Rivals (1972)

          Christine and Jamie have some issues. She’s an attractive divorcée open to embarking on a new romantic adventure. He’s her imaginative and precocious 10-year-old son, prone to sarcasm and startling sexual references. When Christine meets Peter, a motor-mouthed eccentric who wants to marry her, she worries so much about whether he’ll have chemistry with Jamie that she prevents the two males in her life from meeting for an extended period. Good call. Once Jamie realizes how important Peter has become to his mother, he decides to take action. How far he goes to prevent Peter from becoming part of the family defines the weird storyline of Rivals. Written and directed by Indian-born filmmaker Krishna Shah, Rivals is a deeply strange movie that bounces between domestic drama, psychological darkness, romantic whimsy, and shocking extremes. In one scene, Jamie persuades his 16-year-old babysitter to practice carnal maneuvers that he learned by watching through a keyhole as Peter and his mother had rough sex; this leads to the startling image of the babysitter nearly raping her underage friend while his Super-8 camera records every illicit bump and grind.

           Yet Rivals also contains almost laughably innocent scenes, such as romantic montages featuring Christine and Peter gallivanting around New York City to the accompaniment of fruity pop songs. Very little in Rivals echoes recognizable human reality, but as a moderately demented flight of fancy, it’s an interesting viewing experience.

           At the beginning of the picture, Christine (Joan Hackett) and Jamie (Scott Jacoby) both seem fairly normal, if a bit high-strung and overeducated—Shah’s exaggerated version of neurotic New Yorkers. Then Peter (Robert Klein) comes along. He’s one of those only-in-the-movies weirdos, the type who spews poetic bullshit while driving a tour van around Manhattan. (Signature moment: He leaves a busload of tourists trapped in the stifling van while he courts Christine, then talks his way out of trouble by dazzling cops with a lie about intentionally quarantining the tourists.) As the relationship between Christine and Peter advances, they both reveal unsavory extremes—she’s maddeningly fickle, and he date-rapes her after she withholds sex.

          Eventually, Peter decides that Christine is just as hung up on her kid as the kid is with Christine: “The way to your heart is through your nipples!” (Separately, she tells a friend that giving birth to Jamie felt like an orgasm.) Meanwhile, Jamie’s a ticking time bomb, psychologically speaking, at one point hallucinating a hippy-dippy orgy in which Christine and Peter are participants. The preposterous climax takes things even deeper into the heart of psychosexual darkness, though it’s anybody’s guess whether Shah’s sorta-arty, sorta-pulpy storytelling serves a larger theme. If nothing else, Rivals is notable as the first of several films in which Jacoby poignantly depicts youthful insanity. Others include Baxter! (1973) and the made-for-TV Bad Ronald (1974).

Rivals: FUNKY

Blade (1973)

          One of those terrible movies that’s redeemed by a few peripheral elements, Blade is a schlocky New York City thriller about an aging detective assigned to investigate the murder of a high-profile politician’s daughter. The plot is less than nothing, all grimy clichés, and co-writer/director Ernest Pintoff’s storytelling is rotten, since the script bounces around wildly between subplots, often without real transitions, while the dialogue runs the gamut from bluntly expositional to hackneyed. (Nearly all the good lines sound improvised.) What redeems the film, more or less, is a cavalcade of interesting players. John Marley, the craggy character actor who received a career boost by sharing an unforgettable scene with a horse’s head in The Godfather (1971), plays the leading role, so it’s novel to watch him carry a picture, or at least try to. He delivers lines well, all suave crankiness, and his mane of silver hair is a wonder to behold, but he’s hardly the most intimidating figure, a tiny little man wearing sharp suits and dainty neck scarves. The cast also features Keene Curtis, William Prince, Joe Santos, and John Schuck, plus a trio of one-scene wonders appearing early in their careers: Morgan Freeman, Steve Landesberg, Rue McClanahan. There’s even room for Ted Lange, later to become the bartender on The Love Boat. Simply for the pleasure of seeing so many proficient people work, Blade is—well, “fascinating” is pushing it, so let’s just say enjoyable.

          Also helping the picture achieve baseline watchability is a robust score by Jack Cacavas. Sort of. For whatever reason, he composed only three or four music cues, primarily the suspenseful string-driven piece that functions as the main theme, so the film repurposes the same cues over and over again. This creates a weird effect, as does sloppy picture editing. One final attribute worth mentioning is the extensive location photography; while none would ever choose Blade over the average Sidney Lumet movie of the same era for tasting the local flavor of ’70s Manhattan, a sense of place is always welcome. And if nothing else, Blade has a priceless throwaway scene. Landesberg plays a porno director who bombards a clueless actress with copious details about character and motivation, then blithely asks, “Do you understand what I’m saying so far?” Sensing her bewilderment, he inquires further: “You went to Vassar? Radcliffe?” Likely wasted on the audience for which Blade was intended, that’s about as dry a bitchy remark as you’ll ever encounter in a movie.

Blade: FUNKY

The Corpse Grinders (1971)

Covering satirical terrain so familiar as to be trite, The Corpse Grinders compounds its lack of originality with rotten acting, direction, production values, writing, and pretty much everything else. There’s a reason Ted V. Mikels shows up on lists of the worst directors ever, because while it’s true his pictures are odd, he occupies a queasy nether region between eccentricity and incompetence. His characters and themes are peculiar, but not genuinely perverse, and his filmmaking is generically poor. Anyway, the central joke in The Corpse Grinders, which aspires to be a comedy/horror hybrid, involves the transformation of dead bodies into cat food. Creepy grave robber Caleb (Warren Bell) steals cadavers and sells them to the proprietor of a pet-food company, who then runs the bodies through a meat grinder and packages the resulting bloody pulp. Consuming the meat drives cats mad, so they attack their owners. Although it’s not impossible to imagine some version of this premise being wickedly entertaining, getting there would require the comedic skill of, say, John Waters—or at least Roger Corman, whose contributions to the repurposed-corpse genre include the classic A Bucket of Blood (1959). Suffice to say Mikels is not on the level of those luminaries. To his credit, The Corpse Grinders has some kicky flourishes. Caleb’s demented wife spoon-feeds soup to a doll, the proprietor uses ASL to communicate with his one-legged cleaning lady, and so on. Yet these flourishes are not enough to compensate for this very dull picture’s shortcomings, especially since the tinny score sounds as if it was lifted from some old-timey shocker. Inexplicably, Mikels returned to the material by making The Corpse Grinders 2 in 2000 and The Corpse Grinders 3 in 2012. One assumes that Mikels’ death in 2016 ended the cycle.

The Corpse Grinders: LAME

Malcolm X (1972)

          By translating The Autobiography of Malcolm X into a visual document, filmmaker Arnold Perl performed a useful historical service, condensing and contextualizing the turbulent life that transformed troubled orphan Malcolm Little into black-power activist Malcolm X and religious messenger el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Within a tight 91-minute running time, Perl covers many of the important periods in his subject’s life, tracking Malcolm through a rough childhood and adolescence marked by abandonment and crime; a long period serving as an articulate emissary for controversial Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad; an incendiary stretch preaching racial revolution and vilifying the “white devil”; and finally the crucially important final period when, after making a pilgrimage to Mecca, he sought to reconcile his supercharged political rhetoric with the peaceful teachings of his religion.

          Framing the whole story, of course, is the grim reality that Malcolm was assassinated, so instead of being a hagiographic tribute to a mythic figure, Malcolm X represents a passionate delivery of the man’s message. Perl’s portrayal embraces all of the changes and contradictions that made Malcolm intriguing, and this portrayal underscores that Malcolm possessed one of the most agile minds in the history of American political life.

          The film opens on a somewhat heavy-handed note, with Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” (the lyrics of which describe the aftermath of a lynching) playing over a black screen. The opening salvo continues with Malcolm’s famous “by any means necessary” remark, as well as an epithet-filled spoken-word piece by the Last Poets that, prophetically, sounds a lot like rap. Once Perl gets into proper storytelling, he juxtaposes short excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as recited in voiceover by James Earl Jones) with a voluminous amount of archival footage. Sometimes, Perl illustrates points with newsreel shots of, say, civil unrest, but mostly he puts Malcolm onscreen.

          Appearing in public and on TV, Malcolm communicates with supreme eloquence and power, whether he’s expressing deference to Elijah Muhammed, disdain for whites, or a sophisticated synthesis of his past belief systems. As in real life, the Malcolm at the end of the story is the truly dangerous man, not because of his ability to drive people apart—anyone can do that—but because of his ability to bring people together. While stopping short of lodging a formal accusation, the film advances the prevailing theory that the Nation of Islam was responsible for Malcolm’s death. The notion that a black revolutionary might have died at black hands reaffirms the eternal truth that anyone with real power to alter the status quo exercises that power at his or her own peril.

          Prior to the release of Spike Lee’s epic biopic Malcolm X (1992), this documentary likely represented the fairest and fullest screen portrayal of its subject, and the existence of Lee’s movie has done nothing to diminish the documentary’s significance. Indeed, Warner Bros. (which released both projects) has on occasion packaged the movies together for home-video consumption. The films complement each other well, with Lee’s picture offering a personal view of a heroic figure and Perl’s documentary letting Malcolm speak his own truth. Accolades received by the 1972 Malcolm X during its original run include an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

Malcolm X: GROOVY

Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976)

Rather than the cobweb-strewn gothic fare its title suggests, Crypt of Dark Secrets offers 71 minutes of supernatural sleaze set mostly in a swamp. The story is slow-moving nonsense about a witch raising a man from the dead and then using his corpse as an instrument of revenge, although that development doesn’t occur until fairly late in the running time. Most of what happens beforehand is dull and talky, and a few kinky bits overwhelm everything else. Playing the witch is Maureen Ridley, a brunette with an outrageous body and very few inhibitions. In the flick’s most eye-popping scene, Ridley—her figure nude and slathered with oil—does an erotic dance that culminates with humping a coffin. Other WTF moments include the opening scene, in which Ridley levitates, and the vignette featuring a “voodoo lady” giving the world’s most aggressive acupuncture treatment. (After heating needles over an open flame, she stabs them into her client as if she’s channeling Norman Bates.) The “voodoo lady,” by the way, is a young woman wearing a gray wig, a pathetic attempt at making her character appear wizened. Perhaps the most laughable scene in Crypt of Dark Secrets involves the witch’s accomplice, a beardy hermit named Ted. For reasons that make very little sense, he’s pulled from his remote island residence to a nearby city and questioned by authorities about cash he keeps hidden in his house. While Ted explains exactly where the money is located, a bystander leans in to listen so obviously that it’s comical no one in the scene notices. Only those who consume cinema ironically will dig this experience, inclusive of horrid dialogue. During an origin-story flashback, the witch is told the following: “You’ll find that the cool body of the reptile will be your favorite resting place!”

Crypt of Dark Secrets: LAME

The Young Cycle Girls (1978)

Years after biker movies had lost their relevance, porno filmmaker Peter Perry, making a rare venture into the mainstream, offered a distaff take on motorcycle mayhem. He wasn’t the first person to stir up the genre by putting women atop scooters, but that’s not the only reason why The Young Cycle Girls (also known as Cycle Vixens) feels so trite. In some ways, the flick is a bland riff on the biker genre’s biggest hit, Easy Rider (1969). In that film, two hippies celebrate a drug deal with a cross-country trip, but in The Young Cycle Girls, three teenagers trek from Colorado to California because they’re bored during their summer break. Everything about The Young Cycle Girls is as mindless as the setup. Priscilla, Sheila, and Sherry set out for adventure, only to encounter clichéd drug fiends, perverts, and rednecks. The girls make foolish choices, such as flashing a peeping tom and inviting strangers to their campsite in the middle of nowhere, and they pay terrible prices for their naïveté. Yet if Perry and co-director/writer John Arnoldy meant to put across some sort of cautionary tale about the dangers of the open road, they failed completely. The Young Cycle Girls takes place in an alternate universe populated almost exclusively with rural predators, and the “shock” ending is so derivative and pointless as to render the whole movie ridiculous by extension. Even before that point, the picture is amateurish, dull, and repetitive, with the same country-rock theme song popping up again and again, often to complement boring shots of road signs seen from the perspective of moving vehicles. In fact, the movie’s only praiseworthy element is the hip opening title card establishing when the story takes place: “The Time—Like Now.”

The Young Cycle Girls: LAME

Blood Freak (1972)

          This one’s a turkey. No, not in the sense of being an absolute cinematic failure, although that’s true, as well—the monster described in the title is a turkey, or more specifically, a dude wearing a giant turkey mask over his face. Welcome to the strange world of Blood Freak, an atrociously made horror flick with heavy elements of Christianity and reefer. If you think those things don’t belong in the same movie, much less a creature feature, then you’ve identified what makes Blood Freak unique. Cowritten and codirected with spectacular incompetence by Brad F. Grinter, who also appears onscreen at periodic intervals to provide bizarre narration, Blood Freak is a whole lot of things at once. In some scenes, it’s anti-religion and pro-weed, and in other scenes it’s the opposite. Similarly, the movie’s attitude toward casual sex changes like the colors of a mood ring, because the protagonist is just as likely to call a loose woman a tramp as he is to sleep with her. And we haven’t even gotten to the whole were-turkey business or the grimy scenes of the monster slashing women’s throats so he can drink their marijuana-laced blood.

          The movie begins clumsily, with Grinter’s voiceover accompanying shakily filmed scenes of a motorcyclist approaching a woman whose car crapped out on a Florida highway. As Grinter remarks: “A pretty girl on the side of the road—who could resist? Certainly not Herschell!” That would be our hero, Herschell, played by Steve Hawkes, who shares writing and directing chores with Grinter. A big dude with an Elvis pompadour, he seems to incarnate a different character in every scene, because the script is so bad the filmmakers never decide whether Herschell is a rebel, a swinger, a zealot, or whatever. In any event, meeting the girl on the road leads Herschell to a collective of pot-smoking partiers, and he scolds his new acquaintances for their wanton ways. Yet soon afterward, he becomes a pot addict—at which point the filmmakers confuse the symptoms of heroin addiction with the habits of heavy pot smokers. Herschell makes bad decisions and sacrifices his morality because he’s just gotta have that demon weed. Among his drug-induced choices is taking a job for scientists at a turkey farm, who task him with consuming turkey meat they’ve injected with chemicals. Hence his transformation into a were-turkey who prowls the Floridian night, draining fellow addicts of their pot-infused plasma. All of this leads to a big story twist about three-quarters of the way through the running time, but the twist renders the story even more nonsensical.

          It’s hard to identify the weirdest aspect of this flick, though a strong contender is the way Grinter and Hawkes seem to perceive their bloody, low-rent saga as an important social message about the evils of—something. Another contender is the vignette of a chain-smoking Grinter reciting narration, which he appears to be reading for the first time, until he succumbs to an epic coughing fit. Together with the many out-of-focus shots in the picture, the inclusion of this awkward moment suggests Grinter and Hawkes had so little money (or aptitude) that they included every frame they shot. FYI, Blood Freak received an X-rating during its original release, presumably because the kill scenes are so nasty—murder most fowl, if you will.

Blood Freak: FREAKY

Kidnapped (1971)

          Based on two Robert Louis Stevenson novels, Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893), this medium-budgeted British adventure film gets off to a bumpy start, introducing the protagonist as a bit of a cipher while also failing to clearly explain the historical background of the Jacobite rebellion of the 17th and 18th centuries, during which Scots loyal to a deposed king waged battle against the occupational forces of the British government. However, once the movie introduces a key supporting character played by Michael Caine, the storyline achieves both clarity and vitality. By the end, when the protagonist has developed a personality and landed in the midst of a fraught sociopolitical conflict, Kidnapped becomes relatively engrossing. It helps that Caine’s performance gradually evolves from swashbuckling to something deeper, so even though there’s a bit of childish play-acting here—lots of running about with guns and swords—Caine’s natural gifts lend Kidnapped just the smidgen of gravitas it needs.

          At the beginning of the story, David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), whose father recently died, arrives at a remote Scottish castle to claim his inheritance. He’s met by a half-crazed uncle, Ebenezer (Donald Pleasance), who tries to kill David and then arranges to have David kidnapped for indentured service on a vessel sailing to the American colonies. The boat rams a smaller ship piloted by Alan Breck (Caine), a fugitive soldier with the Jacobite cause. Circumstances including a shipwreck throw Alan and David together, so they begin a journey across the Scottish highlands, where rebels offer sanctuary even as British troops stalk Alan, who has a price on his head. Things get even more involved from there, but suffice to say that David transforms from bystander to participant, gaining a crucial role in the story of the Jacobite rebellion while also forming a life-changing friendship with the roguish Alan.

          In its best scenes, Kidnapped is an intelligent homage to the sort of pictures Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power used to make, heroism against a historical backdrop. While there’s an adequate amount of action, the focus is mostly on character interplay and political intrigue, so the climactic moment is a quiet scene of Alan choosing between national pride and personal safety. Yet one should not mistake Kidnapped for high art, since director Delbert Mann employs a workmanlike style. What’s more, the dialogue gets a bit much at times, with everything a “bonny” this or a “bonny” that. Some episodes come and go without leaving a mark, and leading lady Vivien Heilbron renders unmemorable work. Still, with Caine setting the pace and a raft of fine supporting turns—by Pleasance, Jack Hawkins, Trevor Howard, Freddie Jones, and Jack Watson—Kidnapped gets enough right to make for enjoyable viewing.

Kidnapped: GROOVY

Teenage Hitchhikers (1975)

Before it descends into mindless softcore, low-budget sex comedy Teenage Hitchhikers evinces a somewhat appealing dialogue style and a relatively empowered attitude toward sexuality. As the title suggests, the picture tracks a pair of young women thumbing their way down America’s highways, often trading sex for transportation. Bird (Sandra Peabody) and Mouse (Chris Jordan, billed as “Kathie Christopher”) are with-it chicks open for adventure, but wary of being exploited. For instance, when a traveling rock band invites the ladies into their RV, Bird and Mouse nix a proposed group-sex situation because the dudes come across as too entitled and pushy. Lest this give the impression that Teenage Hitchhikers is some sort of feminist statement, not long afterward Bird and Mouse grab a ride with a grody traveling salesman, then take turns servicing him until a cop pulls over the saleman’s car. As was true of way too many ’70s sexploitation flicks, Teenage Hitchhikers tries to have it both ways, presenting its protagonists as avatars of women’s liberation while also featuring endless scenes of nudity and screwing. If this disconnect was the only problem associated with Teenage Hitchhikers, the movie might merit closer examination. However, other issues include the failure to gift the protagonists with distinct motivations (where the hell are they headed?), the lack of a plot (unless continued forward motion constitutes a plot), and the presence of an epic orgy scene that edges very close to hardcore porn. Filling the screen with a dizzying array of malnourished hippie types, all protruding ribs and unruly body hair, the orgy scene features unsimulated contact just barely outside the camera’s view. None of this is to say that Teenage Hitchhikers is a total disaster. Some scenes are almost witty, even though the content is distasteful—note the running gag about Bird and Mouse hectoring a rapist for his unsatisfying size and technique. Rape jokes? Really?

Teenage Hitchhikers: LAME

Eaten Alive (1976)

          The best horror filmmakers realize there’s a lot more to disturbing audiences than gore—fictional worlds populated by weird characters often make viewers more uncomfortable than onscreen bloodshed. Consider a pair of early Tobe Hooper movies. His breakout hit, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), imagines a remote pocket of the Lone Star State where insane cannibals prey upon innocent visitors. His follow-up, Eaten Alive, presents a rural hotel where the proprietor is a psychopath who kidnaps people, slaughters them with scythes and other instruments, and feeds their bodies to the gigantic alligator he keeps in a pond behind the hotel. Whereas many horror pictures frighten viewers by inserting a chaos agent into the normal world, these Hooper films drag normal people into chaos.
          That said, there’s a massive difference between these two pictures. Shot on location and featuring a no-name cast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an immersive nightmare. Shot on soundstages and featuring several Hollywood actors, Eaten Alive is fake on every level, and therefore much less effective. Other problems include a slow-moving script, threadbare characters, and the vulgar intrusion of gratuitous nudity. Nonetheless, there’s a certain compelling derangement to Eaten Alive. After all, the first scene features a pre-Freddy Kreuger Robert Englund as a redneck who introduces himself to a prostitute by saying, “Name’s Buck—I’m rarin’ to fuck.” Later, the movie includes a woman stripped to her lingerie and bound and gagged for days; a young girl trapped in the crawlspace beneath the hotel, with the psychopath coming at her from one direction and the alligator coming at her from the other; and various persons impaled, stabbed, and swallowed in grisly death scenes.
          Nihilism hovers over this flick like a dark cloud.

          Yet it’s the bizarre throwaway scenes that make Eaten Alive unsettling, more so than the ho-hum creature-feature moments. In one bit, a weirdo played by William Finley, known for his work with Brian De Palma, engages in a masochistic conversation with his wife. (“Why don’t you just take that cigarette and grind it out in my eye?”) In another scene, the hotel proprietor tries on various pairs of glasses while reading porno mags and ignoring the pet monkey that’s dying in a nearby cage. The strangeness extends to the actual filmmaking. Hooper often bathes his sets in garish red light, so characters seem as if they’re in hell, and the editing lingers on lurid images—the dying monkey, a nubile young woman stripping—so the whole movie has the air of deranged voyeurism.

          Neville Brand’s leading performance is obvious and silly, but his character is so grotesque that Brand’s work gains a sort of unpleasant power, and onetime Addams Family star Carolyn Jones adds a peculiar quality with her small role as an alternately courtly and cross madam who wears men’s clothes. The performances are hardly the point, though. As a straight-through narrative, Eaten Alive—which was inspired by the crimes of a real-life killer—is a dud, too campy and episodic to maintain real suspense. As a journey into an otherworldly headspace, it’s fairly effective.

Eaten Alive: FREAKY

Baxter! (1973)

          Something of a Catcher in the Rye for the grade-school set, this peculiar Anglo-American production begins as the lighthearted story of a precocious Californian exploring a new life in the UK, then steadily darkens until becoming the harrowing character study of a young man losing his grip on reality. Among the film’s many admirable elements are a host of sensitive performances, a witty script by Reginald Rose, and a willingness to follow the subject matter into grim terrain. For those who are okay with offbeat tonal shifts, Baxter! will seem insightful, serious, and touching. For others, the movie will seem confused and depressing. Yet nearly any viewer could find at least one thing to like here, whether it’s Geoffrey Unsworth’s stately photography, Patricia Neal’s sharp work as a speech therapist, or young Scott Jacoby’s impressive performance in the leading role.

          When the picture begins, bitter and self-absorbed divorcée Mrs. Baxter (Lynn Carlin) relocates to England with her son, Roger (Jacoby). He’s charming and imaginative and smart, but he has a glaring speech impediment because he replaces every “R” with “W.” As a result, he can’t even say his own name without embarrassment. Nonetheless, Roger strikes up friendships with kids at his new school, and also with Chris Bentley (Britt Ekland), a beautiful young woman who lives upstairs in the same apartment building. Eventually, Chris invites Roger on getaways with her French boyfriend (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and they become surrogate parents for the boy while Mrs. Baxter preoccupies herself with dating, hobbies, self-pity, and excessive drinking. Also central to Roger’s life is Dr. Roberta Clemm (Neal), who recognizes that Roger’s difficulty with speaking is symptomatic of deeper problems. As the movie progresses, Mrs. Baxter’s parenting becomes abusive, pushing her son deeper into the hiding place of his troubled mind.

          It’s always painful to watch stories about parents damaging their children, and Baxter! employs the familiar balm of a heroic adult endeavoring to rescue an endangered youth. From a structural perspective, there’s nothing new about this picture. Furthermore, the movie’s flow has a herky-jerky quality, with some scenes skewing way too gloomy while others are so frivolous as to be silly. (Try to avoid cringing when Cassel, Ekland, and Jacoby sing a musical number together.) However, the best stuff in Baxter! is quite respectable, and the way the film spins from giddy to sober to terrifying almost works. If nothing else, the filmmakers deserve ample credit for presenting a fully dimensional juvenile character. Even when the narrative bumps, the sense that we’re seeing the world through the protagonist’s unique prism never wavers.

Baxter!: FUNKY

The Hot Box (1972)

More women-in-prison sludge scraped off the floor of the New World Pictures exploitation-flick factory, The Hot Box is mildly notable for a couple of reasons. In terms of content, because the storyline involves freedom fighters in Latin America, the picture anticipates themes that pervaded 1980s cinema. Behind the scenes, the film was an early credit for Jonathan Demme, who cowrote the script, produced the picture, and also directed second-unit scenes. (The film was helmed and cowritten by Joe Viola.) One need not strain to find tropes that recurred throughout Demme’s career, such as political activism and strong women, but in the most important respects, this is typically dumb and sleazy New World fare. Four American nurses are kidnapped by guerillas who need medical services at their hidden compound, and the nurses have varying reactions to their circumstances. Some become sympathetic to their captors, while others simply wish to escape. Action arises in the form of raids the guerillas execute in order to steal medical supplies, as well as showdowns with government forces. Yawn. The characters are mostly interchangeable, and the acting is unimpressive; arguably the biggest name in the cast is Margaret Markov, best known for her subsequent starring roles opposite Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama (1973) and The Arena (1974). Per the New World formula, the filmmakers contrive many silly reasons for topless scenes—bathing in grottos, sleeping nude during oppressive heat, etc. It’s also worth noting that, like so many other exploitation flicks of the same era, The Hot Box was shot in the Philippines, rather than South America, so it’s not as if authenticity was the order of the day. A generous viewer might note that The Hot Box is less vile than other women-in-prison movies (there’s less of a focus on rape than usual), but the film is way too clunky and forgettable to recommend.

The Hot Box: LAME

Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)

Original movies directed by Al Adamson are bad enough, but his hodgepodge flicks, assembled from pieces of films for which Adamson bought the rights, are even worse. Sci-fi/horror embarrassment Horror of the Blood Monsters demonstrates why. To repurpose scenes from a black-and-white Filipino movie about cavemen fighting supernatural monsters, Adamson shot some new material and contrived an incoherent story about Earth sending a space vessel to a distant planet as a means of combating extraterrestrial vampires, or something like that. The picture opens with a lame vampire attack shot in a soundstage, then transitions to ground-control scenes featuring black curtains as backdrops, and eventually to spaceship sequences with the production values (and performance quality) of a high school musical. To mask the monochromatic nature of the Filipino footage, Adamson provides dialogue about mysterious radiation that changes the color spectrum, and the black-and-white stuff appears tinted green or red or whatever. The monsters in the recycled scenes are ridiculous, flying bat-winged little people, real lizards photographed in forced perspective, underwater crab creatures, and vampires whose fangs look like pieces of chalk. Adamson’s new scenes aren’t any better. John Carradine spews pointless exposition, a buxom blonde looks confused while, thanks to iffy dubbing, another actress’ voice emanates from her mouth, and so on. At one point, the technicians at ground control stop supervising the emergency space mission so they can make out and play with a color-spectrum gun, resulting in yet more tinted shots. Alternate titles for this crapfest include Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, The Flesh Creatures, and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet.

Horror of the Blood Monsters: SQUARE

The Wild Country (1970)

          Appraised strictly for technical execution, from cinematography to performances to production values, frontier adventure The Wild Country is impeccable. Wide-open locations convey the beauty and toughness of the story’s Wyoming setting, while sincere work from a cadre of proficient actors puts across the simple story of an earnest family in conflict with nature and an unscrupulous neighbor. Furthermore, smooth direction by Robert Totten allows the story to unfold at a steady but unhurried pace over 100 minutes. Yet originality matters, and that’s where The Wild Country has problems. Every single moment is a cliché or a platitude, if not both, so The Wild Country represents some of the worst inclinations of the folks at Walt Disney Productions. Those seeking a fresh take on the travails of homesteading circa the Wild West era should look elsewhere. That significant disclaimer having been provided, there’s a lot to enjoy here for viewers who accept the picture’s limitations. Steve Forrest and Vera Miles make a handsome pair of pioneers, and it’s a hoot to see real-life brothers Clint and Ron Howard acting together as the homesteaders’ children. (The juvenile performers’ father, Rance Howard, appears in a tiny supporting role.) The Wild Country also benefits from beautiful images of animals and wilderness.

          The story begins with the Tanner family arriving in rural Wyoming after a long journey from Philadelphia. At first, Jim (Forrest), Kate (Miles), teenaged Virgil (Ron Howard), and young Andrew (Clint Howard) seem ill-prepared for their new life on a small farm, but they summon enthusiasm and grit while whipping the spread into shape. Enter one-dimensional villain Ab Cross (Morgan Woodward), who owns a cattle outfit in the mountains overlooking the Tanner place. He’s built an illegal dam cutting the flow of water to the Tanners’ property, so Jim tries every means available to remedy the situation, even if that involves  bare-knuckle brawling with mean old Ab. Everything about The Wild Country is predictable, but the picture gains a certain toughness as it proceeds toward an intense climax during which circumstances force Virgil to become a man. That said, The Wild Country is hopelessly retro, an expression of 1950s values that must have seemed pathetically unhip when the film was released in 1970. In that regard, it’s quintessential live-action Disney.

The Wild Country: FUNKY

Black Lolita (1975)

Excepting the novelty of sketchy 3D photography, Black Lolita—sometimes known as Wildcat Women—is vile junk bordering on porn. An uninteresting woman billed as “Yolanda Love” stars as Lolita, a lounge singer who launches a war on crime after thugs involved with a protection racket murder her uncle, a kindly shopkeeper. Calling upon her martial-arts skills and sexual wiles, Lolita builds a squad of shapely ladies, including a yoga enthusiast and a prostitute, while also forging alliances with police officers. What ensues is a dull cavalcade of fight scenes and sex scenes, with the smutty elements getting most of the attention. At regular intervals, cowriter-director Stephen Gibson stops the movie dead to linger on some carnal encounter that unfolds in real time, very nearly in full view of the camera. (Although nothing crosses the line into hardcore, some bits suggest that actors, ahem, committed to their roles during filming.) The acting is atrocious, the characterizations are threadbare, the dialogue is dumb, the filming style is ugly, and the story presents clichés lifelessly. The picture also relishes in the exploitation and/or abuse of women, as during a long torture scene featuring a villain extinguishing his cigarette on a young lady’s skin. Thankfully, Gibson doesn’t overuse stereoscopic photography during sex scenes. Instead, 3D effects are mostly employed in the corny old way of characters poking random objects toward the camera, such as a two-by-four that a thug brandishes while attacking Lolita.

Black Lolita: SQUARE

Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident (1979)

Out of deference to the fine folks at IMDb, I’m going with their title of choice for this multinational coproduction, which has been released by so many different monikers that some artwork bears the title The Tehran Incident, while other ads have the alternate spelling The Teheran Incident. By any name, this one’s a dud. Curd Jürgens stars a super-wealthy psycho who steals an experimental missile, then conspires to shoot the weapon into Iran, thereby derailing a planned Middle East peace summit. Don’t hold your breath awaiting explanations of how doing so would benefit the villain financially or ideologically; this is one of those hopelessly murky international thrillers in which bad guys do bad things simply because it advances the plot. Peter Graves costars as an American spy tasked with finding the whereabouts of the missile and preventing its use. While tramping around (pre-revolutionary) Iran, he aligns with his Soviet counterpart, played by Michael Dante. Although there are shades of 007, notably because Jürgens played the heavy in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), this schlocky picture exists a world apart from the razzle-dazzle of the James Bond franchise. Graves is almost laughably wooden, and it’s a gross understatement to remark that he lacks heat in scenes with various starlets. He’s so dull throughout this movie that the filmmakers might as well have hired a stand-in. The other notable player in the cast, Hollywood survivor John Carradine, phones in a non-performances as scientist in the villain’s employ. As for Jürgens, he gets the most interesting material simply because his character evinces ambiguous sexuality. He’s got the requisite female arm candy, but he’s also got a one-handed henchman, and in one scene Jürgens’ character implies he wants a three-way. Kinky! In every other respect, this movie is confusing, dull, and pointless.

Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident: LAME

El Super (1979)

          While the term “independent film” can be taken to mean any picture that was financed outside the Hollywood system, truly independent movies present viewpoints from beyond the mainstream. The charming character study El Super is a fine example. Exploring the life of a Cuban expat who endures an unglamorous existence as the superintendent of an apartment building in New York City, the film—adapted from a play by Iván Acosta—explores a host of meaningful topics. Beyond the familiar travails of a blue-collar worker, the story explores notions of national and political identity while working its way toward the existential question of what constitutes happiness. Yet even though El Super engages with heavy subject matter, the movie is never oppressive. Most scenes are amusing and lighthearted, and whenever the narrative goes dark, there’s an edge of satirical humor because sad-sack protagonist Roberto is all of us, railing at the way people impose on his time, complaining about the drudgery of repetitive tasks, and bitching about the weather.

          Roberto (Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) and his wife, Aurelia (Zully Montero), live with their 17-year-old daughter in a basement apartment at the building he maintains. He’s had the job for 10 years, the same span of time he’s spent in the U.S., so his daughter is thoroughly Americanized, even though he and Aurelia still consider themselves Cubans. Life at the building is a drag, with residents banging on pipes early in the morning because they don’t have hot water, garbage perpetually accumulating in snow banks out front, and city officials showing up unannounced to see certifications that Roberto does not possess. Roberto hates the winter in New York, so he dreams of joining the Cuban expat community in Miami, and he constantly vilifies Castro for making life in the old country intolerable. Exacerbating Roberto’s angst is his best friend, Pancho (Reynaldo Medina), a self-proclaimed hero who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion and pontificates endlessly about his hatred of Communists.
          Roberto can’t get away from his problems, no matter how hard he tries, and one of the subtler aspects of El Super is the observation that Roberto has limited himself by not learning English. To a certain degree, he’s trapped in a prison of his own making. Yet the filmmakers never judge the character, instead putting his moments of happiness and hardship onscreen in an unvarnished fashion.

          El Super is a simple film, so the narrative is well served by documentary-style camerawork and the presence of actors who will seem unfamiliar to most viewers. Directors Leon Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal create an immersive sense of reality from the first frames, with the tonal variety of the source material and the lived-in quality of the performances adding to the verisimilitude. We feel as if we’re experiencing a symbolic period of Roberto’s life, so we share in his gloom, his hope, and his thoroughly understandable flashes of pent-up rage. El Super isn’t just a story about a Cuban adrift in America—it’s a story about anyone who feels like a better life is out there somewhere, just beyond reach.

El Super: GROOVY