It Ain’t Easy (1972)

          Of minor interest because it contains the first real onscreen performance by Lance Henriksen, who subsequently became a cult-favorite actor with a sprawling body of genre-oriented film/TV work, It Ain’t Easy also ticks other niche-interest boxes. The picture features extensive scenes of snowmobiles zooming across American and Canadian wilderness, and the leading character is a Vietnam vet battling PTSD. Alas, It Ain’t Easy—sometimes marketed as The Winnipeg Run—is less than the sum of its parts. Beyond the usual shortcomings of a tiny budget, the picture has such an erratic tone that it’s hard for viewers to track, much less empathize with, the protagonist’s plight. During an earnest monologue, for instance, Henriksen wears a face mask made of duct tape, so he looks less like a veteran navigating emotional problems and more like a serial killer preparing for a rampage. Sure, the mask gets a logical explanation—the character is practicing how to protect himself from frostbite during extended exposure to subzero temperatures—but didn’t anyone on the crew suggest that Henriksen remove the mask before his soulful speech? It Ain’t Easy is full of such confounding moments. The story is missing a slew of important beats, and the direction by Maurice Hurley (who later had a moderately successful career as a writer/producer) waffles between inept and perfunctory.

          Anyway, here’s the threadbare story. Randy (Henriksen) leaves a mental hospital and travels to his late father’s remote cabin, where Randy discovers the family business of selling animal pelts is no longer viable. Switching gears, he decides to enter a snowmobile race with a big cash prize. On the way to the race’s starting point, Randy picks up a drifter named Jennifer (Penelope Allen). Despite being the audience for his duct-taped monologue, Jennifer doesn’t savvy that Randy has problems until he refuses to accept that that he missed the start of the race by an entire day. Soon local authorities learn from the military that Randy is off his meds, so a search ensues to find Randy before something tragic happens. Fleshed out, this idea could have been poignant or terrifying (if not both), but thanks to clueless execution, It Ain’t Easy doesn’t go much of anywhere and, worse, takes its time getting there. Accordingly, the only folks likely to trudge through all 90-ish minutes It Ain’t Easy are Henriksen superfans, even though his inexperience converges with sketchy material to yield a performance that’s amateurish at best, borderline embarrassing at worst.

It Ain’t Easy: FUNKY

Mansion of the Doomed (1978)

          Fast-moving shocker Mansion of the Doomed has the shape of a classic mad-doctor movie from the ’30s or ’40s, though the gruesome makeup FX and shadowy cinematography are unquestionably modern. The simple story concerns Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart), an eye surgeon who goes around the bend when his beloved adult daughter, Nancy (Trish Stewart), loses her sight in a car accident. Aided by his compliant wife, Katherine (Gloria Grahame), Dr. Chaney drugs Trish’s fiancé, Dan (Lance Henriksen), surgically removes Dan’s eyes, and places them into Nancy’s head so she can regain her vision. Dr. and Mrs. Chaney then lock Dan in their basement dungeon—because, really, doesn’t every good home in an affluent suburb have one of those? When Dan’s eyes fail, Dr. Chaney abducts a succession of people, repeatedly replacing the eyes in Nancy’s head while telling her that each time her vision fades and revives, it’s the result of some mysterious procedure he performed while she was anesthesized. You can figure out where it goes from there. The eyeless prisoners in the dungeon plot an escape, and Dr. Chaney becomes more and more reckless as his mental state deteriorates. Although Mansion of the Doomed is highly formulaic, it’s an enjoyable little thriller, more cartoonishly spooky than genuinely frightening.
          Plotwise, the film bears more than a little resemblance to French director Georges Franju's cult-favorite thriller Eyes Without a Face (1960), which concerns face transplants instead of eye transplants. Even the main setting of a mansion was lifted from the earlier picture. Mansion of the Doomed has energy, but it's a shameless enterprise on virtually every level.

          Hollywood veteran Basehart gives an entertainingly twitchy performance that’s forever verging on camp, and it’s a kick to see this early performance by Henriksen—later to become a cult-favorite star of fantasy-oriented films and television—even though he delivers most of his performance from behind a Stan Winston-designed makeup that obscures his eyes. Producer Charles Band applies his signature veneer of low-budget cheesiness, borrowing every stylistic trick he can from the Argento and De Palma playbooks with nary a trace of artistry, while director Michael Pataki (better known as a C-list Hollywood actor) powers through scenes with clumsy but relentless efficiency. There’s even a friendly nod to the sort of old-school fright flicks after which Mansion of the Doomed is patterned, since the main character’s name abbreviates to Dr. Len Chaney (read: Lon Chaney). All in all, a fun serving of empty calories for horror fanatics. FYI, this picture’s myriad alternate titles include Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood, Massacre Mansion, and The Terror of Dr. Chaney.

Mansion of the Doomed: FUNKY

The Visitor (1979)

          There are so many mind-meltingly weird elements in the sci-fi/horror epic The Visitor that it’s difficult to do the film justice with a brief description. Put simply, the movie is a vague rip-off of The Omen, concerning the efforts of a heroic character to prevent a malevolent child from unleashing something terrible. Accordingly, The Visitor has the requisite scenes of a wholesome-looking young girl using her supernatural powers—or simply her bare hands—to inflict violence. And while the true strangeness of The Visitor stems from the chaotic storytelling, maniacal style, and WTF plot complications, even the central premise gets tarted up in a way that ensures audience bewilderment.

          Because, you see, it’s not just that little Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is some sort of devil child who must be killed in order to protect the universe. No, the problem is that Katy’s innocent mother, pretty Atlanta divorcée Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail), has a womb that breeds superkids, so conspirators led by mysterious surgeon Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) have positioned Barbara’s boyfriend, Raymond (Lance Henriksen), to push Barbara into marriage and a second pregnancy so she can breed a son, because together with Katy, the son will comprise the demonic equivalent of the Wonder Twins. Got all that? Good, since there’s more!

          Stalking Barbara and Katy is grandfatherly space alien Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston), who leads a band of bald alien musclemen who spend most of their time doing the equivalent of interpretive dance while standing behind scrims atop an Atlanta rooftop. Interstellar performance-art alert! Jerzy chases Barbara and Katy around downtown Atlanta, even though Katy tries to use her telekinetic abilities to kill him, and Jerzy spends one evening in the Collins home by announcing he’s the babysitter sent by an employment agency because the regular girl is sick. After all, don’t most of us welcome 70-year-old men into our homes to watch over our prepubescent daughters while we’re away? Oh, and we still haven’t mentioned the never-seen aunt who gives Katy a loaded pistol for her birthday, or that Katy accidentally shoots and paralyzes her mother. And then there’s crazed nanny Jane (Shelley Winters), who slaps Katy around because she knows that Katy is evil. Is it even worth noting that the plot also includes an intrepid police detective (Glenn Ford) and a silent longhair who may or may not be Jesus (Franco Nero)?

          The Visitor is gonzo right from the opening scene, a trippy special-effects vignette showing Huston in some otherworldly environment with oddly colored liquid skies. Among the film’s myriad bizarre episodes are the following: Katy uses her telekinesis to sway an NBA game by causing a basketball to explode; Jerzy has some sort of orgasmic interaction with a radioactive space cloud full of birds; a scene of spinal surgery gets intercut with a gymnastics routine; and famed movie director Sam Peckinpah shows up for one scene, in silhouette, to play a medical doctor. Accentuating all of this bizarre content is disjointed editing that makes everything seem hallucinatory, and lots of operatic disco music. You’ve been warned.

The Visitor: FREAKY

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

          Riveting from its first frame to its last and infused with equal measures of humor and tragedy, Dog Day Afternoon is a masterpiece of closely observed character dynamics and meticulous dramaturgy. It also contains two of the most powerful performances of the ’70s, from leading man Al Pacino and co-star John Cazale, to say nothing of one of the decade’s most memorable moments, the “Attica, Attica!” bit in which Pacino riles up a crowd gathered around the movie’s central location by invoking a then-recent tragedy at a New York prison.

          The story is a riff on a real-life bank robbery that was comitted by crooks with unusual motivations. Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, an intense ne’er-do-well who recruits his dim-witted buddy, Sal (Cazale), to help with a brazen heist in broad daylight. The robbery quickly evolves into a hostage situation as cops, led by Sgt. Moretti (Charles Durning), congregate outside the bank. Then, as we watch various communications between Sonny and the outside world, we discover why he planned the heist: for money to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. So, while the anxious afternoon darkens into an excruciating evening, viewers develop deep compassion for Sonny’s peculiar plight—on top of everything else, he’s married to a woman and doesn’t want to hurt her, even though his heart belongs to Leon (Chris Sarandon).

          Working from a Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning script and guided by Sidney Lumet’s sure directorial hand, Pacino reveals dimension upon dimension of his offbeat character, never once making a cheap ploy for audience sympathy; the actor illustrates such deep and profound emotional truths, through behavior and dialogue and physical carriage, that Sonny feels like a living and breathing human being in every scene. The performance is not for every taste (the Method-y screaming and general demonstrativeness is a turn-off for some viewers), but it’s impossible not to recognize Pacino’s work as some of the most impassioned and meticulous performance ever committed to film.

          Cazale, the haunted-looking Bostonian who died at age 42 after appearing in just five films (all of which were nominated for Oscars as Best Picture), is terrific as Sal, a slow everyman who can barely grasp what’s happening at any given moment, much less the future implications of his actions; in the classic moment, he’s asked what country he would like to flee to after the robbery, and he says, “Wyoming.” Durning offers humanistic support as a cop trying to keep a bad situation from exploding, Sarandon is funny and sensitive during his brief appearance as Sonny’s lover, and a young Lance Henriksen shows up toward the end of the movie.

          But it’s almost completely Pacino’s show, or, more accurately, Pacino’s and Lumet’s. As they did to an only slightly lesser degree on Serpico (1973), the two men lock into each other’s creative frequencies perfectly—Lumet creates complex, lifelike situations to frame Pacino’s emotional explorations, and Pacino fills Lumet’s frames with as much vitality as they can contain. Detractors might argue that the movie drags a bit in the middle, but because each scene enriches our understanding of Sonny’s inner life and his strange predicament, complaining about too much of a good thing seems petty—few movies offer as much in the way of believable pathos and varied tonalities as Dog Day Afternoon, and few movies sustain such a high level of artistry and craft for the entire running time. Exciting, frightening, moving, surprising, and unique, Dog Day Afternoon is as good as it gets in ’70s cinema.

Dog Day Afternoon: OUTTA SIGHT