Stacey (1973)

Stacey occupies a (very) minor place in film history, because it’s the first example of low-budget director Andy Sidaris’ signature style. During the ’80s and ’90s, Sidaris made a slew of ridiculous action movies starring Penthouse and Playboy models, correctly assuming that the combination of guns and gazongas would score with the home-video crowd. All the elements of Sidaris’ exploitative formula can be found in his debut feature, Stacey. Presented as a hard-boiled detective story, complete with cynical past-tense narration, Stacey concerns Stacey Hanson (Anne Randall), a private eye who happens to be a buxom blonde. Hired by a rich old woman, Stacey is charged with investigating the woman’s potential heirs to see if any of them deserves an inheritance. Naturally, each of these folks is up to something. John (John Alderman) is gay but closeted, so his horny wife, Tish (Anitra Ford), finds pleasure in bed with a handyman, who takes pictures of their trysts for purposes of blackmail. Meanwhile, Pamela (Cristina Raines) is involved with a Manson-style sex cult. This being a Sidaris film, most scenes require Stacey to wear skimpy clothes—or nothing at all—in order to track down clues. Somewhat improbably, Stacey is also a racecar driver, which leads to the silly finale during which she steers a racecar down a rural road while being chased with a helicopter. Even more typical of the film (and of Sidaris’ juvenile aesthetic) is the scene in which a killer stalks Stacy while she showers—only to discover that she’s waiting for him behind the curtain with a gun. The ladies in Stacey are attractive, and the film contains a fair measure of action, so it’s no surprise to learn that Roger Corman’s New World Pictures released Stacey—Sidaris delivers the trashy goods. Nonetheless, Stacey is boring, episodic, and stupid, ideal only for the most lascivious of viewers.

Stacey: LAME

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

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

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

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

The Big Doll House: LAME

Women in Cages: FREAKY
The Big Bird Cage: FUNKY

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

“I never did manage to see Invasion of the Bee Girls,” the film’s screenwriter, Nicholas Meyer, notes in his autobiography, The View from the Bridge. “Maybe one day. People who see it on my résumé keep telling me it is a camp classic, but I never know what this means or if it’s a good thing.” Rest assured, Mr. Meyer, it’s not a good thing. According to Meyer’s account, producers hired him to flesh out their basic notion of a horror movie in which women prey on men. He provided a fanciful story about an experiment that gives women insect-like appetites; these women then suck life energy from male victims during sex. While it’s rather difficult to imagine a worthwhile movie emanating from that storyline, Meyer’s subsequent sci-fi credits (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Time After Time, and so on) justify giving him the benefit of the doubt. In any event, Meyer describes being aghast when he was shown a rewritten version of his original screenplay, and if the finished film is any indication, his reaction made sense. Invasion of the Bee Girls is a cheap-looking, lurid, silly thriller with barely any trace of character development or narrative momentum. In place of these qualities, the movie has naked chicks screwing men to death, to the accompaniment of the kind of funked-out music one might hear in a low-rent strip club. Wandering through this sensationalistic sludge is reliable B-movie actor William Smith, who plays a detective investigating mysterious murders until he’s captured by Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford), the psycho who transformed a bevy of babes into a coven of killers. Invasion of the Bee Girls offers a few kitschy distractions for fans of grimy drive-in cinema, including an endless array of breasts and some bizarre sci-fi imagery once the film decamps to Harris’ trippy lair, but unless that sounds like enough to keep you interested, take Meyer’s lead and avoid this bargain-basement clunker.

Invasion of the Bee Girls: LAME

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Married filmmakers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were awfully lucky they met George Lucas while all three were film students at USC, because outside of their work as writers on Lucas’ productions American Graffiti (1973) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the Huyck-Katz filmography is filled with flops and oddities. One example: their misbegotten horror flick Messiah of Evil. Huyck’s directorial debut, which he and Katz co-wrote, includes a handful of quasi-disturbing images, but it’s so amateurishly assembled and conceptually cuckoo that it’s impossible to take seriously. The story begins when a pretty young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill) travels to the tiny beach community of Point Dume, California, where her missing father was last seen. Just before reaching town, she encounters a strange albino at a gas station, and after she leaves the gas station, we see the albino has a truckload of corpses. Clearly, something’s rotten in Point Dume. Upon arrival, Arletty gets the brush-off from spooked locals, but in true bad-horror-movie fashion, she ignores obvious cues to Get the Hell Out. Soon, Arletty gets embroiled with a swinger named Thom (Michael Greer), who travels with two compliant hotties (played by Joy Bang and Anitra Ford). Then, after Thom’s girlfriends meet grisly fates, the incredibly dim Arletty and Thom finally realize Point Dume is infested with flesh-eating creatures that seem like hybrids of vampires and zombies. All of this grinds toward a bloody climax, and even though the movie briefly flashes back one century to explain the source of Point Dume’s problems, the story never makes much sense. Some bits are fun, like the sequence of Bang’s character getting stalked in a theater (which is modeled after a key scene in The Birds), and some of the images are icky, like the moment when Hill discovers a spider crawling in her mouth, but none of it adds up to anything interesting. Furthermore, the acting is terrible, with second-rate character players Elisha Cook Jr. and Royal Dano embarrassing themselves in bit parts while Hill, though gorgeous as always, delivers an inept leading performance.

Messiah of Evil: LAME