Mission to Glory: A True Story (1977)

          Bad news first—this low-budget biopic about a 17th-century Jesuit missionary who served a parish spreading from northwestern Mexico to southern Arizona and Baja California assumes the moral certainty of his crusade, meaning that all the natives whom the leading character encounters are depicted as savages in desperate need of Christian salvation. Worse, Mission to Glory: A True Story suffers from atrocious storytelling by writer-director Ken Kennedy, who employs clunky blocking and inert camerawork while steering a cast heavy with Hollywood C-listers through their paces. So in addition to being culturally dubious, the film is about as cinematically lifeless as anything you’ll ever encounter. And now the good news—for all of its faults, Mission to Glory: A True Story conveys an interesting narrative, albeit one very likely exaggerated and twisted from the historical events depicted onscreen. Surely it must have taken a unique individual to endure craven political machinations, internal strife among indigenous populations, and near-constant physical danger while trying to better the lives of others. Taken as a tribute to the man whom Kennedy imagines the real Father Kino might have been, the picture feels almost noble.

          According to voiceover at the beginning of the picture, Father Kino spent more than two decades building 19 ranches and 24 missions, suggesting he was spectacularly effective at spreading the gospel while traveling across desert terrain on horseback. At various times Kino clashes with the church, hostile tribes, and violent Spanish soldiers, meeting all adversaries with humility and resolve. Does the hagiographic portrayal stretch credulity? Of course. And does the parade of familiar character actors (Michal Ansara, Aldo Ray, Cesar Romero) add to the overall sense of fakery? Sure. (Playing the leading role, in an inconsequential performance, is 1950s Hollywood stud Richard Egan, quite a bit past his prime.) Yet Mission to Glory has a few vivid-ish moments amid the hokey music, one-dimensional characterizations, and predictable plot twists. Ricardo Montalban, of all people, gives the film’s best performance, an entertaining cameo as a savvy military official. Presumably persons of faith were and are the target audience for this piece, meaning they’re the folks most likely to overlook the picture’s massive shortcomings. For others, Mission to Glory might work best as well-meaning kitsch.

Mission to Glory: A True Story: FUNKY

Dear Dead Delilah (1972)

          Southern Gothic horror made on the cheap, Dear Dead Delilah is just the movie for people who think Tennessee Williams-style stories would benefit from the addition of sleazy grindhouse violence. Like a Williams story, the picture tracks the adventures of a dysfunctional clan, but unlike a Williams story, the source of familial conflict isn’t psychosexual tension but rather garden-variety greed. The central notion is that a dying matriarch taunts her craven relatives by challenging them to find $600,000 buried somewhere on a sprawling estate. Since whoever finds the money gets to keep it all, the fact that someone begins murdering family members seems perfectly normal to everyone involved, hence their refusal to contact authorities. (It’s a schlocky horror flick—just go with it.) The X factor is newly hired housekeeper Luddy (Patricia Carmichael), a disturbed woman recently released from the institution where she lived for many years after murdering her mother. Is Luddy the killer? Or just another victim caught in the matriarch’s cruel game? Whether you care about the answers to those questions probably depends on your tolerance for a piquant mixture of hammy overacting and ridiculous gore.

          The picture begins with a prologue in which Luddy kills her mom, then picks up with Luddy’s release. She happens upon folks headed to the home of Delilah (Agnes Moorhead), a bitchy invalid who hires Luddy as a caretaker. Delilah loves tormenting her wicked relatives, including drug-addicted Alonzo (Dennis Patrick) and money-hungry Morgan (Michael Ansara). Also in the mix is Delilah’s avuncular lawyer, Roy (Will Geer). Eventually, the blood and body parts start flying, with poor Luddy caught in the middle—or not.

          Given the campy storyline and ugly production values, the appeal here mostly stems from the acting. Moorehead, never averse to cartoonish flamboyance, devours the scenery, while Ansara and Patrick keep pace with florid performances. At times, Dear Dead Delilah gets so emphatic as to seem like a TV soap opera, complete with characters walking meaningfully to the foreground for long monologues or spewing lines like this one: “Don’t talk to me that way, you miserable little opportunist!” Like her character, Carmichael is the element that seems out of place; whereas the other players look normal, she wears such deep rings around her eyes that she looks as if she’s half-raccoon. While Dear Dead Delilah is quite dumb, it’s not impossible to zone out during the drab scenes and mindlessly groove on moments charged with hammy performances and Grand Guignol excess.

Dear Dead Delilah: FUNKY

The Doll Squad (1973)

Cheap, dull, and silly, this would-be espionage thriller introduces an all-female commando group of U.S. secret agents, tasked with infiltrating the remote fortress of a former American spy who plans to sell a synthesized version of the bubonic plague to international criminals. (As with James Bond movies, a clear influence on this laughable endeavor, it’s better not to waste too much energy scrutinizing the practicality of the villain’s scheme.) Produced and directed by one Ted V. Mikels, The Doll Squad is about as glamorous-looking—and as well-acted—as a drivers’-ed instructional movie. Michael Ansara, a deep-voiced character actor known for his roles in the original Star Trek series and such ’70s genre fare as The Manitou (1978), is the closest thing to a recognizable name in The Doll Squad. He plays the bad guy, badly. Ansara was perfectly capable of interesting and even memorable work in the right context, so the fact that even he was defeated by the suffocating crappiness of The Doll Squad says volumes about the picture’s substandard approach to everything—action, cinematography, directing, editing, writing. (The so-called “special effects” are particularly crude, with bright flashes superimposed on the screen whenever the filmmakers wish to suggest an explosion.) The Doll Squad isn’t a complete disaster, because the storyline basically makes sense (in a cliché-ridden way), and because some viewers might find distraction in the ample curves of starlets including Francine York, who plays the lead “doll,” and Tura Santana (a veteran of many Russ Meyer productions). That said, The Doll Squad is an exploitation movie without much exploitation, since the titular ladies never disrobe past bikinis—except for Santana, who does a quick bump-and-grind in a strip club at one point. The shootouts deliver low thrills, too, with squibs aplenty popping as the squad mows down dozens of enemy soldiers—who, in the nature of these sorts of movies, stand around waiting to get shot except when the plot requires them to suddenly become formidable. The whole enterprise is scored with atrocious music that sounds like a hybrid of porn tunes and the sort of frenetic, horn-driven jams that used to run beneath Hanna Barbera’s cheaply made superhero cartoons. Oh, and the clothes and hairstyles? Unimaginably bad, even for the ’70s.

The Doll Squad: LAME

Mohammad, Messenger of God (1977)

          Also known as The Message, this historical epic about the creation of Islam is handsomely mounted but of little interest to anyone except true believers—while it’s not a bad film, per se, it’s so reverent that it provides far more detail than casual viewers might want, and far less insight than serious viewers would need to justify the investment of three hours. Mohammad, Messenger of God also has one of the most unusual storytelling problems in the history of religious cinema: Out of respect for a Muslim custom, Mohammad is never shown onscreen. As a result, Mohammad, Messenger of God is a biopic about a person we neither hear nor see. Thanks to producer-director Moustapha Akkad’s resourceful approach, this isn’t a fatal storytelling flaw—Akkad uses narration and scenes of characters addressing the unseen Mohammad to suggest the prophet’s presence. Yet the inability to depict the character around whom the story revolves raises legitimate questions about why Mohammad, Messenger of God is so long.

          In any event, this is a good-looking movie with impressive production values, and composer Maurice Jarre contributes a stirring score in the vein of the music he composed for another desert epic, Laurence of Arabia (1962). Set six centuries after Christ’s death, the movie begins with the illiterate Mohammad emerging from a spiritual retreat in the mountains outside Mecca. He returns to town having received a message from God, who has imbued Mohammad with the ability to deliver prophecies. Because Mecca is a major trading hub in which the worship of hundreds of gods is practiced, Mohammad’s message threatens powerful people including tribal leader Abu-Sofyan (Michael Ansara). Meanwhile, Mohammad gains charismatic supporters, including his uncle, Hamza (Anthony Quinn). For the first hour of the picture, Mohammad’s following increases even as the powers-that-be escalate their violent opposition to his teachings. Eventually, Mohammad leads his people on a 250-mile pilgrimage to find religious sanctuary until another message from God compels the group to reclaim Mecca.

          Although Mohammad, Messenger of God was clearly a labor of love for Akkad, the picture suffers from problems that often plague sincere religious movies. Actors don’t so much inhabit roles as pose in ornate period dress while reciting stilted dialogue that’s written in a faux-classical style. So, while some scenes are powerful, notably the willing conversion of a black slave to Islam despite great personal risk, the film is more educational in nature than entertaining. It’s also awkward that Quinn has top billing, even though he only appears (fleetingly) during the middle hour of the picture. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Ansara, whose sonorous speaking voice suits the role of a regal leader, and by Damien Thomas, who tries to imbue his characterization of Mohammad’s adopted son Zayd with sensitivity.

          Questions of whether Mohammad, Messenger of God accurately depicts events or fairly characterizes the nature of the Islamic faith are for others to explore, though it’s perhaps unsurprising that the U.S. release of the film sparked controversy. The fact that Lybian dictator Muammar Gaddafi bankrolled the film did not curry much favor in America, and a bloody siege on three buildings in Washington, D.C., by radicals who, among other things, demanded the destruction of Akkad’s movie further tainted the picture’s debut. The movie enjoyed a much warmer reception internationally, both in this English-language version and in an Arabic-language version that Akkad shot simultaneously.

Mohammad, Messenger of God: FUNKY

The Manitou (1978)

          The supernatural horror flick The Manitou is about as gonzo as mainstream cinema gets. Featuring a demented concept taken to ridiculous extremes, this mesmerizing misfire combines demonic possession, Native American mythology, parallel dimensions, reproductive horror, sentient machinery, and probably a dozen other tropes of genre cinema, all wrapped up in a tasty package decorated with stilted acting, inane dialogue, and histrionic storytelling. There might be an interesting notion or two buried amid the melodramatic muck, but the beauty of something as strange as The Manitou is that redeeming values are beside the point; the movie’s spectacular awfulness offers a special kind of entertainment value.

          When the movie begins, Karen (Susan Strasberg) seeks medical help for a strange tumor growing out of her upper back. Physicians are astounded to discover that the tumor is actually a fetus. This revelation understandably concerns Karen’s on-again/off-again boyfriend, fake psychic Harry (Tony Curtis), who investigates Karen’s condition when medical science fails to provide an explanation. Eventually, Harry and a real psychic (Stella Stevens) dig up loopy scientist Dr. Snow (Burgess Meredith), who opines that the growth is a “manitou,” the reborn spirit of a Native American shaman.

          Told that one needs a shaman to fight a shaman, Harry treks to the Southwest and recruits John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) to serve as a kind of exorcist. John Singing Rock says he can’t battle the Manitou until the creature leaves Susan’s body, and the manitou’s birth scene is one of the most insane moments in all of ’70s cinema: A miniature muscleman crawls out of a giant sack attached to Strasberg’s spine and then plops onto the floor of a hospital room, panting like a placenta-drenched pervert. Soon, this child-sized monstrosity is lurking inside a force field created by John Singing Rock, plotting some sort of supernatural takeover (and breathing heavily some more). “To quote a hackneyed line,” John Singing Rock says at one point, “This is powerful medicine.” You said it, friend!

          As directed and co-written by genre-cinema stalwart William Girdler (Grizzly), The Manitou is arresting simply because of how far it goes down the bad-cinema rabbit hole. Plus, to be charitable, some of the film’s images are genuinely unsettling: There’s a great bit during a séance, for instance, when a human head rises up through a tabletop as if the tabletop were an oil slick rather than solid wood.

          The acting is, of course, terrible, because no one can be expected to do much with this material, but Curtis has a few entertainingly bitchy line readings even as he trudges through various declarations of the obvious. Syrian-born Ansara, who had a long career as a voice actor in addition to his onscreen work, makes the fatal mistake of playing his role straight, so his wooden performance offers an amusing counterpoint to Curtis’ desperate hamminess. The movie’s high point, relatively speaking, is the trippy finale, which features (and I’m not kidding) a naked Strasberg shooting laser beams of channeled machine energy at the muscled little person as they float in a star field, battling for the final fate of the universe. Powerful medicine, indeed.

The Manitou: FREAKY