1980 Week: How to Beat the High Co$t of Living

          Cut from the same financial-panic cloth as Fun With Dick and Jane (1977) and 9 to 5 (1980), this adequate comedy depicts the extreme measures that three suburban women take in order to keep up with inflation even as their respective incomes fluctuate. Competently made and filled with strong actors, the piece ambles its way through uninspired episodes punctuated with weak jokes. Every actor in the cast has done better work elsewhere, and with all due respect to her terrific work on the small screen, How to Beat the High Co$t of Living quickly proved that Saturday Night Live alumna Jane Curtin was not destined to be a movie star. She’s droll and sexy in what amounts to the film’s leading role, but her costars—Jessica Lange and Susan Saint James—eclipse her in terms of glamour and pithiness, respectively. It says a lot about the picture that the most dynamic performances actually come from two supporting players, Richard Benjamin and Dabney Coleman.

          Cowritten and coproduced by Robert Kaufman, the movie takes a mosaic approach to explaining why three female friends end up in the same desperate situation at the same time. After Elaine (Curtin) is dumped by her husband, she’s left in a financial lurch because of her extravagant lifestyle. Meanwhile, divorcée Jane (Saint James) tries in vain to cover expenses for herself, her kids, and her aging father (Eddie Albert). And Louise (Lange) fares so poorly operating an antique store that her husband, a veterinarian named Albert (Benjamin), sues her in order to compel her into personal bankruptcy. Together, the women hatch a scheme to rob a “money ball” that’s on display in a local shopping center, so predictable shenanigans result from amateurs attempting a heist.

          Most of what happens in How to Beat the High Cost of Living is mildly amusing at best. Worse, the movie’s would-be sexy subplot—Elaine’s various encounters with a horny cop named Jack (Coleman)—culminate in a tacky scene of Elaine performing a striptease in the middle of the shopping center. Yes, the sexual politics of How to Beat the Cost of Living are so creaky that one of the film’s heroines saves the day by flashing her breasts. Curtin does well in edgy scenes but lacks warmth, Lange looks gorgeous but seems bored with the trite material, and Saint James fares best of the three by playing light comedy well. Unfortunately, the three women never quite gel into a cohesive unit.

How to Beat the High Co$t of Living: FUNKY

1980 Week: Die Laughing

          An ambitious but failed attempt at creating a Hitchcock-style caper flick for the teen demo, this overstuffed and underdeveloped comedy was a major misfire for leading man Robby Benson, who also coproduced the picture, in addition to writing and performing several songs for the project. Beloved by a generation of female fans for his blue eyes, glorious hair, and sensitivity, Benson was arguably the best actor of the whole ’70s teen-idol set, but he had a tricky time transitioning to grown-up roles. His turn as a young adult in Die Laughing was a half-hearted attempt at making the leap, because even though Benson’s character gets involved with life-or-death issues, he spends most of his screen time acting like an adolescent goofball.
          Set in San Francisco, the convoluted story begins with a shootout in a college laboratory. The scientist who escapes from the shootout ends up in a taxicab driven by Pinsky (Benson), a wannabe singer-songwriter. Thugs catch up with Pinsky’s cab and kill the scientist, but Pinsky escapes with a mysterious box the scientist had in his possession. Borrowing a page from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Pinsky flees the scene because circumstances give bystanders the false impression that Pinsky committed murder. This set-up begins a farcical chase story. Even as Pinsky evades killers and tries to learn why the scientist was killed (in order to clear his own name), Pinsky juggles changes in his romantic life and a series of high-stakes auditions with his band.

          Had Benson and his collaborators gotten a firm grasp on this material, Die Laughing could have been memorably intriguing and silly, very much in the vein of the Chevy Chase-Golden Hawn hit Foul Play (1978). Alas, Die Laughing director Jeff Wener doesn’t have anything close to the sure hand of Foul Play director Colin Higgins, so Die Laughing spirals out of control almost immediately. Beyond basic questions of logic and motivation, huge chunks of storytelling seem to be missing, and the movie’s kitchen-sink approach to physical and situational comedy comes across as desperate. Among other things, the picture includes a deranged taxi dispatcher who runs his company like a military operation, a shadowy figure who watches events from behind mirrored sunglasses, a trained monkey who somehow memorized the formula for a plutonium bomb, and an epic circus sequence that features Benson falling face first into huge piles of elephant excrement. Weirdest of all is the film’s bad guy, Meuller (Bud Cort). He’s a scrawny nerd with the grandiosity of a Bond villain, a raft of eccentricities, and a penchant for such strangely nonthreatening behaviors as squirting his adversaries with a water pistol.

          Despite the picture’s slick look and vigorous musical score, the story is so discombobulated that it’s hard to follow. Given that Benson and co-screenwriter Jerry Segal’s previous collaboration was the charming romance One on One (1977), it’s shocking that they missed the mark so widely. Similarly, it boggles the mind that costars Peter Coyote, Charles Durning, and Elsa Lanchester are wasted in small roles. Die Laughing is not without its virtues, such as Benson’s energetic performance of the hooky soft-rock tune “All I Want is Love” and the bizarre climax of Cort’s performance, but it’s a mess.

Die Laughing: FUNKY

1980 Week: Up the Academy

Following the success of Animal House (1978), which was associated with National Lampoon, another venerable humor publication saw its brand attached to a lowbrow comedy about kids making mischief. Yet while Animal House benefited from a clever script, an ingenious director, and a strong cast, the Mad magazine movie, Up the Academy, sprang from a terrible script, a presumably uninterested director, and a weak cast. Instead of the outrageous food fights and panty raids and toga parties of Animal House, this lifeless dud includes offensively stupid vignettes of flatulence, homophobia, stereotypes, and so forth. Admittedly, Mad’s comic strips and movie satires were never avatars of sophistication, but there’s infinitely more wit inside a single panel of, say, Spy vs. Spy than there is in all 87 interminable minutes of Up the Academy. As the title suggests, the picture takes place at a military academy, where several ne’er-do-well boys—all of whom have been sent to the school as punishment for misbehavior—clash with the institution’s demented commander, Major Liceman (Ron Leibman). Per the Animal House playbook, the punks split their time between chasing girls, partying, and scheming against their sworn enemy. The movie’s dimwitted tone is set right in the first scene, a riff on the famous opening of Patton, because the punchline of the first scene is a loud gaseous emission. Similarly, the scenes with weapons instructor Bliss (played by former Bond girl Barbara Bach) are beyond tacky. Wearing a shirt open to the navel, Bliss gives sexualized descriptions of weapons while stroking phallic objects including missile casings. Meanwhile, the boys in her classroom moan and squirm, and when a clueless student tries to ask a relevant question, his neighbor says, “Shut up—some of us are trying to come.” Yep, that’s what passes for a joke in these here parts. Overseeing this unfunny business is director Robert Downey Sr., a long way from his bold avant-garde movies of the ’60s and ’70s. One hopes he was paid well for demolishing his credibility.

Up the Academy: LAME

1980 Week: It's My Turn

          One of the quintessential leading ladies of the ’70s, Jill Clayburgh, fell out of fashion almost as quickly as she achieved star status. Yet over the span of several character-driven films, including this slight romantic comedy, Clayburgh built an important body of work that reflects many of the key issues driving the early women’s movement. The characters Clayburgh portrayed were confused, multidimensional, powerful, and sexy, demanding an equal share of life’s bounty even as they navigated the myriad ways in which changes to traditional gender roles complicated their relationships with men. So even though It’s My Turn is plainly inferior to Starting Over (1978) and An Unmarried Woman (1979), the films are all of a piece.

          Penned by first-time screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, who later achieved a major success with Dirty Dancing (1987), It’s My Turn opens in Chicago, where Kate (Clayburgh) is a mathematics professor at a prestigious university. She lives with Homer (Charles Grodin), who shuns real emotional commitment because he’s still recovering from a divorce. Therefore, when Kate travels to New York for the second wedding of her father, kindly widower Jacob (Steven Hill), Kate is susceptible to the charms of Ben (Michael Douglas), one of the sons of Jacob's fiancée. A former professional baseball player whose career ended because of an injury, Ben is dashing and handsome and self-deprecating. Alas, he's also married. Nonetheless, Kate dives headlong into a whirlwind romance during the weekend of her father’s wedding, soon deciding that she wants to leave Homer for Ben. Naturally, Ben has something to say about this, hence the slender drama that ensues.

           Long on character and short on story, Bergstein’s intelligent script features dialogue vibrates with the narcissism and neuroticism of the Me Decade: “I really don’t want to live through every moment of another person’s life,” Homer whines at one point. More damningly, much of the film is bereft of genuine dramatic conflict, so things just sort of happen without recognizable consequences. There’s a reason why director Claudia Weill, who earned critical raves for her independently made first feature, Girlfriends (1978), transitioned to helming TV shows after making this, her only studio picture. On the plus side, It’s My Turn showcases Clayburgh and Douglas at the apex of their charisma, and the supporting cast (which also includes Beverly Garland, Charles Kimbrough, Daniel Stern, and Dianne Wiest) is excellent. It’s My Turn may be little more than a cinematic snack, but it has a pleasant flavor.

It’s My Turn: FUNKY

1980 Week: Foxes

          Disco-era angst over teenage girls growing up too fast was fodder for myriad made-for-TV melodramas and a handful of features, but few such projects have aged well, particularly since most of them used the subject matter as an excuse for creating lurid images of nymphets dressed like streetwalkers. Consider the peculiar case of Foxes, which stars precocious Jodie Foster as the ringleader for a quartet of high-school girls who spend their free time experimenting with drugs and sex, largely because their libertine parents set poor examples. As directed by English stylist Adrian Lyne, who was part of a cadre of slick UK directors invading Hollywood around the turn of the decade (alongside Alan Parker and Ridley Scott), Foxes has the artistic veneer of a serious picture and the narrative soul of an exploitation flick. Yet the actual content of the film occupies a queasy middle ground between those extremes. Bereft of nudity and including virtually no onscreen sexuality, Foxes is like its characters—the movie talks a good game without going all the way.

          Had screenwriter Gerald Ayres compensated for this lack of salacious material by featuring meaningful dialogue and thoughtful characterizations, the movie could easily have become the best of its bottom-dwelling breed. Instead, Foxes is the definition of style over substance. Upon close inspection, the actual storyline is so slight it barely exists. Basically, each of the four girls has a unique set of misadventures, and the quartet periodically merges for scenes of driving and eating and partying. Jeanie (Foster) clashes with her single mother, Mary (Sally Kellerman), who does a lousy job of balancing family, school, and work. Nerdy Madge (Marilyn Kagan) attempts to set up housekeeping with an older man named Jay (Randy Quaid). Hottie Dierdre (Kandice Smith) plays adolescent romantic games, breaking hearts along the way. And doomed Annie (played by real-life rocker Cherie Currie of the Runaways) functions as a one-woman cautionary tale by messing with bad boys and hard drugs.

          Lyne masks the trashiness of the film with the signature look of the Lyne/Parker/Scott school, diffused side-light that makes everything look as if it was shot through the bottom of a used milk bottle. The naturalistic acting of the cast helps, with Currie making a minor impression as a teen trainwreck, and Foster delivers much better work than the picture deserves, even though she frequently shares scenes with the silly Scott Baio, previously her costar in the absurd Parker-directed musical Bugsy Malone (1976). Oh, and one final note—by the time Foxes ends, you’ll need a long reprieve from hearing Donna Summer’s wonderful ballad “On the Radio,” because Giorgio Moroder, who cowrote that song and provided the score for Foxes, features the tune itself and/or the underlying melody about eight zillion times.

Foxes: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Stunt Man

          To grasp the unique power of The Stunt Man, one need merely examine the impact that it had on the career of Richard Rush, who cowrote, produced, and directed the picture. The Stunt Man curried enough favor for Rush to earn twin Oscar nominations, for direction and screenwriting—but the movie also flopped so badly that it helped derail Rush’s filmmaking career. He didn’t step behind the camera again for 14 years, and his would-be comeback was the notorious bomb Color of Night (1994), an execrable erotic thriller starring Bruce Willis. That’s The Stunt Man in a nutshell: It’s simultaneously a pretentious misfire and a visionary masterpiece. The same extremes that make The Stunt Man beguiling and memorable also make the movie deeply frustrating. Continuing this duality, The Stunt Man is both a dark mystery/thriller and a vicious satire about Hollywood filmmaking. Rush’s movie is not for everyone, but it’s a singular experience.

          Based on a novel by Paul Brodeur and adapted for the screen by Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus, The Stunt Man takes place almost exclusively in and around the opulent location shoot for a World War I-themed action movie. At the beginning of the picture, mystery man Cameron (Steve Railsback) flees the police and stumbles onto the shoot at the same moment a stunt man dies in a helicopter crash. The director of the movie-within-the movie, Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), senses a unique opportunity. A domineering and manipulative sociopath, Eli discovers that Cameron feels responsible for the accident, so he offers to let Cameron assume the stunt man’s identity, thereby hiding from the police. Energizing the Faustian metaphor that runs through the film, Eli uses blackmail to leverage Cameron’s soul. The director goads Cameron into performing a series of dangerous stunts, leading inevitably toward a gag so risky that Cameron becomes convinced Eli is willing to kill Cameron for a spectacular scene.

          As all of this is unfolding, Cameron becomes romantically involved with the leading lady of the movie-within-the-movie, Nina (Barbara Hershey). Yet Eli’s thirst for control extends to Nina, as well, and the psychological abuse that Eli heaps upon Nina is horrific.

          The Stunt Man is a flamboyant piece of work, with Rush aiming for fireworks on every level. The story is frenetic and grandiose. The performances are unrelentingly intense. The camerawork is wild, because Rush and cinematographer Mario Tosi employ crowded compositions, operatic movements, and rich colors to create a larger-than-life style. Even the music, by Dominic Frontiere, virtually screams. Given the voluptuousness of Rush’s cinematic attack, it’s surprising that the most resonant moments in The Stunt Man are intimate.  Specifically, the movie’s best scene involves Cross’ ultimate humiliation of Nina, because O’Toole’s Oscar-nominated performance reaches a peak of sadism at the same time Hershey incarnates vulnerability.

          To a certain degree, Railsback is the odd man out, partially because the nature of the story requires his character to be a cipher, and partially because it’s hard to shake the indelible link between Railsback and Charles Manson, whom the actor unforgettably portrayed in the TV movie Helter Skelter (1976). Yet this, too, works in Rush’s favor—the title character of The Stunt Man seems more like a pawn on a chessboard than a human being. Fitting its title, The Stunt Man offers impressive stunt work, particularly a long foot chase across the rooftop of a beautiful hotel. And that reflects another strange irony—for all of its quasi-literary aspirations, The Stunt Man is fundamentally an action movie. Which begs the question—is The Stunt Man a confused endeavor at war with itself, or a brilliant fusion of disparate elements? Yes.

The Stunt Man: GROOVY

The Deathhead Virgin (1974)

More B-movie trash from the Philippines, The Deathhead Virgin combines a conspiracy, sex, supernatural elements, and underwater adventure into 90 minutes of cheap-looking weirdness. After a kicky prologue during which seamen discover a ghost ship that’s dragging a net full of human skeletons, the movie introduces Janice Cutter (Diane McBain), the estranged widow of the ghost ship’s captain. Summoned to the Philippines in order to settle her late husband’s affairs, she half-heartedly endorses an investigation into the circumstances of his death, which occasions wannabe-creepy flashbacks as well as turgid “present-day” intrigue. The overall thrust is that the late Frank Cutter (Larry Ward) explored an underwater shipwreck and thereby provoked a mythical princess who manifests as a naked nymph with a hollowed-out corpse head. Literally. The biggest money shots in this tepid flick involve a shapely young woman flitting about beneath the waves while wearing nothing but a gruesome-looking mask. That’s interesting to look at for all of about 20 seconds, but director Norman Foster and his team bombard viewers with the same visual again and again. Also testing viewers’ patience are the myriad murder scenes—there’s a lot of scalping, because the princess demands sacrifices in the form of human hair—as well as the frequent use of cheap solarization FX. Leading lady McBain is watchably attractive and cynical, and the conspiracy angle was designed to provide Hitchockian twists. Alas, by the time The Deathhead Virgin meanders into a lengthy comic passage of McBain and two dudes frolicking on the beach, it’s clear the filmmakers were desperate to fill screen time with any old thing because they realized their silly and threadbare story wasn’t enough to command attention—even with fair amounts of gore, quasi-religions mumbo-jumbo, and nudity.

The Deathhead Virgin: LAME

Disco 9000 (1976)

“He’s got a plan that makes him king of boogie-land.” Or so we’re told about protagonist Fass Black in the title song of Disco 9000. Sometimes marketed under the title Fass Black, this tedious blaxploitation flick explores the life of an entrepreneur who owns a successful discotheque on the Sunset Strip, as well as a record label that pumps out a steady stream of dancefloor hits. The anemic plot has a crime hook, because out-of-town gangsters try to muscle into the LA market by intimidating Fass into playing records from mob-owned labels at his club, the top influencer in the SoCal disco scene. Meanwhile, Fass juggles relationships with his wife, his mistress, and various other women. Yes, it’s another spin on the “black kingpin” trope so common to blaxploitation flicks, and neither director D’Urville Martin (better known as an actor) nor writer Roland S. Jefferson M.D. (whose medical credential appears onscreen) generates much heat. The narrative is plodding and predictable, with large chunks of screen time devoted to unimaginatively filmed dance performances. Worse, the only character with any flair is Fass’ pugnacious sidekick, Midget (played by famed dancer Harold Nicholas). Considering the colorful milieu of a nightclub, D’Urville’s lack of cinematic dynamism is galling. Viewers are shown the same drab cutaways of neon lights again and again, and the soundtrack is just as repetitive—after watching Disco 9000, you’ll need a long reprieve from hearing Johnnie Taylor’s slinky hit “Disco Lady,” which is featured way too many times. Oh, and there’s a reason why leading man John Poole’s career never caught fire after he played Fass Black. “Bland” is too generous a word for describing his screen presence. He delivers a performance as stiff and unoriginal as the movie surrounding him.

Disco 9000: LAME

They Call Me Trinity (1971)

          Despite originating in Europe, the spaghetti-western genre didn’t help many European actors become international stars; quite to the contrary, Hollywood actors ranging from Charles Bronson to Clint Eastwood to Lee Van Cleef, among many others, gained career boosts by slumming in foreign productions. The success of the man born Mario Girotti was an exception to this rule. Under his stage name, Terence Hill, the Italian/German actor gained such international notoriety by appearing in spaghetti westerns that he eventually landed starring roles in a handful of Hollywood features. That said, Hill’s signature film, They Call Me Trinity, is not among the finest examples of spaghetti westerns. It’s moderately entertaining, and the general looseness of the piece is as appealing as the comedic interplay between Hill and his frequent costar, Bud Spencer (né Carlo Pedersoli). Yet it's forgettable compared to, say, My Name Is Nobody (1973), the gonzo spaghetti western that Hill made with iconic Italian director Sergio Leone and American screen legend Henry Fonda.

          In They Call Me Trinity, Hill plays the title character, an easygoing bounty hunter whose slovenly clothes mask his superhuman skill with a six-gun. After capturing a wanted man through dazzling marksmanship, Trinity rolls into a small town where his brother, an outlaw named Bambino (Spencer), has assumed the role of sheriff under dubious circumstances. Bambino clashes with Major Harris (Farley Granger), a craven landowner trying to run a group of Mormon settlers out of a valley near Bambino's town. Trinity becomes friendly with the Mormons, especially two pretty young women who propose polygamy, so Trinity talks Bambino into helping him defeat the Major’s evil plans.

          Story-wise, this is all very familiar (think The Magnificent Seven, et al), so the mild charm of They Call Me Trinity stems from comic-tinged stunt work and wink-wink attitude. For instance, Hill’s most distinctive performance trope is keeping a childlike smile on his face even as somersaults through brawls and/or shoots people who are standing behind him without even looking in their direction. He’s a cartoonish swashbuckler. Similarly, Spencer incarnates the familiar archetype of the man-mountain who hides his conscience behind a gruff façade. Still, the anything-for-a-laugh cheerfulness makes it difficult to resent the picture’s shortcomings. What’s more, the target audience clearly got what it wanted from My Name Is Trinity, because the producers reteamed Hill and Spencer for a quick sequel, Trinity Is Still My Name (1972). FYI, although Hill and Spencer did many other movies together, there are only two “official” Trinity pictures. Nonetheless, distributors occasionally slapped the Trinity brand onto unrelated Hill/Spencer flicks, creating some film-history murkiness.

They Call Me Trinity: FUNKY

The Fifth Floor (1978)

          The Fifth Floor is a sleazy piece of business, essentially a woman-in-prison story transposed to a psych ward, juiced with a disco soundtrack, and adorned with dubious assertions that the story was based upon real events. The picture is watchable in an exploitation-flick sort of way, which means that tolerating the movie requires lowering one’s standards, and that actually enjoying the picture would require sacrificing a tiny bit of one’s soul. To be fair, The Fifth Floor is mild when compared to, say, the average grindhouse flick, because the lurid elements aren’t designed to make viewers nauseous, and there’s a sense of both consequences and morality. Still, because so much of the narrative revolves around humiliation presented as titillation, it’s not as if there’s some noble movie buried inside The Fifth Floor. Think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with chases and rape scenes in place of satire and social commentary, and you’re close.

          Girl-next-door type Dianne Hull stars as Kelly McIntyre, a discotheque employee saving money for college. One night while shaking her groove thing on the club’s dancefloor, Kelly freaks out and loses consciousness. When she wakes, Kelly is told that she ingested strychnine. Authorities believe she did so intentionally. Despite Kelly’s protests to the contrary, she’s classified as suicidal and committed involuntarily to a psychiatric ward—the “fifth floor” of the title. Kelly gains unwanted attention from Carl (Bo Hopkins), a sociopathic orderly determined play mind games with Kelly as a kind of foreplay inevitably leading to rape. When Kelly reports Carl’s menacing behavior, doctors mistake her claims for paranoia, extending her stay in the psych ward—and when she tries to escape on several occasions, that adds even more time to her commitment.

          To complement the cat-and-mouse game between Carl and Kelly, the filmmakers give one-note personalities to some of the other patients. Benny (Robert Englund) is a sweet guy prone to play-acting as Dracula and other characters, Cathy (Patti D’Arbanville) is pregnant and worried about her baby, Derrick (Anthony James) is a dark-eyed brooder who seems forever poised on the brink of violence, Melanie (Sharon Farrell) is genuinely suicidal, and so on. These character arcs meander toward predictable and unsatisfying payoffs. Meanwhile, the protagonist endures all sorts of abuse, often while naked. Not exactly the stuff of a resonant cinematic statement.

The Fifth Floor: FUNKY

The Hobbit (1977)

          Produced around the same time as animator Ralph Bakshi’s doomed theatrical adaptation The Lord of the Rings (1978), this made-for-TV cartoon presents a truncated version of author J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, a prequel to his Rings book trilogy. Wrought by Rankin/Bass Productions, best known for their stop-motion Christmas specials of the 1960s and beyond (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc.), this take on The Hobbit has a beguiling visual aesthetic but suffers from problems of storytelling and style. In terms of storytelling, the filmmakers condense and/or omit so many events that the narrative becomes choppy, and in terms of style, the filmmakers use songs so prominently that The Hobbit is an outright musical. While it’s true that Tolkein’s book features songs as a recurring device, the melodies exist only in the reader’s mind, and the lyrical passages are balanced with other elements. In the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, musicality dominates to the point of distraction. Given all of these problems, The Hobbit feels frivolous, rushed, and unfocused, which is a shame.

          For those unfamiliar with the source material, The Hobbit begins when the wizard Gandalf informs diminutive and friendly hobbit Bilbo Baggins that he’s to accompany a group of dwarves on a treasure hunt through dangerous terrain, with the ultimate destination being the lair of Smaug, a horrible dragon hoarding gold that was stolen generations ago from dwarf royalty. The Rankin/Bass script, penned by Romeo Muller, treats nearly every part of Bilbo’s adventure as a fleeting vignette, lingering at great length only on two colorful episodes—Bilbo’s creepy encounter with the cave-dwelling creature Gollum, and Bilbo’s riddle-filled conversation with the dragon Smaug. To be fair, these are exciting and offbeat scenes, both worthy of close attention, and the ornate illustrations permeating this production nearly compensate for the hiccups in dramaturgy.

          The film’s dwarves, elves, goblins, spiders, and such are drawn beautifully, with expressive lines and meticulous details; even though the animation is a bit rudimentary, characterization and texture come across well. The voice cast is mostly adequate, with Orson Bean giving Bilbo warmth, John Huston lending grandeur to Ganadalf, and New York eccentric Brother Theodore providing the requisite perversity for Gollum. (Richard Boone’s flat American tones seem wrong for Smaug, though these things are of course highly subjective.) Given the strengths of this production, one wishes Rankin/Bass had felt compelled to try for a theatrical release, thereby emboldening them to add a half-hour of screen time and let the story breathe. (Though the songs would have been just as irksome.) But then again, thanks to Peter Jackson’s critically drubbed Hobbit trilogy of the 2010s, we’ve seen that too much Hobbit is not necessarily an improvement over too little Hobbit.

The Hobbit: FUNKY

Move (1970)

Man, the late ’60s and early ’70s were the glory days for pointless movies about over-privileged men whose preferred means of confronting existential crises involved seducing comely young women and then yelling at those women for not understanding why it’s so difficult to be an affluent honky. In the pretentious comedy Move, Elliot Gould plays a put-upon New Yorker who complains about his marriage to the beautiful and funny Dolly (Paula Prentiss), mopes that nobody wants to produce the plays that he writes, and whines that it’s difficult to find good help for moving into a spacious new apartment. In the era of Civil Rights and Vietnam, these constitute real problems? Based on a novel by Joel Leiber and imaginatively directed by the versatile Stuart Rosenberg, Move depicts a fraught period in the life of Hiram Jaffe (Gould). Hiram makes a living as a dog-walker (leading to hassles with a citation-happy cop) and as a porn-novel writer. The character’s impending move to a new apartment is a running metaphor and a source of absurdist comedy, because throughout the picture, Hiram is besieged with phone calls from a moving-company representative who capriciously breaks arrival-time commitments. Hiram alienates Dolly, who finds comfort in the arms of her shrink, and then Hiram hops into bed with a character identified only as Girl (Geneviève Waite), a dippy English fashion model with a annoyingly breathy voice. Given the preponderance of leering nude scenes, trippy hallucinations, and wild camera angles, Move clearly wants to provide with-it social commentary, but there’s no coherence or sting to the filmmakers’ satire. Worse, the protagonist comes across as a neurotic, self-pitying, sexist asshole rather than a victim of nefarious forces. Call this one a case of style in search of a theme.

Move: LAME

Hustler Squad (1976)

So you’re an Allied commander during World War II, and you wish to strike a crushing blow against the Japanese military. Do you launch an air strike or a ground assault? No. You hire a motley crew of attractive women, train them to kill, help them infiltrate a group of hookers who’ve been hired to service Japanese officers during an R&R trip, and you unleash the babes. Or at least that’s the thinking of Major Stony Stonewall (John Ericson), the porn-moustache-adorned U.S. Army officer in charge of the Hustler Squad. Produced on a slender budget in the Philippines, this ridiculous and slow-moving action picture tells an outlandish story without anything approaching the sly wit needed to put such a goofy premise over. While it’s true the filmmakers make some ham-fisted attempts at characterization and irony, Hustler Squad is deficient on every level that matters. The re-creation of a historical period is slipshod, the circumstances of the storyline are unbelievable, the acting ranges from awful to mediocre, and the sporadic action scenes look cheap and fake. Even the picture’s titillation factor, presumably the raison d’être for this sort of cartoonish trash, is tame—beyond a few leering shots of breasts, there’s not much here to excite the heavy-breathing set. A few scenes are unintentionally funny, and some of the starlets (particularly Finnish beauty queen Johanna Raunio) are quite lovely. Plus, naturally, Filipino B-movie mainstay Vic Diaz makes an appearance. But seeing as how the filmmakers squandered a concept that should have rendered memorable grindhouse excess, Hustler Squad is a 98-minute misfire.

Hustler Squad: LAME

Zachariah (1971)

          The music-driven western Zachariah could have become a touchstone for the stoner crowd, since the picture borrows the framework of Hermann Hesse’s trippy novel Siddhartha, features electrified rock bands anachronistically performing in cowboy towns, and uses the hero’s encounters with sex and violence to illustrate his spiritual growth. Alas, while the concept of Zachariah sounds far-out, the execution is disappointingly mundane. Excepting scenes with contemporary music and/or outlandish production design, the film unspools as a straightforward Hollywood western, complete with slick photography, a straight-ahead storyline, and tense gunfight sequences. As such, Zachariah can’t really decide which audience it’s trying to serve—the movie is too square for hippies, and too offbeat for straights.
          Furthermore, while the relationship between the movies may be coincidental, Zachariah comes across like a hopelessly watered-down American riff on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s demented gunfighter epic El Topo, which hit theaters a year before Zachariah.

          Cowritten by Joe Massot and the four members of comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre (who failed to imbue Zacharaiah with much in the way of humor), Zachariah concerns the title character (John Rubenstein), a country boy in the Old West who dreams of becoming a gunfighter. He buys a pistol through mail order, practices with the weapon, and then embarks on a journey along with his best friend, young blacksmith Matthew (Don Johnson). The lads join a small-time gang (portrayed by Woodstock rockers Country Joe and the Fish), but Zachariah longs to earn fame by defeating celebrated gunslinger Job (Elvin Jones). Eventually, Zachariah’s ambitions derail his friendship with Matthew and send Zachariah into the bed of prostitute Belle (Patricia Quinn).

          Director George Englund weaves music into the entire movie, sometimes stopping the story dead for an onscreen performance (hello there, Joe Walsh and the James Gang!), and sometimes utilizing propulsive tunes as an underscore. It’s all very pleasant to experience, inasmuch as counterculture-era sounds and the outlaw mythos mesh well, but nothing extraordinary takes shape. After all, even though the performances are adequate, the look is colorful, and some the tunes swing, how hip can a movie really be when it includes a supporting performance by future Eight Is Enough dad Dick Van Patten as a carnival barker?

Zachariah: FUNKY

Melinda (1972)

          Something of a blaxploitation sampler platter, the overlong, over-plotted, and overwrought Melinda combines conspiracies, crime, martial arts, romance, revenge, and a whole lot of jive-talkin’, the latter element mostly issuing from the mouth of protagonist Frankie J. Parker, an arrogant Los Angeles DJ. The picture is fairly entertaining on a scene-to-scene basis, and it contains some respectable acting by costars Rosalind Cash and Paul Stevens, among others. Moreover, the sheer excess of the movie is beguiling, simply because Melinda wends through so many different genres during its 109 eventful (and frequently violent) minutes. The film doesn’t hang together, of course, and very little of what happens feels credible from either an emotional or a logical perspective. Nonetheless, copping the right attitude often helps put even the slightest blaxploitation flick over, and every so often Melinda hits a pleasing stance. Even when it doesn’t, the disconnect between leading man Calvin Lockhart’s uptight screen person and the movie’s down-and-dirty milieu is weirdly fascinating.

          When the story begins, Frankie (Lockhart) seems like a man in full. In addition to his successful career as a DJ, he struts around town wooding ladies and spends his free time perfecting his martial-arts skills under the tutelage of an instructor named Charles (played by future chop-socky-cinema star Jim Kelly in his big-screen debut). Frankie meets his match in Melinda (Vonetta McGee), a beautiful woman who’s just as self-assured as Frankie. They become lovers, much to the consternation of Frankie’s ex, the mob-connected Terry (Cash). Then things get complicated (to say nothing of contrived and convoluted). It seems Melinda knows the whereabouts of an audio recording that incriminates big-time gangster Mitch (Stevens), so she and Frankie become embroiled in a bloody adventure.

          Melinda hits some strange notes along the way. During the lengthy scene of Frankie and Melinda having sex for the first time, director Hugh A. Robertson repeatedly cuts to a thug standing in the hall outside Frankie’s apartment, masturbating while he listens to the couple’s carnal bliss. In a nasty flashback scene, Mitch sits and laughs while his underlings gang-bang his girlfriend. And in the very first scene, Frankie lays down goofy trash talk while coaxing Charles into a sparring session: “I’m ever-ready for some lightweight shit, but you better come with somethin’ heavy—I’m packed with dynamite!” Whatever you say, man.

Melinda: FUNKY

Black Oak Conspiracy (1977)

          A redneck revenge saga that delivers the meat-and-taters goods while making a few admirable if clumsy attempts at characterization, Black Oak Conspiracy starts strong, lags in the middle, and wraps up with a colorful finale set at an outdoor mine. Viewers will not encounter anything here they haven’t seen before, and none of the actors does anything special. That said, Black Oak Conspiracy goes down smoothly because it evades certain clichés (don’t look for moonshiners in this story), and because leading man Jesse Vint, who also cowrote and coproduced the picture, knows that what people want from this sort of picture is a simple saga about a good ole boy who gets pushed too far and then pushes back. Specifically, Vint—who earned his redneck-cinema bona fides by starring in Macon County Line (1974)—stars as Jingo Johnson, a country boy trying to make a living in Hollywood as a stuntman. When he gets word that his mother has fallen ill, he heads back to his rural hometown and tries to reconnect with his high-school sweetheart, Lucy Metcalf (Karen Carlson). Unfortunately, she’s moved on to a relationship with Harrison Hancock (Robert F. Lyons), son of the richest man in town, power-monger Bryan Hancock (Douglas Fowley). Worse, Jingo discovers that his mother has fallen victim to a conspiracy aimed at stealing land. Is a corrupt sheriff involved? Of course a corrupt sheriff is involved.

          While Vint and Carlson are relatively ineffectual as leading players, some of the supporting actors make tasty contributions. Unlikely as it may seem, one of John Cassavetes’ favorite actors, Seymour Cassel, appears as Jingo’s old buddy, and Cassel adds a bit of humanity. Reliable character actor Albert Salmi imbues the sheriff character with appropriate levels of rage and violence, and sexy starlet Janus Blythe ups the film’s eye-candy quotient as a waitress who helps Jingo fight the bad guys. The movie even provides a few nasty flashes of gore when one of the characters goes on a killing spree, so it’s clear the filmmakers endeavored to tick as many B-movie boxes as possible. The folks behind Black Oak Conspiracy may not have set out to make art, but they sure aimed to please their target audience.

Black Oak Conspiracy: FUNKY