The American Friend (1977)

          German director Wim Wenders tends toward a certain voluptuousness in his storytelling, so even though his narratives are often quite intimate—exploring the emotional lives of small groups of characters—he’s prone to meandering scenes and slow pacing. Yet because Wenders also has a distinct visual style and a novelist’s instinct for using behavior to reveal character, the more-is-more approach often leads to fascinating results. The American Friend is a good example. Based on one of Patricia Highsmith’s acclaimed “Ripley” novels, The American Friend is nominally a thriller about art forgery, double-crosses, murders, and other such intrigue. As seen through Wenders’ unique prism, The American Friend is also a meditation on friendship, loss, and the need to value life as it happens instead of waiting for whatever’s coming down the road. The synthesis between the movie’s high and low instincts is not perfect, but cinematic artistry and thematic ambition elevate the piece far above the plane of mere pulp.

          The story is convoluted, so a brief rundown of key elements should be sufficient to hint at the content. In America, con man Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) acquires paintings by an artist who faked his own death in order to increase the value of his work. After traveling to Germany, Tom sells the paintings in an auction. Tangentially connected to this scheme is German everyman Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), an art restorer whose skills have diminished because of health problems. Jonathan now makes his living by framing artwork, and Tom is one of his clients. When Tom is asked by gangsters to find an expendable person who can commit a murder, Tom suggests Jonathan for the job. (Tom picks Jonathan as a patsy because of a social slight, taking petty vindictiveness to the extreme.) Initially, Jonathan refuses to kill for money—but after receiving a grim prognosis from his doctor, Jonathan accepts the job, hoping to provide for his wife and child. Little does Jonathan suspect that Tom pressured Jonathan’s doctor to exaggerate the gravity of his patient’s prognosis. Eventually, Jonathan and Tom form an unlikely friendship, which complicates the situation in peculiar ways.

         Shot by longtime Wenders collaborator Robby Müller, The American Friend is gorgeous to behold. Mostly employing static frames that evoke the aesthetics of still photography, Müller turns the streets of Hamburg, New York, Paris and other cities into canvases, painting with light and shadows to give the film equal measures of beauty and grit. And even if the pure suspense elements are merely serviceable—an altercation on a moving train feels like watered-down Hitchcock—Wenders’ odd little touches keep the picture humane and idiosyncratic and spontaneous. For instance, Wenders cast three real-life movie directors (Gérard Blain, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray) in supporting roles. In sum, The American Friend is not a potboiler, even though that label could be applied to the source material. Rather, the film asks questions about what might happen if everyday people somehow became embroiled in outrageous schemes. With Ganz providing vulnerability and Hopper representing the opposite end of the human spectrum, The American Friend is an offbeat character study masquerading as a genre picture.

The American Friend: GROOVY

Charlie’s Angels (1976)

          Nearly all the elements that made the glossy detective series Charlie’s Angels popular are present in the feature-length telefilm that preceded the weekly show, and yet some early ideas that were later abandoned are in evidence, as well. The pilot is just as fluffy and silly as the rest of the series, although the T&A quotient is relatively tame considering how much focus was later given to displaying the series’ leading ladies in bikinis, cheerleader costumes, low-cut gowns, and such. Rather than cleavage and legs, the caveman-mentality focus is primarily on the “novelty” of beautiful women demonstrating competence as private investigators, although the distaff detectives get even more male supervision during the pilot than they usually did in their weekly adventures.

          The pilot introduces the three original protagonists—Jill Munroe (Farrah Fawcett-Majors), Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith), and Sabrina Duncan (Kate Jackson)—receiving their first assignments from mysterious employer Charles Townsend (the never-seen character whose voice is provided by John Forsythe). In a brief prologue that later became the show’s iconic opening-credits sequence, viewers are told that the women graduated from the police academy only to be given thankless jobs, and then were hired to work for Townsend. The Angels, as Townsend calls them, take instructions from their direct supervisor, Woodville (David Ogden Stiers), a character who was dropped before the first regular episode. The ladies’ other male colleague is fellow detective John Bosley (David Doyle), portrayed in the pilot as a cheerful buffoon and later reworked as stalwart coworker.

          Written by series creators Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts—veteran screenwriters whose collaborative record stretches all the way back to the James Cagney classic White Heat (1949)—the mystery that the Angels explore in the pilot isn’t really a mystery. Undoubtedly bearing the fingerprints of producer Aaron Spelling, who made a fortune playing to the lowest common denominator of the American viewing audience, the narrative is spoon-fed to viewers, with every complication explained in a condescending manner. The daughter of a wealthy California vintner disappeared years ago, and now that the vintner has also disappeared, his estate may fall into the hands of his unscrupulous widow. It’s up to the Angels to determine whether anything shady is happening, thus prompting the usual cycle of Jill, Kelly, and Sabrina masquerading as various people in order to find information.

          The supporting cast features solid players Bo Hopkins and Diana Muldaur, as well as a young Tommy Lee Jones, and the whole thing drags a bit, not just because the thin story is stretched to almost 80 minutes but because composer Jack Elliot uses the series’ signature twinkling musical sting so many times the cue becomes annoying. Seeing as how Fawcett-Majors was the first season’s breakout star thanks to her dazzling barrage of big hair, erect nipples, and shiny teeth, it’s interesting to note that Smith gets the most screen time in this initial outing. As always, she’s lovely but vapid. In any event, Charlie’s Angels the pilot movie is exactly as disposable as any episode of Charlie’s Angels the series, so the appeal of watching the piece (besides eye candy) is the opportunity to examine the unremarkable beginnings of an enduring pop-culture franchise.

Charlie’s Angels: FUNKY

Moonrunners (1975)

          A hard-driving product of the mid-’70s craze for movies about moonshine peddlers, Moonrunners has interesting connections to popular culture that preceded and followed the film’s release. Costar James Mitchum, the son of legendary Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum, appeared with his dad in the 1958 moonshine-themed B-movie Thunder Road, so there’s a minor passing-of-the-torch element to Moonrunners. More significant is the picture’s legacy, because Moonrunners writer-producer Gy Waldron recycled many of the film’s elements when he created the hit rednecks-running-wild TV series The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985). Although Moonrunners doesn’t have the big-budget polish of The Dukes of Hazzard, the movie epitomizes the good-ole-boys irreverence that made the series popular.

          Set in Georgia, Moonrunners follows the adventures of cousins Bobby Lee Hagg (Kiel Martin) and Grady Hagg (Mitchum). Both drive cars for their uncle, white-lightning manufacturer Jesse Hagg (Arthur Hunnicut). The Hagg boys get into hassles with corrupt cops and with Uncle Jesse’s main competitor, Jake Rainey (George Ellis), a varmint determined to get a monopoly on his county’s illegal-liquor trade. The Hagg boys also enjoy brawling, chasing women, gambling, and participating in stock-car races. While the flick’s plotting is perfunctory at best, the style is fairly appealing. Country singer Waylon Jennings narrates (he served the same role on The Dukes of Hazzard), performing tunes and providing cornpone commentary, though he never appears on camera. Every once in a while, the synthesis between Jennings’ rascally delivery and Waldron’s playful language feels just about perfect, as when Jennings’ narration introduces a certain corrupt sheriff, whose name was repurposed for the series: Roscoe P. Coltrane. “After a career of being honest,” Jennings explains, “Roscoe was gonna retire on a bad case of hemorrhoids and $643 in the Shiloh County Bank.”

          Not everything in the picture is quite that lowbrow. For instance, the best scene involves a police chief explaining to a federal officer the county’s normal procedure for arresting and processing Beauregard, a mule used for hauling materials to and from Uncle Jesse’s still. In vignettes like that one, Waldron conveys a fully imagined subculture. (Similarly, it’s hard to argue with the character names “Cooter” and “Zeebo.”) Looking and sounding very much like a Roger Corman production, Moonrunners is rough around the edges, with inconsistent acting and jumpy editing, though Kiel’s hyped-up persona and Mitchum’s laconic nature complement each other well. Better still, by the time people start shooting dynamite-tipped arrows, Waldron hits the sweet spot for this particular subgenre.

Moonrunners: FUNKY

Spawn of the Slithis (1978)

A drab creature feature set in the funky milieu of the Venice Canals, back when the coastal Los Angeles neighborhood was still a sketchy enclave for artists and surfers and vagrants, Son of the Slithis—the title of which is occasionally abbreviated to just Slithis—offers little of interest, even for monster-movie maniacs. The setup is the usual noise about radioactive waste getting into the water system and causing the birth of a mutated killer. The plot is just as trite, with a journalism teacher and a police detective both investigating murders until clues lead them to discover the truth about “slithis,” an experimental substance that was unwittingly released by a sloppy lab workers. And the monster itself is a standard man-in-suit embarrassment, suggesting the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s dorky cousin. As for the attack scenes, envision shots of everyday people checking out strange noises in their homes at night, only to discover a giant green slime monster with a bad attitude—the watchwords here are “dreary’ and “repetitive.” Unsurprisingly, highlights are hard to come by in Spawn of the Slithis. The bit with the mad doctor revealing he once felt the cold touch of slithis, resulting in a face that looks like it was dipped in acid, is infinitesimally amusing, in a campy sort of way. And the vignette of the monster either eating or killing or raping a young woman is diverting, if only because the muddy photography forces the viewers to parse the imagery for clues about what’s happening. More typical of the picture, alas, is the long scene of the hero negotiating with three drunks for information. Like the movie itself, the drunks have nowhere to go and they’re not in any hurry to get there. Even though Spawn of the Slithis is basically coherent and linear, it’s so lifeless that it never even generates much in the way of so-bad-it’s-good ironic entertainment value.

Spawn of the Slithis: LAME

Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)

          A sleek thriller from the bloodier end of the giallo spectrum, Black Belly of the Tarantula is very similar in style and tone to the many Hitchcock-inspired thrillers that Brian De Palma made—it’s a highly sexualized and nearly operatic melodrama about a psycho who mutilates and kills beautiful women. Accordingly, the same question that one can ask about De Palma’s ugliest movies can be asked about this Italian production. Does Black Belly of the Tarantula justify its own existence? Not really. Although noteworthy for certain elements, including a parade of gorgeous starlets and a truly eerie score by the great Ennio Morricone, Black Belly of the Tarantula is vile for the way it eroticizes the degradation of women. Some psycho-killer movies are worthwhile because they provide insights into the human condition, and it’s true that the people behind Black Belly of the Tarantula follow a fairly true moral compass. Nonetheless, how many images of lovely ladies being sliced open does the world really need?

          Set in Rome, the picture tracks an investigation by Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) into a series of strange murders. As depicted in loving detail, each murder involves an unknown assailant stabbing a woman in the back of the neck with an acupuncture needle, thereby paralyzing the women so the murderer can disembowel her while she’s still conscious. Tellini learns that this method of killing is inspired by the way a black wasp kills its natural enemy, the tarantula. In between murder vignettes and scenes of Tellini examining grisly crime scenes, the picture shows Tellini interrogating suspects and also shows Tellini’s home life. The most interesting thread in the movie is a subplot about Tellini questioning whether he’s cut out to be a homicide investigator, not only because seeing savagery wounds his soul, but also because the killer makes sport of Tellini by surreptitiously filming a sexual encounter between the inspector and his wife.

          Despite its formulaic story and sadistic extremes, Black Belly of the Tarantula is interesting to watch for the way it stimulates the senses. Director Paolo Cavara contrives many dynamic images and even a few somewhat erotic ones (for example, the shots of a nude woman viewed through jellied glass while she receives a massage). And even though Cavara’s chase scenes are perfunctory, he exhibits real glee when filming murders, contriving dramatic camera angles and translating peril into something like choreography. European beauties passing before Cavara’s camera include three women associated with the James Bond franchise—Claudine Auger, Barbara Bach, and Barbara Bouchet—while Morricone’s inventive melodies are like aural candy with bitter undertones. Furthermore, Giannini gives a strong performance in the leading role, blending desperation, ennui, fear, and rage into a sympathetic characterization.

Black Belly of the Tarantula: FUNKY

Charge of the Model T’s (1977)

Harmless but stupid, this war-themed comedy is roughly in the mode of a Disney live-action picture from the same era, only Disney moves of the ’70s were generally more palatable thanks to breakneck plotting and the participation of name-brand actors. Charge of the Model T’s writer-director Jim MicCullough Jr. grinds a small number of jokes into the dirt through endless repetition, and the broader the style of the movie gets, the more actual amusement disappears from the equation. By the time the movie sputters out, viewers who’ve gone the distance are likely to be left numb. The mere fact that McCullough obviously means well isn’t enough to make the experience of watching his picture worthwhile. Set in southern Texas during World War I, the story follows Lt. Matthew Jones (John David Carson), an ambitious young officer assigned to a cavalry unit even though he’s not a horseman. Matthew swears by his Ford Model T automobile, going so far as to advocate the creation of a fully automated cavalry unit. Meanwhile, German spy Friedrich Schmidt (Louis Nye) receives orders to stir up trouble on the Mexican border, ostensibly to distract soldiers who might otherwise participate in the European war effort. Also thrown into the mix is a trite love story involving Matthew and the daughter of his superior officer, as well as silly business related to a Mexican bandito—who is played by the familiar Jewish character actor Herb Edelman. Oh, and Laugh-In star Arte Johnson plays a dumb supporting role as an elderly doctor who causes trouble because he can neither hear nor understand what people say to him. Based on a novel by Lee Somerville, the picture starts off well enough, with Carson evincing fresh-scrubbed likeability, and then the rot sets in: To the accompaniment of awful, Keystone Kops-style music, characters engage in lifeless physical comedy and the worst kind of farce, with jokes predicated on characters being total morons. Furthermore, any novelty stemming from the sight of doughboys driving Model T’s as they battle villains in the desert wears off very quickly.

Charge of the Model T’s: LAME

That Lucky Touch (1975)

          Suave British actor Roger Moore never properly capitalized on his visibility while playing James bond from 1973 to 1985, appearing in fun movies that failed to find wide audiences (such as the 1979 action romp North Sea Hijack, released in the US in 1980 as ffolkes), and, more often than not, headlining misfires along the lines of That Lucky Touch. A British/German coproduction plainly designed to capture the effervescence of Cary Grant’s romantic comedies, That Lucky Touch suffers from a woefully underdeveloped story, and neither the action components nor the humorous elements connect. Thanks to the presence of several big-name actors and the use of picturesque European locations, the movie is pleasant enough to watch on a scene-by-scene basis. Alas, it all crumbles the minute one tries to connect the narrative dots. Viewed with forgiving eyes, however, the picture has one strong virtue, which is the chemistry that Moore shares with costar Susannah York. (This was the duo’s second and final picture together, following the solid 1974 thriller Gold.) Although Moore and York aren’t exactly Grant and Hepburn—not even close—they banter well and have similar upper-crust screen personas.

          Moore plays Michael Scott, an international arms dealer who may or may not operate inside the law. (Even though Michael takes clandestine nighttime meetings like a criminal, he’s portrayed as having above-board UN connections.) York plays Michael’s next-door neighbor, Julia Richardson, a reporter for The Washington Post. Both characters are friendly with US Lt. Gen. Henry Steedman (Lee J. Cobb), a blustery career officer married to the overbearing Diana (Shelley Winters). Michael wants Henry to buy a large shipment of guns, and Julia’s snooping imperils the deal, so, naturally, Michael and Julia share a meet-cute that leads to love. The plot also involves a UN war-games exercise that puts Julia into the orbit of an amorous Italian named Gen. Peruzzi (Raf Vallone). The final player on the board is Michael’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, sexy Sophie (Sydne Rome). Allegedly based upon an idea by the legendary playwright Moss Hart, That Lucky Touch makes very little sense. At its worst, the movie devolves into bewildering chaos, especially during a duck hunt that’s intercut with both the war-games exercise and Michael’s desperate attempt to stop Julia from doing—something or another. All very murky.

          Mildly tasty but also flat and unsatisfying, That Lucky Touch is like champagne without the fizz.

That Lucky Touch: FUNKY

Zaat (1971)

Easily one of the dullest creature features ever made, the awful Floridian indie Zaat concerns a mad scientist who contrives a formula that transforms him into a giant walking catfish, even as he unleashes a plague of actual walking catfish onto unsuspecting residents of the Sunshine State. Not giant walking catfish, mind you, just normal-sized critters that skitter across the ground during the brief intervals when they can survive outside of water. As for the man-monster, he’s not very threatening, either. Picture a facsimile of the Gill-Man costume from The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955) made with papier-mâché by five-year-olds, and you get a sense of how realistic the aquatic atrocity in this picture looks. Produced, cowritten, and codirected by Don Barton, who wisely never made another movie, Zaat begins drably. While mad-doctor voiceover explains a plan to gain revenge on skeptics through the transformation of man into fish, Barton presents stock footage of fish in captivity. Then, once slovenly everyman Dr. Kurt Leopold (Marshall Grauer) appears onscreen to tinker with knobs and levers in a hidden laboratory, the dreary voiceover continues all the way through to the transformation scene, which is abrupt and flat: Kurt straps himself into a stretcher, lowers the stretcher into a vat of electrified water, and steps out in the fish suit, after which he walks over to his paper-covered wall and makes notes. The movie doesn’t even feature synchronized dialogue until about 20 minutes into the painfully overlong 100-minute running time. Scenes of the monster attacking people are tedious, especially since actor Wade Popwell can barely move while wearing the creature suit, and the peripheral scenes of folks living their lives unaware of the monster in their midst are beyond vapid. Unsurprisingly, Zaat’s best claim to fame is that it was ridiculed on a 1999 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Oh, and if you care—which you don’t—the title Zaat refers to the formula the mad scientist uses to transform himself.

Zaat: SQUARE

Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973)

          On the plus side, the dueling-rednecks picture Lolly-Madonna XXX features elegant cinematography, an impressive cast, a plaintive score, and a whopper of a final act filled with bloodshed and tragedy. For fans of melodramatic pulp, there’s a lot to savor in this fictional story that vaguely evokes the Hatfield-McCoy mythos. Nonetheless, the film’s weaknesses are plentiful. The basic premise is awkward and contrived, the middle of the movie is dull and uneventful, and many of the character relationships stretch credibility to the breaking point. One can feel the filmmakers trying to push all the pieces in place for a spectacular finale, but the elements never cohere dramatically or logically. Considering that the movie was co-written by future mystery-fiction queen Sue Grafton, who adapted Lolly-Madonna XXX from her own novel of the same name, it’s fair to say that Grafton was still learning how to construct plots.

          Here’s the iffy set-up. In backwoods Tennessee, two families have been fighting for years because one bought a piece of a land that previously belonged to the other. The Feathers are led by stoic patriarch Laban (Rod Steiger), while the Gutshalls answer to the highly principled Pap (Robert Ryan). One day, the Gutshall boys leave a postcard in the Feather mailbox, indicating that a young woman named Lolly Madonna is scheduled to arrive in the region, with plans to marry one of the Gutshall boys. The Feathers head to the bus station and kidnap a young woman named Roonie Gill (Season Hubley), whom they mistakenly believe is Lolly Madonna. In reality, there is no such woman, and the postcard was a ruse to get the Feathers away from their moonshine operation so the Gutshalls could vandalize the still. Despite Roonie’s vehement objections, the Feathers refuse to believe she’s not the intended bride of a Gutshall, so they try to leverage her as a hostage. Somehow, even though Roonie has no actual relationship with the Gutshalls, this scheme exacerbates the rivalry, triggering arson, rape, theft, and eventually murder. Does any of this hogwash make sense? No.

          But consider the vivacious actors populating the cast. Jeff Bridges. Gary Busey. Ed Lauter. Randy Quaid. Scott Wilson. Not too shabby. Moreover, director Richard C. Sarafian does his usual frustrating job, rendering richly textured images and staging individual scenes well even as he fails to convey a persuasive overarching story. At least the movie’s final half-hour is memorably grim, and it’s hard to shake the weird vignettes with Lauter—not only does the tough-guy actor pretend to give a rockabilly concert performance while standing alone in a hog pen, but he also plays a rape scene while wearing lingerie and makeup. You don’t see that sort of thing every day. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Bridges is terrific, as usual, giving a better performance than the movie probably deserves, even as Ryan underplays and Steiger thunders for the entertainment of those in the cheap seats.

Lolly-Madonna XXX: FUNKY

Baker’s Hawk (1976)

          A family-friendly Western that delivers exactly what it promises, and not an iota more, Baker’s Hawk is cut from the same cloth as the 1977-1983 TV series Little House on the Prairie—it’s a wholesome homily, with all the negatives and positives that description implies. Based on a novel by Jack M. Bickham, the picture follows a teenaged farmboy named Billy (Lee H. Montgomery) as he learns about friendship, intolerance, mortality, and vigilantism. Schematic in the extreme, the narrative runs along two tracks. In the overarching storyline, Billy watches his small community succumb to mob rule as citizens form a “vigilance committee” and try to force principled individuals including Billy’s father, Dan (Clint Walter), to take up arms against unwanted outsiders. In the main subplot, Billy finds a weak young hawk left in the nest by its mother, and then nurses the hawk to full strength with the help of a kindly hermit, Mr. McGraw (Burl Ives). Inevitably, these story elements intersect because Billy’s sensitivity to outsiders makes him a target for bullies, which parallels the way his father’s resistance to vigilantism alienates him from small-minded neighbors. Baker’s Hawk is so full of Meaningful Life Lessons that flashing numbers should appear onscreen each time a new teachable moment occurs.

          Yet Baker’s Hawk isn’t quite as dry and trite as the preceding synopsis might suggest. The focus on animals means that every so often, the movie is elevated by something real—a shot of a hawk soaring through the sky, a vignette of a deer fawn frolicking in the woods. Additionally, the cast is sufficiently colorful to make all but the most sentimental scenes palatable. Montgomery, who played a number of kid roles in movies and TV shows throughout the ’70s, favors wide-eyed wonder over misty-eyed mawkishness, so he mostly steers clear of typical kid-actor excess. Walker, the towering he-man best known for the 1955-1963 Western series Cheyenne, renders a characterization best described as John Wayne Lite, and his dramatic limitations work well for the role of a simple man facing complex problems. Ives does what he can with the picture’s most clichéd character, his honeyed voice and seeming comfort with animals lending a smidgen of gravitas. The filmmakers would have been prudent to give leading lady Diane Baker, who plays Billy’s mother, a bit more screen time, just as they would have been prudent to give Partridge Family kid Danny Bonaduce, who plays a bully, a bit less. At least the hawk, who undoubtedly gives the film’s best performance, never disappoints.

Baker’s Hawk: FUNKY

Curse of the Headless Horseman (1972)

Opinion being what it is, cinefiles will never agree on which movie deserves the title “Worst Film Ever Made,” or even the title “Worst Picture of the ’70s.” Nonetheless, Curse of the Headless Horseman would be a fierce competitor in either contest. Cheap, grubby, incoherent, and stupid, this unwatchable horror flick blends amateur theater, half-assed FX, insipid hippies, and weird sexual encounters into a nonsensical stew of poorly exposed and frequently out-of-focus images. The movie has several different main storylines, but it’s not as if the filmmakers strove to generate a multi-threaded narrative; rather, one gets the feeling that they either made up new scenes during production or simply shot every idea they had without bothering to reconcile how different elements related to each other. Mark (Marland Proctor) and his girlfriend, Brenda (Claudia Reame), venture to an old ranch that Mark has inherited, because the terms of a bequest require that Mark transform the ranch into a viable business. Mark tries to open a resort (or a hotel or something), but every night, a headless horseman shows up to either splatter someone with blood or kill someone. Exhibiting the sort of illogical behavior that’s typical of characters in bargain-basement horror flicks, Mark stays put instead of fleeing, thereby ensuring a steady supply of victims as the headless horseman continues his/its supernatural search for a group of gunfighters from the past. Whatever. If anything makes sense in this movie, it’s accidental. The acting is as wretched as the storytelling, the kill scenes lack any discernible excitement, and the soundtrack is filled with screechy noises. Furthermore, once the filmmakers start assaulting viewers’ eyes by tinting different shots with random colors, it’s clear that pure desperation has taken root, even though every effort the filmmakers make to generate stimulation utterly fails. Make your own jokes about how the people behind Curse of the Headless Horseman could have solved their problems by using their heads.

Curse of the Headless Horseman: SQUARE

The Yum Yum Girls (1976)

A grungy story about models sleeping their way to success that one fears was intended to contain comedic elements in addition to tawdry melodrama, The Yum Yum Girls is a dull and unpleasant viewing experience. Although leading lady Michelle Daw is so appealing and pretty that it’s a surprising she never made another film, the movie surrounding her is repetitive and vapid. The story literally begins with Melody (Daw) getting off the bus in Manhattan after leaving Ohio, with dreams of becoming a top model. Yet instead of portraying Melody as a naïve Midwesterner, the filmmakers—actually, let’s call them culprits—depict her as a sexually experienced striver willing to disrobe, fellate, and fornicate whenever she meets someone who can help her career. So if The Yum Yum Girls isn’t a morality tale about the coarsening of a decent young woman, is it a male fantasy about the sexual availability of beautiful models? Whatever the case, the only conceivable reason for watching The Yum Yum Girls is the promise of titillation. Melody’s first love scene has a tiny bit of heat to it, but every other carnal vignette disappoints. Some of these physical encounters are nasty (producers demanding oral sex during auditions, a guy raping Melody because she won’t put out after he bought her dinner), while most are simply boring. Worse, a running “gag” in The Yum Yum Girls involves a stationary camera positioned inside a dressing room capturing shots of girls as they change clothes between photography sessions. Skeeve City. FYI, future Charlie’s Angels star Tanya Roberts plays a supporting role and somehow manages to stay dressed throughout her screen time, as does minor ’70s starlet Judy Landers, who displays her eye-popping form in bikinis and lingerie. Anyone seeking cheap thrills is sure to be disappointed by The Yum Yum Girls, and the movie offers nothing else to compensate.

The Yum Yum Girls: LAME

The Grasshopper (1970)

          How campy is the sexualized melodrama The Grasshopper? In one memorable scene, bereaved heroine Christine Adams (Jacqueline Bisset), still dressed in black from a loved one’s funeral, demands that her limo driver pull to the side of the road and pick up two scraggly-looking hitchhikers. Once the longhairs are inside the limo, Christine screeches, “Are you holding? Do you have any shit?” By the next scene, Christine is unconscious from an overdose, and the movie still has another half-hour to go. Based on a novel by Mark McShane and written by the unlikely duo of Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, whose most famous collaboration was the 1970-1975 sitcom The Odd Couple, this fast and furious soap opera charts the spiritual decay of a wholesome Canadian girl who tumbles into a degrading cycle of drugs, prostitution, and tragedy. Yet because the Belson/Marshall script is peppered with quippy dialogue and because director Jerry Paris films the whole story with the bright visual style of, say, a Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy, The Grasshopper is impossible to take seriously. Plus, with all due respect to the fine acting skills that she later developed, Bisset plays the leading role with a kind of sunny vapidity, smiling blankly through some scenes and unpersuasively mimicking anguish in others.

          When the movie begins, 19-year-old Christine drops out of college and flees her home in British Columbia to join her boyfriend, who has already begun his working life in Los Angeles. Along the way, Christine has car trouble and is given a ride by Danny Raymond (Corbett Monica), a Las Vegas nightclub comedian. Although Christine declines Danny’s sexual overtures, she’s dazzled by Sin City while staying overnight there. So when Christine grows bored with her quietly domestic life in LA, she ditches her boyfriend and returns to Vegas, where she gets a job as a showgirl. Eventually, she becomes romantically involved with Tommy Marcott (Jm Brown), an ex-NFL player now working as the manager of a cheesy football-themed restaurant. For a few moments depicting the heyday of the relationship between Christine and Tommy, The Grasshopper is energetic and fresh—addressing miscegenation without sensationalism, the movie draws a connection between two people who wish to be appreciated for more than just their bodies. Alas, Christine’s chance encounter with a horny, Mob-connected businessman (Ramon Bieri) triggers violence, which in turn begins the spiral leading to Christine’s drug problems and sex work. By the end of the picture, when Christine is juggling relationships with an aging sugar daddy (Joseph Cotten) and a craven young stud (Christopher Stone), the lurid aspects of The Grasshopper have spun out of control.

          From start to finish, the presentation of The Grasshopper is slick but garish, epitomized by Christine’s showgirl costume of a blue wig, a sparkly leotard complete with built-in pasties, and giant feather wings. Meanwhile, the soundtrack features absurdly on-the-nose songs explaining the heroine’s emotional state. Brown elevates his scenes with the casual cool he brought to all of his screen work, and some of the supporting players are excellent, particularly Ed Flanders as a sleazy hotel manager. Nonetheless, The Grasshopper is unrelentingly artificial, a cautionary tale without credibility, and a jokey treatment of bleak subject matter.

The Grasshopper: FUNKY

Blue Water, White Death (1971)

          Embracing the virtues of the nature documentary Blue Water, White Death requires a bit of time travel. When the movie was released in 1971, neither Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws nor the smash 1975 film adaptation of Benchley’s book had been released, so audiences were not yet accustomed to seeing images of great white sharks. Nonetheless, even though Blue Water, White Death is very much a product of its time—and even though great whites don’t appear until the last 15 minutes or so—the documentary is still interesting to watch. Somewhat like Steven Spielberg’s film of Jaws, the doc spends more than an hour building drama and suspense. Therefore, once great whites finally appear, viewers—to say nothing of the documentary’s onscreen participants—have been primed to appreciate the creatures’ awesome ferocity.

          Originally filmed in 1969 throughout waters off Africa, Australia, and India, the doc follows the Terrier VIII, a 158-foot steamship loaded with diving cages, scuba gear, and other equipment. Led by the unlikely figure of producer, cowriter, codirector, and expedition chief Peter Gimbel, heir to a department-store fortune and a onetime Wall Street big shot, a small group of explorers travels from one section of the world’s oceans to the next, trying to get the elusive great white on camera. The first stop is grisly. Off the coast of South Africa, the explorers trail a whaling vessel, watch the whalers harpoon a giant victim, and then dive in the water to watch sharks feast on the whale’s corpse, which lingers in the water for hours before the whaling ship returns to tow the remains into port. Although no great whites appear in this scene, watching the carnage inflicted by smaller sharks—which gnash at the whale’s flesh in a feeding frenzy—is sobering. So, too is the ensuing sequence that depicts workers butchering the giant corpses of whales in a gristle-strewn factory setting. As Gimbel’s cameras capture all of this nautical gore, conversation and narration reveal facts about the great white, including disturbing stories of sailors and swimmers who were attacked.

          The style of Blue Water, White Death is uniquely cinematic, with gorgeous widescreen 35mm photography and lyrical editing; adding to the mystique of the piece are songs written and performed by folksinger Tom Chapin, who served as an assistant cameraman on the expedition. Others on the crew include Aussie daredevils Ron and Valerie Taylor, who later gained fame by shooting real footage of great whites for Spielberg’s movie. In one of the film’s eeriest sequences, the divers hit the water at night to survey a feeding frenzy around another whale corpse. Watching sharks dart in and out of the feeble beams cast by underwater lights creates a frightening effect that the filmmakers accentuate with hissing musical stings from synthesizers.

          The final sequence, in which the explorers finally lure great whites to their cameras by chumming the water with blood and meat and oil to simulate the presence of a whale corpse, is as alarming as it is amazing—there’s nothing quite like seeing the massive open jaws of a 16-foot great white rushing toward you, with only the meager bars of a diving cage for protection. And when one hungry shark starts banging away at the cage, causing the bars to give way . . . Yikes. Inspired by true curiosity and powered by a gentle environmentalist message, Blue Water, White Death is both a celebration of nature’s wonder and a reminder of the real-life horrors that gave Jaws its bite.

Blue Water, White Death: GROOVY

Soul Hustler (1973)

          Sort of an Elmer Gantry for the counterculture era, this brief and fast-moving melodrama concerns a low-rent schemer who stumbles into a lucrative career as a rock-and-roll preacher performing under the name “Matthew, Son of Jesus.” The movie has a high kitsch factor, with 1950s/1960s teen idol Fabian Forte playing the starring role and DJ/actor Casey Kasem in the supporting cast. Yet because writer-director Burt Topper goes balls-out while portraying the lead character’s vices (everything from heroin to hookers), the picture has a pulpy sort of integrity. Superficiality ultimately keeps the piece mired in mediocrity, but Soul Hustler is enjoyable as what could perhaps be termed “thoughtful trash.”

          In the beginning, wandering longhair Matthew Crowe (Forte) bums around the country, bonding with fellow vagabond Brian Spencer (Larry Bishop) even as Matthew cultivates his gifts for bullshit and music. Crashing a tent-revival meeting overseen by middle-aged preacher Evin Calder (Tony Russel), Matthew fleeces the faithful for donations, thereby discovering his destiny. Under Evin’s tutelage, Matthew polishes his act, eventually donning saintly white robes and growing a scruffy beard so he can front a hot band and praise “my father, Jesus Christ.” Offstage, Matthew becomes a diva rock star, demanding private jets and other perks even as he indulges himself with drugs and women. Lurid aspects enter the story when Matthew’s drug use causes recovering addict Brian to relapse, when Matthew clashes over strategy with the avaricious Evin, and when sexy Helena (Nai Bonet) tries to wean Matthew off drugs with the promise of a healthy relationship. High-strung promoter Birnie, played by Kasem with a fierce salt-and-pepper perm, lingers around the periphery of Matthew’s story, booking steadily more important gigs until a climactic concert at the famed Forum in Los Angeles.

           Although none of the original tunes in the movie is especially memorable, some of the music has a tasty fuzzy-guitar Blood Sweat & Tears quality, which suits the milieu and the time; concurrently, Fabian’s obvious comfort onstage sells the illusion of Matthew as a charismatic star. Nonetheless, the filmmaking itself is perfunctory, and the story is predictable even though the rise-fall-rise arc is always somewhat satisfying because it parallels the normal cycles of real rock-star lives. No one should sample Soul Hustler expecting a deep movie full of surprises. Taken for the sensationalized cheapie that it is, however, Soul Hustler is an effective expression of the demons that plague a self-destructive and self-loathing hypocrite.

Soul Hustler: FUNKY

The Bees (1978)

While the most enduring pop-culture artifact stemming from widespread mid-’70s paranoia about killer bees is undoubtedly the recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live depicting the striped insects as Mexican banditos, Hollywood cranked out a few overheated horror pictures on the subject, as well. Disaster-flick titan Irwin Allen was responsible for The Swarm (1978), a big-budget flop starring Michael Caine, and Roger Croman’s low-budget factory New World Pictures was responsible for this dud starring John Saxon. In fact, according to a book about New World, Warner Bros. paid New World to delay the release of The Bees until after The Swarm passed through theaters. In any event, The Bees is just as silly as the Allen production, only without the redeeming values of a kitschy cast and a melodramatic narrative. The Bees opens in Brazil, where crossbred bees attack their keepers at a ranch owned by an international conglomerate. (The murky setup tries to involve both accidental and intentional blending of insect species, resulting in a super-aggressive hybrid.) Soon after the deadly incident in Brazil, a scientist named Sandra Miller (Angel Tompkins) smuggles killer bees into New York, where she reports to John Norman (Saxon), head of a company angling to get a monopoly on the world’s honey supply. Or something. The plot is so stupid and turgid that parsing details isn’t worth the effort, and even trying to watch the movie for the “exciting” scenes is pointless. Once killer bees start rampaging across the United States, director Alfredo Zacarías employs cheap animation to show massive swarms passing landmarks, and he uses grainy stock footage to illustrate the military response. Meanwhile, Saxon gives stilted line readings and John Carradine, in a supporting role, speaks in some amateurish hodgepodge of European accents. The whole pathetic enterprise concludes (spoiler alert!) with the protagonist realizing the bees have learned to communicate, then addressing a general assembly of the UN with this urgent message: “You have to listen to what the bees have to say!” Sadly, just when the movie reaches campy terrain, it ends instead of going full-bore into craziness.

The Bees: LAME

El Topo (1970) & The Holy Mountain (1973)

          Although the word “visionary” is often used by lazy critics to describe filmmakers with distinctive visual styles, to my way of thinking, a true cinematic visionary is someone who creates worlds that have never existed before. Based on the evidence of his two most famous films, Chilean provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky meets the criteria, because El Topo and The Holy Mountain explode with images and situations and themes that can’t be found anywhere else. The question, of course, is whether there’s any compelling reason besides curiosity to visit Jodorowsky’s universe.
          With regard to El Topo, it’s easier to answer in the affirmative, because the movie offers a strange theological meditation on familiar gunslinger iconography, blending counterculture-era philosophy with old-fashioned signifiers to create something new. Although El Topo is overwrought and silly and violent and ugly, it’s also inquisitive and passionate—which might explain why the picture was one of the earliest hits on the so-called “midnight movie” circuit. Yet Jodorowsky’s foll0w-up, The Holy Mountain, is too much of a not-so-good thing. Despite containing several mesmerizingly strange scenes, The Holy Mountain is so grotesque and pretentious that its power to shock wanes. After listening to someone scream for a long time, the noise isn’t startling anymore; it’s just irritating. Nonetheless, it’s likely that some fans consider these two movies among the highest accomplishments in cinematic history, because for all of their faults, El Topo and The Holy Mountain are the products of a unique mind.

          The opening scene of El Topo sets the bizarre mood. Black-glad gunfighter El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) rides a horse through a desert, holding an umbrella as his naked preteen son clutches his abdomen. El Topo dismounts, then tells the boy to bury his first toy and a photo of his mother in the sand, symbolically ending his childhood. Next, El Topo encounters a village whose inhabitants have been slaughtered. The streets are red with rivers of blood, and humans and livestock lie everywhere, some with innards sprawling out of massive wounds. Still dragging his naked son everywhere, El Topo vows revenge, then finds and castrates the man responsible for the slaughter; the villain subsequently kills himself rather than face life emasculated.
          Soon El Topo abandons his son (“Destroy me! Depend on no one!”), venturing off with one of the villain’s concubines to battle several of the world’s best fighters, each of whom teaches El Topo a philosophical or religious idea. Jodorowsky stages all of these odd scenes with artistry, composing striking frames and utilizing elaborate design to give each vignette its own outlandish flavor. Concepts flow freely throughout El Topo, at the cost of telling a compelling story. By the time El Topo transitions to a second passage, leaving the gunslinger storyline beside for obtuse material involving deformed people and religious frenzy, the movie has drifted into the ether.

          Still, El Topo is downright grounded compared to The Holy Mountain. The threadbare narrative of The Holy Mountain involves a religious allegory about a thief who resembles Jesus going through phases of spiritual enlightenment, eventually gaining such offbeat followers as a chimpanzee and a prostitute. Those watching The Holy Mountain closely will find ample fodder for interpretation, because Jodorowsky fills the movie with overt allusions to spiritual tenets; accordingly, The Holy Mountain is full to bursting with symbolism. Still, it’s hard to take Jodorowsky entirely seriously as a guru wearing the mask of a storyteller. The scene of the thief raging through a factory that makes Christ statues hammers the false-idols note a bit too obviously. The scene in which frogs race around a miniature castle wearing tiny knight costumes—until unseen incendiary devices cause the frogs to explode in slow-motion gore—feels needlessly cruel.

          And then there’s the sex machine.
          In one sequence, Jodorowsky outdoes himself from a design perspective by revealing an elaborate mechanical device meant to represent human sexual function in an art-installation context. A woman approaches the machine, strips half-naked, picks up a giant phallic object, and jabs the machine’s g-spot until the machine ejaculates a geyser of nasty-looking fluid. And we haven’t even gotten to the scene of the thief/messiah sitting on a glass bowl and filling it with excrement that an alchemist (again played by Jodorowsky) transforms into gold. Or the knife fight between the thief/messiah and a robed holy man in a giant chamber painted to resemble the inside of a rainbow.

          Jodoroskwy reportedly experimented with everything from LSD to mushrooms to sleep deprivation to yoga in order to access the transcendental plane while preparing The Holy Mountain, and it shows. For those who venture headlong into the cerebral wilderness with Jodorowsky, the movie is undoubtedly a bracing experience. For those of us rooted on terra firma, the movie—even more than El Topo—is alternately dull, grotesque, offensive, and ridiculous. Like El Topo, however, The Holy Mountain is never the least bit ordinary.

El Topo: FREAKY

The Holy Mountain: FREAKY