Nasty Habits (1977)

          Time has diminished much of the charm that the UK/US coproduction Nasty Habits might have possessed during its original release, because the satirical analogy the film draws between its storyline and the events of the Watergate scandal now feels contrived and tenuous. After all, the picture depicts the dirty tricks that an ambitious nun uses to win election to the office of abbess in a Philadelphia convent, and her nefarious techniques include an elaborate bugging system. In the late ’70s, when the details of Nixon’s White House bugging system were still fresh, the humor of Nasty Habits could have seemed pointed and sly. Seen today, the film thrives on its own merits, rather than as a commentary on current events, and those merits are slight.

          The picture’s main character is shrewd Sister Alexandra (Glenda Jackson), who leads a contingent of older, conservative nuns. Her rival for the abbess position is Sister Felicity (Susan Penhaligon), a pretty young blonde having a sexual affair with a Jesuit priest. Alexandra tasks her underlings with gaining incriminating evidence, so they obtain tape recordings of Felicity defying church doctrine and fomenting sedition. Not only does Alexandra win the election, but she also ejects Felicity from the convent. Upon resuming civilian life, however, Felicity launches public attacks against Alexandra, eventually becoming a folk hero for challenging a powerful institution. This turn of events triggers the movie’s closest parallels to Nixon, because reporters demand to hear Alexandra’s secret recordings, and her defiance to release them imperils her status.

          Polished in most technical regards and populated with fine actors, Nasty Habits goes down smoothly whenever the focus is Alexandra’s machinations. Jackson purrs complicated dialogue with mesmerizing authority. Complementing her are Anne Meara and Geraldine Page, who play Alexandra’s main co-conspirators. Less effective is Sandy Dennis, who plays a bumbling nun tasked with performing goofy undercover work. As for the bits with Penhaligon as Felicity, indifference seems the appropriate response. She’s spunky but unmemorable, and her character isn’t sufficiently sympathetic to energize the story. Moreover, the whole Nixon allusion is questionable because Alexandra isn’t an unhinged paranoiac like Nixon, but rather a smooth operator—so when Alexandra caps the movie by paraphrasing one of Nixon’s most famous quotes, the intended satirical flourish doesn’t quite connect. And that insufferably chirpy musical score by John Cameron? No thanks.

Nasty Habits: FUNKY

Shoot It Black, Shoot It Blue (1974)

          The only feature directed by Dennis McGuire, whose sole Hollywood credit outside this project was cowriting the bizarre insane-asylum picture End of the Road (1970), this obscure drama somewhat anticipates the notorious Rodney King incident, because the plot concerns a young man capturing an episode of police brutality on film. Unfortunately, McGuire—who adapted the script from a novel by Paul Tyner—can’t quite figure out where to go from his incendiary jumping-off point. Instead of taking the obvious path by creating a thriller wherein the police officer tries to prevent evidence from surfacing, or even the more challenging path of exploring the societal repercussions after the evidence is released, McGuire opts for a two-pronged character study. Most of the scenes depict the bad cop in his everyday environment, carousing and drinking in between bouts of Catholic guilt and self-loathing. A smaller number of scenes depict the person who shot the incriminating footage, a young, African-American film student. Neither of these characters is put across in a satisfying way, and it doesn’t help that idiosyncratic actor Michael Moriarty plays the leading role—he’s alternately somnambulistic and weird, conveying the surface of the cop without providing much psychological insight.

          The film starts on an interesting note, setting up the possibilities and problems of McGuire’s ambiguous approach. Beat cop Herby (Moriarty) gets caught taking a bribe in exchange for not writing a traffic ticket, so he’s briefly suspended. Meanwhile, young Lamont (Eric Laneuville) spends his time filming a praying mantis for an experimental film project. One day, their lives collide. Back on the beat, Herby casually murders a suspect in an alleyway, and Lamont films the altercation from his apartment window several stories overhead. Then, once Herby is suspended again while the investigation grinds along, the lawyer (Paul Sorvino) representing the dead man’s widow finds Lamont and arranges for him to be a surprise witness at Herby’s trial. Yet much of the picture concerns tangential stuff, like Herby’s debauched exploits with fellow sleazebag Garrity (Earl Hindman). McGuire tracks and resolves the story in an awkward manner, largely ignoring obvious and worthwhile possibilities for expanding the narrative’s sociological impact. Shoot It Black, Shoot It Blue contains intimate and strange details, but it also contains lots of pointless filler. So by the time the picture reaches its fashionably cynical finale, McGuire has lost most of his authorial credibility.

Shoot It Black, Shoot It Blue: FUNKY

A Matter of Time (1976)

          As talented as he was versatile, Vincente Minnelli directed a handful of great films, plus quite a few that were merely respectable, before his career started to lose momentum in the late ’60s. Anyone would be proud of a legacy including Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Gigi (1958). Minnelli also lived long enough to watch Liza Minnelli, his daughter with Judy Garland, blossom into a dynamic and award-winning entertainer. The wise move after the moderate success of his Barbra Streisand vehicle On a Clear Day you Can See Forever (1970) might have been to retire gracefully. Unfortunately, showbiz professionals often need to get yanked off the stage, and that’s what happened when Minnelli made his final film, A Matter of Time.
          Convincing Liza to play the leading role presumably trumped any concerns that producers might have had about Minnelli’s old-fashioned style, since she was a hot commodity at the time, and Papa Minnelli recruited another big name, Ingrid Bergman, for the film’s main supporting role. Things didn’t go so well past that point. Minnelli was fired for going overbudget and overschedule. Then distributor American International gutted his footage to generate a 97-minute version of what Minnelli originally intended to be a three-hour epic. Ouch.

          Watching the released cut of A Matter of Time, it doesn’t seem as if Minnelli’s ouster represents a loss to cinema history. Telling the fairy-tale-like story of a maid who rose to fame and fortune by learning from an eccentric old woman how to seduce powerful men, A Matter of Time is overproduced, tone-deaf, and unseemly. After a present-day prologue, the film flashes back to Rome during some undetermined stage of the postwar era, where 15-year-old Nina (Liza) arrives at the decaying hotel where her cousin works as a maid. (Yes, Liza, who was pushing 30 when this film was released, plays her character as a teenager.) Nina befriends the strange Contessa Sanziani (Bergman), who wears a flamboyant cloak with leopard-skin trim and sports ghastly black makeup rings around her eyes. Back in the day, the Contessa played muse to great artists and thinkers, so she passes along her philosophy of, put bluntly, using sex to help men realize their potential even if the woman gets nothing in return. Nina thinks this lifestyle sounds terrific, so she does the Contessa one better by trading sex for wealth and notoriety.

          All of this icky stuff plays out in stilted dialogue scenes, and the gaudy production design gives a more spirited performance than any of the actors. Oh, and about halfway through its running time, the movie suddenly becomes a musical, with Liza howling a few forgettable numbers. Need we even mention the scene in which Mina forgives a would-be rapist for assaulting her because he’s upset about writer’s block? Ultimately, the saddest and strangest thing about A Matter of Time isn’t watching a venerable director derail his career and legacy—Minnelli never made another movie—but the notion that he roped his Oscar-winning daughter into playing an opportunistic whore. Not the best “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” in Hollywood history. Having said that, nepotism worked out better for Bergman, because her daughter Isabella Rossellini made her screen debut in A Matter of Time, playing the small role of a nun.

A Matter of Time: LAME

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

          Like a novelist practicing with short stories before attempting the grand statement of a first novel, the singular German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a number of documentaries and short-subject fiction films before mounting his first two fictional features, Signs of Life (1968) and this strange picture. Yet because he followed up these intimate projects with the ambitious Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), it’s tempting to look at early projects including Even Dwarfts Stated Small as the byproducts of apprenticeship. For while Even Dwarfs Started Small contains some of Herzog’s signature themes and is suffused with his idiosyncratic style, it’s trifling compared to the powerful allegories he made later.

          Plus, truth be told, Even Dwarfs Started Small is a gimmick picture, because it’s a black-and-white oddity featuring only little people. The limitations of gimmickry become evident as Even Dwafts Started Small trudges along: It’s hard to get emotionally invested in a fictional feature populated exclusively by nonprofessional actors playing interchangeable roles. There’s something bold about the way Herzog asks viewers to plunge into the deepest waters of his imagination, but boldness only goes so far.

          Set on a remote island off the northern coast of Africa, the picture depicts a rebel uprising at an asylum or some other sort of institution. The gist is that the inmates/patients/residents dislike the way they’re treated, so they cut off communication with the outside world and lay siege to administrators until chaos reigns. Despite copious amounts of dialogue, much of which is deliberately cryptic and/or peculiar, so it’s never especially clear just what’s happening, though the film seems to take an antiauthoritarian stance. (For instance, rebels toss rocks at an administrator while he speaks to them from a high rooftop.)

          Mostly, the threadbare plot provides Herzog with an excuse to capture weird images. A camel too groggy or ill to stand on its forelegs. Rebels shoving a car down a seemingly bottomless hole in the ground. A driverless vehicle spinning in circles. A man holding a tube of cream over his crotch and spurting the cream onto a nearby woman. And so much giggling. At times, it feels like half this film’s screen time is devoted to shots of characters laughing idiotically. Herzog has never been afraid to stop a story dead so he can linger on some odd tangent, but Even Dwarfts Started Small is nothing but tangents, and the lack of a larger purpose renders the whole enterprise somewhat pointless, beyond the inherent value of putting onscreen people whose life experiences are rarely explored in popular culture.

Even Dwarfs Started Small: FUNKY

Moonchild (1974)

One of a handful of ’70s features that began as film-school thesis projects, writer-director Alan Gadney’s Moonchild is ambitious to a fault. Not only did Gadney secure impressive locations and the participation of Hollywood actors, but he also attempted to tell an intricately allegorical story about existential and metaphysical subjects. Had Gadney been able to pull this one off, it would have been such a miraculous achievement that we’d still be talking about his audacity today, because Moonchild would have launched a singular filmmaking career. Alas, Gadney botched things so badly that Moonchild was his last directorial endeavor as well as his first. The murky storyline goes something like this: A young artist (Mark Travis) realizes that he’s been reincarnated in some otherworldly realm, where supernatural figures including the Maitre’D (Victor Buono) battle for control of his soul while an impartial observer called Mr. Walker (John Carradine) both comments upon and observes the momentous events. At first, the scenario unfolds like the setup for a horror movie, with the leading character trapped inside a weird playground for godlike lunatics. Later, once Gadney indulges himself with religious imagery, the story veers into a kangaroo-court situation with spiritual implications. (“If death is a dream," Buono coos, "then what is life? Is life God or Man?”) Some of what happens in Moonchild is borderline interesting, but the movie’s style is insufferable, particularly the hyperactive editing. Worse, the blurring of hallucinations and reality creates long stretches of incoherence. Eventually, it’s all way too much, so the viewer’s inevitable reaction is best summarized by an exclamation the protagonist makes somewhere around the 33-minute mark: “What is this? What are you people talking about?” Exactly.

Moonchild: LAME

Demons of the Mind (1972)

          Featuring plot elements culled from the historical era just prior to Sigmund Freud’s ascension, a time when the study of the human psyche carried associations of heresy and mysticism, the Hammer production Demons of the Mind has some highly commendable elements, such as a grim depiction of savage medical techniques and a sincere attempt at sketching a complex psychological profile for a family plagued by hereditary mental illness. Unfortunately, these strong attributes are married to lurid and sluggish storytelling, problems made worse by leading actors who attack their roles like hungry dogs ravaging pieces of raw meat. What might have been one of Hammer’s most sophisticated movies devolves somewhat, but not completely, into dull sensationalism. Those gravitating toward the picture’s intelligent aspects will be disappointed by all the gore and nudity, while those seeking only cheap thrills will likely get bored with long dialogue scenes.

          In Europe circa the early 19th century, Baron Zorn (Robert Hardy) keeps his two adult children captive in their rooms because he’s terrified they will manifest the problems that drove their mother to suicide. Although the Baron is not without reason for worrying about Elizabeth (Gillian Hills) and Emil (Shane Briant), seeing as how they have demonstrated incestuous desires for each other, the cure is worse than the disease. Captivity pushes the siblings to emotional and mental extremes, and their aunt/caretaker practices such gruesome rituals as bloodletting to control their symptoms. Once controversial mental-health specialist Dr. Falkenberg (Patrick Magee) arrives to experiment with potions and transfusions and other macabre techniques, things spiral out of control because a series of murders in the neighboring village leads superstitious locals to suspect that someone at the baron’s castle is the culprit. Meanwhile, a crazed priest (Michael Hordern) stalks the local forests, inciting people with religious fearmongering.

          Despite being presented with Hammer’s usual high style (atmospheric sets, lush costumes, sexy starlets), Demons of the Mind is neither as clear nor as original as it should be. Sometimes the film gets stuck in the mud of its own convoluted plotting, because director Peter Sykes and his collaborators try to cloud the identity of the killer for as long as they can. Sometimes the film is simply boring, especially when Hardy and Magee share scenes in which they try to out-scream each other, veins pulsing on their foreheads as they fabricate overly theatrical intensity. (Hordern does a fair amount of yelling, too.) At its least imaginative, Demons of the Mind summons that trusty old cliché, the image of angry villagers storming toward a castle with pitchforks and torches, and at its most grotesque, the picture concludes with one of the bloodiest murders in the entire Hammer canon. 

Demons of the Mind: FUNKY

The Great Waltz (1972)

It’s easy to forget that two different Hollywood stories occurred during the early ’70s. In the more familiar narrative, the collapse of the studio system allowed young filmmakers to insert their perspective, resulting in the groundbreaking achievements of the New Hollywood. At the same time, veteran professionals perpetuated the old ways of doing things, resulting in bloated super-productions that have since been largely forgotten. One such epic is The Great Waltz, a musical biopic about the classical-music composer Johann Strauss Jr. and a loose remake of the 1938 movie bearing the same name. To indicate how out of step this movie was with the tastes of 1972 audiences, one need only note that the film’s writer and director, Andrew L. Stone, made this picture two years after helming yet another flop musical, Song of Norway (1970). Why did anyone expect different results the second time around? Running an almost interminable two hours and 15 minutes, complete with intermission, this G-rated melodrama tracks Strauss’ conflicts with his overbearing father, his clashes with people who don’t believe in his talent, and his various romantic entanglements. In other words, the usual soapy formula. Playing Strauss is the handsome German actor Horst Bucholz, whose icy quality ensures that the picture feels clinical instead of personal, and even though the title of the picture is The Great Waltz, most of the musical numbers revolve around singing. Sure, there’s a lot of dancing, too, but Stone lets dippy lyrics, rather than expressive body movements, tell the story. Even the narration is sung. The Great Waltz is not as painfully saccharine as Song of Norway, and it’s all the worse for the difference—The Great Waltz is so polite and stilted as to barely exist. It’s all spectacular locations and predictable dramatic rhythms and robotic acting, archaic techniques in the service of a ho-hum narrative. Perhaps that explains why Stone never made another movie.

The Great Waltz: LAME

Killdozer (1974)

          Enjoyably stupid escapism with more than a tip of the hat to the iconic, Steven Spielberg-directed Duel (1971), this made-for-TV sci-fi thrilller is about exactly what its title suggests: a bulldozer that kills. The narrative justification for this premise is almost laughably lazy, because a meteor falls to earth, and when the blade of the bulldozer strikes the rock, a field of blue energy transfers from the meteor to the machine. Presto-chango, the heavy equipment is possessed! And that’s nearly all the story the film provides, notwithstanding some lip-service material about how the protagonist, a construction-crew foreman, puts efficiency over safety and therefore is slow to react once several mysterious deaths occur. (Well, mysterious to the characters, anyway—we, the viewers, see the Killdozer causing the deaths.) Fitting the lunkheaded nature of this movie, the leading man is 1950s TV star Clint Walker, an amiable man-mountain whom none would ever mistake for an avatar of dramatic nuance. Other members of the sausage-party cast include reliable tough guy Neville Brand and versatile TV thesp Robert Urich.

          As for the plot, it’s so thin as to barely merit description. Lloyd Kelly (Walker) supervises a small crew tasked with clearing land for an airstrip on a remote island in the Pacific. Naturally, this means the men are isolated between visits from supply boats, so once things get screwy, they’re on their own. After the aforementioned close encounter between the bulldozer and the meteor, the titular mechanical monster starts Killdozing, although the first few incidents take place while the victims are alone, hence the time it takes for survivors to correctly assign blame. After that happens, the Killdozer goes into full attack mode, destroying the work camp and with it the survivors’ supplies. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to wonder why the men don’t simply retreat to high ground and stay there until help arrives, but in the realm of dopey genre pictures, it’s better to go with the flow. Otherwise, the viewer would be denied the pleasure of watching survivors try to outwit the Killdozer. Chew on that one for a minute—and if you like the taste, then seek out Killdozer for 74 minutes of brain-cell-murdering silliness. If not, give this baby a wide berth.

Killdozer: FUNKY

Trackdown (1976)

          Tough, nasty, and violent, Trackdown tells the story of a modern-day cowboy who travels to the big city because his little sister has gone missing, then dives headlong into a cesspool of human exploitation and organized crime while looking for his lost sibling. The movie is something of a cousin to Paul Schrader’s provocative Hardcore (1979), although Schrader’s movie deals with pornography instead of prostitution, and there’s a big gulf between the theologically charged Hardcore and the no-frills Trackdown. Still, what both movies share is the rich premise of a man from a simple place wading through the muck of late-’70s Los Angeles, where pretty dreamers looking for new opportunities are easy prey for flesh merchants. In fact, had a stronger actor been cast in the lead of Trackdown, the movie might have found a niche among the era’s memorable exploitation films, since it benefits from a well-constructed plot, interesting supporting characters, and vivid action scenes. Alas, while James Mitchum inherited his father Robert’s hangdog eyes and hulking physique, he didn’t get his dad’s charisma or talent.

          The picture begins with Betsy Calhoun (Karen Lamm) running away from her Montana home and taking a bus to Hollywood. Almost immediately after her arrival, she’s mugged by a group of Latino street toughs, but one of the Latinos takes sympathy on her plight. He’s Chucho (Erik Estrada). Chucho gives Lynn a place to crash and a lead on work, so they become friends—but Chucho’s cronies have designs on the pretty blonde. They kidnap and drug Lynn, delivering her to Johnny Dee (Vince Cannon), a mob-connected pimp. He entrusts Lynn to high-priced call girl Barbara (Anne Archer), who offers to train Lynn as a prostitute. In one of the picture’s most interesting nuances, Lynne accepts the overture after she’s recovered from the influence of drugs—as she explains, there’s a reason she left small-town America for the bright lights and endless promise of the Golden State. Once Lynn’s brother, Jim (Mitchum), shows up to “rescue” her, he quickly learns that he’s looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found.

          Lest the preceding give the false impression that Trackdown is a sensitive exploration of human feeling, it should be emphasized that Trackdown is a lowbrow thrill ride. (Note the fact that Cathy Lee Crosby, who plays a social worker and provides a love interest for Mitchum’s character, spends most of the movie wearing skin-tight jeans and revealing tied-off shirts.) Nonetheless, the filmmakers take their time establishing characters and situations in logical ways, so once the shooting starts, there’s a believable emotional context. Furthermore, while one might expect this sort of film to be presented in the grungy style of a Roger Corman-produced quickie, Trackdown instead has the look of a studio picture, and the polished images get juiced by tasty, disco-infused musical scoring. 

Trackdown: FUNKY

Hammersmith Is Out (1972)

A misguided black comedy that bounces between crude farce and silly satire, Hammersmith Is Out loosely retells the legend of Faust, which concerns a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for success. As ineptly written by Stanford Whitmore and clumsily directed by Peter Ustinov, Hammersmith Is Out concerns an ignorant slob named Billy Breedlove (Beau Bridges), who works as an orderly in a mental hospital. Billy agrees to free a psychotic patient named Hammersmith (Richard Burton), who in turn agrees to kill people on Billy’s behalf, thereby imbuing Billy with the victims’ money and power. Along for the ride is greasy-spoon waitress Jimmie Jean Jackson (Elizabeth Taylor), whom Billy enjoys screwing until her vapidity becomes annoying. The narrative of Hammersmith Is Out moves at awkward rhythms, sometimes lingering on scenes as if they’re pieces of theater, and sometimes rushing through important ones by way of perfunctory voiceover. The tone of the picture is inconsistent, complementing sly verbal jokes with a crass gag about flatulence. Bridges gives an exaggerated turn playing an irredeemable scumbag, and Burton dubiously opts for icy restraint, which makes him seem bored. Taylor is awful—all cartoonish artifice—though in her defense, she’s grossly miscast as a salt-of-the-earth type. Given these wholly unsympathetic characters, it’s a drag to watch Hammersmith Is Out, because the flick is a would-be laugh riot about killing and maiming people for no reason other than greed. Furthermore, it’s hard to cut the movie slack as a spoof of 1972-era society, seeing as how Ustinov’s idea of a witty joke is showing an all-female rock band called “The Tits” performing topless. By the time the movie stops dead so La Liz can deliver an interminable monologue, gifting her character with previously unknown soulfulness, Hammersmith Is Out has degraded into pointless sludge.

Hammersmith Is Out: LAME

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

          First things first: Ignore the advertising materials and the title of this film, which is not in any way fantastic or supernatural. Quite to the contrary, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is the dark and sad story of a woman pushed to violence by a lifetime of mental illness and sexual abuse. While writer Robert Thom and director Matt Cimber deliver so many exploitation elements that their movie is more than a little bit sleazy, they also supply a grim character study based on a rational bit of cause-and-effect psychological theorizing. It’s not as if they break new ground, since every movie of this type lives in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it’s not as if they delve so deeply and thoughtfully into the nature of killing and sexual dysfunction that The Witch Who Came from the Sea overcomes its grindhouse nature. Topless shots and gory murder scenes abound. Nonetheless, the movie has more substance than one might expect.

          Set at various spots along the Los Angeles coast, primarily a sketchy neighborhood in Venice Beach, the picture stars lanky Millie Perkins as Molly, a twisted young woman preoccupied with her long-lost father. According to her, he was a bold sea captain and he might someday return. According to Molly’s older sister, however, Daddy was an abusive, drunken louse who did the world a favor by disappearing and presumably dying. When she’s not babysitting her nephews or working in a bar, Molly picks up men. Once she’s alone with them, she engages in S&M while drifting in and out of hallucinations/memories of being molested by her father when she was younger. Molly acts out her repressed rage by killing her lovers. As the body count rises, cops discover clues leading them to Molly.

         The film’s storytelling is highly problematic on two levels. Firstly, Cimber’s B-movie excesses are so distracting as to be unintentionally campy, as when he trains his camera on the bulging crotches of bodybuilders while Molly watches dudes exercise on Venice’s famous Muscle Beach. Secondly, the way that Cimber weaves in and out of hallucinations makes it difficult to track what’s really happening. Putting the audience inside the leading character’s head is one thing, but creating unhelpful narrative confusion is another. Yet every so often, the filmmakers lock into something interestingly weird, like the supporting character of a tattoo artist named “Jack Dracula.” Plus, the murder vignettes and sexual-abuse flashbacks are genuinely unpleasant to watch. In sum, it’s fair to say there’s a real movie hiding under the grotesque surface of The Witch Who Came from the Sea, but that real movie is so mediocre that most viewers won’t find it worth the trouble of working their way past the tacky stuff. 

The Witch Who Came from the Sea: FUNKY

Premonition (1972)

Before he started making idiosyncratic character studies, Alan Rudolph got his directorial career started with a pair of low-budget genre pictures, the first of which was this underwhelming thriller about hippies running afoul of demonic flowers. Rudolph also wrote the movie. Dull, shapeless, and vague, the flick begins with lackadaisical musician Neil (Carl Crow) working as an assistant to Professor Kilrenny (Victor Izay) during a research trip into the desert. They discover a skeleton in a field dotted with vibrant red flowers, and Neil has weird visions. Some time later, after Neil has parted ways with the professor, Neil assembles a rock trio and takes his bandmates to a remote cabin, where they practice tunes and romance compliant hippie chicks. Unfortunately, those pesky red flowers bloom near the cabin, so Neil’s bandmates begin experiencing visions. Mayhem ensues, with a major character falling victim to the flowers’ influence—or something like that. The deliberately ambiguous Premonition leaves viewers as bewildered as the characters, but that type of narrative approach only works when storylines are grounded in memorable events. Alas, nothing in Premonition is memorable. Neil spends a lot of time gawking while he reacts to dark visions, and he yaks to his buddies about how upsetting the visions were, but he never does much of anything to improve his situation. Although Premonition benefits from slick photography by future A-list Hollywood shooter John Bailey, the movie is so bereft of actual events that it’s excruciatingly boring, and Rudolph misses the opportunity to draw ironic parallels between the herbs that the hippies smoke onscreen and the plants that might or might not be the source of their troubles. At least Premonition got Rudolph’s unique career going, so props to the filmmaker’s father, veteran TV helmer Oscar Rudolph, who executive-produced his son’s directorial debut.

Premonition: LAME

Killer Force (1976)

          A heist thriller that sacrifices believability and logic in the name of plot twists, Killer Force—also known as The Diamond Mercenaries—features an offbeat cast and a moderately exciting climax filled with bloodshed and chases and gunfights. Getting to the finale requires a bit of patience, since the picture’s first two acts are a bit on the sluggish side, and none should seek out Killer Force hoping for anything along the lines of resonance or substance. This is manly-man escapism of the most vapid sort imaginable, although the macho posturing is leavened by leading man Peter Fonda’s sensitive-dude mannerisms. Plus, it’s hard to take the movie too seriously, not only because of the far-fetched storyline, but also because of two peculiar visual tropes: Costar Telly Savalas wears sunglasses throughout the entire movie, removing them only in the final shot, and Fonda sports a goofy perm that looks like a half-hearted attempt at a white-guy Afro. The innate silliness of Killer Force is part of the movie’s appeal, but that’s to be expected of any movie featuring O.J. Simpson in a supporting role.

          Set in the South African desert, the picture revolves around a heavily fortified diamond mine. Harry Webb (Savalas), a cold-blooded security specialist, arrives at the sprawling facility because clues indicate that someone is planning an inside-job robbery. Mike Bradley (Fonda) is a member of the private army that patrols the facility and the surrounding area. Criminal mastermind John Lewis (Hugh O’Brien) has assembled a small team to invade the mine and steal diamonds. His accomplices include easygoing “Bopper” Alexander (Simpson) and sadistic ex-solider Major Chilton (Christopher Lee). Another player in the convoluted plot is Chambers (Stuart Brown), the facility’s administrator. Distrusting Webb, Chambers asks Bradley to play double agent by seeking out and joining the conspirators, thus drawing them into a trap. Complicating matters is Mike’s romantic involvement with Chambers’ fashion-model daughter, Clare (Maud Adams). And so it goes from there. Intrigue compounds intrigue, with the body count growing as the date of the inevitable heist attempt draws ever closer.

          About half of what happens in Killer Force makes logical sense, although everything goes down smoothly in a dunderheaded, Saturday-matinee sort of way. There’s a little romance, a little sex, a little male bonding, and lots of dudes grimacing with fierce determination. Director Val Guest—a somewhat unlikely candidate for this gig, seeing as how he’s best known for his sci-fi pictures—shoots Killer Force with the bland, boxy style of episodic television, so Killer Force doesn’t get any points for style. Still, the cast is hard to beat as a random assortment of familiar faces, and there’s just enough action to keep the picture’s blood pumping.

Killer Force: FUNKY

Baffled! (1973)

          Following three years each as an ensemble player on Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, Leonard Nimoy apparently took just one stab at becoming the lead of his very own TV series, notwithstanding multiyear runs hosting the nonfiction shows In Search of . . . , Ancient Mysteries, and History’s Mysteries. (Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke!) Nimoy’s wannabe star vehicle, Baffled!, could just as easily have been titled Baffling!, seeing as how it’s confounding that anyone thought the concept could sustain an entire series. Even just watching the feature-length pilot episode, the only installment that was made, requires patience. Adding to the offbeat nature of the project is the sheer Englishness of Baffled!, which was photographed in the UK and coproduced by the British company ITC. Even the pilot’s costar, Susan Hampshire, is British. (One version of Baffled! was released theatrically in Europe, and a slightly different cut aired on American TV.)

          Yet the peculiarity of the project’s geographical origin pales next to the strangeness of the storyline: Nimoy plays a racecar driver who suddenly manifests psychic abilities, then teams with a paranormal specialist to solve supernatural crimes in Europe. Quite frankly, even Nimoy’s presence is odd, thanks to the actor’s aloof demeanor and lanky appearance—fascinating as he could be in the right role, Nimoy was not the matinee-idol type this sort of project requires. In any event, Baffled! opens during a race, when daring driver Tom Kovack (Nimoy) has a series of weird visions that cause him to ride off the road. For no good reason, he explains what happened on TV, attracting the attention of Michelle Brent (Hampshire). Tracking Tom down, she determines that his visions relate to a particular manor home in England, so away the two go for an adventure filled with danger and intrigue. The plot has something to do with a blowsy innkeeper (Rachel Roberts) tormenting an American movie star (Vera Miles), with the movie star’s teenaged daughter (Jewel Blanch) caught in the middle.

          Baffled! hits viewers with lots of hokey old-dark-house stuff, plus listless sequences of attempted violence; the bit of Nimoy falling off a cliff and safely landing in deep water is about as exciting as it gets. The acting is indifferent, the plotting is turgid, and the supernatural element—mostly comprising shots of Nimoy squinting while he has visions—adds little. Through it all, tinny music that could have been copped from  a trove of Avengers outtakes—as in Steed & Peel, not Captain America and Iron Man—honks and tweets on the soundtrack. Nearly the only rewarding aspect of watching Baffled! is listening to Nimoy croak lines in a ridiculous UK approximation of American slang. “I like you,” he says to Hampshire. “You’re warm, enthusiastic, and—why shouldn’t I use the word—you’re a great-lookin’ chick.”

Baffled!: FUNKY

Smokey and the Hotwire Gang (1979)

Wretched nonsense involving criminals, hookers, and truckers, Smokey and the Hotwire Gang is passable only as the cinematic equivalent of background noise—it contains just enough action, lowbrow humor, and sex to hold the attention of undemanding viewers so long as they’re doing something else while the movie is running. The discombobulated plot seems to have two major elements. In one, amiable rednecks Filbert (Tony Lorea) and Joshua (James Keach) share criminal misadventures, mostly to do with stealing vehicles. In the other major element, a madam nicknamed “Hotwire” (Carla Ziegfeld) augments her skin-trade income by selling stolen cars. There’s also some sleazy business involving two prostitutes who prowl the countryside in a tricked-out, cowboy-themed Winnebego they call “The Westerner” while offering their services to truckers via CB radio and using the handles “Sexy Sadie” and “Sweet Cakes.” Eventually, all of these things coalesce during a shabby attempt at a madcap finale, because Smokey and the Hotwire Gang is supposed to be a comedy. No matter the genre, the picture is chaotic, disoriented, and sloppy. The movie also looks and sounds awful, thanks to grungy cinematography, jumpy editing, and a rotten soundtrack combining bad country tunes with even worse disco songs. Adding insult to injury, the flick is so tame it bears a PG rating, meaning that anyone looking for cheap thrills during the prostitution scenes will be disappointed. About the only fleetingly enjoyable things in Smokey and the Hotwire Gang are snippets of weird dialogue, as when a trucker identifies himself as “Texas Levy, the Kosher Cowboy,” or when a redneck exclaims, “I haven’t seen anything take off like that since that kid put acid on a cat’s ass.”

Smokey and the Hotwire Gang: LAME

Train Ride to Hollywood (1975)

          Countless recording artists have attempted to capitalize on their popularity by appearing in movies, and the success rate for these endeavors is not particularly high. Rare are the projects that deliver exactly what fans want—for every Purple Rain (1984), there’s a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). Hidden between these extremes are oddities such as Train Ride to Hollywood, a cheerful love letter to old movies starring the members of R&B group Bloodstone. The movie is pointless and silly, roughly the equivalent of a sketch one might encounter on a ’70s variety show, only stretched to feature length. As such, it’s harmless, and some sequences are fleetingly entertaining, so Train Ride to Hollywood isn’t an outright misfire. That said, it’s a perplexing movie. Since Bloodstone’s biggest hit was the romantic slow jam “Natural High,” one might expect the band’s movie to be a modern love story. Nope. It’s a broad-as-a-barn farce that sorta-kinda takes place in the past. Even stranger, the band doesn’t perform any of its best-known material, instead crooning several originals written in the style of old-timey tunes. And since none of Bloodstone’s members is a gifted actor, it’s not as if Train Ride to Hollywood showcases hidden talents. The movie is too amiable to get dismissed as a vanity piece, but it represents a bizarre approach to brand management.

          Shot and edited with a fair amount of polish but obviously made on a slender budget, Train Ride to Hollywood begins at a concert, where heavyset Bloodstone vocalist Harry Williams (playing himself) suffers a knock to the head. He dreams that he and his bandmates are scrappy Dead End Kid-type strivers eager to become stars by traveling to California. They disguise themselves as porters and hop onto a train carrying Humphrey Bogart (Guy Marks), Dracula (Jay Robinson), Clark Gable (Jay Lawrence), W.C. Fields (Bill Oberlin), and others. Bloodstone’s Charles Love (also playing himself) gets involved with a harem girl, because one of the other passengers is a sheik with seven women. As the episodic storyline unfurls, viewers encounter light comedy in the Hope/Crosby style, musical numbers showcasing Bloodstone’s stylistic versatility, and fourth-wall-braking gags. Some of the weirder scenes involve the whole cast getting wasted on smoke from the sheik’s hookah, Harry boxing a gorilla, and the search for a killer who suffocates people with his armpits. Yet Train Ride to Hollywood is so brisk, gentle, lively, and weird that it’s hard to hate the movie, even though many sequences are painfully stupid. After all, where else can viewers watch Robinson do a bargain-basement Bela Lugosi imitation while saying, “Hey, Bogie, don’t bogart that joint!” 

Train Ride to Hollywood: FUNKY

Dodes’ka-den (1970)

          Akira Kurosawa’s dreamlike ensemble piece Dodes’ka-den is akin to an abstract painting, in that different viewers will interpret the piece in different ways. Rather than delivering one overarching storyline, as was the norm in most of Kurosawa’s films prior to and following this one, Dodes-ka’den uses a single location to connect various subplots and vignettes. Although most of the individual narrative elements are coherent and linear, the cumulative effect of Dodes’ka-den is largely experiential. However, because the film is so long, running nearly two and a half hours, and because the pacing is so meditative, not everyone will have the patience to accompany Kurosawa for the whole journey. Furthermore, the episodic storytelling style creates an inevitable problem: Some threads in this tapestry are more interesting than others, which means that whole stretches of the picture feel like needless intrusions. That said, small rewards await those who accept this film on its offbeat terms, and it’s possible to simply revel in Kurosawa’s compassion and creativity without trying to grasp the big picture that he paints with Dodes’ka-den.

          The setting is a massive trash heap, where dozens of people have created a shantytown rife with the same sorts of gossip and interconnected relationships and melodrama found in any other human community. Given the setting, obviously all of the characters face horrific challenges. Beyond the shared hardship of poverty, some citizens suffer from mental and physical illness, while others endure alcoholism. In one of the film’s typically poetic flourishes, Kurosawa introduces viewers to the world of the trash heap by showing the resident who seems most content with his life. He’s a mentally challenged young man who believes that he has a job operating a train, so every day, he wakes up and climbs into his imaginary trolley, then pantomimes driving the vehicle throughout the trash heap while making sound effects with his voice. (The film’s title stems from the noise he makes when imitating the chugging of a train engine.) Since this young man lives inside the special world of his imagination, he’s insulated from the suffering that surrounds him.

          An older man, who used to be a business executive but tragically lost his family, pleads with the trash heap’s resident doctor for poison with which to kill himself. A sensitive young woman tries to break through the emotional barriers of a mystery man so disconnected from everyone else that he seems like a zombie. An imaginative father regales his young son with stories about the great house he’s going to build for them, even as they both succumb to disease. And so on.

          Kurosawa weaves together the lives of more than a dozen characters, sometimes using minimalistic techniques (conveying relationships through facial expressions and physical proximity), and sometimes using copious amounts of verbiage. Even the notion of what’s meant to be real and what’s meant to be metaphorically representative is fluid. In the father/son storyline, for instance, Kurosawa uses stylized makeup and painted backdrops to create surreal effects, whereas most of the film is realistic. Toro Takemitsu’s musical score is similarly eclectic, ranging from cutesy and sentimental to ethereal and evocative.

          There is, in fact, a great sense of experimentation flowing through Dodes’ka-den, Kurosawa’s first film in color. Certain scenes rely so heavily on shadows that they would have been just as effective in black and white, but the boldest stuff—notably the father/son scenes—anticipates the masterful use of color that distinguished Kurosawa’s films of the ’80s and ’90s. Dodes’ka-den is more uneven than frustrating, for while the picture often feels rudderless, much of what it contains is intimate and touching. There’s also something eerie about watching the suicide storyline, since Kurosawa attempted to take his own life following the commercial failure of this picture. For all its peculiarities, Dodes’ka-den comes across as a deeply personal expression by one of the cinema’s true giants.

Dodes’ka-den: FUNKY

Sweet Revenge (1976)

          Allegedly conceived and marketed as a comedy, Sweet Revenge is instead an über-’70s character study about a woman who supports herself by stealing cars, and who uses myriad fake identities to avoid being captured by authorities. It’s an odd little picture, neither funny enough to work as a comedy nor serious enough to cut very deeply as a drama, but it’s executed at a high level of skill behind and in front of the camera. So even though Sweet Revenge is sluggishly paced, tonally uneven, and generally lacking a clear sense of purpose, the film contains some mildly interesting stuff. That said, Sweet Revenge is only truly recommended for fans of one or more of the key participants, since casual viewers are likely to lose interest fairly quickly.

          Stockard Channing, in one of her few leading roles, plays Vurria Kowsky, an eccentric young woman who lives in a hovel and spends her time hotwiring cars so she can sell them for cash. Her big goal in life is gaining enough wealth to buy a Ferrari. Vurria, who often uses the name “Dandy,” has accumulated a few lowlife friends, especially fellow small-time crook Edmund (Franklyn Ajaye), who drives a pimped-out car that he calls “Sweet Revenge.” Eventually, Vurria gets caught during one of her robberies, so a public defender named Le Clerq (Sam Waterston) is assigned to her case. Much of the film depicts his attempts to help her, even as she pushes him away with pathological dishonesty stemming from her generalized distrust of authority. In a meandering and shapeless way, Sweet Revenge tells the story of an outsider learning how to rejoin society, but viewers are likely to feel the way Le Clerq does, which is moderately sympathetic until Vurria lies about having an abusive background. Put bluntly, she ain’t got no class.

          Had the filmmakers treated this material dramatically, Sweet Revenge could have evolved into a tough little piece about a driven individual creating a private world outside of society’s restrictions, but because the approach is quasi-lighthearted, everything feels  pointless and superficial. After all, a comedy without laughs isn’t really much of anything. Perhaps the strangest aspect of Sweet Revenge is the participation of director Jerry Schatzberg, whose previous films—including The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and Scarecrow (1973)—were gritty dramas. Schatzberg’s collaborator on Scarecrow, masterful cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, shot Sweet Revenge with his signature blend of elegance and moodiness, though his shadowy frames don’t quite suit the flavor of the material.

Sweet Revenge: FUNKY

Don’t Hang Up (1974)

Exactly as amateurish, dull, and pointless as its director’s first effort, Don’t Look in the Basement a/k/a The Forgotten (1973), this slow-moving shocker, which was later reissued as Don’t Open the Door! (hence the above poster), tells an illogical but linear story cribbing elements from classic horror pictures. There’s a reason why no one has proposed adding S.F. Brownrigg’s name to the pantheon of all-time great genre filmmakers, although he’s not so spectacularly incompetent that he deserves special mention among the worst people ever to make movies. He’s on the very low end of mediocre, which is about as ignoble a stature as one can achieve. Like The Forgotten, this picture has some creepy elements, but they’re all derivative and enervated; moreover, the film’s pacing is so slow and the storytelling is so weak that it’s impossible for Brownrigg to generate much in the way of suspense. Don’t Hang Up looks and feels like a horror movie without being horrifying. The gist of the piece is that young blonde Amanda (Susan Bracken) returns to her hometown in order to care for her ailing grandmother, only to suffer bedevilment at the hands of greedy small-town weirdos. None of this should come as much of a surprise to Amanda, seeing as how her mother was brutally murdered in the small town 13 years ago. Why does she return, knowing what she knows about the place? Why doesn’t she involve authorities once she starts receiving creepy phone calls? Why does she let a doctor and judge, both of whom have obvious ulterior motives, prevent her from transferring her grandmother to a care facility? Why doesn’t she just haul her ass out of town? One gets the impression that Brownrigg doesn’t care about the answers to such questions. His priority is using claustrophobic closeups and garish lighting while pitting Amanda—who, apparently, exists only to be stalked—against oddballs like a cross-dressing mannequin collector. Any resemblance to Psycho (1960) is as intentional as it is pathetic.

Don’t Hang Up: LAME