A Different Story (1978)

This highly problematic rom-com offers a textbook example of how iffy politics can derail a movie that shouldn’t have been political in the first place. The story of a gay man and a lesbian becoming a straight couple, A Different Story has the unintended effect of marginalizing homosexuality as a phase some young people pass through on the way to adulthood. To describe that implication as repulsive is to make a gross understatement. Yet nothing about A Different Story feels didactic or mean-spirited, so one fears the filmmakers were simply ignorant of the statement they were making. In some ways, that’s worse than deliberately belittling an entire class of people. Anyway, it’s not as if there’s a great movie buried inside A Different Story, and that all one need do is detach from political correctness long enough to enjoy the story. Even setting aside its treatment of human sexuality, A Different Story is mediocre at best. The characterizations are clichéd and superficial; the storytelling is choppy, with some scenes drifting off into nothing; and the plot is as hackneyed as bad episode of a sitcom. After kept boy Albert (Perry King) gets dumped by his wealthy lover, his casual friend Stella (Meg Foster) says he can crash on her couch. He cooks fancy meals and tidies the place, so she extends her hospitality. Discovering that Albert has immigration issues (he’s a Belgian national), Stella suggests a green-card marriage. They wed. Later, they sleep together, thinking it a one-time event until Stella learns she’s pregnant. She dumps her on-again/off-again girlfriend, and then Albert and Stella fall into the bickering rhythms of a generic movie marriage. He spends too much time at the office! She’s stuck at home all day with the baby! Yawn. Foster and King render professional but undistinguished work, while director Paul Aaron orchestrates the whole middling affair in similarly bland fashion. It’s all so enervated and false that the only quirky thing in the picture is a sidecar motorcycle.

A Different Story: LAME

The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972)

          Released a year before The Exorcist (1973), this intense thriller offers a much different approach to similar subject matter. Virtually no special effects were used for The Possession of Joel Delaney, and the spirit inhabiting the title character belongs not to a demon but to a person. Elegantly photographed, intelligently written, and filled with credible performances, The Possession of Joel Delaney treats its outlandish storyline with respect—so even though the film isn’t especially frightening, it makes for an immersive viewing experience. And while The Possession of Joel Delaney is not up to The Exorcist’s level, it’s still fun to play the contrast-and-compare game. The earlier picture is insinuating and restrained, while the latter is confrontational and spectacular. What both films share the deeply frightening notion of losing control over one’s soul.

          Set in New York City, The Possession of Joel Delaney revolves, as does The Exorcist, around a woman who watches in terror as a loved one succumbs to possession. In this case, the woman is Norah Benson (Shirley MacLaine), an affluent mother of two. (The children’s father doesn’t figure into the story.) Norah worries about her younger brother, Joel Delaney (Perry King), a handsome twentysomething who seems adrift in his life. Then an incident reveals that she has reason to worry—after Joel is arrested for attacking a man, Joel claims he has no memory of committing the crime. Norah arranges to get Joel freed from jail so long as he sees a therapist, but Joel insists he’s fine. Later, when a woman of his acquaintance is murdered, clues suggest an unhinged Joel was the killer. However, clues also point to an at-large Cuban immigrant. Conveniently, Norah has a Cuban maid, so the maid introduces Norah to the world of Santería and the possibility that the Cuban immigrant’s spirit entered Joel’s body.

           The Possession of Joel Delaney takes its time during the investigative phase of the narrative, allowing ambiguity to seep into the storytelling. MacLaine thrives here, showing how her character struggles to comprehend things way behind her normal experience. She’s also fierce and understandably terrified during the film’s creepy finale. King, appearing in his first movie, does well playing a willful young man whose first manifestations of possession seem like mere petulance to those around him. If there’s a big flaw to the film, besides some sketchy gore effects, it’s that neither King nor the filmmakers create much empathy for the Joel character—a greater sense of what is lost by the corruption of Joel’s soul would have deepened the film’s emotional impact. As is, the picture is tense and unnerving, but it lacks the pathos that made The Exorcist work. That said, The Possession of Joel Delaney is among the rare horror pictures that take themselves seriously without seeming ridiculous for doing so.

The Possession of Joel Delaney: GROOVY

Bad (1977)

          The full title of this picture is Andy Warhol’s Bad, and although the possessive phrasing reflects artist/provocateur Warhol’s role as the film’s producer, the title could also be interpreted as a sentence: Andy Warhol Is Bad. Given that this movie, like so many other Warhol productions, was designed to offend everyday people and to delight nonconformists, Andy Warhol Is Bad seems like a fair statement. After all, the picture’s most memorable scene, and easily one of the most deliberately repulsive images Warhol’s troupe ever captured on film, involves a depraved woman tossing her infant out a high-rise window. The baby cascades through the air before hitting the sidewalk headfirst with an impact so catastrophic that blood and viscera splatter onto bystanders. The scene, it should be noted, is played for laughs. You see, Bad is a social satire of sorts, presenting the worst people imaginable without any editorial commentary—a sitcom about scumbags, if you will.

          Director Jed Johnson, working with Warhol’s biggest-ever production budget and benefitting from the presence of several legitimate Hollywood actors, gives the piece a much more polished look than the average Warhol scuzzfest. Nonetheless, the material—and more importantly the attitude—is just as punk as everything else Warhol made in the ’70s.
          Bad concerns Hazel Aiken (Carroll Baker), a middle-aged woman who runs an electrolysis business out of her home in the suburbs of New York City. Yet Hazel’s real income stems from a murder-for-hire business that she operates on the side. Hazel’s clients are horrific people who give absurd reasons for wanting their enemies killed. One slob of a woman, Estelle (Brigid Berlin), wants a neighbor’s dog murdered because the neighbor had the temerity to say that Estelle looks ugly in shorts. Another customer wants her autistic son murdered because the boy is an inconvenience. And so on. Hazel never does the killings herself, enlisting hustlers and junkies. The main drama of the movie, such as it is, stems from Hazel’s tense relationship with L.T. (Perry King), the first man Hazel has ever hired to complete an assignment. A slovenly drug addict, L.T. loafs around Hazel’s house until she’s so sick of him that she sprinkles broken glass on the floor the minute she sees him walking around barefoot. Hazel also employs a pair of loudmouthed prostitutes who burn down a movie theater for kicks one evening, killing 14 people. And then there’s Mary (Susan Tyrrell), Hazel’s simple-minded daughter-in-law; Hazel spends inordinate amounts of time telling Mary that Hazel’s son will never return to be with his dowdy wife and their ugly infant son. Because Hazel is a bad person, get it? The movie’s called Bad, remember?

          Even though it’s relatively slick, and even though some of the performances are tasty—Baker opts for a dryly funny spin on viciousness—Bad is so excessive, nasty, and obvious that the central joke takes a while to coalesce, and then almost immediately loses its potency thanks to endless repetition. Is it fun to watch a craven woman crush a man beneath the hydraulic lift in a garage, and then cut off his finger for a souvenir? Despite the glimmer of hope peeking through the grim final scenes, Bad is an exhibition of ugly primal urges, and the picture’s sense of humor is juvenile and perverse. The movie imagines an alternate universe without conscience, inhibitions, and morality, so watching Bad is a bit like listening to someone hit the same gloomy notes on a piano’s lower register over and over again for 105 slow-moving minutes.

Bad: FREAKY

The Wild Party (1975)

          It’s difficult to decide which aspect of The Wild Party is more bizarre—the idea that costume-drama specialists Merchant Ivory Productions could ever make anything justifying the adjective “wild,” or the idea that a Merchant Ivory film was distributed by drive-in suppliers American International Pictures. Adding to the overall strangeness of the piece is the subject matter. Set in 1920s Hollywood, the film concerns a debauched soiree thrown by an overweight silent-movie comedian. And yet The Wild Party is not based on the real-life scandal involving Fatty Arbuckle, an overweight silent-movie comedian who was accused of rape and murder. Why anyone thought it wise to film a story that sorta-kinda resembled the notorious Arbuckle case is beyond understanding. In fact, it’s challenging to discern the reasons why The Wild Party exists. Instead of being provocative and rough and sexy, the picture is chaste and genteel and tame. So even though it’s a handsomely produced film that offers a colorful window into the culture of 1920s Hollywood, the movie is mechanical and sterile. Without blood pumping the veins of something like this, what’s the point?

          Based on a narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March and written for the screen by Walter Marks (as opposed to Merchant Ivory’s usual scribe, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), The Wild Party revolves around Jolly Grimm (James Coco), a man out of time. Although the industry has shifted to sound films, Jolly has invested most of his money in a new silent production, set to be his comeback after a five-year screen absence. To make matters worse, Jolly has grown distant from his sexy live-in mistress, Queenie (Raquel Welch). The comedian throws a huge party so he can present his new movie to studio heads, but as soon as the screening gets underway, it becomes clear no one is interested. Concurrently, Queenie becomes infatuated with a handsome party guest, Dale (Perry King). Eventually, the bash devolves into drunkenness, sex, and tragedy.

          Tonally, The Wild Party is a mess. At the beginning, Jolly’s writer friend, James (David Dukes), delivers rhymed voiceover to introduce the various characters, and James even speaks to the camera periodically. As this half-hearted trope fades away, the movie segues into unnecessarily long musical numbers, such as when Queenie performs a novelty number called “Singapore Sally” for the party guests. By the time The Wild Party ends, the filmmakers strive for some sort of bittersweet lyricism. These varied narrative elements don’t gel any better than the performances. Coco is robust and even somewhat poignant, but Welch is as amateurish as ever, despite looking magnificent in her Marcel Wave hairdo and slinky dresses. Among the supporting cast, artificiality and stiffness reign, though B-movie actress Tiffany Bolling tries to invest her role of a forsaken woman with pathos.

The Wild Party: FUNKY

The Lords of Flatbush (1974)

          Were it not for the presence of two actors who later became famous, ’70s TV icon Henry Winkler and perennial action-movie star Sylvester Stallone, The Lords of Flatbush would have long since faded into obscurity, because even though the film is sincere and thoughtful, it’s simply not that memorable or well-made. A nostalgic story about a (mostly) nonviolent street gang in ’50s Brooklyn, the picture presents trite themes related to the transition from adolescence to adulthood, as seen through the interconnected journeys of four friends. The principal characters are David “Chico” Tyrell (Perry King), a smart-ass lothario who juggles multiple girlfriends, and Stanley Rosiello (Stallone), a none-too-smart bruiser whose hulking frame disguises a sensitive soul. As the film progresses, Chico tries to seduce a pretty girl from the suburbs, Jane Bradshaw (Susan Blakely), only to find that she’s a player as well, manipulating various men for her benefit. Meanwhile, Stanley gets his girlfriend pregnant and wrestles with the choice of whether to do right by her. Receiving much less screen time are the other two members of “The Lords,” Chico’s and Stanley’s gang—secretly smart Butchey (Winkler) and self-descriptively named Wimpy (Paul Mace).

          Much of the picture comprises scenes of the quartet getting into trouble while running around town in their matching leather jackets, and although the actors don’t make convincing teenagers (Stallone, for instance, was nearly 30 when he made the movie), co-writers/co-directors Martin Davidson and Stephen Verona obviously drew from personal experience to re-create the rhythms of life in ’50s Brooklyn. The problem, unfortunately, is that the narrative is inconsequential. Nothing makes these characters special or unique—they’re exactly the same as any other teenagers who mess around before growing up—and the storytelling is amateurishly blunt. Sure, a few moments connect, like Stanley’s pathetic attempt to save face while pricing engagement rings, but nothing really soars. That said, Stallone is quite good in the picture, running laps around his less dynamic costars, with King suffering badly by comparison—King’s swagger feels contrived, whereas Stallone’s posturing seems fueled by relatable anguish.

The Lords of Flatbush: FUNKY

Mandingo (1975)

          This lurid story of sex and violence in the slavery-era South stands alongside The Klansman (1974) as one of the most reviled race dramas of the ’70s. Shameless even by producer Dino De Laurentiis’ déclassé standards, Mandingo is an overwrought soap opera about Falconhurst, a 19th-century plantation owned by aging monster Warren Maxwell (James Mason). The callous patriarch is preoccupied with getting his son Hammond (Perry King) hitched so he can produce an heir, and with buying a Mandingan slave in order to breed “suckers” (a nasty slang term for black babies) who’ll fetch high price tags. However, most of the screen time is devoted not to the master of Falconhurst but to his son’s conflicted relationship with various slaves. Hammond falls in love with his “bed wench,” Ellen (Brenda Sykes), growing closer to her once he enters a loveless marriage with his drunken shrew of a cousin, Blanche (Susan George). Then, when Hammond buys a Mandingo named Mede (Ken Norton), who brings glory to Falconhurst by defeating opponents in brutal bare-knuckle brawls, Hammond buys into the delusion that he’s found a friend. When the threads of Hammond’s life converge in tragedy, however, his true nature as the son of a heartless slave owner emerges.
          Mandingo is a strange movie, because on a technical level, it’s executed with considerable artistry: Richard H. Kline’s shadowy cinematography, Maurice Jarre’s menacing main theme, and the evocative locations create an oppressive mood. Yet journeyman director Richard Fleischer lets scenes run wild, with George flailing and screaming like a wild animal, and the startlingly miscast Mason camping it up as a greasy old son of a bitch who constantly rests his feet against slave children because he believes doing so will cause his rheumatism to drain out of the soles of his feet. One major problem is that the movie never fully develops any of the slave characters, so the slaves come across as caricatured narrative mechanisms instead of people. And though it’s a given that the movie is tasteless, the inevitable scene when Blanche demands sex from Mede is beyond stereotypical, the bloody fight scene in the middle of the picture is beyond excessive, and Mede’s final fate is beyond vile. Mandingo also seems to take itself quite seriously, which is confusing: Did the people making this movie actually think they were tackling a serious subject with the appropriate respect? Still, Mandingo can’t be entirely dismissed because it’s watchable despite a fleshy 127-minute running time. That said, the semi-sequel Drum (1976) has the same lurid appeal without Mandingo’s pretentions to relevance.

Mandingo: FUNKY

The Choirboys (1977)

          The weirdness of this comedy-drama adapted from a Joseph Wambaugh novel about debauched L.A. police officers is epitomized by one particular scene. Hot-tempered redneck cop Roscoe Rules (Tim McIntire) wakes up by a pond in L.A.’s MacArthur Park after passing out from heavy drinking (the characters call their drunken revels “choir practice”). Roscoe looks down and discovers that a duck is, well, enjoying Roscoe’s private parts with its beak. All around Roscoe, his fellow officers bust out laughing. Turns out that practical-joke-loving cop Francis Tanaguchi (Clyde Kusatsu) found Roscoe drunk, opened Roscoe’s zipper, and laid a trail of breadcrumbs from the pond to Roscoe, thereby luring the frisky foul. Unspooling across 119 deranged minutes, The Choirboys zigzags wildly between sub-Animal House humor like the duck scene and horrific moments like the opening sequence, in which Roscoe taunts a potential suicide by shouting, “Go ahead and jump, bitch!” until she does exactly that.
          The theme of this wildly overstuffed ensemble picture seems to be that anything goes if you’re wearing a badge, so one storyline involves a sensitive cop (Perry King) who gets his kicks through S&M, while another follows a Vietnam vet (Don Stroud) perpetually on the edge of a complete meltdown. And then there’s the nerdy beat cop (James Woods) enlisted to entrap hookers because he looks like an accountant, and the fat slob named “Spermwhale” (Charles Durning), whose grudge match with his overbearing superior officer gets serious when the lieutenant threatens Spermwhale’s pension. Most of the storylines include some sort of raunchiness, like the cringe-inducing scene of a slow-witted cop sliding under a glass table to “kiss” the nether regions of a female officer sitting on the table, and the picture also has more than its share of physical and psychological violence. At one point, a mischievous vice cop (Vic Tayback) taunts Roscoe with put-on homosexual advances, triggering a gay-panic freakout in which Roscoe mercilessly pummels the vice cop until other officers intervene.
          What makes all of this so odd is that venerable director Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) exerts absolutely zero control over the movie’s tone. Pathetically sad moments are played for laughs, idiotically silly scenes are played straight, and the film’s sympathies seem to lie with its most depraved characters. The indescribably inappropriate music by Frank DeVol only accentuates the strangeness; DeVol’s sunny tunes punctuate sequences the way rimshots accompany a nightclub comic’s routine, though often with no apparent connection to the actual content of the sequences. Eventually, a plot of sorts emerges from the chaos, but even that is so distasteful as to seem utterly perplexing: The “heroes” scheme to cover up the accidental killing of the most sympathetic character in the movie. The Choirboys is loaded with colorful events and interesting actors, but it’s a sure sign of trouble when the never-subtle Burt Young, playing a disgusting vice cop named “Scuzzi,” gives the most disciplined performance in the movie.

The Choirboys: FREAKY