Thumb Tripping (1972)

An awful picture that only comes alive when it succumbs to lurid extremes, Thumb Tripping is a road movie in which neither the travelers nor the journey is interesting. Michael Burns plays Gary, a sweet-natured college kid who drops out of mainstream society for a summer of hitchhiking in Northern California and thereabouts. He soon hooks up with Shay (Meg Foster), a spaced-out hippie chick, but for the first 20-ish minutes of the movie, nothing happens. Gary and Shay mill around small towns including Carmel, occasionally getting hassled by the man, and they camp in a seaside cave with other hippies. (There’s literally a five-minute scene in the cave during which the four characters discuss the virtues of soup as a dietary staple.) Then the movie shifts to a series of episodes revolving around the weird people who give Gary and Shay rides. The best sequence features Bruce Dern as Smitty, a quasi-psychopath who threatens the kids with a knife; although Dern is typecast as a violent nutter, he’s so vital he almost makes the movie seem purposeful. Almost. Michael Conrad, later of Hill Street Blues fame, plays a horny trucker eager to get into Shay’s pants, and the final major characters are Jack (Burke Byrnes) and Lynn (Marianna Hill), hard-partying drunks who lead the heroes through high junks such as bar-hopping and skinny-dipping. Thumb Tripping is beyond pointless, not only because the story never goes anywhere, but also because the lead characters are twits. Gary’s an inactive cipher who simply watches things happen, except when he’s demonstrating squaresville hang-ups, and Shay is such a reckless wastoid that it’s bizarre we never see her drop acid. As for the acting, Burns is fine in a nothing role, Foster’s icy-blue eyes are as striking as ever, Conrad is effectively sleazy, and Byrnes and Hill are awful—hyper and screechy from their first frames to their last. Worst of all, the movie lacks a point of view: It’s neither a celebration of the counterculture lifestyle nor a condemnation, and since Gary’s just a visitor in this world, it’s not a docudrama, either.

Thumb Tripping: LAME

High Plains Drifter (1973)

          After making a strong directorial debut with 1971’s Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood decided to put his stamp on the genre that originally made him famous as an actor: the Western. Yet instead of simply churning out a moralistic shoot-’em-up in the John Wayne mold, Eastwood made High Plains Drifter, a creepy revenge tale so heavily allegorical it might actually be a ghost story. Considering this was only his second directing job, Eastwood’s artistic ambition is impressive. Yet while the movie is brisk, nasty, and stylish, it has major narrative weaknesses. One big problem is that the protagonist is a cipher—we never learn the character’s background, name, or true motivation—and another is the way the movie fails to clarify whether onscreen events are happening in “reality” or taking place in a supernatural netherworld. Eastwood gets points for attacking heavy themes, but his inability to bring everything together is disappointing.

          The story begins when a character referred to as the Stranger (Eastwood) rides into the lakeside frontier town of Lago. He gets into a hassle with a group of thugs, and then kills all of them with his frightening gunplay. Impressed, the townspeople ask the Stranger to plan an ambush: Three murderers who have just been released from prison are pledged to ravage Lago, so the townspeople are terrified. Courtesy of (confusing) exposition and flashbacks, we learn that some time ago, the murderers slaughtered Lago’s do-gooder sheriff while the townspeople watched—and that the tragedy stemmed from a conspiracy related to the mine from which the town derives its livelihood. Furthermore, Eastwood’s character may or may not actually be the sheriff’s reincarnation and/or spirit—never mind the fact that no one recognizes him.

          Anyway, the Stranger is given carte-blanche throughout Lago, so he installs a local dwarf (Billy Curtis) as the new mayor/sheriff, seizes a local tramp (Marianna Hill) as his personal concubine, and makes the townspeople paint all of Lago’s buildings red so the town looks like a vision of hell. This sets the stage for a showdown with the murderers, although the townspeople start to wonder if their “savior” is worse than the killers he’s been hired to fight.

          The gist of the piece is painfully obvious right from the beginning—the people of Lago are being punished for their sins—but the script, by Ernest Tidyman, muddies the narrative waters. The Stranger is a bloodthirsty, crude, sarcastic outlaw capable of violent sexual assaults, so it’s not as if he’s the personification of justice. Therefore, the movie has virtually no morality on display, making it difficult to care what happens to any of the film’s characters. And since the movie doesn’t compensate for this deficit by providing a tidy parable, what’s the point? Still, High Plains Drifter looks great, especially during the moody nighttime scenes, and Eastwood surrounds himself with interesting faces. Curtis stands out as the town’s perverse voice of conscience, and Eastwood favorite Geoffrey Lewis is effectively odious as the leader of the murderers.

High Plains Drifter: FUNKY

Death at Love House (1976)

Although it suffers from the rudimentary execution that doomed most ’70s TV movies to oblivion after their initial broadcasts, Death at Love House has such a kicky story that some enterprising soul could probably put together a worthwhile remake. Plus, the movie stars a pair of comfortingly familiar actors. Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner, respectively of Charlie’s Angels and Hart to Hart fame, play authors who take up occupancy in a gloomy Hollywood mansion while researching a book about long-dead ’30s actress Lorna Love, the mansion’s onetime owner. Joel (Wagner) is the son of Lorna’s lover, so when paranormal events suggest that Lorna’s spirit is roaming the grounds of the mansion, Joel begins to wonder if he’s being courted by a ghost. As happens in this sort of story, Joel starts to reciprocate the attraction by becoming obsessed with a giant portrait of Lorna. He also fantasizes about her in dream sequences featuring beautiful ’60s/’70s starlet Marianna Hill as the glamorous Lorna. This is all enjoyably undemanding stuff, right down to the obligatory subplot involving a creepy old caretaker (Sylvia Sidney) who serves the otherworldly whims of her dearly departed mistress. The idea of blending old-Hollywood glamour with the ’70s supernatural fad was novel, whether the credit goes to writer James Barnett or producer Hal Sitowitz, but a limp screenplay and perfunctory acting prevent the piece from realizing its potential. So, even though Jackson summons a smidgen more gravitas than the ever-wooden Wagner (and even though Hill is so sexy it’s easy to believe she can beguile from beyond the grave), it’s only a matter of time before Death at Love House tumbles into bad-movie chaos during the conclusion. Still, there are worse ways to spend 74 minutes (though not many) and the basic concept is memorable.

Death at Love House: FUNKY

The Astral Factor (1976)

So drab it sat on a shelf for nearly 10 years after being completed, The Astral Factor is a thriller about an imprisoned murderer who masters paranormal skills including astral projection and invisibility. Armed with these new abilities, he escapes jail and begins killing women who testified against him. Despite this colorful premise, The Astral Factor offers nothing of interest except for the presence of attractive B-level actresses. The acting is lifeless, the direction is amateurish, and the story is as dull as it is insipid. Robert Foxworth tries to add a little swagger to his leading role as the cop tasked with tracking down the paranormal psycho, but since the climax of the picture involves him shooting an M-16 at the empty space where he imagines the unseen murderer to be, it’s not as if Foxworth ever really had the option of retaining his dignity. Playing the killer, Frank Ashmore is so bland he barely exists onscreen; Ashmore spends most of his time scowling in way that makes him seem constipated instead of homicidal. The various lovelies decorating the movie fare even worse. Marianna Hill appears for one scene as a shrewish actress, while Stefanie Powers appears at regular intervals as Foxworth’s bimbo girlfriend. (Powers’ character refers to herself in the third person, so she makes perky announcements like, “And now, Candy is gonna cook you a birthday dinner!”) Playing the largest female role, a robotic Elke Sommer struts around in bikinis and other revealing outfits during her “performance” as a sexed-up eyewitness. It’s all a tease, however, because The Astral Factor lacks genuine titillation in the same way it lacks genuine suspense. When The Astral Factor was finally released in the mid-’80s—going straight to video, of course—it was retitled The Invisible Strangler. By any name, it’s junk.

The Astral Factor: SQUARE

The Baby (1973)

          One of the most perverse low-budget thrillers of the early ’70s (and that’s saying a lot), The Baby concerns a social worker who becomes fascinated with a mentally challenged adult male whose family treats him like a baby, as in dressing him in diapers and sleeping him in a crib. Although the picture was marketed as a horror flick, it’s really more of a twisted psychological thriller leading up to a whopper of a twist ending: While it features grisly scenes and a sizable body count, the focus is on disturbing, rather than shocking, the audience. The sight of “Baby,” a grown man crawling on all fours and communicating through goo-goo-ga-ga gibberish, is consistently unsettling, and actor David Manzy gets points for his committed performance.

          Even creepier are Baby’s relatives, from his blowsy, frequently inebriated mother (Ruth Roman) to his sexed-up adult sisters, Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Judith (Beatrice Manley). As if the bit when Germaine slips into Baby’s crib for an incestuous liaison isn’t icky enough, Hill plays her entire role with outrageously teased manes of blonde hair, making her seem as weird as her infantilized sibling. Roman, with her throaty voice and caked-on cosmetics, works the estrogen-deficient vibe that characterized Shelley Winters’ roles around this period, so she’s a horror show all on her own, scheming to keep the welfare checks coming by arresting her son’s development.

          Adding a whole different level of crazy to the mix is the social worker, Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer). A glassy-eyed enigma who lives in a grim household with her mother-in-law and grieves for the husband she recently lost in an accident, Ann is a basket case in no shape to deal with something as troubling as Baby’s home life, yet she gloms onto Baby relentlessly. In their crude way, the filmmakers do a good job of implying that Ann’s interest in Baby is deviant until revealing a secret about her during the over-the-top climax.

          Director Ted Post, who mostly made action pictures and Westerns, doesn’t have the demented flair The Baby needs, which leads to scenes that feel drab and workmanlike. Plus, it should go without saying that the script by Abe Polsky is so gonzo that credibility was never going to be part of the equation. Still, the plot gets kickier as the picture progresses: The final stretch, in which Ann kidnaps Baby and provokes a final confrontation with his bizarre clan, layers one grotesque image upon another. Furthermore, because The Baby is more competently made than most out-there fright flicks of the same era, there’s a veneer of realism coating the picture’s truly insane plot.

The Baby: FREAKY

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Married filmmakers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were awfully lucky they met George Lucas while all three were film students at USC, because outside of their work as writers on Lucas’ productions American Graffiti (1973) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the Huyck-Katz filmography is filled with flops and oddities. One example: their misbegotten horror flick Messiah of Evil. Huyck’s directorial debut, which he and Katz co-wrote, includes a handful of quasi-disturbing images, but it’s so amateurishly assembled and conceptually cuckoo that it’s impossible to take seriously. The story begins when a pretty young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill) travels to the tiny beach community of Point Dume, California, where her missing father was last seen. Just before reaching town, she encounters a strange albino at a gas station, and after she leaves the gas station, we see the albino has a truckload of corpses. Clearly, something’s rotten in Point Dume. Upon arrival, Arletty gets the brush-off from spooked locals, but in true bad-horror-movie fashion, she ignores obvious cues to Get the Hell Out. Soon, Arletty gets embroiled with a swinger named Thom (Michael Greer), who travels with two compliant hotties (played by Joy Bang and Anitra Ford). Then, after Thom’s girlfriends meet grisly fates, the incredibly dim Arletty and Thom finally realize Point Dume is infested with flesh-eating creatures that seem like hybrids of vampires and zombies. All of this grinds toward a bloody climax, and even though the movie briefly flashes back one century to explain the source of Point Dume’s problems, the story never makes much sense. Some bits are fun, like the sequence of Bang’s character getting stalked in a theater (which is modeled after a key scene in The Birds), and some of the images are icky, like the moment when Hill discovers a spider crawling in her mouth, but none of it adds up to anything interesting. Furthermore, the acting is terrible, with second-rate character players Elisha Cook Jr. and Royal Dano embarrassing themselves in bit parts while Hill, though gorgeous as always, delivers an inept leading performance.

Messiah of Evil: LAME

The Traveling Executioner (1970)

          The New Hollywood era was probably the only time The Traveling Executioner could have been made by a major studio, because the film is so dark and weird that at any other point in history, studios would have shunned the project like it was infected with a contagious disease. The movie is about exactly what the title suggests, an entrepreneur who owns an electric chair and shuttles between various Southern jails sending condemned killers to their final destinations. Imaginatively written by one Garrie Bateson (whose only other credits are a pair of early-’70s TV episodes), the picture doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its outlandish premise, but if only for its spectacular opening and closing scenes, it’s worth a look for adventurous viewers.

          Stacy Keach plays the wonderfully named Jonas Candide, a executioner working the Southern U.S. jail circuit in 1918. He’s perfected a colorful routine: As he straps terrified convicts into his chair, which he calls “Reliable” and treats as tenderly as a woman, he gives a spellbinding speech about how one of the men he killed contacted him through a medium and described “the fields of ambrosia” to which he was delivered after death. One warden chides Jonas for making the afterlife sound so appealing that guards are ready to line up for execution after hearing Jonas’ spiel.

          Our hero’s lifestyle gets derailed when he meets Gundred Herzallerliebst (Marianna Hill), the first woman scheduled for a rendezvous with Reliable. Gundred is persistent and slick, working the court system to obtain a series of stays on her execution, and she’s also a beauty willing to use her formidable wiles. Once Gundred gets Jonas in her sights, he’s a goner. She seduces him into feigning maintenance problems with Reliable, and then convinces him to bust her out of prison.

          The movie goes off-track at this point, getting lost in subplots about Jonas raising money for an elaborate breakout scheme, and the movie also loses its tonal focus; composer Jerry Goldsmith scores scenes in the middle of the picture like high comedy, as if the sequence of Jonas establishing a temporary brothel inside a prison is the height of hilarity. This discursion into ineffective black comedy is a shame, because the really interesting potential of the movie resides in elements like Jonas’ training of an apprentice (Bud Cort) and Jonas’ complex friendship with an amiable warden (M. Emmet Walsh). More damningly, the movie lets Jonas’ dynamic with Gundred slip into the cliché of black widow snaring a man with sex, when something more emotional would have had greater impact.

          Still, Keach is on fire throughout the movie, showing off his physical grace and his silky vocal delivery; the scene of him trying to sweet-talk a bank manager into providing a loan by pandering to the man’s patriotism is terrific. Even better, the dark turn the movie takes in its last act is simultaneously poetic and tragic, so by the end of the picture, Jonas’ peculiar identity as an evangelist for the afterlife has returned to the fore. This strange little picture also looks great, with journeyman director Jack Smight and veteran cinematographer Philip Lathrop assembling a series of stark widescreen frames that alternate between the shadowy spaces of prisons and dusty panoramas that make the picture feel like a deranged Western. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Traveling Executioner: FREAKY

The Last Porno Flick (1974)

          If the making of an adult movie strikes you as unlikely subject matter for a PG-rated comedy, then you’ve realized one of the many reasons why The Last Porno Flick isn’t just unwatchably dull, but also inherently pointless. A cheaply made “comedy” about two cab drivers who decide that producing a skin flick will make them rich, this dreary movie is too tame to attempt the raunchy humor its premise suggests, and too sleazy to provide the family-friendly entertainment its rating promises. Really, what audience could there possibly be for a movie about porn without any salacious content? Obviously, the filmmakers didn’t set out to make an unfunny comedy, but if they had any illusions of reaching a broader audience by making vanilla jokes about the porn industry, then they were as deluded as their lead characters, because the jokes are so lame that they barely merit a reaction on first mention, then go on endlessly as the filmmakers beat one dead horse after another.

          For instance, cab driver Tony (Frank Calcanini) tricks his ultra-religious mother-in-law, Mama Theresa (Carmen Zapata), into investing by telling her he’s making a religious movie instead of smut. Soon afterward, Mama Theresa and a gaggle of her equally devout friends go to church, where they chat reverently about Tony’s movie project while the pastor delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon against pornography. Yawn. Every character in this movie is a demeaning cliché, from the bimbo actress who stars in the porn movie because she’s told it has “redeeming social values” to the queeny camera assistant who flits around the set.

          The acting is across-the-board terrible, with Tom Signorelli’s one-note stoner routine as the porno flick’s hippie-dippie director the only quasi-amusing performance. Although familiar actors like Marianna Hill (Medium Cool) and Michael Pataki (Rocky IV) appear in the cast, they deliver work as uninspired as the material. So in short, The Last Porno Flick lacks laughs, sex, and smarts, making it an even greater waste of film than the never-seen movie-within-the-movie, The Temptations of Synthia—because at least The Temptations of Synthia presumably delivers the goods.

The Last Porno Flick: SQUARE

El Condor (1970)

Excitement is in short supply throughout most of El Condor, a lurid south-of-the-border adventure costarring former NFL star Jim Brown and spaghetti-Western guy Lee Van Cleef. Apparently the fact that Brown’s modern persona was preposterously anachronistic in his previous Western, 100 Rifles (1969), wasn’t enough to deter producers from pairing him with Van Cleef, whose squinty toughness made him seem right at home in a long string of low-budget oaters. But given the loopy narrative of El Condor, credibility obviously wasn’t a priority. In the story, an escaped convict (Brown) and a crusty prospector (Van Cleef) persuade a band of Apache Indians to storm a castle in 19th-century Mexico, ostensibly for revolutionary purposes but really because the Anglos want to steal gold that’s hidden inside the castle. The buildup to the siege is quite dreary, because scenes establishing the buddy-movie dynamic include such unpleasant vignettes as a “comedy” bit of the heroes getting tarred and feathered. But the actual siege, which takes up the last half-hour of the movie, is trashy fun—shots of the invaders using handheld metal claws to climb the outer walls of the castle, à la Spider-Man, are awfully cool. The siege also includes a show-stopping scene with lovely ’60s/’70s starlet Marianna Hill, who holds an entire army in her thrall by disrobing in full view of the entire castle. B-movie icon Larry Cohen was one of the screenwriters, so his style of cheerful sensationalism is prevalent throughout the picture, and director John Guillermin contributes his usual elegant camerawork. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

El Condor: FUNKY