#27: Katie's Passion

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side B
1975

A brief glance at the synopsis for Katie’s Passion might lead you to expect some cheap, sexploitation-style thrills from this tale of a young woman’s descent into the world of prostitution. After all, this is the Fifty Pack, semi-disreputable institution of talking monster trucks, voodoo exorcists, men in gorilla suits and other unrefined cinematic entertainments. And yet, like the potentially seedy Black Hooker before it, Katie’s Passion turns out to be a sincere and somewhat sobering look at gender and class. Not only that but it was directed by Paul Verhoeven in his Dutch-language, pre-giant-space-bugs days--so it‘s got some talent behind the camera.

It’s the late 19th century. To eke out even the most rudimentary existence--so some helpful onscreen text explains--families are fleeing from their homes in the countryside to the big city. One such family is the Tippels, who we first see huddling under a dockside shelter from the rain, waiting to board a ship to Amsterdam. “You’d soon be rich if you’d put those girls to work,” the captain tells the father, leering in the direction of Katie (Monique van de Ven) and Mina (Hannah de Leeuwe).

Soon after arriving at their new home--a basement-level hovel that floods during a rainstorm--Katie finds a job at a wool-dying mill. “Blood,” she cries in bewilderment upon discovering the chemicals in the dye have burned through the flesh on her hands. “Under my nails,” she says, “it’s bleeding.” The look of stupefaction on the actresses’ face, as though she’s never seen something as mundane and awful as her own blood, turns what might otherwise be a throwaway moment in the film to one of genuine horror. We’re witnessing the loss of innocence, and the cruel laughter of Katie’s fellow workers makes it all the more harrowing. It’s reminiscent in some ways of the famous locker room scene in Carrie and Sissy Spacek’s near-existential terror at her own unexpectedly unfamiliar body.      

Later that same day, Katie winds up in a scuffle with the other women at the mill and is promptly fired. From there, she finds work as an errand girl for a small haberdashery, whose clientele include a local brothel. Here, at the brothel, Katie experiences another moment of disillusionment when she comes upon her older sister Mina, who it turns out has been turning tricks since the family’s arrival in Amsterdam. Mina convinces Katie to let one of the brothel’s elderly customers fondle her in a darkened room, and it isn’t long before Katie, too, is turning tricks for a living.  

The third act focuses onthe relationship between Katie and Hugo (an impossibly young Rutger Hauer), a wealthy banker and a regular at the brothel, who takes a liking to Katie. He buys her fancy clothes, teaches her how to ride horseback and, in one poignant scene, takes her out to an upscale restaurant with a menu so extensive and convoluted it seems to befuddle, delight and frighten Katie in equal measure.

Eventually, Hugo offers Katie a house of her own if she agrees to remain his mistress once he marries a proper and respectable girl. Katie, realizing the terrible superficiality of this life, flees Hugo’s mansion and stumbles, confused, through the darkness. The camera suddenly reveals a parade of the working class, marching determinedly down the narrow streets of the city as they sing and wave banners in protest of poor working conditions. Katie finds herself swept up in their mass, singing along with them. Abruptly, the parade comes to a halt. A row of policemen blocks their way. Shots are fired into the crowd. Torches are tossed back at the police. Bodies fall on wet cobblestone. Frantic, the crowd scrambles. It’s during this thrilling sequence Katie’s Passion becomes something remarkable, though not for reason of plot: The Verhoeven of the solemn period piece has receded and for a moment or two we're given a glimpse of the ridiculously kinetic director to come. 

#26: Invasion of the Bee Girls

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side B
1973

Invasion of the Bee Girls begins like an abstract, blank-verse visual and auditory poem: We see a shot of a weedy, junk-strewn motel parking lot. Suddenly a piercing, overdubbed scream is heard. Cut to a middle-aged maid in one of the motel’s dingy rooms standing, horrified, over a man’s corpse, the bluish-gray hue of which seems otherworldly and decidedly wrong. Police sirens are heard in the distance. An incongruously funky score, almost mocking in its idiotic vigor, kicks in. The title flashes on screen: Who are these bee girls, we wonder, and what do they have to do with whatever it is we just saw?

For a low-budget b-movie, it’s a rather artful and avant-garde open--disorienting and slightly subversive in the way it seemingly strips away all motivation and meaning. Or maybe it’s just an incoherent, poorly-edited mess. Whatever the case, there’s something oddly compelling about it all, a sense of the unearthly invading the everyday that the film loses once the plot commences.

Neil Agar (genre vet William Smith) arrives from the definitely-not-made-up, totally-real-sounding State Department of Security to investigate the mysterious death. Turns out the victim, Professor Grubowsky, worked at the Brandt organization, a government-sponsored research facility where the late professor was involved in bacteriological warfare experiments. His lab assistant Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri) tells Agar this before confessing she was with the professor at the motel the night he died.

“What happened?” asks Agar. 

“We balled and we balled and we balled,” Julie tells him, “until he dropped dead.”

“Let’s go to lunch,” says Agar.

Meanwhile, the bodies continue to pile up. Hoping to stave off panic, the local police and medical community hold a meeting for the town’s residents in what appears to be a rundown American Legion. “There are three points of uniformity I’d like to bring out and underline for you,” Capt. Peters (Cliff Osmond)--just one of many large-headed, black-haired, mustachioed men in the cast--tells the crowd. “One: All the victims have been men. Two: All the men have been residents of Peckham. And third: They’ve all died apparently--I’d like to stress the word apparently--by over exhaustion during the act of sexual intercourse.”

This pronouncement only elicits derisive laughter from the crowd; but when one of the doctors suggests abstaining from all sexual activity until the mystery is resolved they turn outright hostile. “Nobody’s gonna deny me what little pleasure I get from screwing my old lady,” cries one balding, beefy citizen who turns up dead a few short scenes later.

While the movie seems to be aware of its own ridiculousness--thanks to a somewhat tongue-in-cheek script by author and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for adapting his 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to the big screen--it loses the artistry of the first few minutes amid sluggish and repetitive plotting. That is, until the very end, when Agar discovers the female staff of the Brandt organization have been fusing their cells with those of the queen bee and mating in a primeval frenzy with the male population of the town--or something like that.

The big reveal doesn’t make any sense, but the climax, set at the bee girls’ futuristic-looking hive, is well-staged by director Denis Sanders, achieving a sort of exquisite weirdness. Lights blink crazily upon the surface of sinister-looking lab equipment. Vaguely-scientific bleeping sounds are heard. The bee girls surround one of their new recruits and slather her body in a thick white substance, cocooning her. The recruit is then locked in a small chamber, the interior of which is soon swarming with hundreds of bees. The recruit is engulfed. When she emerges from the chamber the other bee girls--most of them bee women in their mid-thirties--peel the white substance from her body as ethereal music plays on the soundtrack. She is transformed, bearing the black, inhuman eyes of her kind. Soon Agar will rush in, smashing the equipment and killing the monsters in predictable and inevitable b-movie fashion. This is how a movie like this must end--but for a few brief moments Invasion of the Bee Girls takes on the quality of something better than itself, something richer and more mystical. It’s an abstract poem again, all subtext, implication and possible transcendence.  

#25: Shock

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side A
1946

The movie begins with Janet (Anabel Shaw), waiting at a San Francisco hotel for her husband, Lt. Paul Stewart (Frank Latimore), a prisoner of war returning home after two years. She soon falls asleep and dreams Paul is pounding on the door of the hotel room, trying desperately to get in. Frantic, Janet runs towards the door, which, in typical nightmarish fashion, seems to grow further and further away. By the time Janet finally reaches it, she has shrunk. She is hardly bigger than the doorknob and cannot open the door. Paul is stuck on the other side, unable to get in. The dream ends, but a strong sense of absence and anxiety lingers.

Janet wanders out onto the balcony for some fresh air. Through the window of the room opposite hers she sees Dr. Richard Cross--an impossibly young Vincent Price--arguing with his wife Margaret. “I’ve decided to ask you for a divorce,” he tells her. Margaret refuses, threatening to expose his adulterous ways to the papers. Enraged, Cross goes full-on Clue and clubs Margaret to death with a candlestick. Janet faints in fright. When Paul finally arrives, he finds Janet on the couch, silent and petrified. In a very noir-ish twist of fate, Dr. Cross himself is called upon to examine her. 

“What do you think caused it, doc?” asks Paul.

“It’s hard to say,” muses Price in that faintly menacing, slightly ironic, vaguely lisping way of his. He looks out on the balcony, suspecting Janet may have witnessed the murder. He convinces Paul to let him take Janet to his remote, countryside sanitarium for further study. What follows is a seemingly endless succession of scenes in which Dr. Cross skulks into Janet’s room, hammers his fist on her bedside table and prods her with questions, forcing her to relive the night of the murder and in this way determine how much she knows. When Janet suddenly recognizes her doctor as the murderer, Cross sets about trying to convince the woman that she’s insane.

“Your mind is sick and getting worse,” he tells her. “You wouldn’t want your husband to see you in that condition. He doesn’t even want to see you like this. You’re losing your mind,” he says. “Losing your mind.”

While these scenes have a certain queasiness to them in the way Dr. Cross abuses his role as an authority figure and care provider, they also grow a bit repetitive. In fact, the film loses momentum almost as soon as the action shifts to the sanitarium, a setting which should be steeped in anxiety and paranoia but which--excepting a tense scene involving a thunderstorm and a bug-eyed escapee from the mental ward--becomes rather dull and stagnant. If only the rest of the film had been able to capture the tension of that early dream sequence, which plunges our heroine into a world of post-war uncertainty where her very sanity, less than five minutes into the picture, seems to be in question. Sure, it's a bit derivative of the famous dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, released a year earlier; but it's still effective, lending a certain ambiguity and psychological depth to Janet that the character loses the longer Shock confines her to bed, an inert and passive victim.

#24: In Hot Pursuit

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 7: Side A
1977

Wacky, circus-style music plays over the opening credits of In Hot Pursuit, struggling mightily to establish a tone of pure and unadulterated zaniness that is immediately undercut by the very first scene, in which two pilots mutter disinterestedly to each other as they slowly bring their pot-filled plane in for a landing in a field somewhere in rural Georgia. Waiting for the plane are drug-runners Oosh (Don Watson), his Bad Company t-shirt-sporting brother Boosh (Don’s real-life bro Bobby Watson) and a couple other long-haired, too-tight-jeans-wearing, Doobie Brothers-roadie-looking-types. When the plane lands Oosh and Boosh hand off a sack full of money to the pilots and load the grass into their musty Winnebago. That’s when the fuzz shows up.  

“Jesus Christ!” cries Boosh in his thick Southern drawl. “Here come the damn po-lice!” Cue a protracted backroads chase--In Hot Pursuit’s raison d’etre--involving the Winnebago, half a dozen cop cars, a Cadillac-driving old-timer, and an oblivious, burrito-eating trucker who continues chowing down even after accidentally swerving his eighteen-wheeler across the road and slicing the roof off Oosh and Boosh’s RV. Eventually the boys are apprehended and brought to the local jail, whereupon Mr. King (Paul Weiner), the sweaty, thick-necked head of the drug-smuggling operation, calls in his sweaty, thick-necked associates to devise a prison break. Their brilliantly idiotic plan entails landing a helicopter on the roof of the jail, where the boys just happen to be repairing an air-conditioning unit (who knew maintenance work was such a big part of serving time?) under the watchful eye of the sheriff. As the copter descends, the boys knock the sheriff out, grab onto the copter’s landing struts and are whisked away.      

This, inevitably, leads to more chases; double crosses; an armored car heist; multiple cops bellowing slight variations on the line, “That’s the car we got a lookout on! Let’s get ‘em!”; incongruous musical cues; some extended bed-lounging; a miraculous plane-landing in the middle of the forest; and a belabored comic set-piece consisting of a massive double-wide being transported down the highway atop a flatbed, an out-of-control, dope-filled tractor-trailer, and repeated cuts to a drunken, barefoot yokel inside the double-wide napping on a dirty cot.

Between this sort of desperate humor, the largely incomprehensible dialogue, Mr. King’s wood-paneled office that looks more like one-time director Jim West’s step-mom’s rumpus room than it does the headquarters of a major crime syndicate, and the delightfully low-rent credits (one of the actors is billed simply as Big Jim, another as Mrs. Oxly), In Hot Pursuit has a scuzzy, homemade charm to it not unlike that of fellow southern-fried Fifty Pack classics Twister’s Revenge and Country Blue. Add to it the fact that the movie, also known awesomely as Polk County Pot Plane, is loosely based on one of those strange-but-true news briefs--in August 1975 drug smugglers cleared out a 1000 foot landing strip on Treat Mountain in Georgia and against all odds landed a Douglas DC-4, a plane designed for runways of 3000 feet or longer--and the whole thing seems imbued with a goofy, over-the-top sense of local pride. Then there’s that badass claim at the end of the movie--No stuntmen were used in this film--which makes Oosh and Boosh’s car-crashing and helicopter-dangling antics all the more impressive. In some ways, the movie seems like something your inebriated, hirsute, redneck uncles--you know, the ones that let you play with fireworks when you were a kid and sip from their cans of Bud Light at family BBQs--might’ve cobbled together back when they were still young, a little crazy and their ambitions extended beyond long, hazy afternoons on the couch watching NASCAR.

#22: Voodoo Black Exorcist

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 6: Side B
1973

Let‘s get this out of the way now: Voodoo Black Exorcist only delivers on a fraction of its convoluted, haphazardly-constructed title. One third of it, to be precise. The movie opens in the distant past somewhere in the Caribbean, where hulking shaman Gatanebo (Aldo Sambrell) kills some scrawny, balding little guy in order to defend the honor of his beloved Kenya (Tanyeka Stadler). The action then shifts to an exotic ceremony full of sudden zooms and jarring close-ups of chanting, writhing, grass-skirted natives, who behead Kenya, toss around a papier-mâché lump that vaguely resembles Kenya’s head, and then slaughter Gatanebo in apparent retaliation for the murder of their clansman.

All of which is sort of voodoo-y, I guess. So there you go. There’s the voodoo in Voodoo Black Exorcist. At no point in the movie, however, does exorcism come into play. As for the black part of the equation--well, that, too, is up for debate, considering the actors playing Gatanebo, Kenya and even the balding, algebra teacher-looking man from the prologue all seem to be Caucasians in black face.

In other words, a title as ridiculously lurid as Voodoo Black Exorcist can only disappoint. No surprise there: Misleading titles are a b-movie tradition. But can Voodoo Black Exorcist deliver some abrupt, largely incomprehensible narration (another b-movie tradition almost as rich and storied as misleading titles)? Fear not: Just take a gander at this baffling bit of anti-poetry, which plays over a shot of Gatanebo’s sarcophagus and which rivals Plan 9’s speechifying Amazing Criswell for sheer goofiness:

“Happenings in life repeat themselves,” our narrator tells us. “Within a thousand years, two thousand, Gatanebo will seek Kenya. Blood will be spilled. Terrible things will happen again. And everything will start again. Begin again.”

Cut to stock footage of rockets blasting off into space. Cheesy psychedelic rock guitar-noodling is heard on the soundtrack. Apparently, it’s now the present day, circa 1974. Gatanebo’s sarcophagus has been discovered by a collector and is being transported aboard a luxury cruise ship populated almost exclusively by sweaty, cigar-smoking men with receding hairlines and poorly dubbed exotic dancers, one of whom--Sylvia (Eva Leon)--looks a lot like Kenya, sans black face. Naturally, Gatanebo comes back to life. He, too, is sans black face. In fact, the actor’s noggin is now slathered in thick gobs of putty makeup, making him look like a low-rent knock-off of Boris Karloff--a minstrel mummy, if you will. .

The second act consists almost entirely of slow-motion flashbacks of Gatanebo and Kenya frolicking on the beach, interspersed with shots of Gatanebo wandering the ship’s decks and occasionally beheading passengers. One of these passengers resembles Kenya’s killer and Gatanebo sneaks into Sylvia’s cabin to dangle the bastard’s head over her sleeping form. “Your killer is dead,” he intones flatly. “I bring proof of my vengeance oh Kenya, most beloved of women.” He then sets the head down beside Sylvia and slowly backs out of the room.

See, deep down Gatanebo is a romantic, prone to grand, irrational acts of love and spouting nonsensical, pseudo-blank-verse in the style of the film’s infrequent narrator. “The sea is beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks Sylvia at one point. “However, there are many creatures in the center of the earth who have never seen it. Imagine how they’d feel, if put here now. That’s how I felt when I found you again.” Truer words have never been spoken, at least not by a moldering, sentimental voodoo-killer.

#20: Trauma

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 6: Side A
1978

A jazzy, incongruously upbeat score plays over the opening credits as we see the body of a teenage girl dumped from the trunk of a car into a river. Police inspector Johnny Di Salvo (genre-lifer Fabio Testi) is put on the case when the body is discovered, washed up on the riverbank.

“Her lower abdomen has been torn apart by an instrument that was anything but sharp,” the coroner informs him. “Her face is composed, which suggests she was unconscious before being butchered.”

The perpetually unperturbed Di Salvo hardly reacts to this disturbing bit of news. Then again, maybe this unflappability doesn’t come from the character, but rather Fabio Testi himself, who had already starred in a number of violent Spaghetti Westerns and Euro crime films, as well as the classic giallo What Have You Done To Solange?, which, along with this film and What Have They Done To Your Daughters?, forms the loose, somewhat sleazy--no, hugely sleazy-- “Schoolgirls In Peril” trilogy. In other words, by this point in his career Fabio Testi had seen his fair share of torn-apart abdomens. 

So jaded is Testi--er, Inspector Di Salvo--that, upon discovering the dead girl is sixteen year old Angela Russo, he visits Angela’s mother and younger sister Emily (Fausta Avelli) at the cemetery. Yes, rather than call the family down to the station for questioning, he decides to show up, unannounced, at Angela’s grave and grill the family right there. His methods may be unconventional, but dammit, he gets results. Young Emily tells Di Salvo Angela had a small, very close-knit group of friends at school who might know something about Angela‘s murder.

“They were called the Inseparables,” says Emily.

Intrigued, Di Salvo decides to visit the school, where he’s introduced to the ridiculously suspicious teaching staff, including the shifty-eyed math instructor and the zonked-out, Coke-bottle-glasses-wearing Latin professor. The movie is suddenly like a game, lining up the suspects for us in the simplest, most unimaginative manner possible. Really, it’s like some incredibly seedy version of Clue: The burly, swarthy-looking, probably-pedophiliac gym teacher Mr. Riva did it in the girl’s locker room with the wrench or the menacing-looking reverend who’s only included in the cast for some half-assed attempt at exposing the hypocrisy of Catholicism did it in the confessional with the candlestick.

Then again, maybe the teachers had nothing to do with Angela’s murder. Di Salvo runs into Emily again, who gives him her sister’s pocket calendar and points out the Inseparables to him. Inside the calendar, Di Salvo finds some cash tucked between the pages and a cryptic drawing of a cat on each entry for Saturday. Later, he sees the same symbol on a roadside billboard for a local jean shop, which he quickly learns is the center of a teenage prostitution ring, to which the Inseparables are charter members.       

Soon Di Salvo finds himself the target of Angela’s killer and from there things get pretty convoluted. Still, Trauma--also know as Rings of Fear, Red Rings of Fear, Enigma Rosso, Virgin Killer, and probably fifty or sixty other alternate titles as is the custom of Italian genre pictures--is worth watching, if only for the sheer ludicrousness of scenes like the one where Di Salvo breaks his typically unruffled exterior and barges into the boarding school in the middle of the night. 

“Game’s over girls,” he tells the Inseparables, kicking open the door to their dormitory, turning on the light and hovering over their beds threateningly as they huddle in fear in their nightgowns. “I want you to tell me the truth,” he bellows. “Get it through your heads your friend was raped and murdered, and that the same thing could happen to you unless you tell me everything you know.”

Still later, Di Salvo busts into the home of Michael Parravicini (Jack Taylor), the head of the prostitution ring. He drags the sick bastard out, tosses him into the car, then drives him to a local carnival, where he forces him onto a roller coaster in an attempt to scare a confession out of him. It’s completely nonsensical stuff like this that makes Trauma an interesting watch, even when things start to get a bit rape-y and unpleasant, like the filmmakers' profoundly bad decision to inter-cut footage of an orgy gone wrong with shots of an abortion. How many serial killer movies stop for a trip to the amusement park? Imagine if The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was set at Six Flags and you might have something like this little oddity.

#19: The Devil's Hand

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 5: Side B
1962

The upbeat surf guitar that plays over the opening credits of The Devil’s Hand bring to mind images of bikini-clad teenagers being stalked by seaweed-covered monsters--something along the lines of, say, 1964’s The Horror of Party Beach. Instead, we get swarthy-looking, sleep-deprived Rick Turner (played by Alan Alda’s dad Robert), who’s kept awake by visions of a mysterious woman swaying rhythmically in the clouds. So troubled is Rick, he takes to wandering the streets at night in an insomniac’s haze. What could these visions mean?

“How could I explain when I myself couldn’t understand?” he asks in jarring voiceover narration that will soon be dropped as abruptly as it appears. “I dream about a woman night after night. A woman I’ve never met, never seen before. And with each dream she becomes more real, more alive, until it seemed if my hand reached out I could’ve touched her.” Suddenly, Rick finds himself in front of a doll shop. “Some will stronger than my own brought me here,” his voiceover helpfully explains. Through the store window he sees a doll bearing an uncanny resemblance to the dream woman.

The next day he brings his fiancé Donna Trent (Ariadna Welter) to the shop and shows her the doll in the window. “Darling, it‘s probably just a coincidence,” Donna tells him. “That’s she alright,” says Rick in a grammatically-correct, though awkwardly-constructed sentence. Inside, the shopkeeper Francis Lamont (Neil Hamilton, later of Commissioner Gordon semi-fame in the 1960s Batman TV series) claims Rick brought him a photograph of the woman and requested a doll be made in her image. Rick has no memory of this. Just when it seems things can’t get any stranger--or more derivative of The Twilight Zone--Donna spots a doll on the shelf that looks like her.

Insisting there’s been a misunderstanding, Rick and Donna leave the shop. The second they‘re out the door, the shopkeeper is donning a massive rob, climbing atop an altar and thrusting a pin through the doll made in Donna’s likeness. Out on the sidewalk, Donna collapses in pain and is brought to the hospital. That night, Rick has another vision of the mystery woman hovering in the clouds. “What do you want?” he grumbles at her. She tells him to pick up her doll from the shop and deliver it to the address on the box. The next day he does just that.

“Mr. Turner,” says the mystery woman--Bianca Milan (Linda Christian)--upon opening the door. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“You know about the dreams?” asks Rick.

“Certainly,” says Bianca and invites him in for dinner.

“What are you?” he asks, after the meal.

“Don’t you know?” says Bianca.

“You’re a she-devil,” cries Rick, then adds, “You’re beautiful. Fascinating.” Turns out, Bianca belongs to a cult that worships the devil-god Gamba and she wants Rick, for no discernible reason, to join. Rick is so enamored of Bianca--and so totally over his hospitalized fiancé--that he agrees. Cut to the doll shop. The ritual is already underway. Voodoo drums are thumping. Women in robes are swaying, as if in a trance. The shopkeeper is at his altar. Seated on the floor before him are Gamba’s disciples, most of whom are sweaty, thick-necked men in business suits. Rick is called to the altar.

“Will you swear absolute allegiance to the great devil-god Gamba?” asks the shopkeeper. 

“I will,” mumbles Rick and--just like that, no indoctrination necessary, no breaking down of psychological barriers--he’s a full-fledged member of the cult. What follows is a long, aimless middle act, during which Rick uses his newfound voodoo powers to play the stock market and place winning bets at the local racetrack. Then, for no apparent reason, he comes to regret abandoning his fiancé and pledging his loyalty to the devil-god--a complex, emotional transformation represented here by Rick staring somewhat mournfully at an old photograph of Donna for a couple seconds. The following night he sneaks into the doll shop, finds the Donna doll and pulls the needle out of it. Donna is cured, but is immediately kidnapped by the cult and placed on the altar to be sacrificed to Gamba. Will Rick swoop in and save her in time? Yes, of course he will.

That the cult is populated almost exclusively by seemingly upstanding, middle-class, middle-aged citizens is The Devil’s Hand’s only twist. The notion that witchcraft is alive and well in modern day society, that a select few are secretly using the powers of Satan for their own ill-gotten gain, wouldn’t become a staple of the horror genre for another few years, when Rosemary’s Baby did it far more convincingly. Too bad then that The Devil’s Hand is otherwise so clunky and old-fashioned--and worse, dull. It strives for the impact of an episode of The Twilight Zone, yet lacks the sharp characterization, tight plotting and hardboiled dialogue with which Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont and the show’s other writers were able to imbue even the most far-fetched premise.

Really, the only scene of any note is towards the end, when Rick is sitting in a bar, contemplating the mess he’s made of his life. Blaring out of the nearby jukebox is the surf guitar music--performed by Baker Knight and the Knightmares--from the opening credits. Rick rubs his temples. He takes an angry swig of his drink. It's too much. He needs peace and quiet to think. “Shut that music off!” he yells. The music stops. It’s a strange, almost self-aware moment, as if the film itself were acknowledging the unfulfilled expectations of its rollicking theme song and its own dreary reality. 

     

#18: Murder Mansion

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 5: Side B
1972

Motorcyclist Fred (Andres Resino) picks up hitchhiker Laura (Lisa Leonardi), and together they journey through a remote and foreboding valley. The locals warn them not to continue. Like any self-respecting horror-movie-protagonists, Fred and Laura go on. A thick fog descends. A ghostly Rolls Royce bears down upon them, nearly swiping them off the road. The sky grows dark. Suddenly, the motorcycle drops into a ditch.  

“What happened?” asks Laura.

“No more road,” Fred says. “That’s what happened.”

Unfazed, Fred decides to put the moves on Laura. He’s interrupted by Elsa (Analia Gade), an heiress who has crashed her own car and been chased through a nearby cemetery by two shadowy figures: A woman in a dress and a man in a chauffeur’s outfit.

“The only thing that really makes any sense is that your car has broken down and here we are, all three, lost in a fog,” says Fred, semi-coherently and largely non-reassuringly. “What we’re going to do about it I don’t know,” he adds. Together they decide to venture through the fog in hopes of finding a village where they can get help, careful to skirt the cemetery. “I’m afraid the village will be as dead and dark as those unattended graves,” Fred says, offering more of his patented inarticulate and generally dispiriting wisdom.

To their surprise, they come across a mansion on the far side of the cemetery, where an assortment of secondary, subplot-ridden characters are already gathered: There’s sleazy, hard-drinking, gun-toting Mr. Porter (Franco Fantasia), bickering couple Mr. and Mrs. Tremont (Eduardo Fajardo and Yelena Samarina), and Martha Clinton (Ida Galli), the owner of the mansion. They, too, have seen the shadowy figure in the chauffeur outfit.

“I keep having the sensation we’ve crossed the realm between the real and the unreal,” says Mr. Tremont, rather casually. Martha then happens to mention that the residents of the nearby village were killed by vampires. This elicits a few raised eyebrows, but otherwise Elsa is the only one who seems particularly troubled. Martha adds that her aunt, whose ominous portrait hangs above the fireplace, was a witch. A few more eyebrows are raised. Martha goes on to explain that her aunt and her aunt’s beloved chauffeur were both killed many years ago when the chauffeur crashed his Rolls Royce into a wall.

Does this revelation strike any of Martha’s guests as strange? Not really. Like most thinly-drawn horror movie victims, they all seem to lack a sense of fear, curiosity or self-preservation. In fact, they immediately decide to disband and retire to their separate bedrooms. Ghostly sounds are soon heard. Corridors are wandered down. Secret passageways are discovered. Voyeurs grow voyeuristic. Flashbacks are flashbacked to. Finally, the chauffeur shows up, looking pale, menacing and generally undead. Mr. Porter, who’d been stealing into the bedrooms of the various female characters to offer free swigs of whiskey from his flask, is killed. Elsa is chased by the specter of the witch. A floating, disembodied head is seen. Corpses are discovered. Eventually, Fred and Laura decide to investigate. Things get convoluted fast.

To be fair, there are a few surprising twists and turns to the plot, and the atmosphere, cribbed from the gothic fever-dreams of Mario Bava, is generally effective. No surprise: Directors Francisco Lara Polop and Pedro Lazaga are both veterans of the genre. However, the real pleasure in this Italian-Spanish co-production lies in its atrocious dubbing, which lends Fred's dialogue the quality of disjointed blank verse poetry: After all, the only thing that really makes any sense is that here we are, all of us, lost in a fog. It's like a metaphor for life, man.

#17: Horror of the Zombies

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 5: Side A
1974

The simpler the setup, the scarier the horror film. There are exceptions, of course, but the classics of the genre--say, Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre--maneuver their characters to their fate in a relatively straightforward manner. Sure, these films begin slowly, but there’s a simplicity underlining the inexplicable quality of the horror. Viewers can imagine themselves winding up in a similar situation. Sometimes, all it takes is a wrong turn.

Even Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Blind Dead--which aren’t classics, but aren’t that bad, either--display a certain amount of ease as they go about stranding a bunch of poorly-dubbed Spanish actors in isolated medieval ruins populated by the empty-socketed zombies of the Templar Knights. Horror of the Zombies, also known as The Ghost Galleon, is the third in the Blind Dead series, and instead of simply dumping a bunch of unsuspecting tourists on its zombie-filled 16th century galleon, it spends half its running time on an increasingly convoluted set up:

Noemi (Barbara Rey), a fashion model, approaches Lillian (Maria Perschy), her photographer, after a photo shoot. It seems Kathy, Noemi’s roommate and fellow model is missing, and Noemi thinks Lillian knows something about it.

“She’s out of town. Special assignment,” says Lillian. “Simple as that.”

“I hope it is that simple,” says Noemi. “Yet I fear she’s in jeopardy.”

Lillian relents. Cut to a crumbling, dock-side warehouse. Lillian introduces Noemi to sporting goods magnate Howard Tucker (Jack Taylor), who explains that Kathy and another model--Loren-- have been brought out to the middle of the ocean as part of a publicity stunt and left in a special motor boat Tucker has been developing. His hope is that the crew of a passing ship will spot the girls, think they’re stranded, bring them aboard, and return them to shore. That’s step one. Step two involves the girls getting on the news and spinning their tale of survival into a promotion for Tucker's boat. How exactly would two people stranded at sea in his boat be a good endorsement for his boat? Tucker seems unconcerned by such details.

Next we see Kathy (Blanca Estrada) and Loren (Margarita Merino), adrift in a thick fog. The boat is taking on water. Suddenly, the ghostly galleon, complete with rotting sails, appears. Oddly, the girls don‘t seem particularly frightened. In fact, Loren throws a ladder from their boat to the galleon and climbs aboard to look for help. Kathy soon follows.

Back on shore, Noemi, Lillian, Tucker, Tucker’s assistant Sergio, and Professor Gruber (Carlos Lemos), a vaguely-defined researcher who seems to be an expert on whatever random subject happens to come up, decide to search for the girls. They, too, wind up on the mysterious galleon, where they wander around and bicker. Eventually, the blind dead crawl from their tombs below deck. What follows will surprise no one already familiar with the series: There’s some lesbian undertones, shots of skeletal hands slowly wrapping around female necks, plentiful bell-bottoms and striped turtle necks, and just enough history on the Templar Knights to make the whole thing seem a little more sophisticated than it actually is. This time around, there’s also a bit of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. See, the ghostly galleon actually exists in a parallel dimension. 

All of which distracts from--and undermines--the reason for this film’s existence: The blind dead themselves. With their empty sockets, ragged cloaks and lumbering gait, they’re among the creepier horror movie creatures out there. They don’t look like underpaid actors in zombie makeup. They look like the real thing. Unfortunately, writer/director Amando de Ossorio, who helmed the previous two entries in the series, puts this to good use only once in Horror of the Zombies: Late in the film, Lillian is slowly dragged below deck by the blind dead, clawing all the way at the decaying floor boards. It’s a long, unsettling scene, and the blind dead seem to grow more impassive and inhuman as it progresses. The terror here is simple, visceral and uncomplicated. If only the same could be said for the rest of the film.

#15: Blood Mania

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 4: Side B
1970

Blood Mania doesn’t get better than its title sequence: A grim, pale-faced man pursues a terrified woman in a nightgown through a dark, unidentified netherworld. Jarring colored lights--red, blue and green--disrupt the darkness. The woman screams, silently. Disjointed electronic music plays. The whole thing seems to hint at some surreal, nightmare vision, like those of Mario Bava or Dario Argento. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the rest of the film, neither in subject matter nor style.

The credits end. We meet Victoria Waterman (Maria De Aragon), looking after her ill, bed-ridden, bitter father, Ridgeley (Eric Allison). “You probably poisoned it,” he grumbles when Victoria brings him his breakfast.

“Daddy,” Victoria pleads, hoping he‘ll stop.

“Don’t daddy me,” Ridgeley says. “I could choke to death on my coffee and you wouldn’t shed a tear.”

Next we meet swinging, side-burned Dr. Cooper. Cooper is Ridgeley’s doctor, who shows up late to their appointment because he’s busy at home, carousing in the bathtub with his girlfriend. Cooper’s so irresistible, in fact, that Victoria tries--and fails--to seduce him that same day. The key to Cooper’s charm? It has something to do with the actor who plays him, Peter Carpenter: He was also one of Blood Mania’s screenwriters.

No matter. Cooper returns home, eager for more bath time with his girlfriend. A swarthy-looking blackmailer interrupts them. “That’s a nice girl you got there,” says the blackmailer. “But I wonder if she cares enough to come visit you in prison for the next ten years.” Turns out Cooper used to perform illegal abortions. The blackmailer wants fifty thousand dollars or he’ll expose Cooper’s little secret.

“You’ll probably live to be a hundred and ten,” Victoria tells Cooper, after her second--successful--seduction.

“Why’s that?” asks Cooper.

“Only the good die young,” Victoria replies. But she, too, has a dark side. When Cooper tells her the amyl-nitrate she’s addicted to could kill someone with a heart condition, she gets an idea: Cooper needs money and she wants to be rid of her father. That night, she creeps into Ridgeley’s bedroom, waves the amyl-nitrate under the old man’s nose, then watches as he dies. The next day, she tells Cooper. Cooper is taken aback, but lies to the coroner, claiming Ridgeley died of a stroke. After all, Victoria has promised to give him her inheritance.  

“I don’t want the money,” she explains, eyes glinting crazily. “I have you.”

At the reading of the will, however, Victoria learns Ridgeley has left part of his fortune to his beloved nurse and the rest to Victoria’s sister Gail (Vicki Peters). Victoria freaks. Cooper sedates her. The nurse is unperturbed: “Yesterday I was broke,” she tells the mourning family, chuckling. “Today I’m an heiress.” She pauses, smiling. “Anybody for a hot game of Scrabble?” she asks. It’s the first stage of grief, Milton-Bradley edition.

The rest of the film is equally silly: Cooper woos Gail, the true heiress. Mad with jealousy, Victoria goes full-Clue on her sister, bashing her head in with a candlestick. There’s a little blood and a little mania--though not enough to constitute the horror film the title suggests. Really, Blood Mania is nothing but an overblown soap opera with some gratuitous nudity thrown in and even more gratuitous footage of a renaissance faire, where Cooper takes Gail on their first date. They take an archery lesson. They peruse the olde-timey wares for sale. Incessant flute music plays. Some mimes wander around, eating popcorn. A jarring close-up shows a random stranger’s dirty afro. It’s all very disjointed and surreal--and, frankly, more nightmarish than the opening sequence.  

#14: Absolution

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 4: Side A
1978

“What are we but a little blood and a little flesh and a collection of bones?” So says Father Goddard, played dourly by a dour-faced Richard Burton as the dour patriarch of a Catholic boarding school in the dour-looking English countryside. It’s all very--what’s the word? Dreary? Dismal? It starts with a d. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

The point is, Goddard isn’t one for levity. Benjie (Dominic Guard), Goddard’s star pupil, knows this better than anyone. Early on in Absolution, we see Benjie fall under the sway of Blakey (Billy Connolly in his big screen debut), a charismatic, banjo-playing, motorbike-riding, hammock-sleeping drifter who has set up camp in the forest near the boarding school. Blakey is about as far as can be from Father Goddard, who surely has a staunch no banjo, no motorbike, no hammock policy, though the film doesn’t specify.

Benjie and Blakey spend their time catching fish, drinking beer, and discussing the faults of Father Goddard. Blakey urges Benjie to play a prank on him: During confession, Benjie tells Goddard he had sex with his wildly-bearded drifter friend. “Blakey says we should experience everything,” explains Benjie, “then judge for ourselves.” Horrified, Goddard forbids Benjie from seeing Blakey again, then calls the local police. Like bluegrass-hating fascists, the police storm into Blakey’s camp, smash his banjo, and beat the poor strumming bastard senseless. By the time Benjie gets there, Blakey is awake but angry. He orders Benjie to leave, blaming him. Despondent, Benjie picks up a heavy stone and makes as if to hit Blakey. The film cuts. We see Benjie running frantically through the woods. What happened?

In confession, Benjie tells Goddard he killed Blakey. “I hit his head as hard as I could,” he says, sobbing. He couldn’t bear Blakey rejecting him, and he tells Goddard the body is buried in the woods. Goddard is alarmed, though still dour. When he finds the grave, he discovers a scarecrow with a jack-o’-lantern head--not a corpse. Blakey and some of the other boys from school are nearby, laughing: Another prank. Goddard is furious--and yes, extremely dour.

In confession the next day, Benjie claims he's now gone through with the murder: “I picked up a stone like I told you before. Only this time I hit him.” Goddard isn’t sure what to believe. He returns to the woods. There, he finds Blakey’s body. The man will never strum again. And yet, having learned of the murder in confession, Goddard is unable to alert the police.

You see, earlier in the film Goddard explained to his students, “The priest is an intermediary, a middleman between the penitent and almighty God. It is for this reason incidentally that the priest is bound to secrecy. Even, for example, if I told my priest I was tempted to murder someone tonight--even then the priest could only warn me my soul was in mortal danger.”

In other words, it’s wise to avoid heavy-handed foreshadowing in daily conversation. Goddard urges Benjie to turn himself in, but Benjie refuses. In fact, he confesses to Goddard his plan to murder Arthur Dyson, the school’s glasses-wearing, leg-brace-sporting outcast, who Goddard seems to hate as much as his students do. When Dyson disappears, Goddard’s dour exterior starts to crumble. Is Benjie’s murderous plan real or yet another hoax? Can he break his oath to God in order to save one of his flock?

Though Absolution is more of a character study than it is a thriller, there are actually quite a few interesting twists to the story. And all joking aside, Burton delivers a solid performance, as does David Bradley, who plays Arthur Dyson: You understand Goddard’s aversion to Dyson’s sycophantic, wheedling ways. Yet Dyson’s the most sympathetic character in the film. Really, he’s the only sympathetic character--which is Absolution’s greatest strength and it’s greatest weakness. It’s a film very much of its time: Dark, cynical and hopeless in the way only a film from the 70s about religious hypocrisy can be. At the very least a character like Father Goddard, who finds his most deeply-held beliefs coming into question as he tries to navigate unfamiliar territory, should engender some empathy. The film, however, has no such empathy for him. Sure, the seriousness of subject matter is surprising amid the hordes of vampires and ninjas found here in the Fifty Pack. But ultimately, Absolution is a little too dour for its own good.   

#12: Black Hooker

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 3: Side B
1974

What Would You Do If Your Mama Was A Hooker? So goes the tagline for Black Hooker, also known as Black Mama and Street Sisters. The best taglines--think In Space No One Can Hear You Scream or Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In the Water--are provocative. They pique your interest without revealing too much about the film itself. Often, they do little beyond establishing a general mood. What Would You Do If Your Mama Was A Hooker? is perhaps too straightforward. It’s less a tagline than it is a writing prompt for the screenwriter. Imagine if Alien had asked, What Would You Do If You Were Trapped On A Spaceship With A Horrible Monster? Now Write A Screenplay About That And Pitch It To A Movie Studio.

But then Black Hooker isn’t a sci-fi blockbuster. It’s a blaxploitation film, right? The luridly-rendered Pam Grier clone on the poster seems to suggest so. She Was Mean, the poster claims. Damn Mean! Sounds promising. Then the movie starts. We see Young Boy (Teddy Quinn), a little floppy-haired white kid running out of a rundown shack with Grandpa (Jeff Burton), an older black man, in hot pursuit. Grandpa catches up to Young Boy and grabs him by the collar.        

“Please love me, grandpa!” cries Young Boy. Grandma (Kathryn Jackson) shows up, shoos Grandpa away and gazes fondly into the eyes of Young Boy. Over the credits, we get a montage of Young Boy and Grandma strolling through a field of tall grass with their arms around one another. Any remaining hope that Black Hooker might turn into a funky action flick along the lines of Foxy Brown, Coffy or Cleopatra Jones are dashed the second the words “adapted for the screen from the stage play” appear on the screen.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a dialogue-heavy, largely plot-free family drama with sociopolitical overtones now and then. Theoretically speaking, that is. Unfortunately, Black Hooker botches the execution. Painted Woman (Sandra Alexander), the daughter of Grandma and Grandpa, shows up at the rundown shack to check in on Young Boy, her illegitimate son. She is, we quickly surmise, the black hooker of the title. Her parents, not surprisingly, don’t approve of her career. Grandpa is a preacher and Grandma is highly religious; both of them want their daughter to give up her life on the streets and take care of Young Boy.

“I gave you love,” Grandma tells Painted Woman, “and that’s more than I can say you’ve ever given this poor child.”

“What do you know about love?” says Painted Woman in the first of many heated, heavy-handed exchanges. It’s this sort of dialogue that bogs the film down. Perhaps it would play better on stage, where clunky dialogue can sometimes be redeemed by the immediacy of theater. Here, it just falls flat. The long, ponderous scenes of Painted Woman at work slow the film down even more.    

“Are you a man of action,” she asks one of her Caucasian clients, “or do you get your pleasure just looking at my black magnificence?”

“Why are you so hostile?” the client asks. When he leaves, Painted Woman’s pimp follows him down a hallway and smacks him around for what seems like hours, rivaling the many interminable slap-heavy scenes of violence in Fifty Movie Pack Project entry #8: Mad Dog. Next, we get a riveting scene of Grandma and Young Boy shopping for a suit. By the end of the film, Young Boy has grown into Older Boy (played by Timothy Bottoms look-alike Durey Mason) and has decided to track down his mother and force her to love him. There’s a sequence filmed entirely in sepia-tone for no apparent reason, some mild hallucinatory imagery, gratuitous slow-motion, and then Older Boy strangles Painted Woman to death. That, apparently, is his way of answering the question, What Would You Do If Your Mama Was A Hooker?

If only, amid his duties as director, writer, set decorator, production designer and art director, one-time auteur Arthur Roberson had found time to instill his film with some narrative drive and a bit of grace. The performances are good and the intention is admirable. A movie that attempts to tackle issues as complex and far-reaching as race, religion, class, family and sex with virtually no budget can‘t be all bad. Black Hooker just needs something else: A little subtlety, perhaps. Or maybe just a better tagline.        

#11: Jive Turkey

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 3: Side B
1974

The little-seen blaxploitation flick Jive Turkey is also known by the more colorful title Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes and the less politically-correct Get Nigger Rich on Number 666--which, depending on your point of view, is more confusing than it is offensive. “This Is A True Story,” an opening title informs the viewer. “Only the Names, Places, and Events Have Been Changed To Protect the Innocent.” By these loose, ambiguous, noncommittal standards, pretty much any film could be said to be a true story.

No matter. It’s 1956, or so nearly every character in the film would like us to believe. “This is 1956!” they are often heard to say, a claim that goes unsupported by the 70s era cars we see in the background, the slang, the haircuts and the tie-dyed poncho one guy is seen wearing in an early scene. Still, you have to admire this low-budget movie for even attempting a period setting. The story follows Pasha (played with conviction by Paul Harris), an African-American crime boss who controls the numbers racket in an unidentified Ohio city. His rival is Italian mobster Big Tony (Frank DeVoka).

“The narcotics business is in a slump,” explains Big Tony at an uneasy meeting between the two criminals. He wants the numbers game for himself.

“Numbers is my business,” says Pasha with a confident smirk.

Big Tony thinks for a moment. He needs to negotiate. “You can keep prostitution,” he offers. Pasha isn’t having any of it. Big Tony goes on to say that one of Pasha’s men is secretly working for him and that he--Big Tony--knows Pasha’s every move. Not only that, but there’s a contract out for a hit on Pasha from Big Tony’s bosses in Chicago--pretty forthcoming for a deceitful, nefarious mobster, but still Pasha refuses to give up the numbers. Next we see the mayor and his aides discussing their plan to eradicate Pasha's
gang. As in almost every single movie or television show ever made about organized crime, it’s an election year--1956, to be exact--and the mayor is determined to crack down in order to please his constituents, even if it means bending the rules himself.

It’s a story that’s probably inspired--at least in part--by the exploits of infamous Harlem mob boss Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, who was portrayed in the 2007 film American Gangster and provided the inspiration for 1997‘s Hoodlum. In other words, it’s pretty ambitious stuff for a b-movie--too ambitious, in the end. Jive Turkey devolves into a standard action movie, complete with back alley shootouts and car chases, as the cops and the Italian mob close in on Pasha’s numbers racket.

It’s standard, that is, except for the character of Serene, Pasha’s female assassin, who is lusted after by Big Tony’s flunkies and who dispatches them in ever more gruesome ways. In one scene, Serene poisons a guy, climbs on top of him and repeatedly slams the heel of her shoe into his eye, laughing maniacally as the camera lens is drenched with blood. It’s genuinely disturbing, something more fitting of a horror movie than a blaxploitation flick. That Serene is actually a man in drag is obvious to no one within the world of Jive Turkey--not even to Pasha, it seems. Are we, the audience, supposed to recognize that Serene is a man? I began to wonder.

Then, with a group of mobsters trailing her, Serene goes into her house, removes her wig, fake eyelashes and makeup, puts on a pair of glasses, a hat, and a suit and tie, and walks back out, transformed. She goes right up to the car where the mobsters are waiting, pulls out a cigar and asks for a light from the man behind the wheel. None of the mobsters recognize her. As she strolls away, we hear her trademark maniacal laugh. It’s a strange, subversive moment in an otherwise conventional film. What does it mean? Who knows?

#10: I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now?

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 3: Side A
1975

The animated title sequence and opening jazz score for I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? recalls, rather desperately, the Pink Panther series. No surprise, then, that Pete Sellers was originally cast in the lead role of Jordan Oliver. Unfortunately, Sellers suffered a heart attack before shooting began. The producers were unable to insure the actor and brought in Bob Dishy as a last-minute replacement. So it's a little ironic that a major plot point in the film concerns a life insurance policy. Is that life imitating low-art? Art imitating life insurance? Who knows?

The story opens on Jordan, caught embezzling $250,000 from his father-in-law’s company. That very same day his wife Clarice (Joanna Barnes) announces her plans to divorce him and cut off his allowance. Facing financial ruin, Jordan takes out a life insurance policy on Clarice for one million dollars with himself as the beneficiary. Then he hires local hitman Bobo (Bill Dana) to kill Clarice. The twist comes when it’s revealed the doctor who examined Clarice is a fraud, thereby invalidating the policy. Jordan sets out to stop the murder, but discovers Bobo has subcontracted the hit out to another assassin, who has subcontracted to yet another assassin, and so on. This sprawling cast of hitmen includes a doctor in monster makeup who talks like Bela Lugosi, a man in a nurse’s uniform, and Patlow, a broad Indian caricature played in tan-face by a white actor.

Director Steven Hillard Stern clearly intends this story to be incredibly madcap and zany, rather than the convoluted, pointless thing it is. Nearly every joke falls flat. Some stretch on and on only to end on the briefest, most embarrassing of punch lines. In one scene we see Jordan practicing a concerto on a grand piano for a charity ball that evening; soon it’s revealed a little person is playing the concerto on a tiny piano, rather than Jordan. Jordan’s plan is to hide the little person and his toy piano inside a bass drum that night and trick the guests into thinking he’s a master pianist.

“Just come in through the doggy door,” Jordan tells his cohort, “and watch out for the doggy doo.” 

That’s about as sophisticated as the film gets. And because it’s a comedy from the mid-seventies, there’s an inevitable, unfunny dig at that passing fad known as psychiatry.  

“If I told you I was going to kill my wife you wouldn’t call the police?” Jordan asks his therapist.

“I would not call the police, correct,” says the wild-haired, European-accented therapist. “I would let you kill her and then we would talk about it at the next session.

“And if I were to kill myself?” asks Jordan.

“That would be a different question,” replies the therapist. “You would not be able talk about it at the next session.”

Then a cuckoo clock goes off in the background. Since the movie isn’t nearly as funny or clever as it thinks it is, Jordan’s obsession with killing his wife is a little creepy. With better direction, subtler performances, a smarter screenplay, and a few decent jokes, this could be a decent black comedy--something along the lines of an early Mel Brooks picture. Instead, I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? is a long, unpleasant hour and a half spent with an unsympathetic, sociopathic, possibly psychopathic protagonist. Still, you can’t help but admire Bob Dishy’s straight-faced, unwavering commitment to every terrible gag he’s forced to take part in. Whether he truly believes in the character or whether he’s simply unwilling to show any doubt there’s something almost brave about his performance. The Indian characiture in tan-face? Not so much.


Anyone seen this dud? Would the presence of Peter Sellers have improved it? Or is it beyond saving? 

#7: Going Steady

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 2: Side B
1979

Going Steady opens on our protagonists--Benji, Huey and Bobby--cruising in their convertible through what looks like the classic-car-infested set of America Graffiti. It is, we presume, the 1950s.

“Hey now, look over there!” cries Huey. “There’s a good-looking girl!”

Soon after, the boys park the car and amble into a diner, where other youngsters are shaking their hips to the rock and roll blasting out of a jukebox. Huey snaps a girl’s bra strap. Uh oh, the viewer thinks. How integral will bra-snapping be to this plot? The viewer’s fears deepen as the boys pick up some girls at the diner, drive them out to the beach, strip naked and jump in the ocean, all the while trying to entice the girls to join them. Suddenly the girls’ boyfriends show up on motorcycles, snatch the boys’ clothes and speed off. Benji (Yftach Katzur), Huey (Zachi Noy) and Bobby (Jonathan Sagall) are forced to go home naked and face their disapproving parents, seeming to confirm the viewer's suspicion that Going Steady is yet another in the long tradition of films about the humiliation of young adulthood and the age old quest to get laid.

And yet it manages to rise above Porky’s and its countless rip-offs and sequels--Porky’s II: The Next Day, Porky’s III: The Day After Tomorrow, Porky’s IV: The Final Chapter, Porky’s V: A New Beginning, Porky’s VI: Jason Takes Angel Beach High School. The film leaves behind the silly gags to focus on Benji’s pursuit of his dream girl Tammy (Yvonne Michaels). He fakes a letter from the principal in order to get Tammy out of class. He holds up a sign asking Tammy if she’ll go out with him. He sits down across from her in a quiet library, pulls out a carrot, celery, bell pepper and other crunchy vegetables, and takes loud bites--much to the irritation of the other patrons. Tammy, however, is impressed, and agrees to go out with him. Yes, it’s still pretty silly, but there’s something charming about Benji and Tammy’s courtship. And as the movie progresses, their relationship deepens, they go through emotional highs and lows of young love, and, like the characters themselves, Going Steady seems to mature a little right before the viewer’s eyes.

But perhaps what distinguishes the film most of all is that, despite its American Graffiti-style milieu, Going Steady is actually set in Tel Aviv. It’s the second in the popular, long-running Lemon Popsicle series from Israel that predates Porky‘s and its ilk by quite a few years. In the Hebrew language version of the film, Benji, Huey and Bobby are Benzi, Yudale and Momo, respectively. Going Steady is simply a poorly-dubbed version of the original, Yotzim Kavua. Somehow, this adds another layer to what, at first glance, seems like your average teen sex-comedy.



Anybody else pleasantly surprised by Going Steady? Anybody seen the other films in the Lemon Popsicle series? Are they any good? How much bra-snapping is involved? Too little or not enough?

#3: The Creeper

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 1: Side B
1977

Obviously, the easiest way to enjoy the 50-pack is by lowering your expectations. That way a truly terrible film like Twister’s Revenge! will seem almost like a strange, noble failure, a completely forgettable piece of junk like Devil With Seven Faces will become an adequate time-waster, and half-way decent fare like The Creeper (also know as Rituals) will seem like some sort of little masterpiece. Outside the confines of the 50-Pack a horror movie like this might not warrant a second glance; but here, in this context, it’s pretty interesting.
  
The plot concerns five doctors on a trek in the Cauldron of the Moon, a remote wilderness area where, we’re told, the Indians believed the moon bumped into the earth. “The Cauldron’s in the middle of nowhere,” says the grizzled pilot who drops them off by hydroplane. Undeterred, the doctors arrange with the pilot to be picked up in seven days, hike a couple miles, and set up camp for the night.
  
Around the fire they discuss the possibility of starting a practice together, the merits of organic grafts and the morality of assisted suicide. Their doctor-ly banter gets a bit tiring after a while, but you have to appreciate that the filmmakers were trying to create an authentic rapport between these characters, who are all supposed to be old friends and colleagues. Not only that, but it’s refreshing in a horror movie to see people other than your typical libidinous teenagers. And, as the patient viewer will discover, this talk of morality becomes important later on.
  
In the morning, all the doctors shoes are mysteriously missing, except one pair--those belonging to DJ (Gary Reineke). He decides to go look for help while the others, left with no other choice, stay behind. But that night they discover on the outskirts of their camp a deer’s head impaled on a spike, planted there, it seems, as if part of some strange ritual. Who could’ve done such a thing? The Blair Witch wouldn’t come on the scene for another twenty years, so it’s anybody’s guess. Understandably freaked-out, the four remaining doctors wrap cloth around their bare feet, pack up their bags and set off into the woods, all the while being stalked by someone or--cue the ominous music--something.
  
This is where the movie gets interesting. At one point during their flight, the doctors stop to pose for a photograph--a decision that leaves them sitting ducks for their pursuer. And yet this foolish choice doesn’t feel like part of the trend in horror movies to have characters explore dark basements, undress at inopportune times or do any number of stupid, unnecessary things when they should be concentrating on getting the hell out of there. Here it feels somehow authentic. It’s part of human nature, even in extreme situations like this one, to take our own safety for granted. Who wouldn’t stop to snap a few quick photos of your exhausting, shoeless journey, if only to prove when you get home that it really did happen? That you might not make it home at all wouldn’t seem possible.    
  
Still later, there’s a very suspenseful scene in which the men have to cross a roaring river, the bottom of which is, unbeknownst to them, lined with bear traps. And as the film progresses, we come to understand that all the campfire talk of surgery, assisted suicide and morality was a way to show us what lengths each character is willing to go to survive. What you expect to be a low rent Canadian Deliverance when you first pop open your 50-pack and put the DVD in your player proves to be quite an effective little thriller. Now if only we could apply the same 50-pack formula of low-expectations to the rest of life we’d never be disappointed.



Anybody else pleasantly surprised by The Creeper? Was it too Canadian or not Canadian enough? Any recommendations for other obscure Deliverance knock-offs?

#1: Twister's Revenge!

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 1: Side A
1987

Most people don’t have particularly high-standards for movies about talking, computerized monster trucks. Yet no matter how low you set your expectations for the 1987 laugh-free comedy Twister’s Revenge!, it somehow finds a way to startle you with its sheer ineptitude. You sense this as soon as the title flashes on the screen and you see that big, bold, yellow exclamation point. Such punctuation in movie titles is meant to suggest excitement, a boundless comic energy, wacky shenanigans to come. Airplane! remains the high-water mark of the exclamation point school of comedy. Hot Shots! is pretty good, too, while the exclamation point in Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! is sardonic and purposely incongruous. The exclamation point in Twister’s Revenge!, however, only punctuates the film’s desperation. An ellipses trailing off into nothingness would do a better job of establishing the tone.

The title fades, the soundtrack fills with cheesy, fumbling power-chords that sound like they were learned the day of the recording, and we are treated to an extended montage of a dirty, low-rent county fair. If you ever wanted to see sweaty, unshaven men in trucker hats riding the Tilt-a-Whirl and clambering around in the sort of grimy ball-pits typically reserved for children under four feet, then Twister’s Revenge! is the movie for you. For the rest of us, it’s a bit unsettling, especially when we realize the three dimwitted men--Kelly (David Alan Smith), Dutch (Jay Gjernes) and Bear (R. Richardson Luka)--are our protagonists (or maybe antagonists, it’s never quite clear). During a long scene in which we get to watch the trio watch a monster truck show, they suddenly, for no apparent reason become suspicious of the headlining truck, Mr. Twister.   

"Go down and check that out," Kelly, the ringleader, orders Dutch.

"Me?" Dutch whines. "I can't."
  
"Why not?" Kelly wants to know.
  
"Because I split my pants," Dutch confesses--a comedic high never again reached by Twister's Revenge!. Not only that, but like Ophelia's death in Hamlet this great pants-splitting tragedy happens off-stage--a truly odd choice for a lowbrow comedy. Imagine if a Three Stooges short consisted of Larry, Moe and Curly sitting down and calmly discussing how they had once poked each other in the eyes at a different, unseen location.
  
Before we can dwell on this any further, we are introduced to Sherry (Meredith Orr), scientist and inventor, who humbly explains to her fiancé Dave (Dean West) how her creation Mr. Twister works.

"All I did," she says, "was integrate the artificial intelligence system with the internal logic unit."

"Enough of that computer talk," Jack replies. "You know it gives this cowboy a headache."
  
Imagine if Sherry applied that great mind of hers to combating global warming, curing cancer or simply unlocking the mysteries of the universe, rather than to monster truck technology. But alas, as with Stephen Hawking and his robotic jet-ski Sir Tsunami, her talents are wasted. As it is, Kelly, Dutch and Bear decide to kidnap Sherry, apparently in hopes of getting Mr. Twister for ransom, though it's never quite clear what their intentions are. Soon they've surrounded the rusting camper-van where Sherry and Dave, now wedded, are spending their honeymoon, consummating their marriage beneath a pile of musty blankets--which is vaguely unsettling. In movies this low-budget you sometimes get the impression everyone involved in the production is related, so watching these two kiss is like walking in on two of your cousins secretly making-out at a family reunion.
  
This doesn’t deter Kelly, Dutch and Bear, however, who enact their master plan, which entails shaking the camper van really hard until the back door flies open and the couple inside tumble out. Sherry is captured in the ensuing confusion and hidden in an abandoned mineshaft. Dave and Mr. Twister must then team up to track her down, a quest that consists entirely of Mr. Twister racing across flat, barren, muddy landscapes and occasionally rolling over the rows of conveniently-placed, dilapidated Cadillacs that appear out of nowhere. At one point Bear, running for his life, ducks into an outhouse--helpfully marked Shit House--solely so Mr. Twister can run it over. Not only that, but much of this action is shot in fast-motion, which is to lazy comedy-filmmaking what the exclamation point is in Twister‘s Revenge!: An act of desperation. When in doubt, the old adage goes, get zany.
  
Unfortunately, bad comedy doesn’t offer the same campy pleasures that bad sci-fi and bad horror movies do. For aficionados of the so-bad-it’s-good style of cinema, the more inept the dialogue, acting and plot, the greater the laughs. For proof, look no further than the other titles in the oeuvre of Twister's Revenge! director Bill Rebane. He’s responsible for Monster-a-Go Go and The Giant Spider Invasion, two ultra low-budget turkeys that provided some of the best riffing-material for the crew of the Satellite of Love in Mystery Science Theater 3000. You can’t help but laugh at the lack of competence in such movies. But how can you laugh at the lack of anything to laugh at in a film like Twister’s Revenge!? What’s funny about the unfunny?
  
Yet the movie isn’t a complete waste. Midway through there is the sort of odd, disconcerting moment that I search for in films like Twister’s Revenge!, where the terms good and bad become almost meaningless. It’s a musical interlude by Lulu and the Lovebirds, set in a grungy biker bar where three be-spandexed women of varying degrees of doughy-ness gyrate halfheartedly to a weak rock-guitar noodling. It's so embarrassing for everybody involved--even the viewer--you can only stare in disbelief. Is this hilarious? you wonder. Depressing? Hilariously depressing? Or depressingly hilarious?   

At this point the filmmakers almost seem to be challenging you not to ridicule them: So what if we're a bunch of unappealing, unfunny people who made a tedious, mind-numbing comedy in the late 80s? Does that give you the right to mock us? Does that make you better than us?

We, the audience, can no longer criticize Twister’s Revenge! as if it were made in a vacuum. Real, live human beings created this ungainly thing. They took a risk and failed so miserably it’s almost noble. Not bad for a movie about a talking, computerized monster truck.



Any thoughts on Twister's Revenge!? Anybody else seen this dud? Did it meet your expectations for a movie about a talking, computerized monster truck? Did it exceed them?