L.A. 2017 (1971)

          While the 1971 telefilm Duel was the first standalone feature-length project that Steven Spielberg made as a professional, he directed two other pieces with commensurate running times the same year, namely the first weekly episode of the long-running detective series Columbo and this installment of a series called The Name of the Game. Given how central science fiction subsequently became in Spielberg’s work, L.A. 2017 is of particular interest. Additionally, L.A. 2017 plays like standalone piece because its only narrative connection to The Name of the Game is protagonist Glenn Howard (Gene Barry), who time-travels away from the series’ modern-day milieu for the duration of this adventure.

          While driving through smoggy canyons in Los Angeles, socially conscious magazine publisher Glenn succumbs to noxious fumes and crashes his car. Emergency personnel wearing gas masks and protective suits extract Glenn from his vehicle and drive him to a sprawling underground campus. Through interactions with psychiatrist/policeman Cameron (Severn Darden) and high-powered politician Bigelow (Barry Sullivan), Glenn learns that he’s in the Los Angeles of the future, and that civilization has been driven underground by environmental degradation. Per the talky script by Philip Wylie, what ensues has more exposition than excitement. In this grim future, America functions as a corporation with totalitarian control over citizens. People exchange math equations instead of jokes, much of the population is sterile, and everyone is under constant surveillance. Given Glenn’s unique status as a man out of time, Bigelow asks him to become a propogandist for the government, but he rebels—with the assistance of Sandrelle (Sharon Farrell), an attractive woman assigned to be Glenn’s consort.

          Watching L.A. 2017, it’s possible to discern why the piece, in tandem with Spielberg’s other 1971 work, helped raise his profile—the director does a lot with a little. Frenetic movement and tight angles make scenes in underground tunnels feel appropriately claustrophobic, and Spielberg guides actors portraying villains to underplay, which adds to the general air of menace. Moreover, the piece’s biggest shortcomings (flat scripting, meager budget) originated above the young director’s pay grade. While nowhere near as revelatory as Duel, this piece demonstrates that even in his earliest efforts, Spielberg had a formidable skillset. No wonder he graduated to theatrical features after a relatively short run as a Universal Television worker bee.

L.A. 2017: FUNKY

Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970)

Apparently conceived as a sequel to the 1967 hit What’s New, Pussycat? (starring Peter Sellers and written by Woody Allen), this dreadful sex comedy lost nearly all connection to the earlier film during the development process—and it must have lost many other things, as well, presuming they were ever there. Among other shortcomings, Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You lacks appealing characters, a tangible plot, and viable jokes. Loud, stupid, and tacky, the flick is a pointless compendium of situations leading nowhere, held together by the presence of a borderline repugnant protagonist and infused with such idiotic running gags as a dude in a gorilla suit whose presence causes the protagonist to experience a weird form of gay panic. Set in Rome, the picture stars Ian McShane—a fine dramatic actor unfit for light comedy—as Fred C. Dobbs, an American living in Italy. Never mind that McShane is British, and never mind that his character is pointlessly named after Humphrey Bogart’s role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). After a truly filthy opening song (“I wanna move and groove and fill you with my love”), the picture explores Fred’s sexual exploits and hangups. He sleeps with seemingly every woman he meets, then complains that life with multiple lovers is too complicated. He also suffers recurring nightmares about a horny gorilla. Various desperate attempts at jokes include the use of the theme song for Mission: Impossible, a would-be farcical visit to the set of a spaghetti Western (where extras dressed as Indians eat plates of spaghetti), and a hideous subplot featuring offbeat character actor Severn Darden in a bizarre red wig. At one point, an onscreen title reads, “This is a time lapse.” Enervated and sluggish despite posh production values, Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You is so formless and misguided and vulgar that it drains the viewer’s will to live.

Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You: LAME

The Legend of Hillbilly John (1974)

          Lore emanating from insular communities can be fascinating, because local legends are shot through with metaphors reflecting ideals and superstition; the nature of fictional characters elevated to heroic status is as revelatory as the nature of figures regarded as monsters. All of which goes to say why the offbeat fantasy picture The Legend of Hillbilly John is interesting even though it’s far from impressive as a piece of filmmaking. Based on stories by Manly Wade Wellman, an imaginative fiction writer who spent time in the Ozarks researching the folklore of mountain people, The Legend of Hillbilly John concerns a traveling troubadour whose guitar has magically powered silver strings that repel the devil. Moving from one rural enclave to the next, the hero discovers residents living in fear of various oppressive forces, then helps the residents escape tyranny by, in some fashion or another, robbing the oppressive forces of their power. Taken to its most literal extreme, this mode of supernatural crimefighting manifests as the hero battling a giant bird that’s put onscreen by way of old-fashioned stop-motion animation. In other words, the narrative spirit is willing but the cinematic flesh is weak.

          The story’s hero, John (Hedges Capers), is an easygoing singer whose Grandpappy John (Denver Pyle) loses a fiery musical duel with the devil. Thereafter, John carries a magic guitar from one Appalachian community to the next, accompanied by a dog he calls “Hunter Hound.” In one very long sequence, John escorts a dangerous man called Zebulon Yandro (Harris Yulin) to a meeting with Yandro’s ultimate fate. And in the most dynamic sequence, John duels with “Ugly Bird” atop Hark Mountain. Somewhat holding the pieces of the story together is Mr. Marduke (Severn Darden), a host/narrator who lists among the enemies plaguing the Appalachian Mountains the devil and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. (The insertion of a ’70s ecological message is as pointless as it sounds.) Some have noted that a core flaw in this weird picture is the way the filmmakers altered John’s personality from the source material, transforming him from a backwoods avenger to a peace-and-love hippie. Indeed, the less authentically rural a moment in this movie is, the less entertainment it provides. Still, there’s something inherently unique about The Legend of Hillbilly John, though curious viewers should be advised to set their expectations very, very low.

The Legend of Hillbilly John: FUNKY

I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? (1975)

A dreadful attempt at black comedy in which nearly every joke falls flat, and in which nearly every characterization is predicated upon some irritatingly stupid contrivance or stereotype, I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? was apparently prepared as a starring vehicle for British funnyman Peter Sellers, but it’s not as if the presence of replacement star Bob Dishy is the problem. A reliable comedic player in films, plays, and television who thrived in supporting roles (as subtlety was never his forte), Dishy does everything he can to enliven old-fashioned gags powered by idiotic non sequiturs and laborious wordplay. Dishy plays Jordan Oliver, a cheerfully corrupt businessman who gets fired from his father-in-law’s company for embezzlement. The same day, his wife says she wants a divorce, adding that she plans to leave Jordan with nothing. Jordan responds by taking out a $1 million insurance policy on his wife and conspiring to kill her, which leads to the movie’s main farcical notion—after Jordan hires a hit man, the assassin subcontracts the work, the subcontractor hires someone else, and so on. So when Jordan learns that his insurance policy has been cancelled, he must track down all of the weirdos who have inherited the contract on Jordan’s wife in order to prevent the murder. Although director Steven Hilliard Stern films I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? with his usual polished style, the script is abysmal. (Sample routine: “He practices brain surgery—it affects the brain.” “How can brain surgery affect the brain?” “He practices on his own brain.”) At one point late in this tedious movie, the filmmakers become so desperate to generate gags that they accidentally enter the realm of surrealism. When three characters in enormous fat suits sneak into a weight-loss clinic, they encounter a screaming-queen doctor wearing Kabuki makeup and speaking in a Bela Lugosi accent, who’s assisted by a man cross-dressing in a nurse’s costume. Huh? Adding to the movie’s sins, terrific character actors Severn Darden and Richard Libertini, each of whom plays multiple roles, are utterly wasted.

I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now?: LAME

Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

While it’s not as if the title Werewolves on Wheels raises expectations of superlative cinematic art, the very least the title promises is extensive footage of bikers turning into monsters. Alas, even that is more than the makers of this tedious flick can manage. Although the picture is photographed handsomely and benefits from brief interludes of eerie musical scoring, Werewolves on Wheels has such a thin storyline that long passages of the film comprise nothing but quasi-documentary footage of bikers hanging out, picking fights, and screwing their compliant female companions. Worse, lycanthropy is incidental to the narrative, since the principal drama—such as it is—stems from conflict between a motorcycle gang and the members of Satan-worshiping cult. After a dull first 20 minutes, during which viewers meet the interchangeable members of the gang, the story gains a smidgen of momentum once the bikers arrive at the weird temple occupied by the robe-wearing cultists. Led by a guru named “One” (portrayed by B-movie stalwart Severn Darden), the cultists ply the bikers with drugged bread and wine, then perform some weird ritual involving a sacrificed cat, a stolen hair, and the sexual violation of a girl from the biker gang. Once the bikers leave the temple, the ritual somehow has the effect of turning random bikers into werewolves, resulting in brief and unclear scenes of nocturnal monster attacks. (Although the movie is only 85 minutes long, the first werewolf doesn’t appear until nearly 40 minutes have elapsed.) Mistaking the murders for the direct handiwork of the cultists, lead biker Adam (Steve Oliver) leads his people on a revenge mission, only to have that endeavor subverted by a mass transformation of several bikers into canines. The climax of the film is an unexciting showdown around a campfire, during which the afflicted bikers wear silly hair masks and growl like children pretending to be monsters for Halloween. If anything of genuine interest happens in Werewolves on Wheels, it’s accidental and it passes quickly.

Werewolves on Wheels: LAME

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

Wanda Nevada (1979)

Peter Fonda made some truly inexplicable choices in the years after Easy Rider, and one of the most inexplicable was signing on as director and star of this lifeless Brooke Shields vehicle. Fonda plays a modern-day swindler roaming through the Southwest until he wins 13-year-old Shields in a poker game and gets embroiled in a silly quest for a vein of gold that an old drunk claims exists in the Grand Canyon. It’s hard to discern the intended audience for this movie, because while the plot is nominally a kiddie adventure in which the characters trot about on mules while encountering eccentric characters and evading a pair of incompetent crooks, several scenes depict adult men lusting after Shields. Even the basic relationship at the center of the story seethes with implied pedophilia, because it’s never clear if Fonda is Shields’ surrogate father or her would-be lover. Fonda’s performance is even more lackadaisical than usual, which is saying a lot, and Shields seems more suited to a sitcom episode than a feature film, given her canned showbiz-kid acting and jarring painted-lady makeup. (As Fonda says at one point, “I thought you were a good kid under all that hot sauce.”) The only thing that might have saved this picture is the depiction of colorful people who live and work in and around the Grand Canyon, but these minor characters are all contrived and uninteresting, despite being played by energetic actors. B-movie stalwart Severn Darden plays an incongruently pale bird watcher in a pith helmet and jungle khakis, giving a few moments of amusement with florid dialogue and outright perversion (he tries to buy and then seduce Shields); Fiona Lewis appears rather pointlessly as a photographer who gives Shields friendly encouragement; and an unrecognizable Henry Fonda shows up for a brief cameo as a sun-baked prospector. He’s got the right idea by getting the hell out of his son’s misbegotten movie as quickly as possible. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Wanda Nevada: LAME