A Knife for the Ladies (1974)

Despite my usual aversion to movies about violence against women, I wanted to like A Knife for the Ladies because of its novelty, seeing as how it’s a serial-killer saga set in the Old West. Alas, the toxic combination of sluggish pacing and stupid plot twists makes the picture tedious and unsatisfying. Oh, well. Set in a small town somewhere in the Southwestern frontier, the picture follows two men as they investigate a series of mysterious killings. Jarrod (Jack Elam) is the local sheriff, a surly tough guy convinced he’s capable of keeping order all by his lonesome, and Burns (Jeff Cooper) is some sort of traveling specialist whom town officials hire because they think Jarrod isn’t up to the task. The movie’s rhythm is painfully predictable—in between gloomy scenes of a mystery figure slashing women, Jarrod and Burns engage in a pointless pissing match that distracts them from their investigative work. All of this unfolds on the same types of prefab locations used for a zillion cowboy shows, so even though the film’s production values and technical execution are fine, A Knife for the Ladies lacks authenticity in the same measure that it lacks suspense. The nature of the acting doesn’t help matters. Elam is restrained to a fault—the movie could use his customary over-the-top saltiness—and Cooper is genuinely terrible, a mannequin with a bad perm. Although costar Ruth Roman lends some energy to her scenes as the town’s grand dame, she unfortunately resides within the subplot that renders A Knife for the Ladies ridiculous during its final act, when the picture awkwardly transforms from a detective thriller to a campy horror show.

A Knife for the Ladies: LAME

Impulse (1974)

          The would-be horror movie Impulse, which concerns a psychopath who makes his living by swindling gullible women with shady investment opportunities, was doomed to become an exercise in camp the moment William Shatner was cast in the leading role. For example, the lead character’s signature gesture is placing his pinky on his lower lip, so whenever Shatner gets caught in a homicidal fury, he delivers florid dialogue while mimicking a baby with a binky. Suffice to say, the effect is more comedic than chilling. And so it goes throughout Impulse, because at nearly every turn, Shatner reduces his characterization to something infantile, even though he’s supposed to seem dangerous. In one special moment, Shatner strings up a victim by a noose, then dances around the victim and swats the dangling body like it’s a punching bag. Making matters worse, Shatner’s ridiculous costumes include the staggering ensemble of a striped wife-beater T-shirt accompanied by red bell-bottomed slacks and a wide belt. Wow.

          The story begins with a bizarre prologue, during which young Matt Stone watches a WWII veteran attempt to rape Matt’s mother. Setting the pattern for his life, Matt “impulsively” murders the man with the samurai sword the man brought back from Japan. (The prologue also introduces the pinky-in-the-mouth trope.) Afterward, the movie cuts to the present day, revealing that adult Matt (Shatner) is a smooth-talking swinger who uses women for money, then kills the women once they’ve outlived their usefulness. One day, Matt meets a little girl named Tina (Kim Nicholas) and gives her a ride home from school. During the ride, Matt runs over a dog. Yet when Tina shares this anecdote with her sexy single mom, Ann (Jennifer Bishop), Ann scolds Tina for lying. Meanwhile, Ann’s best friend, blowsy socialite Julia (Ruth Roman), meets Matt and decides to fix him up with Ann. You get the idea.

          A final thread of the story involves Matt’s criminal connection to Karate Pete—played by Harold Sakata, best known as “Odd Job” from the 007 flick Goldfinger (1964)—because ex-con Karate Pete demands a piece of Matt’s earnings as a kind of protection money. Although Bishop and Roman try valiantly to deliver legitimate performances, every scene with Shatner is so innately silly that Impulse is impossible to take seriously. Sakata’s acting is terrible in a different way, just plain old-fashioned incompetence, but he appears in only a few scenes. All in all, Impulse is quite shoddy, but thanks to its high quotient of unintended humor, it makes for a somewhat amusing 82 minutes.

Impulse: FUNKY

The Baby (1973)

          One of the most perverse low-budget thrillers of the early ’70s (and that’s saying a lot), The Baby concerns a social worker who becomes fascinated with a mentally challenged adult male whose family treats him like a baby, as in dressing him in diapers and sleeping him in a crib. Although the picture was marketed as a horror flick, it’s really more of a twisted psychological thriller leading up to a whopper of a twist ending: While it features grisly scenes and a sizable body count, the focus is on disturbing, rather than shocking, the audience. The sight of “Baby,” a grown man crawling on all fours and communicating through goo-goo-ga-ga gibberish, is consistently unsettling, and actor David Manzy gets points for his committed performance.

          Even creepier are Baby’s relatives, from his blowsy, frequently inebriated mother (Ruth Roman) to his sexed-up adult sisters, Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Judith (Beatrice Manley). As if the bit when Germaine slips into Baby’s crib for an incestuous liaison isn’t icky enough, Hill plays her entire role with outrageously teased manes of blonde hair, making her seem as weird as her infantilized sibling. Roman, with her throaty voice and caked-on cosmetics, works the estrogen-deficient vibe that characterized Shelley Winters’ roles around this period, so she’s a horror show all on her own, scheming to keep the welfare checks coming by arresting her son’s development.

          Adding a whole different level of crazy to the mix is the social worker, Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer). A glassy-eyed enigma who lives in a grim household with her mother-in-law and grieves for the husband she recently lost in an accident, Ann is a basket case in no shape to deal with something as troubling as Baby’s home life, yet she gloms onto Baby relentlessly. In their crude way, the filmmakers do a good job of implying that Ann’s interest in Baby is deviant until revealing a secret about her during the over-the-top climax.

          Director Ted Post, who mostly made action pictures and Westerns, doesn’t have the demented flair The Baby needs, which leads to scenes that feel drab and workmanlike. Plus, it should go without saying that the script by Abe Polsky is so gonzo that credibility was never going to be part of the equation. Still, the plot gets kickier as the picture progresses: The final stretch, in which Ann kidnaps Baby and provokes a final confrontation with his bizarre clan, layers one grotesque image upon another. Furthermore, because The Baby is more competently made than most out-there fright flicks of the same era, there’s a veneer of realism coating the picture’s truly insane plot.

The Baby: FREAKY