Wonder Women (1973)

          Ignore the title’s allusion to a certain Amazon princess. Rather than being wholesome empowerment, this flick is a grungy and slightly insane thriller with aspects of horror and science fiction. The title refers to a squad of lethal babes who serve at the pleasure of their mad-scientist employer, also a woman. Judged by any rational criteria, Wonder Women is thoroughly rotten, thanks to an idiotic plot, an overabundance of boring chase scenes, and other shortcomings. Consumed as a straight shot of grindhouse weirdness, Wonder Women is quite something. Here’s an attempt at synopsizing the loopy storyline. In the Philippines, evil Dr. Tsu (Nancy Kwan) tasks her babe squad with kidnapping top athletes, including a popular jai alai player. Dr. Tsu harvests the athletes’ organs and sells them to rich old clients who want to reclaim their vitality. An insurance company holding a policy on the jai alai player hires ex-cop Mike Harber (Ross Hagen) to find the missing athlete. After several run-ins with Dr. Hsu’s lissome agents, Mike gets brought to the doctor’s lair, where she tries to seduce him with a session of “brain sex.” (More on that shortly.) Will our intrepid hero escape the honey trap and return the kidnapped athletes to their rightful places in the world’s stadiums? And what’s the deal with the long sequence taking place at a cockfight?

          Wonder Women is really two movies in one. The stuff with Mike conducting his investigation comprises a standard thrilla-in-Manila potboiler, all chase scenes and fist fights and shootouts. The stuff with Dr. Hsu, photographed exclusively on soundstages, is trippy—with all the brightly colored backgrounds and tinfoil production design, Dr. Hsu’s world seems like the same one occupied by those weird aliens in Godzilla movies. Dr. Hsu even has a dungeon filled with survivors from experiments in crossbreeding men and animals. (Shades of Dr. Moreau.) As if all that weren’t enough, Wonder Women also features catfights, dart guns, karate, nude underwater ballet, Sid Haig wearing a puffy shirt, and Vic Diaz—corpulent and sweaty, just the way you like him—driving a cab. And then there’s the brain-sex bit. In the movie’s wildest scene, Hagen and Kwan strap on helmets, sit next to each other, and moan and writhe uncontrollably while their cerebellums get carnal. It’s amazing they made it through the whole bit without laughing themselves silly. You won’t.

Wonder Women: FUNKY

The Woman Hunt (1972)

Boring, gruesome, mean-spirited, and sleazy, the grade-Z exploitation thriller The Woman Hunt is part of a long tradition of stories about people hunting other people for sport, only this time there’s an ugly element of misogyny added for spice. Yes, the title should be taken literally: The Woman Hunt is about repulsive dudes who get off on stalking and slaughtering pretty young ladies. Set in the Philippines and directed by prolific Filipino hack Eddie Romero, The Woman Hunt features frequent screen partners John Ashley and Sid Haig, alongside a number of relatively anonymous costars. Ashley and Haig play Tony and Silas, thugs who kidnap women for a rich psycho named Spyros (Eddie Garcia), and Spyros is the dude who arranges for wealthy customers to hunt the ladies whom Tony and Silas have obtained. (Abetting Tony and Silas is a third crook, played by Ken Metcalf.) Predictably, Tony has a crisis of conscience when he develops feelings for a woman he kidnapped, eventually turning against Spyros by helping several women escape. Thereafter, Spyros and his trigger-happy pals pursue the fugitives, so jungle-hunt action is intercut with drab scenes of friction among the fugitives. Every so often, the movie is punctuated with a gory kill or a nude scene, but even going so far as to call the acting and filmmaking inept would require giving the folks behind The Woman Hunt too much credit. Considering how much lurid spectacle is woven into the DNA of this movie’s premise, it’s a wonder that The Woman Hunt generates so little excitement. Making a movie this dull from an idea so shamelessly sensationalistic requires special gifts.

The Woman Hunt: LAME

Beyond Atlantis (1973)

Dull and stupid, this Philippines/U.S. coproduction is a fantasy-adventure story about mainland criminals who venture to a mysterious island populated by fish/human hybrids in order to plunder a cache of priceless pearls. Virtually nothing in the movie works. The principal makeup effect involves pasting fake-looking fish eyes over the faces of the actors playing hybrids. One of the would-be highlights involves a fellow falling into a pit full of crabs. Crabs? That’s the most menacing creature the filmmakers could muster? The hybrids are inexplicably led by two normal-looking characters, an old man and his daughter, and the daughter is a slinky bleach blonde with perfect grooming and makeup. Whatever. The cast features a pair of American actors who spent much of the ’70s making bad movies in the Philippines: John Ashley plays a scuba diver with a mercenary attitude, and Sid Haig plays the crook who discovers the whereabouts of the pearls. (Indestructible Filipino actor Vic Diaz appears in a small role, lending his usual cartoonish corpulence.) Playing the movie’s nominal leading role is John Wayne’s son, Patrick Wayne, whose career peaked a few years later when he starred in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and if Beyond Atlantis isn’t the nadir of Wayne’s screen career, it’s close. Although most of Beyond Atlantis is boring, fans of bad cinema might enjoy the last 20 minutes or so, which include an underwater catfight, a poorly staged shootout, and the ridiculously long funeral sequence for a key character. One can actually feel the filmmakers straining to fill the screen with any old thing that might flesh out the running time of this insipid schlockfest.

Beyond Atlantis: LAME

Black Mama, White Mama (1973)

          Judged by the low standards of the cinematic cycle to which it belongs, Black Mama, White Mama is fairly palatable, thanks to attractive starlets, brisk pacing, steady action, and a welcome sense of humor. However, the aforementioned cycle comprises a series of lurid women-in-prison movies that American International Pictures shot in the Philippines during the early ’70s, so Black Mama, White Mama is an inherently crude enterprise. Think incessant nudity, swearing, and violence—as well as the constant use of women as sex objects. None would ever argue that this genre represents a high point in human achievement.

          Black Mama, White Mama begins when new convicts including African-American hooker Lee (Pam Grier) and white revolutionary Karen (Margaret Markov) are delivered to a prison work farm in the wilds of the Filipino jungle. The women quickly catch the eye of a pair of female wardens, sadistic lesbians who are in a relationship but use convicts as playthings. Naturally, this plot development occasions a scene of a horny female prison guard masturbating while she looks through a peephole at showering convicts. Classy! After the usual scenes of catfights and torture, Karen and Lee escape. Unfortunately, they’re handcuffed together, Defiant Ones-style. Intrigue ensues as the women debate whether to rendezvous with Karen’s guerilla pals or Lee’s criminal chums. Meanwhile, pursuers include Ruben (Sid Haig), a flamboyant hoodlum who dresses like a cowboy, and Captain Cruz (Eddie Garcia), an ambitious policeman. The story also includes something about Lee having stolen $40,000 from a Filipino gangster named Vic (Vic Diaz), who sends bloodthirsty lackeys to chase the women.

          Cobbled together by several people (including Jonathan Demme), the story is hackneyed and laborious, but it’s really just a means to an end. As rendered onscreen by prolific Filipino director Eddie Romero, the narrative is merely the gas in the engine of a vehicle traveling at breakneck speed through episodes of bloodshed, nasty interpersonal conflict, and trashy sexualized content. (A typical scene involves Karen slipping off her panties and then placing them around the neck of a dog, thereby throwing pursuers “off her scent.”) Yet when compared to other movies of its sordid type, Black Mama, White Mama is positively restrained—and even periodically entertaining, especially when Haig fills the screen with his gonzo characterization.

Black Mama, White Mama: FUNKY

The Big Doll House (1971) & Women in Cages (1971) & The Big Bird Cage (1972)

          Overflowing with gratuitous nudity, sadistic violence, and various iterations of sexual abuse, this trio of babes-behind-bars pictures—which were filmed together in the Philippines and share many actors, but which do not comprise a continued narrative—is trashy in the worst way. The movies are also, surprisingly, quite boring. The first flick, The Big Doll House, sets the numbing tone. After sexy blonde Alcott (Roberta Collins) gets thrown into a primitive Filipino prison overseen by perverse warden Miss Dietrich (Christine Schmidtmer), Alcott runs into hassles with cellmates including tough-talking African-American Grear (Pam Grier). The movie features myriad ugly scenes of Alcott being fondled by a swarthy cook (played by B-movie staple Sid Haig), being tortured by the warden’s goons, and/or trudging through catfights with Grear. (The ladies’ climactic battle is fought in a puddle of mud, with the combatants wearing only panties and tank tops.) The slim narrative involves Alcott uniting her fellow inmates for an audacious escape, but the story is really just an excuse for generating scenes of women in demeaning situations. And while Collins, Grier, and their cronies are attractive, the movie is so crass that it’s hard to find much enjoyment in director Jack Hill’s tacky take on titillation. That said, blaxploitation fans may find The Big Doll House interesting simply because it features Grier’s first major role. Her acting is dodgy, but Grier is so committed that she even sings the theme song, an R&B thumper called “Long Time Woman.”

          The second picture in the cycle, Women in Cages, is a decidedly weird type of drive-in sludge. Scored with dirge-like music and featuring such a fragmented storyline that the movie feels more like a series of torture vignettes than a proper narrative, Women in Cages comprises 81 minutes of nearly unadulterated brutality. The gist of the piece is that a political prisoner (Jennifer Gan) gets tossed into jail and rallies her cellmates for an escape. The lovely Collins is back, in a florid supporting role as a heroin-addicted inmate tasked with murdering a fellow prisoner—her methods include loosing a snake into a cell, poisoning a sandwich, and tossing acid onto her intended victim. Grier switches to full-on villain mode, playing a psychotic matron who runs her own personal torture garden. Grier’s performance is bug-eyed and silly, but the actress participates in the movie’s best dialogue exchange: After one of Grier’s victims asks, “What hell did you crawl out of,” Grier replies, “Harlem!” Given the lack of a compelling storyline, it doesn’t really matter that leading lady Gan is inept; this one’s all about grooving on seedy textures.

          The best of these three movies, though it’s not saying much, is The Big Bird Cage, which benefits from an action-packed climax and lots of wink-wink jokes. This one stars icy beauty Anitra Ford as an American who sleeps with political figures for social advantage until a misunderstanding lands her in the slammer. Grier and Haig play revolutionaries who pursue the oddball idea of freeing inmates from prison and transforming them into fellow revolutionaries. Written and directed by The Big Doll House’s Jack Hill, who brought more pizzazz to this skeevy genre the second time around, The Big Bird Cage has several interesting gimmicks, such as the presence of a giant sugar mill in the prison yard; the mill is the “Big Bird Cage” of the title, because workers toil inside the towering structure. The picture also benefits from campy humor, usually involving Haig doing something outrageous. (At one point, he masquerades as a swishy homosexual.) Leading lady Ford has a beguilingly reserved quality—she’s the Faye Dunaway of grindhouse cinema—and Grier locks into a groove playing a gun-toting mama with a smart mouth. In fact, of the three pictures, The Big Bird Cage comes closest to delivering the full Pam Grier persona that blaxploitation fans know and love.

The Big Doll House: LAME

Women in Cages: FREAKY
The Big Bird Cage: FUNKY

Savage Sisters (1974)

          Narrative dissonance is often a hallmark of sloppily made grindhouse flicks, thanks to producers’ capricious melding of incompatible genre elements, but Savage Sisters is especially discombobulated. Part part heist movie, part military adventure, part prison picture, and part sexploitation, Savage Sisters has everything except coherence. The movie is strangely watchable simply because there’s no way to guess which direction the story might take in any given scene, but it’s not a satisfying viewing experience. However, the movie isn’t exactly traffic-accident horrible, either, since it sometimes seems as if director Eddie Romero and his collaborators are trying for intentional humor. So the best way to classify the movie’s appeal is to say that if watching semi-attractive women seduce and slaughter their way through South America while delivering lame one-liners sounds like fun to you, then you belong to Savage Sisters’ intended audience.

          The story, which is far too convoluted to describe in detail here, follows revolutionaries Mei Ling (Rosanna Ortiz), an Asian, and Jo Turner (Cheri Caffaro), a Nordic glamazon, as they battle an oppressive military regime represented by the comically preening Captain Morales (Eddie Garcia). When Morales’ men capture Jo and Mei, the women are entrusted to Lynn Jackson (Gloria Hendry), a black stripper-turned-warden who digs torturing people. Then, when the three women hear that an evil bandito named Malavel (Sid Haig) has purloined a briefcase filled with $1 million in U.S. currency, the multi-culti ladies join forces to bust out of jail and seek their fortune. Also thrown into the mix is an American hustler named W.P. Billingsley (John Ashley), who ends up becoming lovers with all three women. Oh, and lest we forget, there’s a scene in which a prison guard threatens to rape Jo with a giant wind-up dildo, a running gag involving a sidekick named Punjab who only speaks in grunts, and a “comedy” scene in which two men are buried neck deep in a beach just before high tide.

          Savage Sisters packs a whole lot of nonsense in to 86 fast-moving minutes, and the tone of the movie is all over the place—Haig plays all of his scenes so broadly that it seems as if he’s acting in a farce, while Caffaro and Hendry strut around like they’re in an action picture. And then there’s Ashley, the workaday feature and TV supporting player who also co-produced the movie. One can almost understand the vanity of Ashley wanting to repeatedly appear on camera while exercising, slipping into bed with women, and wearing bikini briefs, but, still, Ashley’s casting as a second-tier supporting schmuck represents a strange exercise in behind-the-camera power. Yet that’s the meager fascination something like Savage Sisters provides—every decision that went into making the movie seems so loopy that half the fun of watching the thing is imagining what went through the filmmakers’ heads during production. Okay, make that more than half the fun, because genuine audience enjoyment is not something Savage Sisters provides in abundance. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Savage Sisters: FREAKY

C.C. and Company (1970)

          So it’s the late ’60s and you’re Roger Smith, a former leading man now sidelined by various health problems but happily preoccupied with a new marriage to stage-and-screen sex kitten Ann-Margret. Your bride has entrusted you with the management of her career, and you already have a track record of producing (for instance, a coming-of-age feature with Jacqueline Bisset) and writing (including several episodes of the TV show on which you starred, 77 Sunset Strip). The next logical step is creating a vehicle for your titian-haired missus, right? Well, sort of. C.C. and Company is a showcase for Ann-Margret, to be sure, providing her with intense dramatic scenes and sexy peekaboo moments. But it’s a biker flick, and it’s also the first movie in which football star Joe Namath plays a leading role. So you’re Roger Smith, and your best plan for boosting your wife’s stardom is relegating her to a supporting role in the Joe Namath motorcycle picture that you’re writing and producing? Ours is not to judge, and it should be noted that as of this writing, Ann-Margret and Smith are still married after more than 40 years, so C.C. and Company must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

          And, indeed, though it’s awful in terms of dramatic credibility, C.C. and Company is enjoyable as a collection of glossy surfaces. The plot, no surprise, is pedestrian: Hog-riding outlaw C.C. Ryder (Namath) runs with a nasty gang until he falls for fashion writer Ann McCalley (Ann-Margret), but when C.C. tries to break from the gang for a new life with his lady, the gang’s leader, Moon (William Smith), kidnaps Ann to force a showdown. The movie’s visuals, courtesy of director Seymour Robbie and his team, are kicky and vivid—biker fights, fashion shows, romantic interludes, and so on. Namath’s couldn’t-give-a-shit attitude makes him watchable even though he can’t act, and Ann-Margret’s flamboyant vamping is a hoot. Naturally, her beauty is spotlighted at every opportunity, since Roger Smith knew what he was selling. Adding the X-factor that makes C.C. and Company a full-on guilty pleasure is biker-movie regular William Smith (no relation to the producer-director), as the villainous Moon. With his enormous biceps, handlebar moustache, and wicked line deliveries, he’s a great comic-book baddie, ably abetted by supporting thugs including fellow B-movie stalwart Sid Haig.

C.C. and Company: FUNKY

Foxy Brown (1974)

After scoring at the box office with Coffy (1973), writer-director Jack Hill and blaxploitation queen Pam Grier delivered more sexed-up crime drama with Foxy Brown, a nasty flick about a woman taking on the mob. Yet while Coffy has force and momentum, Foxy Brown gets mired in a murky storyline. It’s also much more unpleasant than the previous film, thanks to a gruesome sequence in which the heroine is bound, drugged, and repeatedly raped. The storyline gets off to a bad start, because it’s never clear what Foxy does for a living or how she came to know Michael (Terry Carter), her lawman boyfriend. Plus, how does Foxy balance her relationship with a cop and her tight bond with a drug-dealing sibling (Antonio Fargas)? For that matter, when the hell did she learn how to fly a plane? To cut Hill some slack, Foxy Brown apparently began life as a Coffy sequel, and the director was instructed to transform Foxy Brown into a stand-alone film so late in the game that he wasn’t able to properly reconfigure key elements. Notwithstanding these issues, Foxy Brown has built a huge cult audience over the years. Much of the appeal, of course, stems from Grier’s formidable physical presence. She looks fantastic, whether she’s glammed up in a silky wig and evening dress or down-and-dirty in a giant Afro and head-to-toe leather, and she’s a relentless killing machine. The moment when she coils a wire hanger into a claw and gouges out a scumbag’s eye is memorable, as is the bit when she introduces a thug to the business end of a plane’s propeller. Fargas is almost as entertaining as Grier, jive-talking through a campy performance, and Coffy costar Sid Haig shows up briefly to infuse the picture with a welcome burst of nutjob energy. Yet while some elements are watchable, the movie as a whole is distasteful, and the main villain is awful: Every scene featuring the startlingly amateurish Kathryn Loder, as conniving madam Miss Katherine, is excruciating.

Foxy Brown: FUNKY

Coffy (1973)

          Pam Grier’s status as the queen of blaxploitation movies was secured by her appearance in Coffy—even though she doesn’t give a particularly good performance, she creates an indelible image. Tall, gorgeous, outrageously built, and believably ferocious, she’s a cartoonish vision of empowered womanhood, a superheroine sister with a shotgun mowin’ down every rotten mother*#@%er who does her wrong.

          Just as Grier’s performance is a triumph of attitude over skill, Coffy is more about vibe than cinematic virtues. Writer-director Jack Hill’s narrative is as simplistic as a pulpy comic-book story, portraying Grier as an indomitable avenger cutting a swath through the criminal underworld in order to exact revenge against the system that caused her younger sister to become a brain-damaged addict. Feeling like she’s unable to affect real social change in her day job as a nurse, Coffy (Grier) moonlights as an adventurer, using her wiles to penetrate criminal organizations.

          Coffy soon sets her sights on King George (Robert DoQui), a flamboyant pimp who also deals the nastiest junk in town. So, naturally, Coffy goes undercover as one of King George’s working girls, allowing Hill to put Grier into a series of barely-there outfits, and giving the director an excuse for epic catfights involving screeching hookers who are threatened by the buxom new arrival. Meanwhile, top-level criminal operator Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus) takes an interest in Coffy, at least until his underlings realize she might not be what she seems.

          And so it goes through a series of standard detective-story beats: Coffy digs for evidence, schemes her way out of trouble when she’s trapped, and ultimately confronts the baddest bad guy in the climax. It all goes down smoothly, after a fashion, since Hill’s filmmaking is crudely entertaining and since the director doesn’t skimp on exploitation elements. Coffy overflows with boobs, gore, vulgarity, wah-wah funk music, and horrific ’70s fashions. (DoQui’s pimp outfits are particularly heinous.)

          The movie has lots of lunkheaded exuberance, especially when Sid Haig shows up as Vitroni’s most sadistic lieutenant. Bearded, chrome-domed, and nearly always wearing a sick smile, Haig is Grier’s opposite number, an image of animalistic fury driven by base impulses instead of righteous ones. He’s also weirdly funny, and undoubtedly a big part of why Coffy has enjoyed decades of devotion from its cult of fervent fans.

          Brisk and brutal, Coffy is only incidentally a feminist statement, since it’s really just unapologetic trash—the picture is so shameless in its pursuit of cheap thrills that it has a kind of gutter-level integrity. That it also happens to feature a powerful female protagonist who retains her femininity and sensitivity amid horrific circumstances is an added bonus.

Coffy: FUNKY