Sometimes fate
does cruel things to artists’ legacies, as demonstrated by the fact that a
strange horror movie about cannibalism was the last project from Laurence
Harvey, who both starred in and directed Welcome
to Arrow Beach, but died at the age of 45 while the film was in postproduction. That
Harvey seems wildly miscast in the film’s leading role only adds to the overall
strangeness of watching Welcome to Arrow
Beach. Born in Lithuania, raised in South Africa, and educated in England,
Harvey was most definitely not an American. So why does he play a traumatized
Korean War vet living on a California beach? And why is the sister of Harvey’s
character played by English-Canadian actress Joanna Pettet, who looks nothing like
Harvey and employs a convincing American accent that accentuates how foreign Harvey’s speaking style sounds given the nature of his role?
The story begins with hippie hitchhiker Robbin (Meg Foster) accepting a ride from a
hot-rod driver, who crashes soon afterward with Robbin in his car. Cops
including Sheriff Bingham (John Ireland) and Deputy Rakes (Stuart Whitman)
respond to the accident and discover cocaine that Robbin insists belongs to the
driver, who is badly hurt. Weirdly, the cops release Robbin and do nothing
while she strolls onto a private beach. Then, while Robbin skinny-dips, Jason
Henry (Harvey) ogles her through a telescope from his house above the sand.
Later, Jason offers hospitality, which Robbin accepts
only when she learns that Jason lives with his sister, Grace (Pettet). Yet
Grace isn’t happy to meet Jason’s new houseguest, reminding Jason that he’d
promised not to get in trouble with girls anymore. And so it goes from
there—Robbin ignores obvious warning signs until a frightening encounter
occurs, but once she escapes the chamber of horrors hidden inside Jason’s
house, her past encounter with the cops makes them doubt her sensational claims
about an upstanding citizen.
Although the movie takes quite a while to get to
the creepy stuff, there’s never any doubt where the story is going, since the
first scene includes an epigraph about cannibalism. Therefore the picture lacks
real suspense, and the overly mannered quality of Harvey’s acting further
impedes the movie’s efficacy as a horror show. In fact, many stretches of Welcome to Arrow Beach edge into camp,
as when Harvey cuts repeatedly from closeups of his own eyes to closeups of
Foster’s character eating the world’s bloodiest steak. Just as unsubtle is the
film’s suggestion of incest: At one point, Harvey and Pettet kiss passionately.
Since it’s impossible to take Welcome to
Arrow Beach seriously, perhaps it’s best to regard the picture as drive-in junk with a posh leading actor. After all, the stylistic high
point is a scene in which Harvey’s character lures a woman into a photo
studio, then switches from holding a camera to holding a meat cleaver.
Welcome to Arrow Beach: FUNKY
4 comments:
Joanna Pettet was raised in Canada. That may explain her lack of a pronounced British accent.
You had me at Meg Foster skinny-dipping.
This is INSANELY hard to find for a movie supposedly in the public domain. Warner Bros. evidently dumped it off on some fly-by-night company ages ago, and if anyone out there does currently hold the rights to the film, they clearly have no interest in profiting from them because I simply can't find a legit copy anywhere. Even donning an eyepatch and sailing the Seven Seas turned up squat.
If I ever do manage to obtain it, I might upload it to YouTube to save other B-movie buffs the headache of tracking it down. At least that way if it gets DMCA'd we'll know who actually owns the thing.
Found it and watched it. The full uncut film is said to be 99 minutes long and the common bowdlerized version only 85, but the one I have has a 94-minute runtime. I don't know if anything was cut from my version, but I can make a guess as to at least a few shots that are probably missing from the 85-minute cut. The gore is way too brief to entice the slasher crowd, but what little is in there was surprisingly gruesome for an early 70's picture, especially the shot of Jason's private abattoir near the end.
So it's not intriguing enough to be a good mystery, not intense enough to be an effective thriller, and not bloody enough for gorehounds, but I'll grant that it wasn't all that bad. One of those cases where the whole is about equal to the sum of its parts, although there is a little dash of unintentional comedy from the line "I think Jason Henry kills people... GIRL people!" I'm glad we managed to eventually come up with a proper name for those.
And I did end up enjoying the presence of Ginger, the aging, washed-up hooker. Her first scene immediately had me thinking "Welp, we have our victim!" between her unsubtly propositioning a john and flippantly dismissing Robbin's need of help, but her following scenes makes her out to be likable and somewhat pitiable character, at least enough for me to firmly root against Jason Henry when he grabs a cleaver and goes Martin Yan on the poor girl person.
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