Interiors (1978)

          After writing and directing an extraordinary run of comedy films, from 1969’s Take the Money and Run to 1977’s Annie Hall, Woody Allen needed a change, so he dove headlong into drama with Interiors, a grim chamber piece that recalls the work of Allen’s cinematic hero, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman. Like Bergman’s myriad stories about the mysteries of the human soul, Interiors presents sophisticated but troubled individuals who possess the uncanny ability to articulate even the most miniscule nuances of emotion. Yet while Bergman’s singular movies exist on some elevated metaphorical plane that justifies the contrivance of hyper-verbal characters, Allen’s endeavor represents a queasy hybrid of realism and symbolism. That said, it’s helpful to view Interiors as a transitional moment, because while making his very next movie, 1979’s Manhattan, Allen found a more comfortable idiom by merging comedy with drama. Therefore, it’s as if Allen needed to flush jokes out of his system before he could evolve into a mature artist.
          This long preamble is a kind way of saying that Interiors would seem laughably dour and pretentious had it been made by anyone but a legitimate filmmaker in the midst of an important metamorphosis. In fact, notwithstanding rapturous cinematography by Gordon Willis and strong performances by an eclectic cast, Interiors sometimes approaches self-parody.
          Set primarily at a beach house in the Hamptons, the story borrows from the Eugene O’Neill template of a family plagued by epic dysfunction. Eve (Geraldine Page), an interior designer in late middle age, has been in crisis ever since her husband, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), left her. Over the course of several months, Eve attempts suicide, Arthur remarries, and their daughters wrestle with various neuroses. Nearly every scene in the picture features a depressing visual metaphor, whether it’s an off-white wall decorated by Eve as an expression of her barren emotional life, or an ominous shadow indicative of the ennui suffocating the characters.

          While undeniably artistic, intelligent, and ruminative, Allen’s unrelenting screenplay feels contrived, especially when characters unleash reams of overwritten dialogue. For instance, put-upon daughter Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) delivers a speech that summarizes the movie’s themes far too perfectly: “All the beautifully furnished rooms, carefully designed interiors—everything’s so controlled. There wasn’t any room for any real feelings.” And the scripting gets worse. Later in the same scene, Joey says, “There’s been perverseness and willfulness of attitude to many of the things you’ve done.” Allen has often evinced a proclivity for lines that are so “written” they sound unnatural emanating from actors, but his dramaturgical instinct has rarely failed him as completely as it does throughout Interiors.

          That said, the film is hardly without virtues. Aesthetically, Interiors is a triumph, with the combination of long takes and purposeful silence (there is no score) creating just the right kind of claustrophobia. Furthermore, the acting is impassioned, with performers struggling to make Allen’s stilted worlds sound organic—and occasionally succeeding. Page and costar Maureen Stapleton (who plays Arthur’s second wife) both received Oscar nominations, while Hurt, Marshall, Richard Jordan, and Diane Keaton all do strong work. Each character in the film, however, is essentially an elevated version of a cliché: the alcoholic novelist, the happy idiot, the soulful depressive, the vapid actress, and so on. Accordingly, Interiors remains most interesting as an artistic steppingstone, because it’s far too artificial, chilly, and pretentious to fully succeed as a movie.

Interiors: FUNKY

Cindy & Donna (1970)

Essentially a porno movie without the money shots, this dull, lurid, and tacky softcore melodrama offers little more than attractive young women doing smutty things without clothing. A wispy plot dramatizes the travails of suburban teenager Cindy (Debbie Osborne) as she learns about sex from her promiscuous sister, Donna (Nancy Ison); her adulterous father, Ted (Max Manning); her alcoholic mother, Harriet (Suzy Allen); and her hip best friend, Karen (Cheryl Powell). Accordingly, the picture is an episodic compendium of sexual vignettes—group sex, incest, lesbianism, masturbation, nude modeling, prostitution, stripping, voyeurism, and so on. Photographed with flat lighting, peek-a-boo angles, and shaky camera moves, Cindy & Donna occasionally seems like a highlight reel from a fetishist’s photo shoot. For instance, the interminably long scene of a topless dance by buxom hooker/stripper Alice (Alice Friedland) includes so many close-ups of her bouncing breasts that boredom neutralizes any erotic charge. And so it goes throughout Cindy & Donna, wherein excess regularly diminishes the cheap thrill of ogling. This lack of narrative discipline exacerbates myriad underlying problems, not least of which is the unavoidable “ick factor” of watching something this brazenly demeaning to women. After all, even though the narrative of Cindy & Donna basically makes sense, the filmmakers can’t pretend they aspired to make legitimate drama. Most of the actors in the movie seem as if they were hit in the head with blunt objects before entering view, while costar Allen—as the titular siblings’ mother—gives such an over-the-top and stilted performance that she comes across like a bad drag queen. If there’s a redeeming quality to this disreputable endeavor, which was given an “X” rating by the MPAA, then it is well hidden.

Cindy & Donna: LAME

Alice in the Cities (1974)

          German filmmaker Wim Wenders has made two of my all-time favorite movies, the beautifully sad Paris, Texas (1984) and the transcendent fantasy Wings of Desire (1987). Oddly, however, I’ve yet to encounter another Wenders movie that I genuinely like, even though he’s been prolific in both documentary and fiction features since making his first full-length movie in 1970. I mention my ambivalent relationship with Wenders’ work in order to create a context for my thoughts on his breakout feature, Alice in the Cities, which is beloved by many. While I appreciate the integrity, originality, and thoughtfulness of the picture, I find it needlessly arty and opaque; furthermore, the story is so contrived that it’s impossible for me to buy into the principal narrative device. Having said all that, it’s entirely likely I’m overlooking some key into the movie’s modality, so I hope that others have a more rewarding experience with the film.

          In any event, the story begins in America, where despondent German Phil (Rüdiger Vogler) travels from city to city, taking Polaroids of such soulless sites as run-down gas stations and highway underpasses. It turns out Phil is a writer on assignment, and his task is to write a color piece about the American heartland. However, Phil found America so monotonous that he lost the will to write. Accordingly, his editor is none too pleased upon Phil’s return to New York. Phil decides to go home to Germany, but while still in New York he meets a woman (Lisa Kreuzer) with a young daughter, Alice (Yella Rottländer). Bizarrely, the woman leaves Alice in Phil’s care, with instructions for Phil to escort the girl back to Europe, where mother and child eventually will reunite. Rather than surrendering the child to authorities, Phil follows the mother’s instructions, only to have the mother miss the planned rendezvous. Then Phil and Alice bum around Europe while Alice struggles to remember the name of her hometown.

          While Alice in the Cities is meant to seem quite innocent, the vision of Phil bathing while Alice sits in the same room is one of many such troubling images. Plus, because Phil is shown pursuing sex with (adult) women on two occasions, the illusion of a harmless surrogate-father dynamic is far from persuasive. Putting that worrisome aspect aside, Alice in the Cities has undisputable virtues. The performances are loose and naturalistic, while the grainy black-and-white cinematography by frequent Wenders accomplice Robby Müller offers a vivid travelogue of America and Western Europe. Moreover, Alice in the Cities has a unique tone, because Wenders blends hopefulness and melancholy in a singular way. (Raised to a much higher level and put in the service of a stronger story, that same tonal blend later became a distinguishing characteristic of Paris, Texas.)

          Many admirers have read deeper meanings into Alice in the Cities, praising the film as not only an examination of the gulf between elegant Europe and vulgar America but also a rumination on the strange modern-day blurring of those traditional geopolitical classifications. Yet whether the picture is viewed as a simple story about lost souls bonding or as something loftier, the importance of Alice in the Cities to Wenders’ career is inarguable. Wenders followed Alice in the Cities with two more entries in his “Road Movie Trilogy,” both starring Vogler, The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976). More importantly, Alice in the Cities firmly established Wenders as a leading light in the New German Cinema, and the movie defined the idiosyncratic style that has characterized his work for decades.

Alice in the Cities: FUNKY

Land of the Minotaur (1976)

Given the popular fascination in the md-’70s with all things paranormal—ancient astronauts, ESP, witchcraft, and so on—the notion of a horror flick involving a monster from Greek mythology must have seemed reasonable at the time. Despite its misleading title, however, Land of the Minotaur is not a creature feature. Rather, it’s a thriller about nefarious Satan worshippers, so the only offbeat elements of the story are the location (Greece) and the object at the center of the Satanists’ temple (a minotaur statue with gas jets blazing fire out of the nostrils). The inconsequential story begins when a trio of attractive young archeologists visits their friend, Father Roche (Donald Pleasence), an Irishman who lives near an ancient ruin in Greece that’s supposed to contain a hidden temple. The young adults find and sneak into the temple, only to be captured by cultists under the control of Baron Corofax (Peter Cushing). Then, aided by a private detective (Costas Skouras) and the girlfriend of one of the missing youths, Father Roche tries to find the hidden temple before the hostages are sacrificed. Director Kostas Karagiannis films Land of the Minotaur unimaginatively, relying on silly zoom-ins to closeups of eyes whenever he wants to suggest intensity (which is often). He also fails to effectively define chronological and spatial relationships, so it’s frequently difficult to discern what’s happening onscreen. The wretched storytelling is compounded by goofy imagery. Besides the minotaur statue, which seems more like a party decoration than a fearsome icon, the movie features cultists in shiny silk costumes that look like bathrobes from Liberace’s closet. Nothing that happens in the movie is surprising, the suspense scenes are inert, and the over-the-top finale—complete with exploding cultists—feels like it’s happening in a different movie. (Only the music has any measure of credibility, with composer Brian Eno—of Roxy Music fame—infusing the soundtrack with creepy electronic pulses.) Worst of all, the stars are wasted. Cushing is relegated to just a few scenes of reciting occult claptrap. Meanwhile, Pleasence—cast against type as a heroic character—is hamstrung by an Irish accent he can’t quite master.

Land of the Minotaur: LAME

The Pom Pom Girls (1976)

Rather than being the sexy romp its marketing materials promise, The Pom Pom Girls is a boring hodgepodge of clichéd teen-cinema tropes. The picture throws together cheerleading, dating, drinking, driving, football, pranks, rebellion, and sex, but fails to generate interest because the characters are so anonymous and the storyline is so enervated. In fact, one must exercise tremendous generosity to suggest that The Pom Pom Girls even has a storyline, since the movie is really just a series of vignettes about teenagers making mischief. Filmmaker Joseph Ruben, who later scored with big-budget thrillers including Sleeping With the Enemy (1991), co-wrote and directed this drive-in dud for the schlock merchants at Crown International Pictures as one of his first projects. Ruben assembled a cast of attractive young people, some of whom periodically disrobe, but The Pom Pom Girls doesn’t even have the conviction of a proper exploitation movie; in lieu of truly raunchy scenes, the picture offers such tame distractions as a cafeteria food fight, a dirt-bike race, and a “chicken run” climax borrowed, shamelessly, from the adolescent-angst classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The main characters are football star Jesse (Michael Mullins) and reckless classmate Johnnie (Robert Carradine), along with their girlfriends, cheerleaders Laurie (Jennifer Ashley) and Sally (Lisa Reeves); these leading actors give performances running the gamut from barely adequate to forgettable. The movie tracks the main quartet’s rivalry with students from a neighboring school, as well as the group’s romantic entanglements. While a smidgen of dramatic conflict emerges during arguments between Jesse and his coach (James Gammon), most of the film’s screen time is wasted on trite situations: patrons at a drive-in restaurant getting impatient because the carhop is humping a customer in a van, teenagers stealing a fire truck in order to hose down a rival school’s football team during a practice, and so on. As for the title’s implication that the movie will focus on cheerleading, Laurie and Sally don’t actually wield pom-poms until the 50-minute mark.

The Pom Pom Girls: LAME

Massacre Mafia Style (1978)

          We’ve come to expect vanity pieces from established Hollywood professionals, particularly stars; the annals of film history are littered with ill-conceived projects that people envisioned as their definitive cinematic statements. Vanity pieces from entertainers with whom the general population is unfamiliar are less numerous, because most entertainers on this level realize that their lack of widespread fame is an insurmountable obstacle to reaching audiences. Duke Mitchell was undaunted by these circumstances. A veteran nightclub performer with barely any screen credits, Mitchell hired himself as producer, director, star—and even composer—of this low-budget melodrama set in the world of organized crime. (The picture is known by several alternate titles, including The Executioner and Like Father, Like Son.)

          A small but forceful fellow with the gift of gab and an impressive haircut that looks like a cross between a mullet and a pompadour, Mitchell plays Mimi Miceli, a second-generation mobster whose father was driven from the United States to Sicily by gangland machinations. Determined to put the family name back in the forefront of organized crime, Mimi flies to Los Angeles and hooks up with his old pal Jolly Rizzo (Vic Caesar)—a tubby bon vivant whose elaborate facial hair recalls that of radio DJ Wolfman Jack—in order to begin a bloody rampage. Mimi and Jolly execute bookmakers and other crooks, taking over the victims’ territory and establishing a small criminal empire that includes drugs, gambling, pornography, and prostitution. He also gives impassioned speeches about the nobility of the Sicilian man, the sainthood of the Sicilian woman, and the troubling disappearance of honor from the underworld—notwithstanding the fact that Mimi is an avaricious scumbag who does things like impaling dudes on meat hooks. Eventually, Mimi makes the wrong enemies, and the story takes tragic turns that will surprise exactly zero of the film’s viewers.

          Viewed critically, Massacre Mafia Style is a dud, with grungy photography, spastic editing, trite storytelling, and vacuous supporting performances. Viewed as a unique testament to the willpower of one second-rate entertainer, Massacre Mafia Style is weirdly fascinating. Mitchell has a certain kind of presence, stemming mostly from his overpowering self-confidence, and he’s intense when delivering monologues. Mitchell’s also interesting while acting like a badass, whether he’s mouthing off to a black pimp whom he calls “Super Spook” or delivering the following voiceover: “I didn’t know who had the hit on us, but I wasn’t waiting to find out, so we killed every last son of a bitch.” The most fascinating aspect of Massacre Mafia Style is that Mitchell clearly believes he’s acting in a historically important masterpiece, rather than a sleazy exploitation picture punctuated with gory murders and topless women. While watching Massacre Mafia Style, it’s Mitchell’s world and the rest of us are just bystanders. Amazingly, Mitchell filmed a second indie feature around the same time as this one, but it didn’t reach audiences until years after Mitchell’s death in 1981; Gone With the Pope was issued via Grindhouse Releasing in 2010.

Massacre Mafia Style: FUNKY

Le Sauvage (1975)

          The sleeky entertaining French farce Le Sauvage is like a Gallic spin on a Blake Edwards movie. Fast, funny, sexy, surprising, and touching, the picture matches two iconic stars—breathtaking Catherine Deneuve and suave Yves Montand—with masterful storytelling by director/co-writer Jean-Paul Rappeneau. Le Sauvage is frothy entertainment at its best, exactly because it’s not frothy in every scene; Rappeneau realizes that audiences need moments of sanity in order to care about characters when things get crazy.
          Here’s the short version of the plot. Frenchwoman Nelly (Deneuve) is in Venezuela to marry her hotheaded Italian fiancé, Vittori (Luigi Vannucchi). Just before the wedding, she changes her mind, so she runs away and seeks shelter in a hotel, where an altruistic stranger, Martin (Montand), intervenes when Vittori breaks into Nelly’s hotel room and tries to drag her home. Escaping the hotel, Nelly tracks down her former lover, an American named Alex (Tony Roberts), for help leaving the country. Vitorri finds Nelly at Alex’s place, too, so she flees again—taking Alex’s prized Toulouse-Lautrec painting with her so she can sell it for traveling money. More chases and close encounters ensue, until Nelly finds her perfect hideaway on Martin’s private island, even though Martin has no interest in visitors. Unlikely romance blooms as various forces converge on the island, some pursuing Nelly and some pursuing Martin.

          It’s all completely outlandish, but Rappeneau presents events in such a methodical way that the story never spins out of control. Quite to the contrary, the narrative has a comfortable rhythm of intimate scenes and noisy set pieces. Rappeneau also takes full advantage of a series of dynamic locations, with scenes set in France and New York in addition to the various South American locales. Montand suits this material perfectly, his macho energy leavened by poetic sensitivity; Vannucchi is wonderful as the maniac who’ll stop at nothing to recover his runaway bride; and it’s a kick to see Woody Allen regular Roberts smoothly delivering lines in French.

          Yet the whole piece revolves around Deneuve, since only a woman of her exquisite beauty could support a plot predicated on men chasing her across the globe and tolerating her quixotic behavior. While never disengaging from her familiar screen persona of chilly sophistication, Deneuve lightens up considerably here, and it’s impossible to say enough about how ravishing she looks. Even when scampering around the island wearing nothing but one of Martin’s shirts, she’s mesmerizing. That’s why the main gimmick of the love story—the notion that Martin finds Nelly highly resistible because she’s such a pain in the ass—is so fun. The ending is never in doubt, but the path to the ending is filled with delightful detours. Plus, befitting the analogy to Blake Edwards’ work, Rappeneau stages physical-comedy scenes with the artistry and grace of a choreographer. So even though Le Sauvage isn’t about anything, it’s consistently playful, vibrant, and warmhearted.

Le Sauvage: GROOVY

Pink Angels (1972)

          A truly bizarre artifact from the era when homosexuals were still viewed as society’s freaks, this “comedy” depicts the misadventures of a motorcycle gang comprised exclusively of transvestites as they travel from northern California to Los Angeles for a drag “cotillion.” Although the six bikers disguise themselves as Hell’s Angels, wearing fake facial hair as well as denim-and-leather ensembles tricked out with Confederate and Nazi paraphernalia, the dudes are as flamboyant as the day is long, so the would-be humor of the film stems from incidents during which they drop their butch façades to discuss dresses and makeup in fey lisps. Part of what makes Pink Angels such a confusing film is that it’s hard to decide whether the portrayal of gays is affectionate, derisive, of satirical—or even some queasy combination of all three.

          After all, the bikers are only shown doing two mildly “bad” things: inflicting damage on some property when they’re putting on their tough-guy routine, and playfully applying makeup to the men in a rival gang while those men are passed out from drinking. Considering that many films of the ’70s depicted gay men as homicidal psychopaths, the vision of homosexuality in Pink Angels is positively genteel by comparison. That’s not to say, of course, that Pink Angels is any kind of a worthwhile movie. Quite to the contrary, Pink Angels is an amateurish mess with very little characterization or plot. Furthermore, the movie is burdened with a nonsensical running gag about a maniacal military general whose climactic encounter with the gay bikers inexplicably spins the movie in a downbeat direction. Therefore, the best way to watch Pink Angels—presuming one is masochistic enough to do so—is to marvel at the sheer weirdness of the enterprise.

          For one thing, Pink Angels is far from subtle. In one early scene, the bikers hit a roadside food joint, and then lasciviously consume hot dogs while making double-entendres about phallic-sounding motorcycle parts including “ram shafts.” Later, the bikers tromp through a grocery store looking for items like “man-handler” soup. (At the time the film was made, the phrase “man-handler” was used in ads for the Hungry Man line of frozen foods.) Sometimes, screenwriter Margaret McPherson’s attempts at gay patois are clichéd (“What did you have in mind, fancy pants?”), and sometimes McPherson conjures lines that are merely strange (“I’m sick and tired of you, you fickle pringle!”) Every so often, however, McPherson lands a genuinely amusing line, as when the lead biker brazenly tells a cop that his motorcycle’s storage compartment is filled with drugs and “an 8-by-10 of Robert Goulet.”

          Adding to the overall surrealism of Pink Angels is the appearance in the cast of he-man actor Dan Haggerty, who spent most of the ’70s portraying mountain man Grizzly Adams in movies and TV shows. For Pink Angels, he plays a member of the straight gang that parties with the gay bikers (don’t ask), so Haggerty makes out with a black hooker, wakes up to discover he’s wearing makeup (and bows in his hair!), and hits on a transvestite whom he believes is a woman. Even though Pink Angels is actually quite dull to watch all the way through—the picture feels much, much longer than its 81-minute running time—it’s difficult to look away from things as peculiar as the Haggerty scenes. Plus, because Haggerty and tough-guy character actor Michael Pataki (playing the leader of the straight gang) are the only familiar performers in Pink Angels, the illusion of the movie having emerged from some ’70s-cinema dreamscape is nearly complete. In fact, even after watching the whole thing, it’s still challenging to believe that that Pink Angels exists. Seriously, how many other drive-in movies were made about gay bikers?

Pink Angels: FREAKY

Fat City (1972)

          No genre epitomizes the anything-goes spirit of the best American ’70s movies more than the downbeat character study, because during the ’70s, actors resembling real people were given opportunities to play characters resembling real people. Nothing could be further from traditional Hollywood glamour, for instance, than Fat City, the exceptional drama that revived director John Huston’s career. An ensemble piece set in the agricultural fields and skid-row neighborhoods in and around Stockton, California, Fat City is filled with dreamers, drunks, and losers. It’s a hymn to the hopeless. Whereas Huston had in the immediately preceding years lost his way by making bloated and/or misguided projects including The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), the director used Fat City to return to his core strength of poetic narratives about people living on the fringes of society.

          Although he didn’t write the piece (Leonard Gardner adapted the script from his own novel), Fat City concerns themes that were deeply familiar to Huston, including alienation, boxing, drinking, and failure. So even if one doesn’t get the sense of the director seeing himself in the film’s characters, one intuits that he’s known the type of people whose sad exploits he puts onscreen. Working with a skillful crew including master cinematographer Conrad Hall, Huston generates utterly believable atmosphere, with every dirty location and every tattered piece of costuming accentuating the theme of people whose lives comprise hard-won dignity against a backdrop of desperation.

          Stacy Keach stars as Billy Tully, a washed-up boxer who decides to get himself together by going to a gym, where he meets promising young fighter Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Emboldened by the idea of mentoring a beginner while restarting his own career, Billy initiates a pathetic quasi-romance with a drunk named Oma (Susan Tyrrell). As the story progresses, Billy waffles between his real life, which involves arduous work picking fruit for meager pay, and his imagined life, which involves optimistic notions about a future with a surrogate family including Ernie and Oma. Fat City is primarily concerned with the ways in which people who have nothing latch onto possibilities. Similarly to how Billy entertains foolish notions of being a better fighter in middle age than he ever was as a youth, Ernie buys into Billy’s encouragement, and Oma pretends that what she has with Billy is genuine—even though she’s already involved with another man. Yet Gardner’s story doesn’t oversimplify these desolate characters by focusing myopically on their inability to improve their situations; quite to the contrary, Gardner illustrates every self-destructive tendency of these characters, such as Billy’s habit of blaming his circumstances on bad management. Every person in Fat City seems achingly real.

          Huston cast the picture beautifully, getting letter-perfect work out of nearly everyone in the film. Keach’s unique combination of a bruiser’s physicality and a romantic’s soul transforms the actor into Billy; within his first few scenes, Keach erases any audience knowledge of his aptitude for classical dialogue, creating the complete illusion of a broken-down slob living on the streets of Stockton. Tyrrell gives an equally powerful performance (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), her raspy voice and wild eyes conveying a woman lost to alcohol but not robbed of her humanity, while Bridges and costar Candy Clark provide youthful counterpoints to the main characters. (It’s not hard to imagine the people played by Bridges and Clark becoming like Billy and Oma later in life.) As for Huston, his artistic rejuvenation continued—although he made a few turkeys in the years after Fat City, he also made some of his most interesting pictures, including the challenging chamber pieces Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), all of which are thematic cousins to Fat City.

Fat City: RIGHT ON

The Comeback (1978)

          British writer-director Pete Walker was a prolific source of sexploitation and horror movies throughout the ’70s, developing a lurid style filled with nasty gore, overcooked plots, and plentiful shots of attractive women. Although most of Walker’s pictures were indigenous to his home country, featuring UK actors and locations, many found their way to American screens. For one of his final ’70s movies, however, Walker catered overtly to US audiences by featuring an American leading man and a pair of American supporting players. The Comeback, alternately titled The Day the Screaming Stopped, stars cheeseball singer Jack Jones—perhaps best known for crooning the Love Boat theme—as Nick Cooper, an aging but successful pop singer who emerges from a long hiatus to record a new album. For plot reasons that aren’t worth explaining, Nick lives in the UK, having just vacated a posh London penthouse for a remote country estate.

          When the story begins, Nick’s estranged wife, Gail (Holly Palance), visits the penthouse and is murdered—or so it seems. Thereafter, Nick is haunted by strange noises and visions, most of which manifest while he’s trying to sleep in his new home. Adding to Nick’s tribulations, his only companions in the estate’s sprawling main bulding are a demented housekeeper, Mrs. B. (Sheila Keith), and her addled groundskeeper husband, Mr. B. (Bill Owen). The plot also involves Nick’s hard-driving manager, Webster (David Doyle), as well as Webster’s sexy assistant, Linda (Pamela Stephenson), who becomes romantically involved with Nick. Written by Michael Sloan and Murray Smith, The Comeback has a handful of interesting notions and some decent atmosphere, but these things never coalesce. Vignettes of Nick roaming around the estate while listening to weird noises drag on tediously, partially because nothing really happens and partially because Jones is such a non-presence. Conversely, the super-gory scenes involving Gail’s murder and its aftermath—anybody in the mood for a close-up of maggots crawling around a corpse’s eye socket?—feel like they belong in a different movie.

          On the plus side, the music-industry stuff is somewhat interesting, with Nick contemplating lyrics at home and trudging through recording sessions at the studio; one can almost see glimmers of an offbeat thriller predicated on the tensions associated with the creative process. Moreover, The Comeback is not without meager distractions, because Keith gives an amusingly campy performance as the housekeeper, and because Stephenson is quite fetching. Incidentally, she’s also a unique figure in popular culture. After launching her career as a UK starlet, she did a short stint on Saturday Night Live in the ’80s, married wild-man Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, and then expanded her career to include authoring books and practicing psychology.

The Comeback: FUNKY

Blood Mania (1970)

Representing a brainless union of horror and melodrama, this interminable flick depicts the nasty exploits of a young woman who uses deceit, extortion, seduction, and murder while trying to seize control of her ailing father’s fortune. Despite the lurid title, Blood Mania only occasionally lapses into plasma-splattered excess, because most of the screen time is devoted to lifeless dialogue scenes and to sexual interludes that feel quasi-pornographic even though they’re not the least bit explicit. Director Robert Vincent O’Neill has a pervy tendency to linger on breasts, so whenever he gets a woman naked, he contrives myriad angles and lighting schemes to showcase the anatomical features with which he’s clearly preoccupied. The only name-brand actor in Blood Mania is Alex Rocco, a fine character actor who appears briefly in an inconsequential role as a lawyer. Excepting Rocco, however, the performances in Blood Mania are laughably bad. For instance, stars Peter Carpenter and Maria De Aragon have such difficulty forming facial expressions that it seems as if they shot most of their scenes while heavily medicated. The drab story concerns Victoria (De Aragon), a twisted rich bitch who can’t wait for her loaded dad, Ridgley (Eric Allison), to croak. Victoria’s also a tramp who strips every time she sees a muscular dude, whether it’s the pool boy or Ridgley’s doctor, Craig (Carpenter). Speaking of Craig, he’s got bad money troubles, which makes him susceptible to Victoria’s overtures. Meanwhile, Craig’s dim-bulb girlfriend, Cheryl (Reegan Wilson), tries to save her man’s hide by sleeping with a lowlife (Arell Blanton) who’s blackmailing the doctor. Director O’Neill and his writers (including leading man Carpenter, who penned the story with as little skill as he brought to his acting) consider every narrative thread a mere prelude to a topless scene or a violent murder, if not both. Accordingly, Blood Mania is the kind of boring and misogynistic sludge that gives drive-in cinema a bad name, although the production values and technical execution are slightly above average for a grade-Z movie.

Blood Mania: LAME

The Kingfisher Caper (1975)

          Generic but watchable, this drama about siblings fighting for control of their family’s diamond empire was shot in South Africa, which is also the setting of the story. The location and subject give the picture a measure of novelty, although in most other ways The Kingfisher Caper—sometimes alternately titled Diamond Hunters—is quite pedestrian. The acting is competent but passionless, the direction (by Dirk de Villiers) is perfunctory, and the score is a silly mishmash of lounge-lizard slow numbers and vaguely discofied upbeat jams. In fact, excepting such impressive production values as the ship that’s used as a primary setting for the second half of the story, The Kingfisher Caper feels very much like a run-of-the-mill telefilm. Regarding the picture’s paper-thin characterizations, make what you will of the fact that one of the three leading actors is named Jon Cypher—because “cipher” just about covers each member of the story’s dramatis personae. Having said all that, the picture has just enough action and intrigue to hold the attention of casual viewers.

          Based on a novel by Wilbur Smith, The Kingfisher Caper begins when an aging patriarch receives a terminal diagnosis, causing him to divide his empire between dutiful daughter Tracy (Hayley Mills), ne’er-do-well son Benedict (David McCallum), and stalwart adopted son Johnny (Cypher). The title stems from Johnny’s pet project, a massive sea vessel called The Kingfisher, which he’s equipped with computers and industrial equipment for mining diamonds from the ocean floor via dredging. Johnny’s grasp on power is tenuous because he only gains control over the part of the empire related to the Kingfisher, which has yet to make its maiden voyage. Sensing an opportunity, the craven Benedict contrives to sabotage the Kingfisher in order to seize control of Jonny’s assets. (A deadline related to a bank loan provides the ticking-clock element necessary to make all of this plotting work.) The movie also features romantic elements, because Johnny and Tracy—who grew up together but are not related—realize they have feelings for each other once they’re faced with a common enemy in the scheming Benedict.

          The storyline of The Kingfisher Caper is serviceable (if a bit on the trite side), and it helps that darker textures including murder and suicide complicate the latter half of the film. Still, a potboiler only really connects if the performers add something special to the mix, and that doesn’t happen here. McCallum mostly sulks through his scenes, while former child star Mills (of The Parent Trap fame) contributes little except being attractive in a girl-next-door way. Thus it falls to Cypher to do most of the heavy lifting, dramatically speaking, and he’s never more than adequate. To their credit, however, the filmmakers up their game during the finale, a somewhat exciting action/thriller sequence set aboard the Kingfisher.

The Kingfisher Caper: FUNKY

Fighting Mad (1978)

          Sometimes a bad movie merits an ironic viewing simply because the premise is so absurd that one can happily marvel at the hubris—or insanity—of the filmmakers. Fighting Mad easily meets that criterion. The violent flick was originally released as Death Force, but then it was reissued under the moniker Fighting Mad once two of its costars achieved greater fame—gorgeous starlet Jayne Kennedy became a popular sportscaster, while her husband, DJ-turned-actor Leon Isaac Kennedy, starred in the hit exploitation flick Penitentiary (1979). In other words, never mind the above poster suggesting that Fighting Mad is a straight-up action movie featuring the Kennedys as a couple. Quite to the contrary, Leon plays the main villain, and Jayne plays the long-suffering wife of the actual star, James Iglehart.

          Here’s the humdinger of a plot. In the Vietnam War era, soldiers McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy), Morelli (Carmen Argenziano), and Russell (Iglehart) smuggle gold out of Indochina, and then sell it to criminals in the Philippines. Yet Russell’s partners get greedy, so they stab him and toss him off a boat in the middle of the Pacific. Russell survives, washing ashore on an island inhabited only by two Japanese soldiers who were never told that World War II ended. The Japanese soldiers train Russell to be a samurai, even giving him his own sword. Meanwhile, McGee and Morelli return to the U.S. and become crime lords. Furthermore, McGee puts the moves on Russell’s wife, Maria (Jayne Kennedy), who believes her husband dead. (This is especially odious because Maria has a young son with Russell.) Next, Filipino soldiers find the island and rescue Russell, who travels back to the States with his samurai sword and a thirst for vengeance.

          Fighting Mad is exactly as silly as this description suggests, but it’s got a certain pulpy energy—exciting things happen, the pace is brisk, and the story never gets mired in troublesome things like characterization or nuance. This is sheer escapist nonsense, combining the genres of blaxploitation, crime, and martial arts into a schlocky smorgasbord. Excepting Argenziano, who’s an acceptable low-rent substitute for swarthy ’70s stalwart Don Gordon, the actors in Fighting Mad are uniformly weak. Nonetheless, each player fits his or her role. Iglehart’s built like a boxer, so he’s quite a sight when flailing his katana, and Leon Isaac Kennedy manages to look like a skeevy pimp even though he’s not actually playing a skeevy pimp—watch the way his Afro always seems slightly unkempt. Plus, since Jayne Kennedy was one of the great beauties of the ’70s, it doesn’t much matter that she lacks dramatic skill; cast as eye candy, she more than justifies her presence in the picture. She also gets the best line in the movie. When McGee offers to help raise Maria’s young son, Maria spits back, “He don’t need a mother like you for a father!” And if that line doesn’t immediately seem awesome, note that in this circumstance, “mother” is an abbreviation. Shut yo’ mouth!

Fighting Mad: FUNKY

Blue Money (1972)

          Genuinely thoughtful movies about the porn-film industry are rare (the dark 1974 drama Inserts is among the few examples), because most filmmakers who engage the subject of skin flicks end up telling stories that are as trashy as their subject matter. Blue Money is therefore a peculiar entry in the genre, seeing as how the movie is derailed not by tackiness but by ineptitude. Although it’s a presented as a character-driven rumination on the life of a pornographer, the movie suffers from bad acting and threadbare writing, so it ends up feeling a bit seedy even though the sexual elements of the picture are handled with restraint. French-Canadian hunk Alain Patrick stars as Jim, a freethinking counterculture type who lives in a Malibu beach house with his wife, Lisa (Barbara Mills), and their young child. Jim relocated to California to direct porno movies for quick cash, and he works with a producer named Mike (Jeff Gall). Whereas Mike fits the industry stereotype—he’s a swinger in polyester suits who uses his job to get sex from starlets—Jim is a faithful family man focused on building a sailboat in which he and Lisa plan to sail the open seas once he’s made his fortune. Yet Jim faces twin crises when he meets an actress whom he can’t resist, Ingrid (Inga Maria), and when federal agents begin a crackdown on the skin trade that threatens to land Jim in jail.

          Patrick, who also produced and directed Blue Money (under an alias), seems more preoccupied with appearing shirtless than with communicating the soul of his character. Moreover, his filmmaking is as stilted as his acting—he generates long, drab sequences in which nothing happens, as well as standard-issue ’70s montages and sex scenes set to wimpy music. Leading lady Mills, who can almost act, enlivens scenes during which her character agues with the self-involved protagonist, and costar Gall, who also approaches competence, adds a smidgen of sleaze. Given the overall simple-mindedness of Blue Money, it’s alarming whenever Nick Boretz’ flat screenplay (based, of course, on a story by Patrick) hurtles into heaviness. Consider this mouthful of a line, delivered by Patrick in his French-accented English: “Don’t you think pornography’s damaging, especially to young minds? I think it’s an indication of the sub-surface decay of our society.” The effort at substance is appreciated, but the strain on the part of all involved is painfully obvious. Thanks to its lurid setting, Blue Money has a fair amount of nudity—none of it sexy—and the film’s extensive location photography provides an interesting-ish travelogue of ’70s Los Angeles. Ultimately, Blue Money is substandard in every important way, but it has flashes of conscience and intelligence—amid far too many narcissistic shots of Patrick’s golden-skinned Québécois bod.

Blue Money: FUNKY

Velvet Smooth (1976)

The blaxploitation genre had crested by 1976, so the glory days of Pam Grier and Fred Williamson quickly gave way to an era of schlocky movies with grade-Z stars and substandard production values. For instance, the embarrassingly bad Velvet Smooth features an attractive but forgettable actress named Johnnie Hill as the title character, a karate-choppin’ lady detective who becomes involved in a trite saga of underworld intrigue. When thugs start attacking businesses controlled by gangster King Lathrop (Owen Watson), King hires Velvet and her trio of lady-detective colleagues to find out who’s muscling into King’s territory; utterly uninteresting complications related to traitorous henchmen and unethical policemen ensue. Directed by Michael Fink, who (thankfully) only made one other feature, Velvet Smooth is defined by a shocking level of incompetence behind and in front of the camera. Shots don’t edit together properly, sequences tumble into each other without logical transitions, and the performances are so stilted that one gets a sense actors were filmed as they spoke their lines for the first time ever. Plus, we haven’t even gotten to the sad subject of the movie’s myriad martial-arts scenes. During these goofy interludes, camera positions reveal the distance between fists and intended targets, an amateur-hour mistake that even most beginning film students quickly figure out how to avoid. Furthermore, the staging of the combat scenes is just as atrocious as the filming of them. Typical of Velvet Smooth is a sequence in which the heroine, who is bone-thin, somehow manages to fight off a quartet of beefy guys while wearing an evening gown. She accomplishes this not because of impressive skills, but because each time she engages with one assailant, the others wait nearby instead of teaming up to get the job done. Seeing as how Velvet Smooth is primarily a martial-arts flick, one fears that the fight scenes were the element upon which the filmmakers lavished the most attention. Maybe that explains why so many shots are out of focus and why the sound is frequently indecipherable. Aside from the unintentional laughs provided by the inept fight scenes, Velvet Smooth offers viewers nothing remotely akin to enjoyment.

Velvet Smooth: SQUARE

Getting Straight (1970)

          Stylishly directed by the singular Richard Rush, a filmmaker who is equal parts entertainer and provocateur, the campus-unrest dramedy Getting Straight has taken a lot of flack over the years for being too glib and polished. After all, the movie engages such inflammatory topics as drugs, sexual liberation, and student protests against the Vietnam war. Yet even though film historians are unlikely to classify Getting Straight as one of the essential counterculture movies, Rush does a great job of capturing a moment from a romantic viewpoint. Specifically, he makes with-it college students seem cool and sexy by showcasing charismatic stars, flashy camerawork, rebellious attitudes, and sharp dialogue—even if, in order to propel his story, he also exposes the ways in which these characters can be hypocritical, ridiculous, and self-important.

          The brisk narrative concerns Harry Bailey (Elliot Gould), a graduate student/Vietnam vet who’s pushing 30 and feels as if he’s outgrown campus activism. Determined to finish his master’s so he can begin a teaching career, Harry tries to steer clear of political demonstrations that are erupting around his campus. Alas, Harry’s beautiful girlfriend, Jan (Candice Bergen), is deeply involved in activism, so she’s part of the very chaos Harry wishes to avoid. The purpose of this storytelling gimmick, of course, is to make Harry choose between apathy and involvement—while also forcing Jan to examine whether she’s committed to political causes for meaningful reasons or simply because flipping off the Establishment is fashionable.

          Working from a script credited to Ken Kolb and Robert Kaufman—but likely co-written by Rush himself—Rush does a bang-up job on Getting Straight, his first studio feature after cutting his teeth on a series of wild biker- and drug-themed exploitation pictures. Rush and cinematographer László Kovács use a fluid camera style combining long lenses, probing movements, and sneaky zooms to create a sense of tension and vitality; one feels as if the very world is being torn asunder by campus conflict. Even the casting feeds into the central theme of generational clashes spinning out of control. With his bushy hair and walrus moustache, Gould bridges youth and maturity, his bitchy line deliveries underlining his character’s constant exasperation. Bergen, conversely, provides a complicated and glamorous vision of entitlement meshed with idealism. (That being said, the movie’s portrayal of women can be a little dodgy, with Jan sometimes coming off as a needy narcissist with bourgeois sensibilities.) Meanwhile, supporting characters played by Jeff Corey and Harrison Ford represent, respectively, conservatism and the apolitical stance.

          Inevitably, the picture climaxes with a full-on riot—after all their debating, joking, and speechifying, the characters in Getting Straight must face the test of civil disobedience with real consequences. And while it’s true that Getting Straight may ultimately be little more than a lavishly produced snapshot of a fraught era, Rush and his team deserve credit for exploring a trend when it was still central to the national conversation.

Getting Straight: GROOVY