The Candy Tangerine Man (1975)

          The kitschy appeal of this low-budget flick about pimps and gangsters in mid-’70s Los Angeles can be summarized by a line of dialogue from a supporting character: “I can’t sell you no chick, man—that just ain’t croquet! Shee-it!” That torrent of jive encapsulates the film’s questionable portrayal of African-American culture, its casual objectification of women, and its queasy way of finding humor in the gutter of human exploitation. Essentially a low-rent rehash of the cult-favorite pimp movie The Mack (1973), producer-director Matt Cimber’s The Candy Tangerine Man is unrelentingly derivative, silly, and tacky, but it has a certain so-bad-it’s-good magnetism. After all, it’s hard to truly hate a thriller in which the hero’s classic 1930s car is tricked out with hidden machine-gun turrets.

          The picture opens with scenes showing how “Baron” (John Daniels) runs his empire on Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip. He intimidates his girls into meeting their quota of tricks per night, he easily defeats thugs who try to rip him off, and he repels gangsters seeking to muscle in on his territory. All the while, he wears natty suits, leather gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat, kicking ass (and peddling ass) in high style. Yet every so often, “Baron” retreats to the suburbs and becomes Ron Lewis, whose wife and kids think a job as a traveling salesman is what keeps him away from home so much. This revelation doesn’t exactly meet the minimum standard for imbuing a character with dimensionality, but at least it’s something. Most of the picture comprises the protagonist’s battles with other pimps and gangsters, as well as the cops who want to bust him, and eventually his long list of enemies expands to include a traitorous hooker. In throwing so many adversaries at the protagonist, however, the filmmakers dilute narrative focus, so The Candy Tangerine Man becomes a blur of “Baron” fighting this enemy and that enemy even as he tries, often in vain, to keep his girls safe. (In the picture’s most gruesome scene, a crook uses a knife to cut the breasts off a hooker.)

          The acting is generally rotten, the cinematography is unattractive, the editing is jumpy, and the production values betray the project’s meager resources. Nonetheless, sleazy energy infuses The Candy Tangerine Man, as when some poor slob gets his hand shoved into a kitchen-sink garbage disposal. (The same gag was employed, much more memorably, in the 1977 William Devane thriller Rolling Thunder.) It’s also worth noting that the picture has persuasive atmosphere thanks to extensive location photography, and, according to the opening credits, supporting performances by “the actual ‘hookers’ and ‘blades’ of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.”

The Candy Tangerine Man: FUNKY

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

          First things first: Ignore the advertising materials and the title of this film, which is not in any way fantastic or supernatural. Quite to the contrary, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is the dark and sad story of a woman pushed to violence by a lifetime of mental illness and sexual abuse. While writer Robert Thom and director Matt Cimber deliver so many exploitation elements that their movie is more than a little bit sleazy, they also supply a grim character study based on a rational bit of cause-and-effect psychological theorizing. It’s not as if they break new ground, since every movie of this type lives in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it’s not as if they delve so deeply and thoughtfully into the nature of killing and sexual dysfunction that The Witch Who Came from the Sea overcomes its grindhouse nature. Topless shots and gory murder scenes abound. Nonetheless, the movie has more substance than one might expect.

          Set at various spots along the Los Angeles coast, primarily a sketchy neighborhood in Venice Beach, the picture stars lanky Millie Perkins as Molly, a twisted young woman preoccupied with her long-lost father. According to her, he was a bold sea captain and he might someday return. According to Molly’s older sister, however, Daddy was an abusive, drunken louse who did the world a favor by disappearing and presumably dying. When she’s not babysitting her nephews or working in a bar, Molly picks up men. Once she’s alone with them, she engages in S&M while drifting in and out of hallucinations/memories of being molested by her father when she was younger. Molly acts out her repressed rage by killing her lovers. As the body count rises, cops discover clues leading them to Molly.

         The film’s storytelling is highly problematic on two levels. Firstly, Cimber’s B-movie excesses are so distracting as to be unintentionally campy, as when he trains his camera on the bulging crotches of bodybuilders while Molly watches dudes exercise on Venice’s famous Muscle Beach. Secondly, the way that Cimber weaves in and out of hallucinations makes it difficult to track what’s really happening. Putting the audience inside the leading character’s head is one thing, but creating unhelpful narrative confusion is another. Yet every so often, the filmmakers lock into something interestingly weird, like the supporting character of a tattoo artist named “Jack Dracula.” Plus, the murder vignettes and sexual-abuse flashbacks are genuinely unpleasant to watch. In sum, it’s fair to say there’s a real movie hiding under the grotesque surface of The Witch Who Came from the Sea, but that real movie is so mediocre that most viewers won’t find it worth the trouble of working their way past the tacky stuff. 

The Witch Who Came from the Sea: FUNKY