earth!” He screams at her. “You’re scum! You’re the defecation of the slums of London!” Perhaps more than any other of Milligan’s ’70s films, The Man With Two Heads makes the persuasive case that Milligan used movies to process issues, but in this case, the issue seems to be unrelenting hatred for women. Until it devolves into bloody chaos during an incoherent scene combining an orgy and a killing spree, The Man With Two Heads is almost technically competent, and DeMarne’s leading performance isn’t bad. Thematically, however, The Man With Two Heads is vile.

The title of Milligan’s next opus—The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!—might be the best thing in his entire filmography, though one assumes Nicholas Winding Refn would argue the point. Alas, the movie doesn’t have the same vitality as the moniker, because it’s a painfully boring domestic drama concerning the horrid Mooney family. These 19th-century Brits spend all their time abusing each other physically and verbally; in one scene, repugnant protagonist Monica (Hope Stansbury) visits her mentally challenged brother, whom the family keeps locked in room filled with chickens, then pours hot wax on him and beats him with a broom. Eventually, Milligan gets around to introducing horror elements, with brief scenes of rats (some of which get killed on camera) and a wisp of lycanthropy (translation: a few actors wear hairy masks). Yet most of this interminable film comprises aimless familial nastiness.

            Nineteen seventy-three found Milligan broadening his cinematic horizons, after a fashion, because he did uncredited directing work on a porno film called Dragula—a gay spin on Stoker—and used his real name while making a skin show called Fleshpot on 42nd Street. (Like Nightbirds, both films fall outside this survey’s parameters.) Then it was back to gore for the succinctly titled Blood. Shot in and around the house where Milligan lived at the time of filming, this is low-budget schlock at its least impressive. The discombobulated plot involves a werewolf and Dracula’s daughter hiding out while the werewolf performs arcane scientific experiments. Also featured are amputees, bizarre servants, flesh-eating plants, and a prissy lawyer. Any improvements in technical areas that Milligan achieved while filming The Man With Two Heads seem to have evaporated before he shot Blood, which has nonsensical camera angles, out-of-focus shots, and pitiful sound quality. Milligan also takes the gimmick of killing animals onscreen to a nauseating extreme, because at one point an actress chops a mouse in half, then shoves the tail end into her mouth.

            Milligan’s ’70s output sputtered to a halt with Legacy of Blood, which, title notwithstanding, bears no relation to its immediate predecessor. Rather, Legacy of Blood is a loose remake of Milligan’s 1968 movie The Ghastly Ones. And here’s where things get confusing. Both The Ghastly Ones and Legacy of Blood steal the basic plot from The Cat and the Canary, a 1922 play that has been filmed, officially and unofficially, many times. (Premise: Relatives gather in a creepy house to compete for an inheritance, but a killer stalks them.) Among the other unauthorized versions of The Cat and the Canary is a 1971 movie with John Carradine, Blood Legacy a/k/a Legacy of Blood. Yep. Same title. Although Milligan’s Legacy of Blood was unavailable for review, reports from those who’ve seen the picture suggest it has all the usual flaws, from bad acting to incompetent filmmaking, with dialogue consuming most of the screen time.

On the topic of legacies, it’s disheartening to look at the scope of Milligan’s career and see how little he had to show for his work, the adoration of Nicholas Winding Refn notwithstanding. As of this writing, not one of Milligan’s ’70s movies has a rating above five (out of ten) stars on IMDb, and most online commentary about the man’s work focuses on his remarkable cinematic incompetence. (The same is even more true of his later output; Milligan made a handful of widely detested pictures in the ’80s and died in 1991.) As noted earlier, it’s not as if Milligan’s screen career set him up financially—exactly the opposite. One therefore hopes that he had more fun making his movies than most people have watching them, or at least found some measure of release from his psychosexual hangups.

Bloodthirsty Butchers: SQUARE

Torture Dungeon: SQUARE

The Body Beneath: LAME

Guru, the Mad Monk: SQUARE

The Man With Two Heads: FREAKY

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!: SQUARE

Blood: SQUARE

Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

Providing more red meat for deranged moviegoers who patronized the previous year’s theatrical release Snuff, this abysmal horror picture is yet another low-budget exploitation flick purported to contain footage of real killings. Like Snuff, this craven enterprise went through a few developmental stages before becoming the atrocity that reached theaters in 1977. Originally released in 1974 as The Fun House, with a running time of three hours, the flick was whittled down to 78 interminable minutes and retitled to echo the moniker of Last House on the Left (1972), another grungy shocker designed to test viewers’ endurance. As for the various descriptions of Last House on Dead End Street as a surrealistic horror film, the picture is indeed weird, but not because of deliberate artistry—bad taste and cinematic incompetence are the reasons behind the film’s strange vibe. Long stretches feature characters wandering around while disembodied voices provide their interior monologues, and equally long stretches comprise excerpts from softcore porn, since several of the characters are in the business of making adult films. The overall gist is that a psychopath named Terry Hawkins (played by director Roger Watkins under a pseudonym) decides to make snuff films so he can earn money selling his products to depraved clients. Kinkiness ensues. In the climactic scene, a woman strips off her top, then places an animal hoof in the crotch of her jeans and forces a man to fellate the hoof until someone else kills the guy by burrowing the bit of a power drill into his skull. All the while, Terry/Roger films the carnage and laughs hysterically. It’s not enough to say that one hopes the people who made this film eventually got professional help. Similar assistance should be provided to anyone unfortunate enough to actually watch Last House on Dead End Street.

Last House on Dead End Street: SQUARE

Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls (1973)

          Enjoyably ridiculous, the supernatural horror thriller Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls benefits from a unique performance by John Considine in the leading role. By his own admission, Considine received zero guidance from director Eddie Saeta, so Considine went big in his first take and stayed there throughout production. What’s more, because the actor knew going in how silly the script was for this project, it’s tempting to credit him with an appropriate sense of irony, as if every florid line reading or theatrical gesture is a wink-wink commentary on the inherent goofiness of the piece. In any event, Considine is fun to watch because his performance is so absurdly stilted, channeling every bug-eyed excess that John Carradine, Boris Karloff, or Vincent Price ever brought to a similar role, only without the elegance or nuance one associates with those actors. Adding to the picture’s considerable kitsch factor are the polished production values—clearly, Saeta and his crew thought they were making a proper horror picture—and the campy extremes of the plot. Whereas most shockers about mad scientists portray brilliant characters driven to extremes by obsession, this one offers the parallel image of a madman driven to distraction by a sort of incompetence. After all, the title character spends most of the movie trying to complete one task, so he’s a bit like that guy in your office yelling at an uncooperative copy machine.

          The nominal protagonist is Fred Saunders (Barry Coe), a businessman whose beautiful wife, Laura (Jo Morrow), just died. Determined to defy mortality, Fred searches for a spiritualist who can revive Laura, eventually meeting Tana (Florence Marly). She “represents” a magician named Dr. Death (Considine), so on some level, Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls is about a psychopath with a talent agent. Dr. Death’s trick is transferring souls from one body to another, so he promises to help Fred in exchange for $50,000. Thereafter, Dr. Death seeks a soul to put inside Laura’s body. Unfortunately, Laura’s corpse resists Dr. Death’s mojo, so he goes on a killing spree while searching for a soul with which he can reanimate Laura’s corpse Watching Dr. Death get more and more annoyed while this process drags along is morbidly funny. The picture also provides some domestic melodrama, because Tana becomes jealous of Dr. Death’s new sexual plaything, Venus (Sivi Aberg). Leading man Coe is beyond forgettable, and the same is true of starlet Cheryl Miller, who plays the hero’s secretary-turned-lover. So while Aberg is lovely, Marly is suitably deranged, and Leon Askin (who plays Dr. Death’s henchman) provides some unintentional laughs whenever he moves his bulky frame across the screen, it’s all about Considine.

Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls: FUNKY

Holocaust 2000 (1977)

          Derivative Eurotrash noteworthy for featuring an American star in the leading role and for venturing into fairly extreme places, Holocaust 2000—sometimes known as The Chosen, Lucifer’s Curse, and Rain of Fire—is among the most enjoyably stupid ripoffs of The Omen (1976). Despite being quite slick on some levels, thanks to lavish production values, Erico Menczer’s vivid cinematography, and Ennio Morricone’s wonderfully gonzo score, the picture suffers from an atrocious screenplay and erratic direction. Things get so bad at one point that the film stops dead so Douglas can stand in place while voiceover of previously spoken expository dialogue repeats several times, lest the audience somehow miss the incredibly obvious implications of the storyline. And yet in the movie’s weirdest scene, pure narrative goes out the window as director Alberto De Martino lets loose with an apocalyptic dream sequence featuring visions of the end times intercut with, believe it or not, scenes of an anguished Douglas running across a desert while fully nude. File under “Things You’ve Never Seen,” cross-referenced with “Things You Never Particularly Wanted to See.”

          The ridiculous plot goes something like this: As American developer Robert Caine (Douglas) struggles to get plans for a Middle Eastern nuclear plant approved by reluctant government officials, prophecies and tragedies reveal that the plant is actually a scheme wrought by the antichrist, who, naturally, happens to be Caine’s adult son, Angel (Simon Ward). Yep. Angel. And Caine, as in “and Abel.” In other words, forget the mechanics of the dopey script. Grooving on the storyline’s broad strokes is more than sufficient, because the perverse fun of watching Holocaust 2000 involves laughing at Douglas’ overwrought performance—while secretly acknowledging that, every so often, his intensity gives real edge to the movie—and marveling at the abuse good taste endures in the name of disposable entertainment.

          One subplot involves assassination attempts on the life of a Middle Eastern prime minister, and this narrative thread culminates with a graphic beheading scene involving an errant helicopter blade. It’s as if the filmmakers studied the famous decapitation bit in The Omen, then asked how they could reconfigure the scene to add a provocative connotation. Never mind that the last thing the world needed was another depiction of political violence in the Middle East. Even more dubious is a long sequence set inside a mental institution—while shockingly gory and unquestionably unnerving, the sequence plays like a grindhouse homage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). That’s not to say Holocaust 2000 utterly lacks imagination. A scene of Douglas caught on a flood plain while the water line rises with supernatural speed is memorably creepy, and the final act of the film echoes the all-is-lost vibe of The Omen, albeit without the benefit of ingenious storytelling. Holocaust 2000 is shameless crap, no question, but if you like your stories dark and pulpy, you may find yourself going along for the ride.

Holocaust 2000: FUNKY

The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

A fair argument could be made that applying critical standards of any sort to a picture called The Giant Spider Invasion is pointless, seeing as how the title is so ridiculous that only an equally ridiculous film could accompany the title. In that spirit, let’s dispel with the usual appraisal of whether The Giant Spider Invasion “works” in any traditional sense. Instead, let’s explore a more relevant topic: whether the movie is fun to watch. That depends. If you’re looking for a few chuckles, mostly at the expense of the filmmakers, then you could do worse than investing 84 minutes in The Giant Spider Invasion. Made in the tradition of the giant-monster flicks of the 1950s, the picture offers old-fashioned silliness with a few concessions to modernity, namely brief nudity and a little bit of gore. The movie’s distinguishing characteristics are its absurd special effects, since the oversized monster of the title is actually a set of flailing legs and a furry body strapped to car as it put-puts through various locations. On some level, The Giant Spider Invasion is endearingly terrible. The plot involves familiar hokum. A meteor falls into a field outside a small town, unleashing normal-sized but vicious spiders. They kill a few folks. Then a human-sized spider claims a victim. Finally, an arachnid the size of a house begins its rampage. All the while, two scientists try to halt the invasion. Envision all the usual clichés executed without energy or imagination, and you’re on target. Directed by one Bill Rebane, the picture relies on stock characters and trite dialogue, though flashes of something resembling wit appear. Gilligan’s Island star Alan Hale Jr. plays a sheriff, and his first line is “Hi, little buddy!” A bumpkin character maligns someone by saying, “You’re so dumb you wouldn’t know rabbit turds from Rice Krispies.” Not exactly Algonquin Round Table banter, but serviceable in this context. The Giant Spider Invasion is cheap, goofy, and shallow, but for insatiable creature-feature addicts, those aren’t necessarily negatives.

The Giant Spider Invasion: LAME

The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978)

          Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Exploitive, grotesque, profane, and racist, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is among the most extreme movies featuring internationally famous actors, so it’s morbidly fascinating in the manner of, say, Caligula (1979), though it pales next to that infamous film’s excesses. Still, it’s impossible to classify The Mountain of the Cannibal God as restrained, seeing as how the picture includes shots of real animals getting slaughtered, as well as abundant over-the-top gore, a simulated scene of bestiality, and, for no particular reason, an unsimulated scene of a young woman—well, let’s just say she looks as if she’s enjoying herself. While it’s not a great shock to see Ursula Andress mixed up in a production like this one, since she spent much of the ’70s adding brazen sex appeal to dubious European productions, it’s jaw-dropping to watch Stacy Keach a credible performance in between gory kills and nauseating shots of animal carnage.

            Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about The Mountain of the Cannibal God—released in the U.S. as Slave of the Cannibal God—is that it’s entertaining. Telling a simple story in a propulsive way, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is lean and suspenseful, and the score by Guido De Angelis and Maurizio De Angelis is imaginatively terrifying. If the goal of pulpy cinema is to evoke visceral reactions, then The Mountain of the Cannibal God succeeds, shamelessly.

          The narrative is simple, a throwback to xenophobic jungle adventures of the 1930s. When her husband goes missing somewhere in the primitive wilds of New Guinea, Susan Stevenson (Andress) and her brother, Arthur (Antonio Marsina), hire scientist Professor Edward Foster (Keach) to lead a rescue expedition. Edward warns that the area where Susan’s husband disappeared is home to a tribe of cannibals, but Susan dismisses the admonition as silly superstition. Venturing into the jungle with native bearers, the searchers soon learn Edward was right, as cannibals kill the bearers one by one, often absconding with all or part of the bodies. Along the way, the searchers see horrific things, like a python devouring a cute little monkey or natives gutting a monitor lizard while it’s still alive. These scenes are real, and the camera lingers on every disgusting detail. Once the searchers reach the cannibals’ lair, the filmmakers crank up the cinematic volume, bombarding viewers with startling images of ritual sex and violence. Andress getting stripped naked and slathered with body paint is the least alarming of these visuals.

          On the most primal level, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is exciting, because it’s loaded with action sequences and sensationalistic visions, and the film’s technical polish is fairly impressive. On every other level, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is vile. Every nonwhite character in the movie is either a childlike idiot or a vicious monster, and seeing a white woman drives the entire cannibal tribe wild. In the picture’s wildest scene, cannibals mutilate and devour a dude, then celebrate with an orgy. Virtually every racist fear of indigenous peoples finds its way into the storyline, and the kicker is that we’re asked to root for a central character even after it is revealed that the character personifies the worst aspects of white entitlement. An entire Ph.D. thesis could be written about this film’s messaging related to gender and race, but for now, one word shall suffice. Odious.

The Mountain of the Cannibal God: FREAKY

The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979)

There’s a germ of an interesting idea within this no-budget exploitation flick, that being the notion of what might happen if two serial killers crossed paths. Unfortunately, filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler (who used separate aliases for his writing and directing credits) brings exactly zero nuance and style to the task, so The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher quickly degrades to the grindhouse equivalent of, say, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), inasmuch as the picture tries to compensate for its shortcomings by offering two ghouls for the price of one. While the worst thing about the picture is unquestionably its sleaziness, seeing as how the strangler scenes involve a fully dressed middle-aged man murdering topless young women, the weirdest thing about the picture is its soundtrack. Steckler and his team either failed to record location sound or screwed up the process, because nearly all the dialogue in this picture appears as voiceover. Right from the first scene, when strangler Jonathan Click (Pierre Agostino) takes nudie pictures of a model before killing her, the audience hears his thoughts vocalized as narration. Faint snippets of dialogue appear periodically, though they’re not the sonic focus. The storytelling is just as slipshod. Between strangler scenes, Steckler cuts to the unseen slasher murdering hoboes with a switchblade, eventually revealing that she’s an attractive redhead (Carolyn Brandt). The murderers meet, with predictably bloody results. Although The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher is dull, repetitive, and tacky, some gonzo-cinema fans appreciate the flick for its almost surrealistic trashiness—the disorienting treatment of sound makes the picture feel different from, though not necessarily any better than, run-of-the-mill gorefests. For the most part, however, this one’s for cinematic masochists only.

The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher: LAME

Gang Wars (1976)

The best thing about this wretched hybrid of crime, horror, and martial arts is the name of the leading actor, because it’s hard to top “Warhawk Tanzania.” Incompetently cowritten (with four other people!) and directed by Barry Rosen, the flick opens in China circa 200 B.C., with fanatics performing a deadly ritual near a deep pit. Cut to the present, where Luke (Tanzania) is a martial-arts master in New York City. His student, Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan), gets into a hassle with Chinese gangsters in Manhattan before traveling, with Luke, to Hong Kong for advanced kung-fu training. Rodan stumbles onto the pit from the ritual and accidentally releases a demon, which follows him and Luke back to New York and sets up housekeeping in the city’s subway system. If you’re already confused, join the club. The demon starts murdering folks in the subway, which causes police to suspect gangsters are responsible and eventually leads detectives to Luke and Rodan. None of this makes any more sense onscreen than it does on paper, and Gang Wars—also known as Devil’s Express, hence the above poster—has production values commensurate to its storytelling. Scenes smash together without transitions, repetitive funk grooves make fight sequences feel tedious, and the filmmakers periodically replace production sound with voiceover, which merely adds to the overall awkwardness. The demon bits are ridiculous, culminating with Tanzania kung-fu fighting some dude in a rubber suit, and the highlight—as far as horror goes—is a vignette of a fellow ripping off his own skin while the demon possessing him breaks free. Too infrequently, glimmers of droll weirdness poke through the sludge. NYC freakazoid Brother Theodore plays a priest in one scene, and, in the most enjoyable moment, a crazed bag lady (Sarah Nyrick) harangues strangers on the subway before she’s attacked by the demon. You may find yourself wishing the movie was about the bag lady.

Gang Wars: LAME

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971)

          This low-rent Floridian exploitation flick presents an offbeat pastiche of crime, gore, melodrama, and same-sex relational dynamics. Yet Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things isn’t quite as weird a viewing experience as you might imagine. Instead, it’s alternately droll and tedious and unpleasant. Scenes of two male criminals bickering at each other like an old married couple approach camp, even though the conflict between a repressed psychopath and a slovenly thug is quite grim; drab sequences of cops searching for clues chew up screen time without adding much; and bloody murder vignettes, often tweaked with solarization effects, repulse in typical grindhouse fashion. Cheap production values, some shoddy performances, and ugly cinematography add to the generalized sleaziness of the piece. While Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things tells the creepy story of a dysfunctional relationship triggering a string of murders, it’s exaggerating to say there’s a real movie in here somewhere. Nonetheless, the filmmakers exhibit a small measure of curiosity and imagination, even if they lack skill.

          Paul (Abe Zwick) and Stanley (Wayne Crawford) killed someone up north and fled to Florida, where Paul put on women’s clothes and assumed the identity of Stanley’s “Aunt Martha.” The idea is to create the illusion of a quiet suburban existence until they can slip back into society as themselves, but problems emerge. A pesky neighbor tries to make friends with the reclusive Martha, and Stanley is too undisciplined to maintain the ruse. He refuses to cut his hair or ditch his counterculture wardrobe, he slips out of the house on a regular basis to chase local chicks, and he treats Paul/Martha like a nagging spouse. Stanley’s sex life is of particular interest, since the filmmakers make a point of showing his inability to go all the way with compliant lovelies, and they also show him in bed with Paul/Martha. Therefore, the dreadful things of the title come across as manifestations of Paul’s jealous rage. Things get extreme during the climax, which involves a C-section, sadomasochism, and a van covered with pastel-colored peace signs.

          Is Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things yet another wrongheaded movie presenting the stereotype of gays as deviants? Yes and no. Somehow, the picture is simultaneously a misguided attempt at telling a serious story, an unfunny pass at comic material, a transgressive spin on familiar B-movie tropes, and a vulgar blast of sex and violence. As such, it’s uncommon without actually being special.

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things: FUNKY

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) & The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) & Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

          Around the same time that Alfred Hitchcock’s career began to wane, potential successors for his “Master of Suspense” title emerged in Hollywood and abroad. In America, director Brian De Palma laced several films with overt homages to Hitchcock. Overseas, Italian director Dario Argento won a fleeting sort of international fame with his first three pictures, all of which have unmistakably Hitchcockian elements.

          Argento’s debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, benefits not only from the self-assurance of a youthful talent eager to strut his stuff but also from extraordinary collaborators. Having proven himself as a screenwriter on pictures including Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Argento secured the services of composer Ennio Morricone and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. Their unnerving music and stately photography elevate the contrivances of the script Argento adapted from a 1949 novel by Fredrick Brown. The film opens with a bravura visual flourish—while living in Rome, American writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) happens upon an attack inside an all-white art gallery, so he watches from behind the gallery’s glass façade as a beautiful woman struggles to survive a stabbing. Luckily, he’s able to call for help. Afterward, police detective Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) confiscates Dalmas’ passport and forces the writer to remain in Italy until the investigation concludes. Dalmas then starts an investigation of his own, even as the killer attacks others who get too close to the truth.

          Despite myriad lapses in credibility and logic, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage moves along fairly well. Unfortunately, so many scenes feature the brutalization of women that Argento left himself vulnerable to charges of misogyny, just as De Palma did with his Hitchcockian shockers. That said, most of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is vivid. Expertly staged jump scares complement unpleasant scenes including a horrific razor-blade attack.  Salerno’s world-weary portrayal, while clichéd, is fun to watch, though Musante is far less impressive. In his defense, he’s burdened with some wretched dialogue (“What’s happening to me? This damn thing’s becoming an obsession!”). All in all, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is an impressive first effort, its rough edges attributable to inexperience and its highlights indicative of promise.

          Argento’s follow-up, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, is made with just as much confidence but slightly less panache. Morricone returns, but the movie suffers for Storaro’s absence, because the imagery in Argento’s second film is pedestrian instead of painterly. Also miring The Cat o’ Nine Tails in mediocrity are distasteful themes of child endangerment, homophobia, and incest. Once again, Argento uses the device of a witness who becomes an amateur sleuth. This time, blind typesetter Franco Arnò (Karl Malden) overhears a suspicious conversation and then makes a connection when he learns about a murder that happened near where the conversation took place. Franco enlists the help of newspaperman Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), and they search for the killer’s identity. Things get convoluted fast, because the plot involves, among other things, cutting-edge genetic research and the use of a whip as a metaphor. Still, the plotting of The Cat o’ Nine Tails is no more ridiculous than that of the typical Hitchcock picture, except perhaps for the sheer number of McGuffins pulling the story down blind alleys.

          Logic is even more of a problem in Argento’s sophomore effort than it was in his debut, since the police in The Cat o’ Nine Tails seem both ineffective and weirdly tolerant of amateur detectives. Like Musante in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Franciscus cuts a handsome figure but offers little else to the proceedings, though Malden’s avuncular charm makes all of his scenes watchable. Argento’s apparent desire to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock gets a bit tiresome, as during a long scene involving poisoned milk, but Morricone saves the day with his offbeat score, all eerie wails and spidery syncopation. Furthermore, Argento comes through with a fun chase at the end as well as a colorful final death. So even though The Cat o’ Nine Tails doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, it’s the most entertaining installment of Argento’s so-called “Animal Trilogy.”

          Four Flies on Grey Velvet lacks the elegance of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the pulpy energy of The Cat o’ Nine Tails. Worse, Four Flies on Grey Velvet tacks in a grotesque direction by fetishizing violence with close-ups of foreign objects penetrating skin. It’s as if Argento, upon reaching maturity as a storyteller, suddenly forgot the lessons about understatement he’d learned from Hitchcock’s work. Anyway, Four Flies on Grey Velvet gets underway when rock-music drummer Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon) confronts a man he perceives as a stalker, then accidentally kills the man while another person photographs the incident. Blackmail ensues, so Roberto half-heartedly investigates with the assistance of artist friends and a PI. Meanwhile, Roberto navigates romances with two women. Four Flies on Grey Velvet is one of those befuddling thrillers in which the protagonist seems fearful of mortal danger in one scene, then seems untroubled in the next. Further muddying the viewing experience are brief attempts at comedy, such as a scene featuring Italian-cinema funnyman Bud Spencer. It’s hard to reconcile the lighthearted stuff with scenes of slow-motion mutilation, especially since the plot deteriorates into endless explanations of far-fetched motives sprinkled with cut-rate psychobabble.

          After making Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Argento took a break from the rough stuff and made an outright comedy, which flopped. Thereafter, he doubled down on gore and weirdness with Deep Red (1975) and Suspiria (1977). Exit the would-be Master of Suspense, enter the Master of Horror. While none of Argento’s early thrillers remotely approaches the quality of Hitchcock’s best work, all three are creepy and imaginative, with moments that would have made the master proud.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: GROOVY

The Cat o’ Nine Tails: GROOVY

Four Flies on Grey Velvet: FUNKY

Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)

          Essentially an ultraviolent cartoon, this Quentin Tarantino favorite exaggerates beloved tropes of martial-arts cinema to a ridiculous degree. The title character, for instance, is a blind teacher who travels feudal China on a vengeance mission, and his chosen weapon is the “flying guillotine.” Picture a hatbox that accordions out when snapped into place atop a target’s head. The blind teacher launches the weapon from long distances, and then yanks the chain that’s attached to the device in order to spring the trap. The victim is decapitated instantly, with the head delivered to the blind teacher when he retracts the chain. All patently impossible, of course, but that’s the spirit of this movie. Master of the Flying Guillotine is entertaining in a manic and perverse sort of way, but it’s not to be taken seriously.
          Interestingly, Master of the Flying Guillotine is the rare sequel that has achieved more notoriety than the original film from which it was derived. That would be One Armed Boxer (1971), released in the U.S. in 1973 as The Chinese Professionals. Both pictures star and were written and directed by Taiwan’s Jimmy Wang Yu. In the first picture, a character known as One-Armed Boxer (Yu) killed disciples of a martial-arts school. In Master of the Flying Guillotine, the disciples’ teacher, Sheng Wu Chi (Kam Kong), seeks payback. Learning of a national martial-arts competition, Sheng travels to the site of the contest and systematically kills every one-armed martial artist he encounters until squaring off with One-Armed Boxer during the epic finale. As should be obvious, the plot is so thin it can barely sustain an entire movie, and, sure enough, Master of the Flying Guillotine loses the thread partway through.

          A good 30 minutes of the picture depict the competition, with one outlandish matchup after another, while the narrative treads water. Yet this storytelling gambit sorta-kinda works, simply because the battle scenes are outrageous. One fighter magically extends his forearms until they’re as long as spears. A brawl takes place with the combatants balancing on poles that rise above a field of sharp metal blades, so the first guy to fall gets perforated. In an unrelated but similarly silly scene, One-Armed Boxer impresses the students at a martial-arts academy by demonstrating his ability to climb walls and walk on ceilings, as if he’s Spider-Man. Perhaps the loopiest moment in Master of the Flying Guillotine is the scene where Sheng detects a one-armed man in a bar, unleashes his weapon, and lops off the schmuck’s head—without triggering more than a few raised eyebrows from onlookers.

Master of the Flying Guillotine: FUNKY