The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

          The prolific but short-lived German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder enjoys such an enviable reputation that nearly all of his films are considered milestones of international cinema. To some degree, Fassbinder’s demigod status is justified because he consistently explored nature themes in an idiosyncratic but intelligent manner. Nonetheless, not all films are created equal, so some of Fassbinder’s projects invite more divisive reactions than others. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which the director adapted from his play of the same name, is a good example. Admirers characterize the project as a probing investigation of the female psyche because the story depicts the complex relationships that the title character has with other women.

          Yet The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is, by any estimation, a challenging viewing experience. Intentionally artificial and stylized, the movie takes place entirely on one set, with actors delivering their lines in monotones while barely ever moving. As photographed by Michael Ballhaus, who later became Martin Scorsese’s go-to cinematographer for an important period in the ’80s and ’90s (Goodfellas, etc.), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant possesses inarguable pictorial beauty, but watching the picture is a bit like regarding a series of still images. As such, Fassbinder’s refusal to exploit the full cinematic possibilities of his own narrative can be interpreted as either remarkably disciplined or remarkably perverse.

          The title character is a fashion designer who became a lesbian following the dissipation of her marriage to a man. At first, her only companion is an ever-present assistant, whom Petra treats like a slave. But then a friend arrives—provoking a long conversation about the arc of Petra’s marriage—and then Petra meets a beautiful young woman whom she decides to mold into a fashion model. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is simultaneously about Petra’s manipulation of the women around her (with many relationships involving aspects of sadomasochism) and about Petra’s articulation of her grim worldview. Fassbinder’s script is full of grandiose declarations: “If you understand someone, there’s no need for pity”; “If there were no compulsion, I’d be totally lost at times”; “I’ve always been suspicious of hard women.” At one point, a character even articulates her “constant fear of existence.”

          Meanwhile, Fassbinder juxtaposes the ugliness of his words with the beauty of his images—during the film’s most opulent passage, leading ladies Margit Carstensen (as Petra) and Hanna Schygulla (as the would-be model) wear ornately skimpy costumes reminiscent of Theda Bara’s provocative outfits in the silent-cinema classic Cleopatra (1917). Some viewers will feel more inclined than others to parse all of this philosophizing and symbolism for deeper meanings, and, indeed, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has enjoyed a long life, as evidenced by an opera adaption that premiered in 2005. So, even though the picture’s entertainment value is dubious, what can’t be denied is the peculiar integrity of the piece. This is about as anti-commercial as movie storytelling gets.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: FUNKY

Fingers (1978)

          The first movie directed by James Toback, a ferocious chronicler of the male animal in extremis, Fingers can be viewed as a blueblood’s response to the cinema of Martin Scorsese. Whereas Scorsese made his name by dramatizing the lives of small-time hoods prowling the streets of New York, Toback announced his presence by depicting intersections between New York street crime and the city’s supposedly civilized intelligentsia. In his script for The Gambler (1974), which was directed by Karel Reisz, Toback presented the semiautobiographical character of a college professor who spends his private hours feeding his gambling addiction no matter how dangerous his circumstances become. In Fingers, Toback introduces a character following the opposite trajectory, thereby approaching the same themes from a different perspective.

          Jimmy “Fingers” Angelelli (Harvey Keitel) is the son of aging loan shark Ben Angelleli (Michael V. Gazzo), but Jimmy wants more from life than threatening people for repayment. A self-taught pianist, he has visions of performing on the Carnegie Hall stage, and he may or may not have sufficient talent to realize his dream. As with all of the troubled men in Toback’s movies, however, Jimmy is his own worst enemy. Not only does he allow feelings of guilt and obligation to pull him deeper into his father’s violent world, but Jimmy is a sexual daredevil who can’t resist the thrill of the chase. Everything in Jimmy’s twisted psyche conspires to shift his focus away from his dreams. Even before the grim machinations of the plot take hold, this is grim material on every level—meaning that Fingers exists in the creative sweet spot for both Toback and leading man Keitel.

          Toback has a special gift for showing how testosterone drives men to madness, and he’s also a master at creating fully rounded leading characters—by accumulating detail and drawing subtle connections, Toback creates a space in which strange behaviors feel like eccentricities instead of literary contrivances. Jimmy blows through his world like a whirlwind, all fidgety energy and pretentious scarves, and he nearly always carries a portable radio issuing vintage pop tunes along the lines of “Mockingbird” and “One Fine Day”; the juxtaposition of these sweet melodies with the savage nature of Jimmy’s actions is strangely appropriate.

          Toback also plays an interesting game by having Jimmy alternate between gutter vulgarity and outrageously lofty dialogue, because it’s clear that Jimmy receives messages on frequencies inaudible to others. Consider this jaw-dropping pickup line, which Jimmy uses on artist/prostitute Carol (Tisa Farrow): “Don’t you understand? I’m going to bring you into your dreams of yourself. All you have to do is believe in me.” Showing his street side, Jimmy takes a wholly different tack when trying to make time with gang moll Julie (Tanya Roberts), cooing that he can sense her nether regions are like “silk.”

          Fingers goes to many, many strange places—for instance, the subplot about Jimmy’s encounters with Carol’s brutal pimp, Dreems (Jim Brown)—even though the movie eventually drifts down to earth for a violent finale that borrows from the Scorsese playbook. Keitel gives one of his most crucial performances, employing so much intensity while channeling the soul of the peculiar man he portrays that Jimmy seems alternately magnetic, pathetic, and terrifying. While very much an acquired taste thanks to its bone-deep darkness, its fascination with sleaze, and its primitive portrayal of women, Fingers ranks among the most unique American directorial debuts of the ’70s.

Fingers: GROOVY

Z.P.G. (1972)

          Very much a product of the same anxious zeitgeist that generated Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green (1973), as well as other cautionary tales with environmental themes, this downbeat and sl0w-moving sci-fi saga concerns a dystopian future in which man has so completely overrun the earth that the planet’s governments establish a 30-year ban on childbirth. Concurrently, pollution has become so horrific that entire cities are shrouded 24/7 with suffocating smog, and it’s become impossible to grow organic materials, so neither animals nor plants exist. The story’s protagonists, Carol McNeil (Geraldine Chaplin) and her husband Russ (Oliver Reed), work in a museum, where they perform re-creations of domestic scenes from the 20th century inside living dioramas. While some couples in this ugly future society have purchased the only legal substitutes for children—lifelike robot babies—the McNeils want more, even though the penalty for childbirth is death. At Carol’s desperate urging, Russ agrees to start a family. Once Carol becomes pregnant, Russ fabricates a marital separation as a cover story before hiding Carol in an underground bunker until she delivers her baby.

          The plot twists that follow, depicting the McNeils’ efforts to hide their secret from curious neighbors and prying government operatives, are fairly clever even though a lot of what happens in Z.P.G. (abbreviated from the government policy of Zero Population Growth) is logically dubious. Made in the UK and written by Frank De Felitta and Max Ehrlich (who also wrote the strange 1974 George C. Scott drama The Savage Is Loose), Z.P.G. features imaginative gadgets (such as the clear masks that citizens must wear while walking around smog-choked streets) and unnerving manifestations of totalitarianism (notably a high-tech torture chamber that feels like a precursor for a similar chamber in the 1976 sci-fi classic Logan’s Run). Unfortunately, neither the dramaturgy nor the performances rise to the level of the concepts. Chaplin’s acting is fidgety but icy, and Reed plays so many of his scenes with a stone face that he barely seems present, much less emotionally involved. Combined with long stretches of repetitive scenes, the inert acting makes the first hour of Z.P.G. very slow going. And while things pick up somewhat in the second half, when characters played by Diane Cliento and Don Gordon emerge as unlikely villains, the movie runs off the rails again during the ludicrous climax.

Z.P.G.: FUNKY

A Little Romance (1979)

          It’s not hard to understand why the whimsically titled A Little Romance has earned a devoted following over the years—depicting the adventures of two lovestruck teenagers cavorting across Europe, the picture treats young people with respect, whereas most Hollywood movies about teenagers tend to infantilize the experience of adolescence. Moreover, the film reflects wish fulfillment on many levels, from the concept of discovering one’s soulmate early in life to the notion that children can have international escapades without being preyed upon by strangers. Plus, of course, there’s the highly appealing vibe of the picture, which emanates from Pierre-William Glenn’s silky photography and Georges Delerue’s Oscar-winning score. When the movie clicks, it’s charming. Alas, A Little Romance suffers several fundamental flaws—among other things, the story is bloated, meandering, and unbelievable.

          The picture opens in Paris, where 13-year-old Daniel (Thelonious Bernard) lives a peculiar existence. His father is a sleazy cab driver who rarely provides traditional parental guidance, so Daniel finds solace at the movies. Therefore, when he stumbles across a Hollywood film shoot while on a class field trip, Daniel sneaks onto the set to watch the action. He’s beguiled by the presence of veteran actor Broderick Crawford (who plays himself in A Little Romance), but then his head is turned when he meets 13-year-old American Lauren (Diane Lane). She’s the daughter of a crew member, but she’d rather read books than watch a film being made. Impressing each other with precocious patter, Daniel and Lauren arrange to meet again, and before long the pair befriends Julius (Laurence Olivier), an aging man of mystery. As the contrived and convoluted plot unfolds, Daniel and Lauren run away from Paris with Julius as their escort, because Daniel and Lauren become infatuated with the idea of kissing under a famous bridge in Venice. According to Julius, a romantic myth says that lovers who perform this ritual will be together forever. A Little Romance also contains a sizable subplot about Lauren’s mother (Sally Kellerman), who is married, having an affair with the director of the film-within-the-film that’s shooting in Paris.

          Cowritten and directed by the great George Roy Hill (who makes wink-wink references to his past by including clips from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting), this picture has precious little to do with human reality. Daniel and Lauren debate philosophy with the sophistication of college professors, the Julius character is the sort of gentleman con artist who exists only in fanciful fiction, and the thematic heart of the movie—innocent children teach world-weary adults lessons about love—is optimistic but trite. Viewed simply as straightforward narrative, this movie is annoying, overlong, and twee. Viewed as a fable, however, A Little Romance is filled with lovely textures and warm sentiments. Delerue’s gentle guitar melodies create a comforting mood, and the young leading actors give appropriately guileless performances. (This was Lane’s first movie.) So, even if Crawford’s presence is inconsequential, even if Kellerman does her usual haughty number, and even if Olivier delivers one of his campier late-career performances, A Little Romance still manages to beguile—albeit only intermittently.

A Little Romance: FUNKY

The Million Dollar Duck (1971)

          Based on a story by Ted Key, who created the characters Hazel and Mr. Peabody and Sherman, this amiable live-action picture from Walt Disney Productions offers a modern spin on the old Aesop fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. Adhering to the Disney trope of building stories around bumbling professors, The Million Dollar Duck stars Dean Jones as Albert Dooley, a kindly young professor with financial troubles. One day at his lab, a duck that hasn’t proved useful as a research animal wanders out of its cage and into a neighboring lab, where the fowl gets irradiated. Albert takes the duck home, only to discover that the duck now lays eggs made of pure gold. This development delights Albert’s scatterbrained wife, Katie (Sandy Duncan), even though the couple’s son, Jimmy (Lee Montgomery), simply enjoys having a pet. (He names the duck Charley.) Seeing a way out of his fiscal woes, Albert conspires with his buddy, a lawyer named Fred Hines (Tony Roberts), to sell the eggs and make a fortune. Meanwhile, Albert’s next-door neighbor, U.S. Treasury employee Finley Hooper (Joe Flynn), suspects Albert is up to something. Farcical intrigue ensues.

          All of this stuff is completely silly, of course, and The Million Dollar Duck is filled with tomfoolery along the lines of adults sitting on all fours and barking like dogs to make Charley do his trick, since the duck has a phobia about canines. Per the Disney formula, the picture also features a very long climactic chase filled with questionable special effects. (Picture Jones riding the cherry picker attached to a truck, then squealing every time the truck nears an overpass.) Nonetheless, the filmmakers keep things simple in terms of narrative elements, so instead of trying to anthropomorphize the titular critter, The Million Dollar Duck merely depicts what happens when Albert, Fred, and Katie get greedy. Chances are you can guess whether the major characters learn to accept wholesome values by the end of the story. Flynn and Jones provide their usual competent work, while aggressively wholesome costar Duncan, appearing in one of her first movies, makes the most of a trope about her character spewing malapropisms along the lines of “You don’t have to yell at me—I have 20/20 hearing.” Plus, it’s hard to get too stern about a flick that features crusty supporting player James Gregory speaking this unlikely dialogue: “Yes, there does seem to be a certain degree of duck involvement here.”

The Million Dollar Duck: FUNKY

Hot Potato (1976)

Featuring a noxious mixture of cartoonish action scenes and unfunny comedy bits, this martial-arts adventure has strong connections to Black Belt Jones (1974), but it’s not precisely a sequel. Whereas the previous film is a straight-up blaxploitation drama that happens to feature karate, Hot Potato aspires to a frothy level of action-adventure farce. Real-life martial artist Jim Kelly, who played the title character in Black Belt Jones, stars in Hot Potato as a man simply named “Jones,” and no references are made to events in the previous film. (One suspects that producers Paul Heller and Fred Weintraub, who were involved with both films, might have been contractually prohibited from calling their follow-up film Black Belt Jones 2.) Set in a fictional Asian country, Hot Potato concerns a criminal kingpin named Carter Rangoon (Sam Hiona). Carter’s thugs kidnap June Dunbar (Judith Brown), the daughter of a U.S. senator, so the senator enlists secret agent Jones (Kelly) to attempt a rescue. Together with goofy accomplices Johnny Chicago (Geoffrey Benney) and Rhino (George Memmoli), Jones grabs June from Carter’s clutches—or so he thinks. Turns out Carter replaced June with a lookalike named Leslie (also played by Brown), so most of the movie comprises a long jungle trek during which Jones and his buddies cavort with female companions while villains stalk them. Hot Potato is filled with annoying sound effects, the sorts of pops and whistles normally associated with Keystone Kops-style comedies, and the action scenes are deflated by weak attempts at humor—a remote-controlled toy car that hides a bomb, an uncooperative elephant named Butch, and so on. Additionally, the filmmakers periodically forget that Hot Potato is lighthearted fare and try to generate actual thrills. (Example: a painfully dumb sequence of characters mired in quicksand.) Kelly is as uninteresting here as he is in his other pictures, even though his athleticism is impressive, and the whole movie feels like a brainless knock-off of 1973’s Enter the Dragon. FYI, the confusion over whether Hot Potato is a real sequel to Black Belt Jones is compounded by the existence of a totally unrelated Jim Kelly movie called The Tattoo Connection (1978), which is sometimes deceptively marketed as Black Belt Jones 2.

Hot Potato: LAME

The Savage Is Loose (1974)

          Depicting the travails of three (fictional) people marooned on a tropical island during the early years of the 20th century, this strange melodrama combines the basic DNA of the Adam and Eve story with Oedipal angst. Even though it’s made with restraint, the film follows its psychosexual premise all the way to the logical conclusion, so the vibe is deeply creepy. Therefore, it’s fascinating to ponder what might have attracted George C. Scott to such outré material. After all, this is unmistakably Scott’s film from top to bottom: Although he did not write the script, Scott produced, directed, played the leading role, cast his real-life wife as his costar, and released the film through his own company. Alas, The Savage Is Loose coincided with, and presumably contributed to, the decline of Scott’s star power. It was also the last of the two theatrical films he directed.

          The Savage Is Loose starts on a false note, because Scott depicts the shipwreck that triggers the story by showing close-ups of a painting of a shipwreck. Weak. Then, during the first live-action scene, several minutes of interaction suggest that John (Scott) is alone on an island with his preteen son David (played as a boy by Lee Montgomery). Thus, it’s jarring when John’s sexy wife, Maida (Trish Van Devere), arrives on the scene. Eventually, however, The Savage Is Loose locks into a Robinson Crusoe­­-type groove by portraying people from civilized society learning to survive in nature.

          The best part of the film is roughly the second quarter of the running time, during which John and Maida clash about priorities while raising David. John trains David to be a hunter so the boy will be able to fend for himself after John and Maida die, but Maida schools John in the ways of the outside world, hoping against hope for rescue. About halfway through the movie, things get kinky when David sees his parents having sex and asks Maida whether she and David will marry once he reaches adulthood. Then the movie cuts to David as a strapping young man (played by John David Carson). Grown-up David quickly becomes estranged from his parents, because David’s youthful affection for Mom was just a precursor. Now ruled by hormones, he’s blinded with lust whenever he’s around her. Conflict over which man gets to be with Maida ensues.

          Among other colossal problems, Scott’s direction becomes amateurish whenever he tries to film sexualized scenes. One bit featuring furtive glances around a dinner table includes more extreme close-ups of eyes than a Sergio Leone movie. A vignette of Maida humping John includes Van Devere grinding and growling with the ferocity of a porn star. And the “shocking” revelation of David’s sex cave—where he’s built an anatomically correct effigy of his mother out of animal parts—is borderline comical. Screenwriters Frank De Felitta and Max Ehrlich (who previously collaborated on 1972’s Z.P.G.) try to play the outrageous story straight, even integrating text from the Bible, but it would have required a far more delicate touch than Scott or the screenwriters could muster to steer The Savage Is Loose clear of camp. Further, Scott’s leaden pacing kills any chance of viewers simply going along for the transgressive ride. In sum, whatever intellectual or social significance Scott perceived in this unpleasant fable is not visible onscreen.

The Savage Is Loose: FREAKY

Rage (1972)

          Inspired by a real-life incident during which the U.S. military accidentally released nerve gas onto a civilian sheep ranch, Rage offers an unusual spin on the ’70s vigilante picture. Instead of seeking revenge against criminals, the film’s lead character attacks anyone and everyone associated with an accident that claimed the life of his young son.

           George C. Scott, who also marked his feature directorial debut with this picture (having previously helmed the 1970 television play The Andersonville Trial), stars as Dan Logan, a Wyoming sheep rancher and widower. One evening, Dan camps on his ranch with his preteen son, Chris (Nicolas Beauvy); Chris sleeps outside while Dan slumbers in a tent. When Dan wakes the next morning, Chris is bleeding from the nostrils, convulsing, and unconscious. Meanwhile, many of Dan’s sheep are dead or dying. Dan rushes Chris to a nearby hospital and summons his family physician, Dr. Caldwell (Richard Basehart). Before Caldwell arrives, two other medical professionals—Dr. Holliford (Martin Sheen) and Dr. Spencer (Barnard Hughes)—assume control over the Logans, separating father and son while examining Dan for symptoms. Turns out the Logans were exposed to an experimental nerve agent, and Holliford and Spencer are government operatives tasked with keeping the incident quiet. When Chris dies, Holliford and Spencer persuade Caldwell to hide the truth from Dan until an “appropriate” time. Sensing that he’s being manipulated, Dan escapes from his hospital room, slips into the morgue, and discovers Chris’ body. Then he snaps, unleashing death and destruction on his enemies.

          Although Scott’s direction is far from perfect, given the presence of bizarre slo-mo flourishes and a distasteful focus on cruelty to animals, the basic story is powerfully simple. Not only is the nerve-gas incident frightening, the ensuing government crackdown is wholly believable. And if Dan’s skill at gathering resources while evading capture sometimes seems a bit far-fetched, it’s useful to remember that a fugitive could hide from public view with greater ease in the days before cellphones and the Internet.

          Rage has its share of unintentionally funny moments, a hazard common to movies that try to sustain an unrelentingly grim tone, but Scott is 100 percent the right guy for the job, at least in front of the camera. Playing an unsophisticated everyman who needs medical jargon translated into plain English, Scott credibly personifies the murderous anger that would fill any parent’s heart under the circumstances. Similarly, Hughes and Sheen (who later played father and son in the 1988 drama Da) capture the chilly efficiency of men who place the needs of the state over the rights of individuals. Holding this taut little picture together is a fantastic score by Lalo Schifrin, who keeps the tension flowing from the deceptively peaceful opening scenes to the bitterly tragic finale.

Rage: GROOVY

Moon Zero Two (1970)

          Produced in the UK and released there in 1969, this leaden thriller represented a rare return to the realm of science fiction for British production company Hammer Films, which spent most of the ’60s and ’70s making horror pictures. Aside from the company’s usual tropes of elaborate costumes and set design, however, Moon Zero Two bears no obvious Hammer trademarks. Quite to the contrary, it’s dull, flat, and turgid, whereas Hammer’s other pictures of the same vintage are generally lusty and violent. Starring American actor James Olson, the movie was released in the U.S. in 1970, presumably to piggyback on the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Any viewers snookered by the promise of another sci-fi head trip were sorely disappointed, because Moon Zero Two runs the gamut from numbingly pedestrian to painfully stupid. Set in the future, when man has built a group of cities on the surface of the moon, the picture starts with an absurd animated title sequence suggesting the story will be about Cold War tensions. Yet once the narrative begins, Moon Zero Two becomes a tepid crime thriller about land rights.

          Olson stars as Bill Kemp, a space pilot who operates a salvage ship. He makes his living recovering broken satellites and selling the parts. Eventually, Bill is recruited by Clementine Taplin (Catherine Schell) to help find her missing brother, whom she fears was the victim of foul play because he owned the rights to potentially profitable land. A convoluted adventure ensues, during which Bill and Clementine match wits with an unethical entrepreneur, J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchell), who wants to seize all the land rights he can get.

          None of the characters is interesting, and the performances are lifeless. Worse, the style of the picture is consistently goofy. The immaculate space suits look like holdovers from bad ’50s movies, and the less said about the dancing girls who perform during innumerable scenes taking place in a moon lounge, the better. Long stretches of time pass without spaceship action, and this movie’s idea of a wild action scene is a zero-gravity bar brawl that the lazy filmmakers merely stage as a reduced-gravity bar brawl. (Picture lots of slow-motion leaping.) For devoted ’70s sci-fi nerds, the most interesting aspect of Moon Zero Two is the presence of leading lady Schell, who later played a shape-shifting alien on the cult-fave UK TV series Space: 1999 (1975-1977). Although hidden behind animalistic makeup on the series, Schell appears in all of her unadorned loveliness here.

Moon Zero Two: LAME

’Gator Bait (1974)

          A grimy revenge picture set in the swamps of the American south, ’Gator Bait is one of several ’70s B-movies that upended exploitation-cinema tropes by featuring sexualized leading ladies as formidable avengers. Interestingly, the picture was also written, coproduced, and codirected by a woman, Beverly Sebastian, who shared producing and directing chores with her husband, Ferd Sebastian. Claudia Jennings, the sexy redhead B-movie queen who began her career as a Playmate of the Year in Playboy magazine, stars as Desiree Thibodeau, a Cajun wild woman who lives deep in the wilderness. She supports herself and her two younger siblings by poaching animals and selling hides. One day, idiot deputy Billy Boy Thomas (Clyde Ventura) and his redneck pal, Ben (Ben Sebastian), track down Desiree and threaten to arrest her unless she provides sexual favors. Desiree outfoxes her pursuers, eventually tossing a bag of snakes into their boat—at which point Billy Boy accidentally shoots and kills Ben while trying to fend off the snakes. Ashamed of his stupidity, Billy Boy lies to his father, Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman), by saying that Desiree killed Ben. When Joe Bob shares this false report with Ben’s father, T.J. (Sam Gilman), T.J. swears vengeance. Accompanied by T.J. and his psychotic older son, Leroy (Douglas Dirkson)—whom Desiree castrated years ago during an attempted rape—the cops head into the swamp to find and kill Desiree. Bloodshed and tragedy ensue.

          ’Gator Bait is as grisly as any other rape-and-revenge picture of the ’70s, featuring at least one stomach-turning scene (the horrific fate of Desiree’s sister), and the way women’s bodies are showcased makes it impossible to forget that ’Gator Bait is a lowbrow endeavor. (Jennings wears a series of barely-there costumes, her legs and midriff on constant display.) Nonetheless, there’s a smattering of local color amid the sleaziness. Nearly every scene was filmed outdoors, so the verdant locations are like characters in the story, and the score features a saucy mix of harmonicas and other rootsy instruments. Jennings also gets to do a bit of acting, which was more than was usually asked of her, and she has a couple of decent moments brandishing a shotgun and spewing tough dialogue in a Cajun accent. ’Gator Bait isn’t quality filmmaking, to be sure, but it’s periodically exciting in a grotesque sort of way. More than 20 years later, the Sebastians returned to the swamp for the straight-to-video sequel ’Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice (1988), but none of the original actors returned.

’Gator Bait: FUNKY

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

          Comprising equal parts magic and mystery, this atmospheric Spanish film offers a child’s-eye view of a country undergoing dramatic sociopolitical changes. Set in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, The Spirit of the Beehive is generally interpreted as a rich canvas of metaphors representing adjustments resulting from the installation of Francisco Franco’s totalitarian regime. The film’s lead character, a little girl named Ana, naturally has no way of understanding the tensions that plague her parents and the larger world around her family, but she internalizes these feelings, then interprets them through the prism of youthful imagination. Adding a layer of idiosyncrasy is Ana’s fascination with the classic American monster movie Frankenstein (1931), which she sees at a screening in her small village.

          Six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) lives with her slightly older sister, Isabel (Isabel Telleria), and their parents—middle-aged beekeeper Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) and his beautiful wife, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), who is many years Fernando’s junior. Life in Ana’s household is strained on many levels. Fernando connects more deeply with his bees than with his wife, Teresa spends most of her time writing letters to a former lover, and Isabel makes sport of her little sister by telling audacious lies that Ana believes unconditionally. All of this distance and secrecy coalesces when Ana and Isobel see Frankenstein. Ana perceives the movie’s misunderstood monster as a benevolent figure, and Isabel persuades Ana that the monster is a spirit who resides in a farmhouse near Ana’s home. Ana spends time at the farmhouse looking for the monster, eventually befriending a rebel soldier who uses the farmhouse as a hideout. The story culminates with Ana taking a long nocturnal journey through the woods surrounding her village, during which time she might or might not fall under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms, depending on how the viewer interprets clues buried in the movie’s ambiguous textures.

          Exquisitely photographed by Luis Cuadrado, whose amber hues resemble the dusky look that Nestor Almendros later created for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), The Spirit of the Beehive is defined as much by the cinematic equivalent of negative space as it is by actual narrative events. Long stretches of the picture are wordless, with the sound effects of rustling leaves and soft winds reverberating through Cuadrado’s painterly frames like the ghosts that permeate the story. Cowriter-director Victor Erise, who has only made four feature films to date (The Spirit of the Beehive was his debut), presents the movie like a combination of a dream and a poem, offering countless enigmas for viewers to do with as they will. Erise constructs a deliberate pace that suits the material but will challenge restless viewers.
          For those who fall under the film’s singular spell, however, unique bewilderments await. Leading actress Torrent embodies innocence tainted by the rigors of the adult world, her impossibly wide eyes constantly expressing something poignant about the human soul. Similarly, the bee imagery implies collectivism, a fraught topic in the context of a story about Francoist Spain. And if some elements of The Spirit of the Beehive are ultimately impenetrable, so, too, are the stages of maturation that Ana goes through during the story.

The Spirit of the Beehive: GROOVY 

The Kids Are Alright (1979)

          Less a proper rock doc than a greatest-hits sampler plate, this colorful overview of the Who’s glory days is a relic from a bygone era of rock fandom, because the barely-there narrative style used to connect performance clips and interview snippets has become irrelevant now that casual fans can get roughly the same experience by browsing through YouTube videos. There’s a reason why surviving band members later participated in a proper career-spanning documentary, the 237-minute opus Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who (2007). Fun as its individual components might be, The Kids Are Alright lacks anything resembling substance. Assembled by fan-turned-director Jeff Stein, who shot a handful of new scenes to complement extensive archival footage, The Kids Are Alright is organized along the lines of a concert set list. Instead of presenting songs in a purely chronological manner, Stein builds a show that connects the Who’s early years as a gang of ambitious bad boys to its late-’70s reign as a collective of arena superstars.

          Much of the archival footage had been shown publicly before, of course, including TV appearances and the Who’s fiery set of the Woodstock festival. The appeal, therefore, is seeing everything in context. The Kids Are Alright loosely tracks Roger Daltrey’s evolution from a brash but unsure singer to a powerfully charismatic front man, as well as Pete Townshend’s growth from a bratty kid who snickers every time he smashes a guitar to an adult artiste who leads with his angst and his poetry. Meanwhile, bassist John Entwistle mostly lingers in the background (except for a strange bit during which he shows off his grandiose collection of guitars and uses a gold record as a shotgun target), and drummer Keith Moon treats everything like a nonstop, booze-drenched party.

          Moon’s presence gives The Kids Are Alright a small claim to historical status, since an early version of the documentary was completed just prior to Moon’s death in September 1978. In fact, the movie contains Moon’s final concert and studio performances with the band, including a partially live studio version of the potent hit “Who Are You,” which was the title song from the last full Who album featuring Moon. Elsewhere in The Kids Are Alright, Moon acts the fool during interview bits, sometimes clowning around with buddy (and fellow drummer) Ringo Starr. More impressively, Moon and his mates are at their very best during the picture’s closing number, an epic concert performance of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that features the band’s signature laser-light accompaniment. Very much a minor blip on the continuum of rock movies, The Kids Are Alright is essential for devoted Who fans, but it’s of only mild interest to casual viewers.

The Kids Are Alright: FUNKY

The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

          Something of a precursor to the Mad Max franchise, this interesting but problematic sci-fi/action picture follows a principled mercenary in postapocalyptic New York City. Written and directed by Robert Clouse of Enter the Dragon fame, the story suffers from underdeveloped characters, so it unfurls as a series of incipient notions stretched out to feature length and padded with chases and fights. Had a little more brainpower been devoted to the script, the movie could have evolved into something special; as is, the picture loses momentum somewhere around the two-thirds mark and never fully recovers.

          In The Ultimate Warrior’s grim futuristic vision of New York, small factions of people band together for survival. One group, which resides inside a heavily fortified apartment building, is a pacifistic enclave led by the Baron (Max von Sydow). The Baron’s son, Cal (Richard Kelton), has genetically engineered seeds for growing vegetables—which were nearly wiped off the planet during a nuclear war—so the Baron has fantasies of relocating his group to a safer environment where they can restart civilization. Also operating in New York is a roving band of killers and thieves led by the brutal Carrot (William Smith); Carrot’s crew looms outside the gates of the Baron’s facility as a constant existential threat. Enter Carson (Yul Brynner), a muscular fighter who offers his services to the highest bidder. The Baron woos Carson with an offer of extra rations and female companionship, so Carson engages in a series of battles with Carrot’s people before leading a desperate escape mission.

          In principle, this basic storyline should work just fine—good versus evil, with a morally ambiguous avenger caught in the middle. Unfortunately, the narrative is riddled with plot holes. Carson seems to be the only mercenary working the circuit. Security at the Baron’s place is ridiculously weak. Carson proves ineffective at preventing tragedy, basically undercutting the entire premise of the movie. Carrot’s thugs behave nonsensically, threatening the very people whose agricultural experiments could ensure their survival. Worse, a number of subplots about friction within the Baron’s crew show promise, only to be discarded in favor of a trite mano-a-mano showdown between Carrot and Carson. The Ultimate Warrior isn’t awful, by any stretch, thanks to tasty production design and a zippy score by Gil Melle, to say nothing of Von Sydow’s gentle performance. However, the picture isn’t nearly what it could be, Brynner’s impassiveness gets tiresome after a while, and B-movie stalwart Smith is underused.

The Ultimate Warrior: FUNKY

Killer Fish (1979)

Several bargain-basement American stars appear in this rotten international production, which is part aquatic horror movie and part romantic heist thriller. The story alternates between two tonalities—incoherent and stupid—while the filmmakers waffle about what sort of movie Killer Fish should be. Sometimes, it’s a straight-up Jaws rip-off with bloody scenes of victims getting chewed to death by carnivorous sea creatures. Sometimes, it’s glossy late-’70s fluff about slender people with nice tans having sex with each other. And more often than not, Killer Fish is simply confusing. The picture starts out with an elaborate robbery sequence during which criminals Robert Lasky (Lee Majors) and Kate Neville (Karen Black), along with their accomplices, break into the office of a Brazilian power plant and steal a cache of emeralds. To distract security guards, Robert and Kate set off a huge explosion. Meanwhile, mystery man Paul Diller (James Franciscus) gambles in a tropical bar. Turns out Paul is the brains behind the robbery, and an inside man at the company that owns the plant. Paul, Robert, and Kate stash the emeralds in a lake, figuring that’s a safe hiding place while they wait for the inevitable investigation to cool down. Only Paul, without telling his pals, fills the lake with piranha so no one can grab the gems prematurely. As if the story wasn’t already crammed with enough random elements, enter fashion model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway), who arrives in Brazil for a shoot and, naturally, falls in love with smoldering Robert. Never mind that Kate’s sorta hung up on Robert even though she’s Paul’s girlfriend. After several of Paul’s underlings die from piranha bites while trying to steal the gems, the surviving major characters end up on a boat together during a giant storm, which producer Alex Ponti (son of Carlo, stepson of Sophia Loren) and director Antonio Margheriti depict with cheesy miniature effects straight out of a Toho Productions monster mash. Awful disco music runs underneath all of this nonsense. An embarrassment for everyone involved, Killer Fish is almost completely without redeeming values, except perhaps for some attractive locations. Together with The Norseman (1978), Steel (1979), Agency (1980), and The Last Chase (1981), this movie also helped kill Majors’ post-Six Million Dollar Man movie career before it really began.

Killer Fish: LAME

The Evil (1978)

          Schlocky but entertaining, The Evil takes the haunted-house genre to its logical extreme, resulting in a climax that’s embarrassingly obvious and stupid. Before it totally goes off the rails, however, the movie offers a number of gruesome deaths and touches on nearly every cliché associated with the haunted-house genre—apparitions, inexplicable noises, objects moved about by unseen forces, people possessed by dastardly spirits, and so on. None of what happens is particularly scary, so The Evil plays out like one of those old ’50s horror comics—it’s all about the fun of playing with concepts that might actually be scary if they were executed with greater care and sophistication. Because, rest assured, care and sophistication are not among the elements that cowriter-director Gus Trikonis brings to the party. Trikonis and his collaborators generate a few decent effects, particularly during scenes of people getting thrown around by supernatural powers, but The Evil is bargain-basement pulp through and through.

          Richard Crenna, all beardy and serious, plays Dr. C.J. Arnold, a shrink who rents an old mansion for a summer of psychiatric research. Several colleagues gravitate to the mansion in order to help with the project. While the scientists prep the house in anticipation of receiving patients, C.J.’s wife, Dr. Caroline Arnold (Joanna Pettet), sees ghostly visions and strange phenomena, including a fireplace roaring to life without being ignited. Concurrently, director Trikonis shows the house flexing its maniacal muscle, because the live-in caretaker gets burned alive when a magical jet of flame bursts from a furnace. Demonstrating why it is unwise to parse the logic of The Evil, C.J. doesn’t perform the de rigueur act of foolishly unleashing the malevolent entity that resides in the house until about 30 minutes into the story, when he removes a crucifix that’s holding a secret compartment in the basement closed. (Because, of course, that’s what any sensible person would do upon encountering a secret compartment locked with a crucifix.)

          The problem, from a story perspective, is that the house has already racked up a body count before C.J. uncorks the hidey-hole, so the story that subsequently unfolds—in which the heroes must reseal the compartment in order to save themselves—doesn’t reconcile with onscreen events. Nonetheless, one doesn’t watch a flick like The Evil for masterful storytelling, and Triknois provides enough mayhem to keep casual viewers engaged. A couple of folks get electrocuted, a dude gets swallowed by the earth, and an unfortunate lady gets most of her clothes ripped off by demonic winds. You get the idea. The acting in The Evil is nothing special, although everyone delivers basically competent work, and it’s a hoot to see corpulent bon vivant Victor Buono show up for a ridiculous cameo at the end.

The Evil: FUNKY

Winterhawk (1975)

          Beautifully shot in wide-open locations throughout the Montana wilderness, Winterhawk has the trappings of a proper Native American–themed Western saga, complete with appearances by such reliable Hollywood character actors as Elisha Cook Jr., Denver Pyle, and Woody Strode. Alas, the film’s merits are almost wholly superficial, because the characterizations are thin and the narrative is trite. One suspects that writer-director Charles B. Pierce knew he’d missed the mark during principal photography, because he adorns the finished film with a corny theme song and prosaic narration (both penned by Earl E. Smith), and those elements provide most of the story’s shape.

          Winterhawk begins on the tribal lands of the Blackfoot Indians, where proud chief Winterhawk (Michael Dante) watches his people suffer from smallpox, which was brought into their lives by white men. Taking the counsel of a friendly mountain man named Guthrie (Leif Erikson), Winterhawk travels to a white settlement seeking medicine. He is not only rebuffed but ambushed, so Winterhawk attempts reprisal by kidnapping two siblings from the encampment—pretty young woman Clayanna (Dawn Wells) and her little brother, Cotton (Charles Pierce Jr.). Then things get convoluted. Finley (Cook), the uncle of the kidnapped youths, forms a posse to chase Winterhawk, enlisting Guthrie as a guide. Shortly afterward, a thug named Gates (L.Q. Jones) attacks Guthrie’s cabin, raping and killing Guthrie’s Indian companion, Pale Flower (played by Sacheen Littlefeather, infamous in real life as Marlon Brando’s Oscar proxy).

          Pierce twists the story into knots to create comic relief from the interplay between the folks in Finley’s posse, to create tension from the various chases, and to disguise the fact that nothing much happens in the main plot. After all, scenes of Winterhawk and his captives include nothing more than shots of people riding across fields, mountains, and rivers. It’s not hard to figure out what went wrong, because Pierce clearly wanted to portray Winterhawk as a noble victim of circumstance, meaning that Winterhawk couldn’t be shown leading raiding parties or mistreating Clayanna. Instead, he does next to nothing. Supporting players deliver entertaining work, but the miscast Dante mistakes sleepwalking for stoicism, and Wells (of Gilligan’s Island fame) simply looks lost. On some level, Pierce’s heart was in the right place. Nonetheless, the countless shortcomings make Winterhawk a slog even though it’s supposed to be a song.

Winterhawk: LAME