Joe Panther (1976)

          Telling the story of a modern-day Seminole Indian youth torn between the limitations of life in his impoverished village and the potential moral compromises of pursuing opportunities in the outside world, Joe Panther is clumsily effective. The story is eventful, the protagonist’s journey is meaningful, and the themes of assimilation and identity create believable points of conflict. Made with more sophistication, Joe Panther might have earned a place among the best coming-of-age stories from the ’70s. Unfortunately, the film falls short of contemporary standards for racial sensitivity thanks to any-minority-will-suffice casting, and that’s but one of many flaws. Nonetheless, Joe Panther is commendable for a few moments of genuine emotion as well as at least one scene of thrilling action.

          Living in a close-knit but financially troubled Seminole village near Miami, fatherless Joe Panther (Ray Tracey) worries about how to provide for his mother and his younger brother. Joe isn’t thrilled by his prospects in the village, and it galls Joe to watch his best friend, Billy Tiger (A Martinez), put on alligator-wrestling exhibitions for tourists. When Joe hears about a job on a fishing boat owned by kindly Captain Harper (Brian Keith), Joe accepts a wild challenge as a condition of employment—he must venture into the Everglades and capture an 11-foot gator that Harper’s brother can use as a tourist attraction at his resort. The mission becomes Joe’s trial by fire, especially when his wise Uncle Turtle (Ricardo Montalban) offers ominous warnings about the dangers of the Everglades.

          Casting Latin actors in prominent Seminole roles is distracting, and the thriller subplot that dominates the last third of the movie is a bit much. Yet parts of Joe Panther have real grit. The sequence of Joe trapping a giant alligator is frightening, and the bond that Martinez and Tracey convey is persuasive. So even if the movie often edges into drab formulas, as when both Keith and Montalban give monologues about the meaning of life, the picture’s intentions seem pure. Everything right and wrong about Joe Panther is epitomized by the gentle theme song, which is performed by soft-rock hitmakers England Dan & John Ford Coley—the message is there, but the choice of messengers is highly questionable.

Joe Panther: FUNKY

The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (1974)

          Conceptually, horror-tinged melodrama The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe is fairly sound, offering a fictional set of circumstances to explain why the real Poe wrote stories about macabre subjects. Specifically, the film suggests that Poe (Robert Walker Jr.) fell in love with a beautiful woman named Lenore (Mary Grover), who suddenly fell ill, giving the appearance of death. During her funeral, Lenore awoke and screamed from inside her coffin, so Poe leaped into her grave and rescued her, but the experience drove Lenore insane. With no choice but to institutionalize Lenore, the movie proposes, Poe entrusted his love to Dr. Grimaldi (Cesar Romero), only to discover that Grimaldi was a madman engaged in perverse experiments on the human brain. Tragedy ensued. Executed with style and wit, this storyline could have generated a fantastic hybrid of character study and thriller, weaving allusions to Poe’s famous stories into the narrative. Alas, cowriter/director Mohy Quandour isn’t up to the task, the cast is unimpressive, and the whole production looks cheap.

          Walker, who brought an affecting quality to roles as troubled young men in various films and TV shows of the ’60s and ’70s, cuts an interesting figure as Poe, but he gets stuck in a mopey groove, rendering his performance dull and one-dimensional. It therefore falls to Romero, of all people, to inject the movie with dynamism, but he, too, misses the mark, playing every scene broadly and obviously. As for the film’s thrills-and-chills quotient, don’t get your hopes up. Although the fright-factor highlight should be a long sequence of Poe trapped inside a literal snake pit—as in a soggy dungeon where serpents swim in brackish water—the snakes are too few and small to deliver the desired shock value. And while the picture also boasts lurid subplots about deranged axe murderers and the like, the filmmaking is so amateurish and clunky that Quandour never gets close to the immersive type of darkness the story would have needed to cast a gruesome spell. Points for trying, though.

The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe: FUNKY

Visions of Eight (1973)

          Rather than providing conventional historical contextualization or even straightforward reportage, this arty documentary project from megaproducer David L. Wolper lets eight internationally acclaimed filmmakers offer cinematic sketches of the Olympics, with the 1972 summer games in Munich as their canvas. The terrorist attacks that left 11 Israeli athletes dead receive only passing mention, not out of disrespect but rather because Wolper’s film was designed to celebrate timeless aspects of the Olympics. As with most anthology pictures, Visions of Eight is a hit-or-miss affair, but even the iffy sequences are imaginative, so as a total viewing experience, Visions of Eight is offbeat, unpredictable, and, just as Woper intended, inspirational. Given a clear shape thanks to well-crafted introductory and closing segments overseen by Mel Stewart (who directed Wolper’s beloved 1971 theatrical feature Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), the film moves gracefully between quasi-narrative sequences and experimental passages.

          Yuri Ozerov’s “The Beginning” is among the merely serviceable vignettes. Mai Zetterling’s weight-lifting sequence “The Strongest” loses focus despite flashy cinematography and editing, because Zetterling drifts into random stats (Olympians ate 1.1 million eggs over the course of the ’72 games) and images of computers processing data. Infusing “The Decathalon” with his characteristically antiauthoritarian humor, Milos Forman juxtaposes pageantry with mundane details such as officials yawning between events, and he tips his hand by narrating, “I got to see the Olympics for free and had the best seats.” Arguably the best sequence is Claude Lelouch’s “The Losers,” which offers a poignant alternative to familiar views of triumphant athletes.

          Innovative Hollywood director Arthur Penn gets a bit carried away with “The Highest,” employing artsy audio drops, slow motion, and soft focus to transform high jumps into audiovisual abstractions, though it must be said that parts of “The Highest” are quite beautiful. Michael Pfleghar’s “The Women” underwhelms, and Kon Ichikawa’s “The Fastest” obnoxiously celebrates its own technical complexity via narration that explains how 24 cameras and 20,000 feet of film were used to record a 100-yard-dash in granular detail. The final segment, John Schlesinger’s “The Longest,” lives up to its title, offering a repetitive look at an English marathoner.

         Still, Visions of Eight amply rewards the viewer’s attention. The best sequences are terrific, the cumulative abundance of atmosphere and information is impressive, and the license Wolper gave to his collaborators resulted in great stylistic variety. Never lost amid the directorial flourishes is the sincere theme of the piece, which has to do with extolling the values of achievement and community.

Visions of Eight: GROOVY

W (1974)

To appreciate Hitchcock’s mastery, one need only watch a few movies that try and fail to emulate his Swiss-watch style. W is a silly mystery/thriller about Katie (Twiggy), a young woman tormented by someone who may or may not be her first husband, who may or may not actually be in jail, and who may or may not have committed a murder, because Katie may or may not have framed him as a means of escaping a troubled marriage. Not only does the plot hinge on so many red herrings that it’s tiresome to sort out which things are cinematic misdirection, but the affronts to logic are countless. Even worse, W is boring, despite a few serviceable suspense scenes and solid production values. (Bing Crosby Productions, the folks behind W, fared better with 1971’s killer-rat epic Ben and 1973’s redneck-vigilante opus Walking Tall.) Penned by a cabal of writers including Ronald Shusett, who later co-created the Alien franchise, W follows Katie and her second husband, Ben (Michael Witney), through several episodes of bedevilment—cars rigged to crash, pets brutally murdered, and so on. Eventually, the couple hires a shifty PI, Charles (Eugene Roche), only to discover he’s more of a problem than a solution. As the movie reaches its dippy climax, Katie’s twisted ex shows up in the form of William (Dirk Benedict), a bug-eyed psychopath personifying every cliché associated with bug-eyed psychopaths. It’s all quite leaden, despite sly supporting turns by Roche, Michael Conrad, and John Vernon. Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered why British model-turned-actress Twiggy never did more with the goodwill she earned by starring in Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971), look no further than this flick for an explanation.

W: LAME

Manny’s Orphans (1978)

          In addition to sequels and a TV series, The Bad News Bears (1976) begat ripoffs including the shameless Here Come the Tigers (1978), directed by future horror-movie icon Sean S. Cunningham. Amazingly, the same year he made Here Come the Tigers, Cunningham made another riff on The Bad News Bears, this time swapping out youth baseball for youth soccer. Manny’s Orphans, which is pleasant enough to watch but painfully formulaic and predictable, concerns an everyman with bad gambling debts who takes a job as the live-in supervisor at an orphanage, then organizes the kids into a soccer team. To the minor credit of Cunningham and his collaborators, the story structure of Manny’s Orphans does not slavishly emulate the plotting of The Bad News Bears, though the gist is similar—a man lacking direction finds himself by guiding children, and the children gain self-esteem by coalescing into an effective team. That said, the characterization, jokes, and style of Manny’s Orphans are primitive compared to the sly textures of The Bad News Bears.

          Manny (Jim Baker) loses his job as the soccer coach at a snooty private school because of his crass manners and disreputable lifestyle. Desperate to pay off a loan shark, he answers a want ad and meets Father McCoy (Malachy McCourt), who needs someone to supervise the boys in his care. Naturally, Manny takes an unusual approach, swearing around the children and playing poker with them. In the usual way of such movies, the kids find his vulgarity endearing. Among feeble subplots, the most important concerns a new arrival at the orphanage, Pepe (Melissa Valentin), who is secretly a girl. (She fled an abusive foster home.) You get the idea. Although Baker’s performance is fairly charming, McCourt is likeable, and some of the juvenile actors render passable work, flat scripting and uninspired direction make Manny’s Orphans monotonous. Still, the picture mostly avoids mean jokes and stereotypes, and the warm-fuzzy ending—no matter how obvious its construction—checks the appropriate boxes.

Manny’s Orphans: FUNKY

Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? (1971)

Apparently this atrocious horror comedy was first released in 1969 as a gay porno titled Does Dracula Really Suck? (later: Dracula and the Boys). Then, in one of cinema history’s most whiplash-inducing transformations, the picture was recast as a PG-rated monster comedy for the drive-in circuit. Some traces of the original incarnation remain visible, because while the PG-rated version of Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? lacks guy-on-guy action, it has a camp sensibility. The acting is deliberately overwrought, the photography is colorful (as in scenes are lit with randomly tinted gels), and the storyline is a (dim-witted) genre spoof. For those who crave sexed-up bloodsucker comedies, even garbage flicks along the lines of Old Dracula (1974) and Nocturna (1979) are preferable to this eyesore, and it’s insulting to mention Love at First Bite (1979) in this context. Anyway, Count Adrian (Dee Roberts) runs a nightclub/restaurant called “Dracula’s Dungeon,” occasionally preying on customers even though he has a stable of concubines. Other elements of the idiotic narrative include a caged gorilla, exotic dancers, and voodoo rituals. Thanks to heinously bad performances and tacky production values, the movie gets boring fast, so it’s immaterial whether the plot is incomprehensible or just uninteresting. Watching eight minutes of this shapeless sludge is painful, much less all 80.

Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?: SQUARE

Mackintosh and T.J. (1975)

          Roy Rogers ended a decades-long hiatus from leading big-screen roles with Mackintosh and T.J., a gentle character study about an aging ranch hand who befriends a directionless orphan. The movie isn’t as saccharine as it sounds, and Rogers’ unfussy acting serves the material well—beyond slipping into the skin of a specific character, Rogers incarnates the heartland values that defined his screen persona during the ’40s and ’50s. That he eschews certain things with which he’s closely associated—gunplay, singing, tricky horsemanship—keeps the focus squarely on character work. So even though the material is thin, the presence of an iconic actor in a suitable role lends Mackintosh and T.J. something like gravitas.

          At the beginning of the picture, Mackintosh (Rogers) roams the West in his battered pickup truck, looking for a day’s work here and there as he moseys along. In one town, he watches a tough sheriff hassle T.J. (Clay O’Brien), a 13-year-old kid who’s given up on foster homes and orphanages, hence an arrest for vagrancy and orders from the sheriff to vamoose. Mackintosh frees the kid from trouble with the law, so they travel together for a spell, becoming friends. Once Mackintosh lands an open-ended job on a cattle ranch, he swings a gig for T.J. as well, and they begin to set down roots until intrigue reveals their situation is precarious.

          Because this movie’s plot is unhurried to a fault, many viewers will grow impatient waiting for complications to arise, but once things get going, Mackintosh and T.J. goes to darker places than one might expect. As directed by journeyman helmer Marvin J. Chomsky, the picture never quite achieves lyricism, though original songs by Waylon Jennings are used effectively to frame the overall narrative. And because the supporting cast is filled with competent players (Walter Barnes, Billy Green Bush, Joan Hackett, James Hampton, Andrew Robinson), the movie is never less than polished. Arguably the picture’s biggest flaw is the choice to withhold crucial backstory about Mackintosh until very late in the running time, but one imagines the notion was to let the character’s actions define him until it became absolutely necessary to reveal secrets.

          In any event, Rogers does something interesting by adding colors of age, loss, and regret into the portrait of the quintessential American man he’d sketched so many times previously in his younger years.

Mackintosh and T.J.: FUNKY

Wheeler (1975)

Wannabe thriller Wheeler, also known by titles including Psycho from Texas, has fans among those who relish bad cinema, and it’s not hard to see why. The plot is derivative schlock about a twisted redneck drifter who abuses women because he was traumatized during childhood by watching his prostitute mother service clients. Fair enough, except for the way the filmmakers illustrate this concept—flashbacks featuring awkward cuts between shots of Mom getting screwed and shots of an angelic little boy crying. Shameless. Adding to the film’s craptastic allure is the bizarre performance by leading man John King III, who elongates and emphasizes random words, somewhat in the style Christopher Walken later employed to more deliberate effect. Watching Wheeler, one gets the sense of an actor struggling to read cue cards that are held too far away for him to see clearly. And then there’s that damn chase scene. In the storyline, Wheeler (King) and his buddy Slick (Thomas Knight Lamey) kidnap a retired oilman, but the oilman escapes—so for a good 40 minutes of the movie, the filmmakers repeatedly cut to Slick chasing the oilman. Beyond how dull and repetitious these vignettes are, the chase scene defies logic since Slick is young and healthy while the oilman is middle-aged and doughy. The capper on this dispiriting cinematic experience is an interminable scene during which Wheeler forces a pretty waitress to strip naked and gyrate while he empties a pitcher of beer onto her. Gross.

Wheeler: LAME

Second Wind (1976)

          Although nobody would ever describe the Canadian sports drama Second Wind as required viewing, it’s the sort of amiably predictable story that unfurls like the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. Moreover, watching Second Wind recalls a time when small movies about the everyday lives of ordinary people were made regularly, even if those pictures sometimes emerged from the fringes of the industry, as is true of Second Wind. Today, character-study features generally trend toward dark examinations of monsters and one-dimensional celebrations of saints.

          Anyway, Second Wind concerns Roger (James Naughton), a 30-year-old stockbroker for whom everything has come easily. One day, he sees a TV report about a 26-year-old running champion and listens intently to remarks from that athlete’s coach. Inspired, Roger begins jogging, soon discovering he’s not in great shape—yet Roger persists, fascinated by the notion of trying something difficult for the first time in his life. This creates friction with his wife, Linda (Lindsay Wagner), who doesn't understand why Roger prefers spending time alone to spending time with her. Per the formula for this sort of thing, Roger’s new hobby also creates problems at work, because he’s distracted when he should be focused on a major deal, allowing an ambitious coworker to usurp Roger’s stature as the firm’s golden boy. In the film’s least developed subplot, an attractive woman named Paula (Tedde Moore) hits on Roger one day while he’s out jogging, then tries to seduce him, testing Roger’s fidelity to the long-suffering Linda.

          The characters in Second Wind are drawn fairly well by screenwriter Hal Ackerman (later to become a popular screenwriting teacher at UCLA’s film school), and some of the dialogue clicks, especially passages of sarcastic banter. More importantly, the overall narrative has a pleasing shape, fully exploring Roger’s dalliance with athletic endeavor. Therefore, fretting that the picture lacks surprise somewhat misses the point, since the focus is Roger testing his limits. Naughton, never the deepest of players, lends likeability and sincerity, while Wagner mostly runs her fingers through her hair. In one unintentionally amusing bit, her character tries jogging but quickly gives up—quite a change from familiar images of Wagner running endlessly as The Bionic Woman.

Second Wind: FUNKY

The Year of the Yahoo! (1971)

          One wouldn't expect to find a tart political satire in the extensive filmography of schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis, and, sure enough, The Year of the Yahoo! disappoints as much as it entertains. Some scenes in this low-rent riff on the classic political drama A Face in the Crowd (1957) are sorta-clever, but the filmmaking is crude, the performances are uneven, and the pointless insertion of a skanky sex scene suggests a crisis of faith on Lewis’ part, as if he feared the drive-in/grindhouse crowd wouldn’t tolerate a movie without at least a little sleaze. Yet while it’s not as if one can envision some better version of The Year of the Yahoo! redeemed by minor tweaks, the flick has a functioning brain and good intentions, two things one doesn’t normally associate with Lewis’ output.

          Amiable Claude King stars as Hank Jackson, a country singer recruited by craven political operatives to run for state office. Initially, Hank ennobles his campaign, articulating a common-sense platform with aw-shucks sincerity. But then party hacks start pushing him to the right, compelling Hank to take cheap shots at welfare cheats and other familiar targets. This doesn’t sit well with Hank’s liberal wife, so the script—by Allen Kahn, also credited with penning Lewis’ 1971 opus The Wizard of Gore—leads inevitably toward a showdown in which Hank must choose between his political career and his principles.

         Nothing that happens in The Year of the Yahoo! is surprising, and parts of the movie drag because of that. Still, the character work and the satirical jabs, no matter how clumsy, generate some interest in how things might resolve. The picture also boasts some wry touches, as when Hank—seated on horseback for the filming of a cowboy-themed commercial—mistakes a camera cable for a rattlesnake and blasts the thing with his six-shooter. If nothing else, The Year of the Yahoo! reveals what Lewis could do with passable material—not much, but not nothing, either.

The Year of the Yahoo!: FUNKY

Uncle Joe Shannon (1978)

          The success of Rocky (1976) created opportunities for nearly everyone involved in the project, among them supporting player Burt Young, who played the title character’s volatile brother-in-law in the first movie and several sequels. After broadening his skillset to include screenwriting by penning a TV episode and a telefilm, Young wrote a star vehicle called Uncle Joe Shannon and teamed with Rocky’s producers to make the film. That Young neither blossomed into a marquee name nor wrote another feature correctly indicates that Uncle Joe Shannon is an underwhelming picture. Formulaic, manipulative, and sentimental, it feels like a throwback to the cornpone weepies of the 1930s, and Young fails to deliver a properly dimensional performance—his tonalities range from addled to cranky to violent to weird, with his attempts at warmth seeming forced and mawkish. Yet Uncle Joe Shannon is surprisingly tolerable, and periodically more than that, because of the polish provided by cinematographer Bill Butler and composer Bill Conti. The movie’s look has that same appealing combination of grit and gloss as the Rocky movies, and Conti’s penchant for over-the-top scoring has never found a more suitable storyline.

          In the opening scenes, Joe (Young) is a successful trumpet player, playing sold-out concerts and scoring big-budget movies. Home life is wonderful, too, because he has a beautiful wife and a sweet son. After a fire claims their lives, Joe becomes a derelict, drinking himself into oblivion until circumstances make him responsible for a young boy named Robbie (Doug McKeon). This relationship follows roughly the contours you might expect, with Joe struggling to play the father-figure role while Robbie pushes Joe to get well. Then Young, in his capacity as the film’s writer, throws an absurd twist into the narrative, transforming the picture from a character study to a tearjerker.

          Given the rickety storyline and Young’s tendency to wail like an animal through emotional scenes, Uncle Joe Shannon should be cringe-inducing, but somehow it never sinks to that level. Even during the stupidest stretches of plotting, Butler’s photography is glorious and Conti’s music (which often calls to mind Chuck Mangione’s smooth-jazz vibe) is immersive. Moreover, it’s not as if Young’s performance is a complete bust—he channels despair believably, he gets humiliation right, and he’s loose and real even when the situations he’s playing are absurdly contrived. Complementing Young is McKeon, later to become a fine teen actor in the early and mid-’80s. Eschewing the cute-kid theatrics of, say, Ricky Schroeder, McKeon credibly manifests bitter rage in many scenes.

Uncle Joe Shannon: FUNKY

Mag Wheels (1978)

Utterly generic teen-sex junk about pretty young white people cavorting and fighting in the Southern California sun, Mag Wheels revolves around a romantic triangle between van-driving jerk Steve (John McLaughlin); his possessive girlfriend, Donna (Verinka Flower); and hot new girl in town Anita (Shelly Horner). Only Anita is remotely sympathetic, since the filmmakers show snippets of her rough home life with a domineering ne’er-d0-well father. After Steve gets an eyeful of Anita wearing a bikini at the beach one day, he loses interest in Donna, so Donna conspires to ruin Steve’s life by telling the cops he’s a coke dealer. Then Donna convinces Steve that Anita was the narc, so he and several of his buddies try to gang-rape Anita for revenge until several lady truckers rescue her. (Yes, that’s really the plot.) The whole mess culminates in a Rebel With a Cause-style drag race. Whereas most teen-sex movies forefront lighthearted comedy, albeit of the crudest possible sort, Mag Wheels wobbles between jokey scenes (such as a weird subplot about Steve treating an underclassman like a fraternity pledge) and grim melodrama. None of it works. The jokes are laborious and mean-spirited, while the drama is contrived and downright cruel. Meanwhile, the acting is rotten and the filmmaking is rudimentary. Only viewers with insatiable appetites for ogling young flesh should seek out Mag Wheels, but fair warning—much more screen time is devoted to storytelling than to smut, unless fetishistic angles of trucks and vans count as money shots.

Mag Wheels: LAME

Sidecar Racers (1975)

          Generally speaking, calling a film “ordinary” is not a compliment—but in the right context, it’s not precisely a dig, either. Sidecar Racers, a sports melodrama coproduced by American and Australian companies, hits nearly every cliché associated with sports films, and the characterizations are just as trite as the plotting. Yet one gets a sense of actors and filmmakers contributing the best efforts possible given the circumstances, since it’s clear neither the budget nor the schedule was quite sufficient for making a picture with plentiful action scenes and location changes. Even more praiseworthy is what the film lacks. Seeing as how the potential for a romantic triangle simmers just below the surface of the narrative, it would have been easy to edge this picture into a rougher style, accentuating sex during off-the-track scenes. Opting for a more family-friendly style works in Sidecar Racers’ favor. The movie isn’t much, but at least it’s inoffensive and relatively sincere.

          Jeff (Ben Murphy) is an American athlete bumming around Australia after his Olympic career ends. One day while surfing, he catches the attention of Lynn (Wendy Hughes), the lover of volatile sidecar racer Dave (John Clayton). She envisions Jeff taking the place of Dave’s old partner, who died during a race. A tryout run proves that Jeff’s superior balance control suits sidecar racing, so the trio makes a go of it, eventually winning several matches and nearly qualifying for sponsorship from Lynn’s father (Peter Graves), who has previously shown nothing but contempt for the reckless and selfish Dave.

          Although nothing that happens in Sidecar Racers is fresh or imaginative, the stunt work in racing scenes is wild, giving a real sense of danger as men riding alongside motorcycles dangle their helmeted skulls just inches above the ground at insane speeds. Additionally, all of the actors give serviceable performances, with occasional moments connecting emotionally. If all of this sounds too shallow for you, then you’re wise to steer clear—but if adequately rendered sports stuff with a little Aussie novelty seems like a agreeable diversion, you’ll get exactly that from Sidecar Racers.

Sidecar Racers: FUNKY

Snakes (1974)

          Sometimes the only way to begin a conversation about an insane movie is to describe the plot. Snakes, alternately known by Fangs and other titles, is set in small-town Texas. “Snakey” Bender (Les Tremanyne) lives alone on a run-down property owned by his buddy, Burt (Richard Kennedy), who long ago moved into town. “Snakey,” a slovenly geezer who always wears greasy overalls and drives a broken-down car missing the truck hood, earned his nickname by assembling a huge collection of serpents. Every Wednesday, “Snakey” drives into town and collects mice local schoolchildren have gathered as food for his reptiles, in exchange for letting the kids gawk at the slithering creatures. After that, “Snakey” hooks up with Burt for weekly “concerts,” which involve them getting drunk and marching half-naked through Burt’s living room while listening to John Philips Sousa marches on Burt’s stereo. Then “Snakey” concludes his Wednesday rituals by visiting schoolteacher Cynthia (Bebe Kelly), the patron behind his supply of mice. What’s her angle? Every Wednesday night, “Snakey” lets Cynthia pleasure herself with Lucifer, the largest serpent in his menagerie.

          But what—there’s more! The weekly routine gets thrown off-kilter when Burt marries an exotic dancer named Ivy (Janet Wood). Concurrently, portly shopkeeper Bud (Bruce Kimball) and his rotund lesbian sister, Sis (Alice Nunn), become preoccupied with getting Cynthia into a threesome—even as slippery local preacher Brother Joy (Marvin Kaplan) endeavors to expose Cynthia’s unholy arrangement with “Snakey.”

          After taking forever to set up these bizarre plot threads, cowriter/director Arthur A. Names pulls things together with contrivances that turn “Snakey” against the people in his life. One by one, he lures them to his place and subjects them to torture involving snakes. All but Cynthia, of course, who—well, let’s just say she dies doing what she loves, and it’s quite a thing to see. Although Snakes is fairly tame in terms of gore and sex, notwithstanding Ivy’s lengthy striptease number, everything about the plot is so perverse that the movie has a certain forbidden-fruit appeal. Accentuating this quality is the presence of Tremayne in the leading role, since nerds of a certain age will recognize him as “Mentor” from the old Saturday-morning TV show Shazam! (1974–1977). Watching this movie makes it difficult to reconcile innocent memories of him driving around the countryside in a Winnebago with a little boy who magically turns into a muscular stud when the need arises.

          Like so many other oddities from the cinematic fringe, Snakes benefits (if that's the right word) from crude execution. The lack of technical polish adds to the sense of this picture being a transmission from the outer edges of the human experience. How else can one describe a film with the following running joke? After each murder, “Snakey” loads the body into a car, pushes the car off the cliff, and struts home to the accompaniment of yet another Sousa march. Plus we haven’t even gotten to the bit when “Snakey” forces a captive Brother Joy to rub a fish all over his body, or the scene in which “Snakey” suspends Sis on a swing over barrels, or . . .

Snakes: FREAKY

Girls for Rent (1974)

          Fact One: Girls for Rent is also known as I Spit on Your Corpse. Fact Two: The flick’s leading actress is porn star Georgina Spelvin. Fact Three: Helming this picture is the one and only Al Adamson, whose extensive filmography overflows with grindhouse schlock. Given these strikes against the movie, it’s surprising to report that Girls for Rent is nearly watchable. The plot makes sense, more or less; there’s quite a bit of action, especially during the last 30 minutes or so; and Spelvin occasionally musters a formidable sort of seen-it-all toughness. By the normal standards of Al Adamson flicks, these are exceptional strengths. Having said all that, Girls for Rent is still a low-budget quickie starring a skin-flick performer, so viewers know what to expect here—lots of grimy sex scenes that drag on interminably, with Adamson’s camera lingering crudely on every grope and gyration. Moreover, it’s not as if removing, say, 10 minutes of dull smut would have elevated this picture to respectability. This thing’s trash.

          Glossing over the needlessly convoluted and time-consuming setup, the movie proper begins when hooker Donna (Susan McIver) doses a client with a knock-out drug. Donna believes her job is to immobilize the guy and take compromising pictures, but it turns out the drug was lethal. She’s been set up. Donna flees, so her criminal bosses send badass ladies Erica (Rosalind Miles) and Sandra (Spelvin) to find and kill Donna. In typical Adamson fashion, what should have been a simple chase movie morphs into something shapeless, thanks to semi-comical interludes with creepy supporting characters and the aforementioned overlong screwing scenes. Eventually, Girls for Rent gets down to business with chases and fights, to say nothing of a truly grim final sequence. In sum, next time you’re craving mindless sleaze with a dash of nihilism, here’s the thoroughly disreputable movie for you.

Girls for Rent: FUNKY

How Do I Love Thee? (1970)

          After conquering television in the 1950s, Jackie Gleason notched impressive achievements as a film actor in the 1960s, balancing credible dramatic work with loud comedic turns of the sort that made him famous. Then came flops including How Do I Love Thee?, Gleason’s last film for seven years and his final romantic leading role in a feature. Turgid and unfunny, How Do I Love Thee? is part character study and part romantic farce. Gleason plays Stanley Waltz, the aging proprietor of a small moving-and-storage company. Vexing Stanley are his wife, Elsie (Maureen O’Hara), a Bible-thumper constantly telling Stanley to embrace God, and Stanley’s son, Tom (Rick Lenz), a philosophy professor caught in a power struggle with uptight superiors. At the beginning of the picture, Stanley suffers a seizure while visiting a religious shrine in Lourdes, France, with the devout Elsie, so Tom rushes overseas to visit his ailing father—who refuses to see him. Through flashbacks, we learn that in a past moment of weakness, Stanley pledged to embrace God and never speak to Tom again. (Long story.)

          The central question is whether a man can truly change. Alas, the filmmakers want the benefit of presenting a heavy topic without the hard work of properly exploring that topic, so they wriggle free of serious implications by way of silly plot contrivances.

          Playing to the cheap seats, Gleason does everything from physical comedy to poetry recitals to sappy speeches. It’s exhausting to watch. And when he plays comedic bedroom scenes with the equally uninhibited Shelley Winters, brace yourself for enough screaming to make anyone’s ears bleed. How Do I Love Thee? is one of those awkwardly “with-it” late ’60s/early-’70s pictures, in which older Hollywood professionals try to infuse hokey storytelling with youth-culture attitudes. Unfortunately, every time something contemporary edges into the mix, the filmmakers quickly retreat to more conservative tropes (for instance, an endless car-chase scene). Therefore How Do I Love Thee? is mildly interesting as a snapshot of culture in transition. As a cinematic experience, it’s confusing and tiresome. As a showpiece for its legendary star, however, it’s labored and overbearing, which feels just about right—love him or hate him, Gleason worked hard for his laughs. Here, the strain shows.

How Do I Love Thee?: FUNKY

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970)

          An American/French coproduction plainly designed to evoke Hitchcock’s style of intricate mystery/suspense plotting—as well as his affinity for kinky sexual undercurrents—The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun is as labored as its title. Adapted from Sébastien Japrisot’s novel by a cabal of writers, The Lady in the Car spins its web methodically, presenting one bizarre event after another until both the protagonist and the audience have good reason to worry about going mad. This means it’s hard to track the narrative from one scene to the next, and even harder to parse character motivations. That the film concludes with an Agatha Christie-style explanation sequence rightly indicates how far out of control the plot spins before the conclusion. Yet the movie is not without its charms, not least the presence of formidable costar Oliver Reed.

          Ad-agency secretary Danielle “Dany” Lang (Samantha Eggar) works for the stern Michael Caldwell (Reed), who asks her to visit his home for last-minute work on an urgent proposal. Since Dany knows that Michael’s wife, Anita (Stéphane Audran), will be home, she doesn’t expect anything out of sorts to occur, and excepting some catty exchanges with Anita, the visit is strictly professional. That is, until Dany retires to her room for the evening, Michael’s private study—positioned next to the bed is a nude photo of Anita. Awkward! Things get complicated once Dany drives Michael and Anita to the airport for a getaway, accepting the use of Michael’s fancy car for several days as payment for above-and-beyond services. Dany’s long trip to a resort town includes strange run-ins and, at one point, an inexplicable episode during which Dany badly injures her hand without any memory of how the injury happened. And so it goes from there, inevitably spiraling toward suspicion and terror and violence.

          Not much of what happens in The Lady in the Car makes sense, and only some of it is interesting. So even though Eggar provides an alluring presence and channels anxiety effectively, the movie overall is quite opaque, perhaps deliberately so, and frequently pretentious. (Try not to titter when Reed delivers this line: “That, as they say, Dany, is life.”) Happily, the movie gets better as it goes along, and the last half-hour provides not only plentiful scenes of Reed being anguished and/or menacing, but also a welcome dash of Hitchcockian kinkiness. Is The Lady in the Car anything more than a distraction, forgotten the instant it’s over? Probably not. But in its best moments, the movie aspires to a kind of literary elegance, and there’s some merit in the attempt. Incidentally, Japrisot’s novel was remade in 2015 as a French film, again called The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun.

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun: FUNKY

Joni (1979)

          One’s religious viewpoint will determine one’s reactions to Joni, an inspirational drama starring the resilient Joni Eareckson as herself. While a teenager, she had a terrible diving accident, becoming paralyzed below the neck. Through a combination of guidance from Christians and support from loved ones, she forged a new path in life, eventually becoming an artist and singer in addition to giving motivational speeches at events hosted by the Rev. Billy Graham, who produced this biopic. With its one-dimensional approach to characterization and storytelling, Joni never tries to be much beyond an advertisement for the healing powers of Christianity, but it’s hard to call that approach insincere, seeing as how Eareckson tells her own story. (The movie was adapted from her memoir.) Therefore, the point here is not to suggest that Joni underwhelms simply because it’s a religious film—rather, the point is to suggest that viewers unreceptive to overtly religious messaging need proceed no further. Joni is less dynamic than the average ripped-from-the-headlines TV movie of the same vintage, and the best measure of Joni Eareckson’s acting ability is that she never acted again—one is impressed not by her communication skills but by her remarkable fortitude.

          The movie begins with her accident, then proceeds, bluntly and without much momentum, through the phases of her emotional and spiritual recovery. Long hospital scenes filled with despair lead to multiple surgery sequences, and eventually to Eareckson’s struggle while mastering the operation of a motorized wheelchair. She also learns to paint by holding a brush between her teeth. Concurrently, Eareckson gravitates toward religion, finding solace in Christian notions of the hereafter, where Eareckson believes her body will be made whole. As noted earlier, the viewer’s ability to embrace Joni’s themes is largely predicated upon attitudes toward Christianity. That caveat stated, it’s fair to describe Joni as a somewhat competent melodrama, acceptably filmed and buoyed by workmanlike supporting performances from players including familiar Hollywood character actor Bert Remsen, who portrays Eareckson’s father.

Joni: FUNKY