14 Years Of NUTS4R2

Lockdown Memories

14th Anniversary Blog Post

When this post goes live, it will be exactly 14 years since I started this blog, initially because I was feeling a lack of connection with certain other elements of my life (who or what will remain nameless here but... some things never change). It’s also, however, two days short of being the 4th anniversary of what was, for many people of my generation, a very unusual, seemingly quite unbelievable and surreal event in our lives... the first UK Government lockdown in response to the deadly Coronavirus outbreak which was whittling down various countries populations.

Now I’m not here to argue that Coronavirus wasn’t a terrible thing. So many people died and the worldwide response to the disaster was fairly tragic and badly thought out... destroying or changing people’s lives forever. I know some people take the view that the UK government were having to deal with something they were unprepared for (and that’s a different can of worms to begin with, lots of warnings by scientists for decades and an underwhelmingly slow and ill conceived response to the situation did not help) but, I personally can’t let the government off the hook so easily. For almost the entirety of the first year of lockdown (and I say this as someone who has never before taken an interest in politics), I just assumed the people in power were a sad combination of naivety and stupidity and couldn’t work out what they were doing there. Then, slowly, it dawned that these were all corrupt idiots who were not interested in helping people at all and were just in it to make money. They are criminals, for sure, there’s no getting around that.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I wanted to say a few words about the actual positive aspects of lockdown... because I think they are important and I think our government has not learned anything from the situation or, most likely, just want to ignore the benefits to the majority of people. What a surprise eh?

Now don’t get me wrong. I know a certain amount of the population, presumably those suffering from severe extroverted personalities, found lockdown hard. I know some friends had some problems with their youngsters which intrigued me because, when I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to not have to go to school and certainly not have to socialise with other people. But some people didn’t reap the same benefits of the lockdown lifestyle that others did and I think it’s worth remembering those unexpected perks because I reckon 80% of the UK population could still be better off from them if the UK government wasn’t so greedy and corrupt (and it’s certainly not just the UK government, for sure).

Okay, so for me, lockdown had so many benefits... and for my blog too, it has to be said.

I have elderly parents and that meant that, working from home, I could keep and eye on them and come running if either of them got into trouble. Something I can’t do again now with a two buses or more (depending on traffic) journey home. It goes without saying that I was saving thousands of pounds by not travelling to work, of course. Not to mention clawing back two to three hours a day for myself when I would normally be travelling. And I was getting through roughly a week’s work in a day by not being at the office... so could respond quicker to any emergencies that came up in a quick and efficient manner. Which was handy for people.

And there were the health benefits too. A colleague of mine said that she’d never been fitter than during the lockdown and I have to agree. The extra time saved meant I had time to go out for a 20 minute walk every night, straight after work. I was borderline diabetic when I went into lockdown... within a year I was completely out of it again. Now I’m back in the office my diabetes and other health issues are worse than they’ve ever been. And I get barely a half an hour a night which I can positively call ‘my own time’ on a week day.

But lastly and perhaps more relevantly in regards to this blog, being in lockdown meant I had time to watch movies after work and then write about them. Because there was more money saved, I ordered expensive box sets from Severin in America and the Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set (start here with that one) really captured my imagination and reignited my love of film. As a result, I still have well over 200 written reviews backlogged and waiting to be tweaked and published. I got through a lot of movies in that travel time and I felt inspired and uplifted to be exploring cinema again... more than I’d felt in a while.

So those, I think, for the record... were my main takeaways from lockdown. And my conclusion is... everyone who is capable of working from home should be... never mind the stupid government edicts and the businesses who want us all to suffer in an office again. If these entities were truly about looking after the people and treating them right, then many of us would be allowed to work from home and, to boot, the climate crisis may not be hanging around our necks so much either. Remember going out in lockdown for a walk and being confronted with no cars on the roads... just fresher air. The less cars on the road (because people are capable of working from home) means less pollution and other benefits. It’s a win/win but, unfortunately, the members of parliament just want to make the economy work for them, so they can continue lining their own pockets with the benefits of other people’s misery. Or, at least, that’s the way it seems to me.

Anyway, those are my memories and take aways from lockdown and, as always, that just leaves me to say ‘thank you for reading’ my anniversary post. Especially to those who have been with me all 14 years to date.

When Dracula Met Frankenstein

Sherman Fountain

When Dracula Met Frankenstein:
My Years Making Drive-In
Movies With Al Adamson
by Sam Sherman
Murania Press ISBN: 9798530794858

What a great book!

Just a quick shout out to something which will be a nice addition, I’m sure, to many a film enthusiast’s book shelves. You may remember when, a couple of years ago, Severin films put out a very pricey but, as it turned out, worth every penny boxed edition of 32 Al Adamson films, as part of a package to accompany the documentary movie Blood And Flesh - The Reel Life And Ghastly Death Of Al Adamson (which I reviewed here). Well, I went through that boxed edition of Adamson films and, though I found some titles to be terrible, I found others to be pretty good and sometimes beyond that but, whatever I thought about them (and I reviewed every one of them for this blog), going through that wonderful set reminded me of just how great an art form cinema could be and it revitalised my slowly waning interest in the medium.

Now, as I said, you can find my reviews of those on this blog and you can check for a title in the second ‘movie’ section of my site index (link at top left) or, if you want to go a more direct way, I also wrote an article specifically about the box, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, as a bookmark section, from which all my reviews are linked... and you can access that here.

As I waded into the set, two things bacame apparent and impressed me. One was that Adamson’s films were more often than not produced by Sam Sherman, who seemed a really sweet guy and came across in all the interviews as someone very knowledgable about the world of film, demonstrating a genuine love and affection for movies in general. He seemed like someone you would want to hang out with in a bar and buy drinks for so he won’t stop telling fascinating, illuminating stories about his decades in the business.

The other thing which came across to me was that, heck, I really needed to read a decent biography, or at least an enthusiastic book, on the films of Al Adamson and so I looked for one on Amazon and various online book stores but couldn’t find anything in print at the time. There was apparently one published in 1998 called Schlock-o-Rama: Films of Al Adamson but, yeah, good luck even finding a copy now, even at the ludicrous price I’m sure it would go for if anyone had a copy to sell. Well, that was a year ago so, imagine my surprise when I’d found out that, not only had a book which was much of what I wanted been published since I’d last looked but, it took the form of a memoir by Sam Sherman, about the films he’d produced with Adamson (and others) at Independent International Pictures.

When Dracula Met Frankenstein, subtitled My Years Making Drive-In Movies With Al Adamson, is a valuable, well written tome from somebody who’s about as no nonsense and as fair a person running a business as you can get. Going out of his way to help people along in the process of his career and championing the art form while still managing to make tonnes of money from... well, if you ask me... from some unlikely pictures. Sherman managed to make something out of both his own productions and others peoples (as I’ve talked about in some of my reviews of... let’s call them ‘rescued films’) and is a genuine success story, capturing various niche markets as and when required.

The various forewords to the book tell it all in terms of Sam’s character, with the people writing those intros singling him out as a nice, honest human being (which really comes across in both this book and various interviews on the Severin set, not to mention his little audio section on the Dracula VS Frankenstein soundtrack CD). And cinephiles will have a ball with many of the anecdotes on offer here.

The book is split into two sections. The first half being a look at his personal history with ‘the age of celluloid’ with tales of Al’s dad, cowboy star/director/producer Denver Dixon, how Sam himself got started on the road to producer by re-releasing an old 1930s Hollywood production of The Scarlet Letter in the 1960s, how he hired out equipment from the late great Kenneth Strickfadden (there’s a book about him I reviewed right here), how he worked with the infamous Hemisphere Pictures and so on. And really great stories I’d never heard before such as how he managed to generate income for the old Hammer films adaptation of the TV serial The Abominable Snowman (reviewed by me here) and, of course, how some of those Adamson flicks like Brain Of Blood and Nurse Sherri turned out like they did (and just why they did too... which was an eye opener). He even had famous artists like Neal Adams (who passed away last week) and Basil Gogos designing and painting promotional posters, sleeves and whatever else was needed to give a movie a first run lift or, often, a new lease of life when required. In fact, there’s a very interesting section which explains the early days of the sudden, burgeoning Home Video market and just how he was able to ‘more than stay afloat’ with some of his old titles.

The second section of the book is a rundown of chapters devoted, alphabetically, to various films he’s been involved with (mostly but not limited to, working with Adamson) and, as you would expect, he has quite a few stories to tell of just what happened on those productions. Blazing Stewardesses which, I’m sorry Sam, I really didn’t like compared to their original The Naughty Stewardesses, certainly makes more sense now in terms of just why the heck it ended up being the film it is now, for sure. Also, the inside story on just what happened with the ending of Girls For Rent is kinda interesting.

There’s also more than a hint in the book that Sam is working on a second book of memoirs (which I’ll be first in line for if it’s publicised better than this one was... I need to know about it before I can buy it) of all the other things which he’s been involved with outside of IIP. Frankly, there’s an unexplained photograph of Sam in the book (it’s also loaded with plenty of photos relating to the various stories, if that’s your thing) where he’s standing with the one and only Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe and, yeah, I really want to hear about that meeting, for sure.

As you can see, I had a real blast with When Dracula Met Frankenstein and I’m sure glad Sam’s still around to share his stories. This is another of those essential film books every cineaste shouldn’t be without, as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps Tom Weaver, a film historian whose name I tend to associate with his expert knowledge on the classic Universal horror movies of the 30s - 50s, says it best when he shares an anonymous quote that... “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” That’s a really nice way of putting things and I couldn’t agree more. When Dracula Meets Frankenstein is available now from Amazon and, as the saying goes, all reputable book stores and... I sure hope Sam gets his skates on writing that second book. I want to read it sooner, rather than later.

Lost

Dog Days

Lost
USA 1982
Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Although it’s not the last footage he shot for a potential movie, Lost is the last film that Al Adamson directed that got any kind of commercial release and it’s one of those films which seems to have been missing in action for some time. Indeed, the 16mm 1.37:1 print which Severin have scanned in and preserved for this, the final stop in their brilliant Blu Ray boxed set, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, isn’t in the best shape when compared to some of the other, much older films in this collection.

The film carries on in the direction that Adamson found himself going at this point in his life, with a pleasant and heartwarming (at least in its intention) family film, much like the far superior Carnival Magic was (reviewed here) but, for my money, this just wasn’t as engaging a film as that one.

The film stars the main male protagonist of that previous film... sorry, I meant the main male ‘human’ protagonist of that film, Don Stewart as Jeff Morrison, a new husband from a family who has just been divorced. Playing his new wife is none other than Sandra Dee as Penny Morrison (yes, that Sandra Dee, the once teen star immortalised in a song from Grease decades after her time in the spotlight) and the film is about both them and the real main protagonists of the picture, her eleven year old daughter Buddy (played by Sheila Newhouse) and their dog Skipper (played by Skipper The Dog).

The family have just moved to the mountainous wilderness of Utah to start a farm in a beat up old shack to make a fresh start for themselves. And it goes through several clichés you would expect from that set up... Buddy is not getting on well with her ‘new father’ and missing her divorced dad, the whole ‘town folks having a hard time trying to start a farm’ situation but being befriended by the locals, the kid being teased at school and, the old classic, helping out on the neighbouring farm and rescuing the horses during a fire.

And then, around half way through the film, Buddy runs off with Skipper and gets lost in the mountains for three days while her family worry about her and join various search parties to try and rescue her. More clichés, of course, such as being washed away in a river, reuniting with her dog, catching her own fish, nearly being killed by a cougar but escaping in a similarly perilous river and ultimately befriending an old man in the wilderness, who is a guest appearance by the one and only Jack Elam.

Of course, all is well in the end but the film is just a whole lot more clumsier than I would expect from even Adamson, with some choppy editing which I suspect is as much to do with not getting coverage on the shots and scenes as it is to do with anything else. He and his cinematographer do try though and there are some interesting shots within the smaller aspect ratio which are well done, such as where they use the cross sections of big window frames from outside the cabin to frame the face of one of the actors in one square while another actor stands way behind and to the left, taking up the length of two squared off window sections, thus pushing the depth of the shot. So, yeah, there’s nice stuff in it but it mostly just felt sloppily done, I have to say.

The acting was all pretty good though. Probably the best one in it was Skipper The Dog although, you do get that common thing happening in canine starring movies where the dog is looking off shot to their owner, waiting for a visual cue as to what they have to do next in the scene (this seems to happen with humans in porn movies a lot too, from what I can remember). In fact, there’s one annoying moment when Buddy and Skipper are on their lonesome on a mountain where, if you check out the bottom left corner of the shot, you can see the shadow of the dog’s owner moving around from off frame.

The music is a bit too syrupy and generic for my liking and, truth be told, it kinda works against the images in some ways. I couldn’t find a composer's credit so I’m guessing the producers used needle drops from a music library for this one, like a fair few of Adamson’s past films. It’s not something which stays with you in any way and I certainly couldn’t find a uniting theme or connection to any of the pieces used throughout the course of the movie.

And I’m not sure I’ve got too much more to say about Lost other than I’m wondering if it’s a somehow cursed film because this was the last released feature film for Al Adamson, Sandra Dee, Ken Curtis, William Kerwin and Sheila Newhouse (as the eleven year old Buddy, it was also her first screen role and she did quite well so I don’t know why nobody used her again). It’s not a film I would really recommend to anybody but it is a milestone for me because this means I’ve finally watched the huge boxed set of Adamson’s films that Severin put out (and sold out of fairly quickly) last year. Tomorrow, I hope to put up one final review which will serve as both an overview of the box contents plus an index link to my reviews for all the other films to be found in this Severin edition (for anyone who wants to read through them all).

Nurse Sherri

Sherri Bobbins

Nurse Sherri
aka Black Voodoo
USA 1978
Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Bizarre spoilers ensue.

Wow... that Al Adamson guy keeps surprising me. I watched Nurse Sherri on the same day that I watched his bizarre musical sci-fi sex comedy Cinderella 2000 (reviewed here) and, believe me, Nurse Sherri was an even stranger experience, tonally, than the former.

So if you look at the trailers for Nurse Sherri you will be sold a film about the demonic possession of a young nurse in the style of something like The Exorcist and... well, it’s certainly a horror movie of sorts but, for one thing, if you’re looking for a scary movie then this isn’t it. And for another, well, let me describe the first few scenes of the movie for you here.

First up we have another animated title sequence similar to those adorning the openings of a lot of Adamson’s films involving various photos and images moved around. And my first thought as I was watching this is that the score, which continues over various scenes throughout the movie, sounded way too old for a 1970s horror movie. At first I thought it was just library music except I also realised I recognised the tune. A quick trip to the IMDB confirmed my suspicions... the film seems to be needle drop scored with some of Dominic Frontiere’s music to the old sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits.

Anyway, the film starts with some scenes from many reshoots Adamson took part in to expand the character of an old ‘occult specialist’ who dies on an operating table early in the movie. There is a sequence shot in the desert where he and a bunch of ‘faithful’ friends of a dead person attempt to raise the person back from death over the space of a number of days. Alas, instead of raising the recently deceased gentleman, the guy collapses as if possessed. We then get his death scene at hospital as Nurse Sherri, played by Jill Jacobson, watches as her doctor boyfriend Peter, played by Geoffrey Land, fails to save his life. And this is where this horror movie takes a bizarre and strange turn...

Following on from this we have a full on naked sex scene where Sherri and Peter are at it for a considerably longer time than you would expect from a scene in any other horror movie. It’s not shy about what it’s showing either. Okay, I thought, this was a mite unusual but, then... after the two are recovering, Sherri asks the good doctor what his strangest sexual experience was. We then get a long flashback to him in his younger days, as he attempts to give a lecture to a class full of students while one of them is giving him a hidden blow job from under his lectern.Wait, what? After a while we go back to Sherri and Peter on the bed and then it’s his turn to ask Sherri what her strangest sexual encounter was... at which point we flash back again to a poolside scene where Sherri is seduced in a lesbian sex scene. Well, this has got to be one of the most ‘off the point’ horror films I’ve ever seen. This is all compounded by another scene when we get back to the hospital and a man is nervous about having an operation. So one of the nurses removes her clothing and starts sexing him up to relax him. So far, this had not been the spectacle of demonic terror I was expecting, to tell you the truth.

After a while, Sherri’s best friend Nurse Tara, played by the incomparable Adamson regular Marilyn Joi, turns up and goes to look in on an all star American football player who has been blinded. It doesn’t take long, of course, for her to remove her clothes and start boning up on the game with him.

Now, in between these unusual sex scenes, there are actually scenes which carry the demonic plot forward. Later scenes with flashbacks explain that the old man who died on the hospital bed has possessed Sherri, which kind of makes sense since every now and again she’ll accidentally let her demon show by talking in ‘croaky old man’s voice’ courtesy of some dubbing. However, we also see a scene from much later than the hospital scene where some bizarrely animated... I can only call it glowy slime sludgy stuff... crawls onto her body and kind of seeps into her. What this has to do with the old occult geezah I have no idea but pretty soon, presumably as a result of this bizarre phenomenon, Sherri starts turning up in unexpected places and doing strange and ‘plot questionable’ killings.

For instance, she’ll turn up at the mini ranch of a retired ‘cowboy hat wearing’ doctor and, for no reason whatsoever and in a scene which has played out, content wise, in at least two other Adamson movies... she sticks a big pitchfork through his back before driving all the way back to hospital again. And it goes on like this for a while, with little inserts of almost non-sequitur horror scenes, surrounded by scenes where everyone seems to think they are in a softcore, sexy nurse movie.

Luckily, Tara’s blinded football star patient had a voodoo priestess for a grandmother and, when everyone starts talking about how strange Nurse Sherri has been lately... like turning up with blood all over her hands and face and speaking like an old man... he tells them that they have to dig the old man up from his grave and burn his body to release his hold on the titular nurse. Which they do, just about saving Peter who is about to get hacked to death by Sherri, wielding two machete’s after she has just killed her carer. Why Sherri has so many framed photographs of different breeds of dogs in her apartment is never explained to anyone’s satisfaction nor, indeed, even questioned by anyone.

And although things don’t end as happily as they could for Sherri, most people in the movie get a slightly happier ending. It’s a strange film though and I honestly thought that Adamson had done another patchwork job on this one, where he’d maybe started off shooting a sexy nurse film due to Roger Corman’s recent success at kick starting that genre and then decided a third of the way through the shoot that they were going to do a horror movie instead but, no, according to the section of the accompanying booklet in Severin’s amazing Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray boxed set, the plan was actually to shoot a horror/sexy nurse hybrid from the start. So colour me baffled. Also, though, the description of the film mentioned in the booklet also mentions some scenes shot in 35mm which are curiously absent from this original 16mm cut of the movie... so I don’t know if those sequences are lost or have turned up elsewhere.

Either way, if you want to see one of the most tonally bizarre movies that Adamson has done (and if you’ve read some of my Adamson reviews lately you’ll know he directed or doctored some curious hybrids in the course of his career), then Nurse Sherri would be my recommendation for that kind of experience. Really pleased I saw this one.

Cinderella 2000

Ball Gown Down

Cinderella 2000
USA 1977 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Once again, Severin’s wonderful Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, highlights another movie by the genre chameleon that, while not exactly a masterpiece, is certainly something completely different to his other films. This is from a time when films such as Flesh Gordon and Alice In Wonderland - An X-Rated Musical Fantasy were making quite a splash at the box office and, while not a hardcore sex film, Adamson’s response to these films was the musical science fiction sex comedy Cinderella 2000. It hit theatres more or less within a week or two of the very first Star Wars film and, I don’t know if this was a successful production (probably was, knowing Adamson’s low budgets and box office takings) but I’m sure it wasn’t the huge cash cow that George Lucas’ similarly space themed epic was.

After the usual kind of animated title sequence of photos being moved around on screen, something which is standard for a lot of Adamson’s films, we have a shot which is reminiscent of the ‘procured shot’ in Adamson’s earlier Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here) in that Adamson freezes the frame so he can show a view screen on the image. Appearing in the telecast is The Controller of the 2047 society, reminding the people of the world about their rules and filling the audience in on the basic premise. A world where ‘fornication’ is illegal due to overpopulation and sex is only permitted, by computer generated lottery, with Tom Prince (played by Vaughn Armstrong)... this version of the tale’s ‘Prince Charming’, who looks pretty much like Flash Gordon, it has to be said.

We then see a couple of sex scenes broken up by law enforcer Roscoe The Robot, who takes two of the prisoners, wearing their restraining bubble wrap, to be shrunken down to doll size for six months as punishment for their sexing. Actually, it’s been so long that almost anyone in this society did the deed that the couple under arrest were studying stick figure drawings in order to work out how to do it in the first place. When the lady is shrunken down to small size, she is literally a Barbie doll in someone’s hand until you get the close up shot where she’s played by the actress again.

And then, midst this backdrop, we pretty much get a futurised, sexed up version of Cinderella, in a society where sex is outlawed by an impotent controller figure and people who get ‘the hornies’ are taken away to a clinic for treatment, where they get zapped by a ray for discouragement... unless it doesn’t work, in which case they just get sexed up. This, of course, makes no sense but I don’t think we’re supposed to be paying much attention to the plot anyway.

Into this we have main protagonist Cindy (played by Catharine Burgess), her two sisters Stella (played by Adina Ross) and Bella (played by Bhurni Cowans) and her mother, the widow (played by Renee Harmon)... who keeps coming down with ‘the hornies’. We also have Jay B. Larson playing the ‘fairy godfather’ who looks like he’s in his late 30s or 40s and, it’s kind of telling that his next movie was playing a lead ‘teenager’ in Adamson’s Sunset Cove (reviewed here).

And it’s a silly film with bad jokes (they even throw in the “Hey Stella” moment from A Streetcar Named Desire), cheap sets, a terrible temper tantrum robot and some truly awful sex scene choreography. I mean, honestly, one guy is riding a girl in missionary position and he’s completely missing the target by a mile, in fact... because of the angle of the camera, you can see his penis just scraping along a sheet when it’s certainly supposed to be somewhere else from the way the couple are acting. Also, the sight of this lonesome member does nothing to communicate that the character is performing his scene with any sense of enthusiasm, if you know what I mean.  

That being said, a lot of the girls make for some good eye candy and Burgess and Larson seem to be doing some good acting in this. Indeed, Burgess seems to be the only one acting really naturally here and Larson is just having a great time waving his magic wand (no, shockingly enough it’s is not a euphemism here) and fixing it so Cindy can go to the ball... or at least go down on a couple.

Another plus is that, despite the cheapness of it, some of the cinematography is pretty good. There’s a wonderful shot in the forest, for example, when Cindy is framed on the wide, scope aspect ratio in the negative space made from the overlapping diagonals of the jagged branches. There’s even a split screen sequence in one of the musical numbers, at one point. Also, the songs themselves such as Doin’ Without and We All Need Love are actually pretty good and catchy.  

Other things which are interesting about this production is that sometimes characters break the fourth wall... such as when Roscoe The Robot comments that “All they talk about in this movie is sex, sex, sex” before breaking into song. Or the scene where a turned on Snow White is moaning about not getting any attention before one of the seven dwarfs, played by Adamson regular Angelo Rossitto, moans at her that this isn’t her movie... before the other six dwarves all chip in to help Snow White fulfil her desires (yeah, it totally goes there, in its own softcore way). As an addendum to that, the fairy tale Cinderella does exist in this version, as the lead character is reading it in the forest scene.

It does get quite surreal at times but this isn’t a bad thing, although I won’t even begin to describe what I shall call the ‘human bunnies’ scene. It does get kind of ‘off putting’ sometimes, though, when one of the characters breaks into song and, more often than not, the person dubbing them sounds nothing like the actor or actress when they are speaking.

The film is not too hard to sit through, though and it’s even quite engaging at times as various shenanigans, sexual or otherwise, all lead to the final sequences where Tom Prince, after having sex with all the ladies of the land to find Cindy, his ‘perfect fit’ so to speak... is whisked away by the Fairy Godfather to see the controller, whom Cindy cures of impotence with the powers of her special blow job skills. Much rejoicing is held throughout the land, an earlier song is revisited in a montage of universal happiness and the credits roll.

I don’t have anything else to offer here other than I was disappointed that, bearing in mind it’s a musical, I couldn’t find any kind of commercial soundtrack release, on CD or otherwise, for this movie (which seems to be a thing with Adamson directed movies, to be honest, so far I only have two CD soundtracks from his films). Would I recommend Cinderella 2000... well, it’s certainly not for everybody but there are some people I know who would enjoy the heady mixture of the ‘so bad it’s good’ vibe and the buxom lasses seen frolicking in the movie. Maybe one to check out with your tongue stuck firmly in your cheek (or possibly someone else’s cheek, who knows?).

Sunset Cove

Cove Story

Sunset Cove
USA 1978 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

One of the unexpected, somewhat dubious pleasures of slowly working my way through Severin’s beautiful Al Adamson box set is that there are a few films which are so bad that, once they’re over, you can congratulate yourself that you both survived the ordeal and that you never have to sit through them ever again. Sunset Cove, not to be mistaken for the similarly titled... erm... Sunset Cove from the same year... is just such a film.

I’d like to say that Adamson’s one and only teenage sex comedy was riding the bandwagon success of Porky’s... another film I hate in a genre which I am loathe to watch. However, this film pre-dates Porky’s by a few years and even the only slightly less famous Lemon Popsicle was produced the same year as this one so... maybe not so much riding a wave as much as helping kick start a popular genre. Despite the unbelievable success of Sunset Cove when it was released a year after production, however... it does nothing to change the fact that it’s a pretty terrible film.

It starts off with shots of people frolicking on a beach and then we are plunged into the last day of term, where two rival factions of teenagers break for their summer holidays. I don’t really know what this college is doing though because, honestly, this bunch mostly look just a little too old to be playing these kind of characters. However, the fact that they all seem a little older and wiser than the parts written on the page doesn’t stop them from acting like complete idiots and doing all the teenager clichés perpetuated on the general public by many a Hollywood movie.

That is to say, they constantly play pranks on the local police enforcement and other authority figures, get drunk (strangely not high, which is interesting), have lots of meaningless sex with each other and generally make a nuisance of themselves. If there’s an empty swimming pool in a scene... you know somebody will be pushed in. If there’s someone who looks even older than the... let’s call them ‘seasoned teenagers’ shall we? Well then they’re quite likely to lose their trousers. If there’s a gal in a shot, it’s more than likely you will see what she’s got under her top before many scenes have gone by.

So, yeah, the usual obnoxious teen hijinks ensue and then, somehow, a plot suddenly turns up and we have the mayor supporting a local building developer to build a bunch of condominiums on the teens’ treasured beach. So the film suddenly becomes about, not just playing pranks on authority figures but actively trying to combat them. And all the stereotypes are in place... the local meathead who really has a heart of gold (played by Bill Nuckols, who played Hawkman in Legends Of The Superheroes, reviewed here), the nice girl who doesn’t let all the partying go to her head as much as the others and, of course, the brainy nerd who isn’t above allowing himself to be corrupted by the other ‘over the hill’ teens’ need to party but who is also studying law... thus allowing the obvious, last minute solution to everyone’s problems to evolve in an almost credible way. Also, enabling part of that final solution, is a cameo appearance by Adamson veteran John Carradine as a retired judge, who helps put the brainy guy on the right track and ensured he gets an audience to combat the mayor and his allies.

And, even with many topless actresses thrown in for good measure, the film is not a fun watch by any stretch of the imagination (although I guess it hit a certain zeitgeist the year it was released, for sure). It gets especially gruelling with a long montage sequence as the kids whip the local community up by wearing t-shirts, painting signs and demonstrating on the beach. It’s a pretty interminable sequence and, just when you think you’ve seen the back of it, some kid with a band gets up on a stage and starts singing a song about “Save Our Beach”, ensuring that the damned montage goes on and on and on.

Sunset Cove quickly resolves itself when the time for all the padding scenes has reached the point where a respectable running time is ensured but, honestly, it’s a painful 87 minutes at best. I’m sorry for the short review but I expect I should probably stop here as I have nothing really good to say about this one and certainly wouldn’t be silly enough to recommend it to anyone. It’s mediocre at best but, most of the time, it’s at its worst.

Death Dimension

Get Sakata

Death Dimension
aka Freeze Bomb
USA 1978 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: There’s a ‘villain reveal’ in here by way of a spoiler.

I’ve been wanting to watch Al Adamson’s Death Dimension for a while now... possibly since before I even knew who Al Adamson was. After the slightly cheap but immensely entertaining Jim Kelly vehicle Black Samurai that Adamson directed (and which I reviewed here) I was really up for watching this one. Alas, asides from a few silly points the film is, sadly, not a patch on Black Samurai and it would be a bit of an understatement to say it disappointed somewhat.

Asides from eschewing the flashier Adamson titles, the film starts off with credits over footage which, I guess, is actually quite impressive. A doctor cuts into the forehead of an actress in close up as she tries to keep still and implants a microdot in her. It actually looks like he’s doing it for real and all I can say is that it’s an impressive looking prosthetic to be able to do that. Similarly, when the thing comes out later in the film... it still doesn’t look fake.

The doctor finishes his surgery and tells the lady to run while he distracts his boss with the test of the new scientific invention which he’d created as a weather control device to end drought. However, the film’s primary villain is using it as a ‘freeze bomb’ and we see it being tested on his prisoners. It basically explodes and then, in the area around the prisoners, it starts snowing until they freeze to death. If that sounds pretty lame, let me assure you, it’s cheaply done and looks even lamer. Luckily, that’s the last time we see the freeze bomb in action because the doctor kills himself and destroys his lab, entrusting the woman at the start of the picture, Felicia (played by Patch Mackenzie) to get the microdot into safe hands.

So now it’s down to heroic cop Ash to find the girl before the villains do. Okay, the plot is set up and... I haven’t mentioned the cast yet, have I. Well, for starters, Ash is played by kung fu guru Jim Kelly but it's the addition of two other iconic actors which make the film so memorable... well, memorable in a way. In Black Samurai, Adamson had a lot of nods to the James Bond-like shenanigans of the main characters. I think it was obvious he liked the Bond films. So in this one he’s got two famous Bond actors on board too and, after seeing how this turned out I have to ask... what were they thinking?

So we have Ash’s police captain boss Gallagher played by George Lazenby, the man who played Bond himself in the greatest of the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here). He doesn’t have a lot to do in this one but, when he later turns out to be a turncoat villain, he does have a fight scene at least, where he is electrocuted in a pool by Ash’s Chinese ally. I’ll get to him in a minute.

The main villain of the piece, known as The Pig, is played by none other than... and I’ll write it as he’s billed on the credits... Harold ‘Odd Job’ Sakata. Yep, the guy who played villainous henchman Odd Job in Goldfinger (reviewed here) is the main villain in this one, with a big talking role no less. That being said, he’s been overdubbed with the voice of James Hong for this movie. But to show that he’s just like a Bond villain, instead of stroking a cat throughout the film like Blofeld often did... here Sakata is constantly stroking his pet tortoise. So, yeah, a clever way for the director to highlight the similarities between the Bond films and... well this mess of a movie.

Aldo Ray also turns up in this one as a ‘buyer’ for The Pig’s freeze bomb (when he can get his hands back on the formula in Felicia’s head) and, last but not least, we have Ash’s Kung Fu buddy Li, played by Myron Lee. And, just to push the additional, obvious mood they’re going for, he’s credited here as Myron ‘Bruce’ Lee. He’s not terrible in this and he beats people up just as well as Jim Kelly but, yeah, this was his only movie role by the looks of it.

And it’s all the usual shenanigans. Curiously, just like in Black Samurai, the fight choreography seems to be better at the start of the picture with the end stuff being a bit underwhelming again. There’s not too much in the way of inventive camerawork during the film other than Adamson using that ‘fly’s eye’ lens again (I don’t know what it’s called) to effectively show Felicia’s state of paranoia as she walks the city streets and tries to find a safe haven. Also, the score which is credited to someone called Chuck Ransdell, who has this as his only soundtrack credit plus one credit as an actor in another film, sounds more like a needle drop assembly to me. I don’t know if he wrote the whole thing or just a cue here and there but, for the most part but it doesn’t quite seem to hang together. Most of it is wah wah but oddly generic funky action music but the more effective stuff at the start which is built around a continuous pulse sounds more like something Fabio Frizzi or John Carpenter might have come up with.

The film has some nice ideas for set pieces such as a speed boat chase and ‘on board’ fight but most of them are just not executed with any real flair it seems. And I know Adamson does have a certain style to his work (especially in some of his early crime pictures) so I don’t know what factors combined to give us this. That being said, the sequence where Jim Kelly is in a helicopter and having a shoot out with one of The Pig’s henchman, who is shooting back from a cable car, is a nice idea and it’s not too terrible. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty terrible but... not too terrible.

I’ll quickly mention that there’s a car chase which suddenly winds up in desert roads and, knowing Adamson, I was waiting for the car to go over the cliff in that same footage he favoured from previous films and, sure enough, that happened. Similarly, I knew just how The Pig would meet his end when I saw a light aircraft (probably piloted by Adamson’s sometimes acting and director friend John 'Bud' Cardos, I should think) coming to pick him up in the desert. I knew it would somehow explode with him in it and I knew the exact ‘stolen footage’ moment Adamson would once again cut to in an attempt to fool viewers into thinking the plane had actually exploded. I’ve seen this second or two of film so many times now as I make my way through this boxed edition from Severin, the Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection. Sadly, this is not one of the films in this set which would qualify as a masterpiece by anyone’s standard, I would have thought. This is not the entertaining thrill ride of a film I had hoped it would be but I’m really glad I have it in Blu Ray quality, at least. I now have five more of the 32 films in this box set to watch. Reviews will be coming soon.

Black Samurai

Dragon His Feet

Black Samurai
USA 1976 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Okay so, out of the many films on Severin’s wonderful Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection boxed set, Black Samurai was one of those that I was most looking forward to. It didn’t disappoint too much and, despite the clumsiness of the production and the usual Al Adamson thriftiness showing in some places, there’s more than enough silly, cool stuff happening to distract from many of the film’s faults.

Now I’ve not read any of the pulpy 1970s Black Samurai novels on which this movie was based so I can’t tell you just how close to the first book this movie is but, with credits talking about stuff like ‘additional story ideas by’ and so on, I’m guessing this is at least an ‘augmented’ take on the original Marc Olden novel. That being said the main character, which I suspect is possibly true of the books too, is in no way a ‘samurai’ of any shape or description. He’s just good at martial arts although, I believe in the novels he may be samurai trained? Anyway...

Three years prior to this, lead actor Jim Kelly had a break out supporting role opposite Bruce Lee and John Saxon in Enter The Dragon. In this... in an element which may or may not have been lifted from the books... Robert Sand, alias the Black Samurai, works for top secret government organisation D.R.A.G.O.N, aka Defence Reserve Agency Guardian Of Nations. They spell Defence wrong in the movie but this is an English blog and, you know, we like to get things right over here ;-)... but my point being that this is perhaps another, not too subtle acronym, to remind audiences of Kelly’s prior success.

Anyway, after some dreadful filler shots with pseudo-oriental music of the streets of Hong Kong, the daughter of a Chinese ambassador is kidnapped by three... well lets call all the bad henchmen in these kinds of movies ‘karate thugs’ shall we? She’s kidnapped by three karate thugs who leave her three bodyguards dead. We then get a credits sequence fairly typical of Al Adamson’s work which consists of various shots of Jim Kelly moved around the screen in a half animated fashion and that all works fairly well.

Then, post credits, we have Robert Sand’s tennis match being interrupted by his boss at the agency who needs him to check out and recover the daughter from the evil cult black magic sorcerer Janicot, played by Bill Roy and his ex-prostitute, high priestess gal Synne... played by lovely Adamson regular Marilyn Joi. Sand isn’t really into it but then he finds out it’s the ambassador’s daughter, Toki (played by Chia Essie Lin), who has been kidnapped... who just happens to be his latest girlfriend! This by way of a photo his people have of him and her kissing which, honestly, begs the question of why they would have a file photo obviously culled from a terrible padded flashback sequence of Robert and Toki frolicking from later in the film, in their suitcase... and why he doesn’t go nuts and beat them up for obviously spying on him. But hey, what do I know?

After this, Black Samurai is on the case and it’s a bit James Bond like in many respects. Adamson regular Biff Yeager is playing the 'government man out in the field' to keep an eye on Sand and, he’s set up quite nicely for both the audience and Sand to assume he’s a turncoat traitor, signalling all Black Samurai’s moves to the enemy... when, in fact, he actually does turn out to be one of the good guys at the end, assisting Jim Kelly in his fight scenes in some of the least credible footage in the film, as this pudgy white man bashes about high level karate thugs with just an odd punch or two.

Asides from the odd topless woman thrown into the mix for good measure, there’s also some really silly stuff which makes this worth watching. For instance, the early fight scenes in the picture are actually quite well choreographed and Kelly really shines in these sections (I believe he did a lot of his own choreography on this gig). However, it would also be true to say that the big climactic chase and fight scene at the end of the film is seriously underwhelming when compared to the first half of the movie. But there’s lot to see here. There are also a number of scenes where the karate thugs are also ‘kung fu midgets’ but I don’t know why they keep being brought back because Sand makes short work of them, taking them out with one punch each time. Pretty useless opponents as presented here, if you ask me.

When some karate thugs try to force Sand’s car off the road, he presses a button and a long pipe comes out from behind one of the tires, similar to the Ben Hur inspired tyre slashers from James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger (reviewed here). However, it’s not any old pipe, it's a gun barrel and it blows the tires out on the other car and sends it crashing off a cliff somehow (well, yeah, it is an Adamson movie... I’m sure this isn’t the last time I’ll see this particular shot). In another nod to the Bond films, when the Black Samurai takes a boat to try and find Janicot in some jungle, he pulls out a jet pack just like the one seen at the start of Thunderball (reviewed here) and whizzes over the trees. So... yeah... a Jim Kelly kung fu movie where he drives a gadget car and travels around by jet pack. What’s not to like?

There are daring escapes and some not so daring escapes. Or even not so believable escapes when, in a bizarre lapse of credibility, Black Samurai manages to get out of a room full of snakes by just quickly pointing his mini blow torch gadget at the lock on the big iron gate for literally half a second and then just pushing. Hmmm... it really doesn’t ring true here guys and I can’t believe an admittedly lame super villain would furnish his black magic mansion with puny locks that are only as effective as his kung fu midgets but, well... I’m still not complaining. After all, Jim Kelly travels by jet pack.

And that’s me done on Black Samurai. Some of the music is okay but there are no composer credits to speak of so I suspect the mish mash of styles points to a needle dropped music library solution to that side of the equation. It’s not a great film but, as I said, it does have it’s good points (jet pack!). Jim Kelly would work with Adamson again (which will be the subject of the next of my Al Adamson reviews) in a film which would also co-star George Lazenby and Harold ‘Odd Job’ Sakata so, you know, Adamson was definitely keeping an eye on the Bond films, I think. More on that soon.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Dirty Cotton
Scoundrels

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
aka Onkel Toms Hütte
USA/West Germany/France/
Italy/Yugoslavia 1977
Directed by Géza von Radványi
and Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Wow... okay then. First of all, as you’ve probably guessed form the specs up the top, if you didn’t already know, that this movie is one of those bizarre Al Adamson re-purposed films that his company, IIP, used to foist onto the public as new product, following the latest trends and, somehow, managing to be quite successful for the most part. This time it’s the turn of a 1965 West German movie called Onkel Toms Hütte and based, of course, on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular and somewhat influential (by the sound of it) novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Now, I don’t really approve of slavery as a thing and I also hate watching a lot of it in movies. I can tolerate stuff like Ben Hur because I know the lead protagonist removes himself from the equation to get his revenge but, as a rule, this trend of slaves working on cotton plantations is not something I can usually stomach and, truth be told, I tend to find these things really boring. Indeed, I only saw Tarantino’s Django Unchained once, when it was released into cinemas, because the whole second half of the movie is just such a tale. Honestly, the first half of that film was electric but when it reached a certain point, my brain kinda switched off. However, this one is part of the massive, 32 movie Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set from Severin which I’ve slowly been making my way through and, well, I really didn’t want to miss any of the films out.

The re-release of this film in this particular form comes about because of two things... the success of the plantation movie Mandingo, from two years prior and, more importantly, the success earlier in the year of the TV mini series Roots. IIP wanted something to capitalise on the success of that show and so they got hold of this movie but needed to really spice it up for audiences if they were going to make a success out of it.

Now then, the original version of the movie is almost three hours long. Here, Adamson has shot and added in a few scenes which lurk completely on the periphery of the plot in that way only he seems to be able to get away with... containing all the lurid content you will find in this movie totalling for, maybe as much of twenty minutes of it. However, bear in mind that, even with Adamson’s extra sex and torture footage added into the mix, the re-release only plays out for just over an hour and a half. So something in excess of an hour and a half has been excised from the original film’s running time.

Now, the film itself, the original, obviously jumps around a bit now but it basically tells of a nasty cotton farmer/slave trader called Legree (played here by Herbert Lom) and of the slave ‘Uncle’ Tom played by John Kitzmiller who, when he is close to death after one of many horrible crimes upon his people perpetrated by Legree, incites the slaves to run, burn down Legree’s big house and flood the cotton fields as they make their escape. And, from what I can see of it, despite the horrible subject matter, it’s a fairly engaging film and I could take it or leave it. Preferably leave it.

But then there’s Adamson’s scenes including a slave called Napoleon, who ties in with the West German footage only because he has the same name of a barely glimpsed character who jumps off a steamer and is suddenly played by a different actor, Prentiss Mouldon. Adamson regular, the lovely Marilyn Joi, also turns up in a pre-credits rape scene. And there’s some interesting things going on with the film in this version.

For example, sandwiched between the prologue and the opening credits, such as they are, is a load of footage from the film (including, I suspect, some of the excised bits) with screen loads of short, sharp blurb about the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel and it kind of makes a bizzare, mini trailer for the film you are about to watch...which I’ve never seen done before.

The other interesting thing about it is just how well Adamson works to blend his footage in with the original film. I mean, don’t get me wrong, once you know it’s extra footage inserted you can tell, for the most part, which are the additional scenes... and I suspect a siege on a monastery near the end of the picture may also be ‘Adamson enhanced’ because, for a minute there, it almost turns into a Western... yarhoooo! However, you can tell that Adamson’s really given it some thought here because he’s obviously studied what Radványi did in his version of the movie. For example, the whole movie, including Adamson’s sections, is based on a very pastel colour scheme which is almost exclusively browns. Everything looks like it’s brown or sepia almost, with no other really strong colours showing up too much. Another thing Adamson does, at least at the start of his scenes, is take a page from Radványi’s book in approaching things from a distance with long shots. Radványi uses a lot of master shots rather than reverting to close ups on his film and, although Adamson doesn’t eschew close ups like the former director, he does give it that kind of look in parts of his scenes to better match up, in visual style at least (certainly not tone), to the original footage. So, yeah, bearing in mind what he did with films like Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here) and Mean Mother (reviewed here), it’s really a step up for his approach on this one, I think.

All in all, though, I don’t have too much to say about Uncle Tom's Cabin. I’m not even once tempted to try and source the original 170 minute version to watch and I probably won’t ever revisit this version again. It’s not as bad an experience as I thought it would be, for sure but, I didn’t really have a good time with it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, in all honesty. Interesting as another experiment in the way you can change films but, ultimately a chore to watch and I’m much more looking forward to the next couple in Severin’s mighty boxed edition. 

Mean Mother

Patch Adamson

Mean Mother
Directed by Al Adamson
& León Klimovsky
USA 1973
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

In a pre-credits scene, a pimp and his associates pay a visit to one of the girls who he has hooked on drugs, setting up for the audience just how bad this minor character is. Then he goes to a rooftop (of course it’s going to be a rooftop... it’s an Al Adamson movie) to buy some drugs off of a Vietnam war soldier called Beauregard Jones, played by Dobie Gray (credited as Clifton Jones). They try to cheat him so he takes out the pimp, his two henchmen plus the two corrupt policemen in the pimp’s pay before grabbing a plane back to the Vietnam war. He’s the... Mean Mother of the film’s title (although he doesn't seem to be wanting to procreate with anybody's mum in the movie so... it might be a bit of a duff title) and the opening credits include shots of Jones from the pre-creds sequence and shots of soldiers (which is a part of the plot which plays out within 5 to 10 minutes of the movie) and is genuinely one of the worst title sequences of any Al Adamson film I've seen to date.

If it could be called an Al Adamson film, that is.

Because what we have here, once again, is a patchwork movie put together by the half cut remains of a Spanish crime movie from two years prior, Run for Your Life (directed by León Klimovsky) with a load of new footage by Adamson (billed as Albert Victor) featuring a ‘parallel plot’ so that he could repackage and sell the movie to the youth of America as one of the growing trend of popular blaxploitation movies. And... it has to be said, it’s not very good. Not absolutely terrible but... yeah, not too far away from terrible either, although parts of it are entertaining, at the very least.

So the Spanish part of the movie has the main protagonist Joe, played by Dennis Safren, with Luciana Paluzzi, the gal from Thunderball (reviewed here) as his love interest. The story follows Joe, who runs from a court martial in Vietnam and goes to Rome, getting mixed up in smuggling and working for a criminal network. At some point it turns into a kind of secret agent movie when Joe is asked to help a Russian ballerina to defect from Spain (where she’s somehow working at the Royal Festival Hall?) and move her to London (wait, what?) but that's also about a valuable jewel she is in possession of and, to be honest, I suspect the great leaps in logic and garbled story line must be because of the bits of the film which got excised for this new, cross pollinated movie (I hope).

Meanwhile, Joe’s ‘mean mother’ of a friend Beauregard also leaves Vietnam and goes to Spain, where he gets mixed up with a girl who stole forged money plates from the mob and who leaves him high and dry, blaming him. With ‘the syndicate’ on his tail, he quickly flies over to Rome to connect up with Joe so they can get away from things with the finances from Joe’s new defecting ballerina job, which doesn’t go without its problems. Beauregard’s main love interest is played by Marilyn Joi, who has used a number of different names in various films and who has been in a lot of Adamson’s movies from this time. She’s always interesting to watch on screen so at least her performance was entertaining, to be sure.

In order to try and sell the idea that these two completely different in tone story elements are somehow part of the same film, Adamson manages to get Dennis Safren over for the new footage with Dobie Grey for two scenes. One is near the start where, even though he is on screen with no other characters other than Safren, Beauregard manages to hook up with Joe in Vietnam where they both decide to go their separate ways (to Rome and Spain). Similarly, there is a scene towards the end of the movie in Rome where the two also hook up. Alas, for Joe’s two scenes in the new footage, the actor seems to have a lot heavier hair and the style he used for the earlier film is not apparent (maybe he was also in the middle of shooting something else at the time)... so he will have really short hair in two scenes sandwiching a scene where it’s much fuller in a couple of places in the movie. Just in case you really were having trouble figuring out which parts of the films belonged to which shoot. Which, trust me, you won’t have any trouble with any way because one’s a Eurocrime movie and the other is a blaxploitation thriller so, yeah... and if you really are having trouble then another clue could be that the soundtracks for each movie are totally different too. Roberto Pregadio provides the Run For Your Life scenes with something appropriate to what’s going on there while Vic Caesar’s funky, wah wah guitar score for our ‘mean mother’ of a character does exactly what you’d expect from that kind of film. So, yeah... these two films don’t splice together seamlessly, for sure.

But, it’s not a chore to get through either and although the separate ending for Joe’s character doesn’t really carry the emotional weight I suspect it’s supposed to... what with half the movie being cut away... Beauregard and Marilyn Joi’s character have an okay ending. Although, their ending includes a car chase through a stretch of desert and I was having real emotional trauma that I was going to have to end up watching that damned Al Adamson car roll again at some point. Fortunately this doesn’t happen this time... that footage is not reused yet again and this is possibly why I was more on board with the ending more than any other factor, it has to be said. Would I recommend Mean Mother to anyone... no. It’s not something I would even highlight to fans of the genres involved (even the Run For Your Life part of the film is somewhat clunky) but I am at least glad I got to see it in the context of my watch through of the huge Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set from Severin. Also, this disc in the series has a pretty nice interview extra with Marilyn Joi where she talks about her time as a burlesque dancer and then meeting Adamson and going to work in the movies (and how she got some of those parts)... which is a really cool bonus feature. Now if I can just get through the next, similar patch up job of a film on the same disc in the box... I will be happier.

The Dynamite Brothers

TNT Smacks On

The Dynamite Brothers
aka Stud Brown
USA 1974 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: This one’s got some major spoilerage in it.
There is a genuinely cool twist in the tail of this
movie which I didn’t see coming.

Well this Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection really is a rollercoaster ride in terms of just how good or, typically, how terrible some of the films in this collection are going to be. Because I’m watching and writing these films up in the order they’ve been packaged into the box, as opposed to the release or production dates (both of which are completely different things anyway), my previous review of an Adamson film was Black Heat (reviewed here), which utilised one of the same leading men as in this one, in a shot at catching some cash from the blaxploitation market. You’ll also remember I didn’t think much of it.

This film, however, is absolutely marvellous. It’s a greatly entertaining flick that I could happily rewatch every seven years or so. The Dynamite Brothers is basically a mash up of two genres which were still just about a big thing at the time this was released... blaxploitation and kung fu movies. It made some money and Adamson was able to re-release the film targeted at just the blaxploitation market a year later, by excising the kung-fu part of the trailer and re-christening it Stud Brown.

After a kung fu training session to show how lethal some of the bad guy’s henchmen are, we meet the main antagonist of the film himself and... it’s James Hong! I love the fact that James Hong turns up in an Adamson movie. He plays ‘over the top but sophisticated Asian villain’ really well, it has to be said. That’s the pre-credits sequence of the movie out of the way, leading to an animated title sequence featuring the two leads, Alan Tang and Timothy Brown... and a load of kung fu people, with Charles Earland’s kick ass score playing out over the titles. Actually, this is the only Al Adamson film I’ve found to date, other than his Dracula VS Frankenstein (reviewed here), which has had a CD soundtrack release so, that’s something.

After this, film starts off proper... with martial arts star Alan Tang as Larry Chin. He is illegally entering the country on a boat but, as he jumps off the ship, a bunch of Hong’s henchmen are waiting for him to persuade him to go back to Japan (under the watchful eye of ‘bent copper in the pay of the bad guys’ Burke, played by Aldo Ray). So straight away we have a big chase/kung fu fight on the harbour which establishes how outclassed the bad guys are compared to Larry, who leaves a trail of unconscious bodies in his wake as he runs off to... to what? Well, it turns out he’s come to America to find his lost brother. There are also hints of a back story in some, it has to be said, shoddily timed little flashbacks to a dead woman at various moments in the film. I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, Burke is escorting the newly arrested Stud Brown (Timothy Brown) in a police car, to be charged for ‘unimportant and never really made clear’ crimes. However, he also finds Larry Chin and so he handcuffs him together with Stud. Of course, the two of them together are presumably spiritually sympathetic so, you know, in a daring escape they presumably become... The Dynamite Brothers... of the title. Anyway, there must be some spiritual connection because, after freeing themselves from handcuffs, the two stay together for absolutely no reason at all. Larry is headed to San Fransisco and Stud takes him to work for his boss, a mobster called Smilin’ Man, played by Don Oliver, so he can support himself while he looks for his brother.

And, of course, this is a blaxploitation movie of the 1970s... so there are evil, bad mobsters like James Hong’s kung fu crew... contrasted with ‘good mobsters’ like Smilin’ Man’s mob, who don’t want any drugs coming into their territory because ‘drugs are bad’ and people shouldn’t do them. Right on brother! It’s here that, in another ‘character with a strange quirk in a 1970s movie moment’, Stud meets a mute lady on Similin’ Man’s payroll called Sarah, played by the title role actress from black exorcist movie Abby... Carol Speed. She becomes Stud’s gal. There’s also a potential girlfriend for Larry when he meets an Asian lady who helps him find a lead to his brother but, she kinda just drops out of the movie once Larry is told that his brother is dead.

So the rest of the movie is about both how Larry’s missing brother and the mob war is all connected and there are various shoot outs and kung fu fights and... the whole thing is a pretty entertaining and surprisingly coherent movie (for Al Adamson) which entertains a lot. Although, it’s a shame that Carol Speed’s character is killed by having her face horribly slashed up by the bad guys to give Stud even extra motivation to end the violent mob reign of her killers.

It all leads to a big fight in Hong’s mansion where we finally find out that those flashbacks were him remembering his wife, who was killed by Hong for rejecting his lustful advances before fleeing to America. Not only that but, in a twist I didn’t see coming, somehow, it turns out that not only is Larry’s brother not dead... but James Hong’s character is also his brother. So, anyway, all the good guys and bad guys converge on the house and a big battle royale ensues while the Hongster makes a break for it in his open topped car, with Larry pursuing on a motor bike. As soon as I saw it was an open topped car I realised that I was once again going to have to watch, possibly from a different angle, that same scene of the open topped car rolling off a cliff edge and killing the driver that I’ve seen now in, it has to be said, a fair few of Adamson’s movies. I honestly can’t be watching this footage again in another movie... but saying that, it’ll probably be coming back to haunt me again before this boxed set is finished, I would imagine. There’s also a stunt fall in this movie, during a gun battle on the streets (surprisingly, there were no Adamson rooftop chases in this picture, he must have had a bigger budget) which I’m pretty sure he recycled into Black Heat but, it certainly packs more power here.

And it’s a fairly joyful film to watch, it has to be said. There are some great fights which use some hand held stuff and some frenetic pacing... but not so much so that you can’t see that Alan Tang can actually do all the stunt fighting himself (unlike a lot of modern American movies where they sometimes have to cut around the actors to hide the fact that they can’t really do the physical stuff that well). Actually, I noticed that in some of the fight scenes, Alan Tang seems to be mouthing a lot of words that are just not coming out on the soundtrack at all. I can only conclude that, like Bruce Lee in the fight scenes in Enter The Dragon, he was probably making a lot of silly, whoop and wahaaah noises but, on hearing the results, the producers decided to cut that audio element for whatever reason (like it sounded totally silly, perhaps).

Added to this we have a good cast of actors doing their thing with a script that really isn’t all that bad and, also, the good guys and gals all have good on-screen chemistry and are pretty likeable. There are even some nicely creative shots in here, where Adamson and the cinematographer use the negative shapes created by various elements of the environment overhanging the foreground of the camera to shoot the action through, which gives the film a more creative edge than a fair few of the films I’ve reviewed from this boxed set here. Add to this a totally redundant snake scene and a silly but underwhelming ‘death by acupuncture’ moment and The Dynamite Brothers comes up trumps when it comes to excelling in explosive excitement. Definitely something I’d recommend for lovers of blaxploitation, kung fu movies and, you know, those rare times both elements come together in the same film. One of Adamson’s best movies, I think.

Black Heat

 

Route Kicksty Kicks

Black Heat
aka The Murder Gang
USA 1976 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Spoilers I guess... c’mon, it’s Adamson.

Okay, so the next title up for me to watch in Severin’s pretty thorough Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection is one of his attempts to ‘cut it’ in the popular Blaxploitation market, albeit it’s kinda late in the cycle. Black Heat gives us lead actor Timothy Brown as... drumroll please... Kicks Carter! There’s a character name for you. Along with his partner Tony, he makes up a two man army of streetwise cops as they keep their ear to the ground (okay, not literally) and get the ‘dope on the streets’ and, you know, all that stuff.

Now, this really isn’t one of Adamson’s best pictures by a long chalk (but hey it’s more watchable than movies like the truly diabolical Brain Of Blood, reviewed here and Nurses For Sale, reviewed here) and the plot on this one almost, but not quite, made sense.

So... bad guys make a deal to trade weapons in the desert (because, Al Adamson, of course he’s shooting in the desert as much as possible) for high grade drugs for the main bad guys that ‘bad guy number one’ is working for... namely psycho Ziggy played by Russ Tamblyn and his boss lady, who owns a nightclub. A nightclub where various ladies employed there have been connected to a series of crimes. With me so far? Okay, so the deal is set but Ziggy needs to blackmail Tony’s girlfriend Terry, played by Jana Bellan, to get them the movements of a security guy from the firm she’s working in, so they know when he’s carrying some money in a suitcase strapped to his wrist. This is after they get rid of suspicious cop Tony and our main man Kicks has to go it, more or less, alone... apart from some other guy who’s next to useless and his sexy news journalist lady Stephanie, played by Tanya Boyd, along for the ride.

Okay, after some shenanigans where it’s revealed that Kicks’ good guy informant, who has a lot more of a vibrant personality than him anyway, is supplying arms (keeping Kicks informed so he can nab them all in the desert) while the bad guys get the money by killing the security guy and cutting his hand off for the case. More shenanigans ensue and there’s a big showdown at the nightclub where Tamblyn gets killed... and then another showdown in the desert where Kicks’ informant gets blown away and the last of the villains takes off with the weapons in a private plane, only to be blown up when a rogue shot from Kicks starts a fire near all that ammunition... in a shot of ‘something’ exploding hastily cut in next to footage of the plane, which looks suspiciously like the same footage from The Fakers (reviewed here)... which I suspect was also tracked in footage back then.

What else? Well... Adamson turns up as a gambling customer in one scene. There’s nudity and rape and it’s mostly unpleasantly handled because... well... I think it’s supposed to be edgy. Actually, the scene where Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol as Valerie... a friend of Kicks, Tony, Terry and Stephanie... gets interrogated by Tamblyn and co with a brutal beating, has some good make-up so it actually does look like she’s having a rough time there. Carrol wasn’t such a bad actress and she comes through in scenes like this. That being said, Adamson’s also given her a long scene where she’s at a piano singing a song for the nightclub customers which... well, it’s not a great tune and it goes on for too long so, it does kind of stop any impetus the movie was trying to build on stone dead at that point. Also, I can’t work out what her character is doing in the movie in the first place. She seems to be way surplus to requirements and, the one time at the end when I thought the bad guys were going to use her as a hostage and thus give a dramatic purpose to her inclusion... they didn’t. In fact, all the way through the picture, the bad guys just seemed to be really stupid... not even realising the cops were onto them before they were already, more or less, knocking down their door.

And there’s not much that’s remarkable in this movie, to be fair. The action scenes are okayish but almost all of them take place in either the desert or on rooftops and, I’m only just realising that when his characters are in an urban environment in these kinds of movies, Adamson generally tends to shoot a chase or two on the rooftops because, well I suppose it’s easier to deal with no crowds and I suspect you can film these low key without paying any licenses. That’s just my best guess though.

Actually, there is one scene which stands out, not because it’s particularly well executed but because it has an unusual outcome. It’s when Kicks is trying to hostage negotiate a guy down from a building and into a getaway car without getting the woman that the guy's taken taken, who is wired up as a human bomb, blown up. Well, that’s a complete failure because, once the psycho packs his hostage into the car he gets in beside her ready to drive off, his wires have got caught in the car door and when he shuts it the car goes up with them in it anyway (I think this may be the sequence that Adamson recut into the end of Doctor Dracula, reviewed here). Which is kind of unusual but I think it matches the slightly bleak attitude Adamson gave to some of his projects.

And there’s not much more for me to say on this one. I didn’t mind it but Black Heat is probably the worst example of the genre I’ve seen (so far, I think he made some more of these kinds of movies) and it’s not something I’d recommend to anyone, to be honest. A bit lukewarm rather than the temperature expectations implied in its title, I would say.

Lucifer's Women/Doctor Dracula

Svengali VS Dracula

Lucifer’s Women
USA 1974 Directed by Paul Aratow

Doctor Dracula
USA 1978 Directed by
Al Adamson & Paul Aratow
Rafael Films/AIP/Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Yeah, this one has spoilers
if you’re worried about that kind of stuff.

This is another one of those stories where a film was made, Lucifer’s Women... and then, four years later, Al Adamson was asked to direct a whole load of new scenes and recut it with bits of the original picture, making and releasing what amounts to a completely different movie with kind of ‘guest highlights’ from the first version. In many cases the originals were often better than Adamson’s, admittedly enthusiastic effort to turn them into completely different films and, yeah, this one is no exception.

Lucifer’s Women is a case of the original being thought lost until the wonderful Vinegar Syndrome label managed to release an uncut, fully restored version of it to Blu Ray a couple of years ago. I’m really glad they did because, otherwise, the Adamson excerpts would have been all that remained of what is actually a pretty good movie. I’ll review the original first.

Lucifer’s Women is a real gem... a kind of marriage of an occult plot mixed with soft core pornography. This one stars Larry Hankin as an academic writer who has published a book about Svengali, only to have been helped by the ‘Bleeding Rose’ society in the form of his publisher, a black psychic, to become possessed by the spirit of Svengali himself. So Hankin is Svengali, who is also, on occasion, fighting a battle with his former self to control his host body.

The film starts strongly with one of his magic shows (there are at least two magic acts by him in the film) where he levitates a woman and cuts off her clothing so she’s floating topless. I don’t know what night clubs he plays but we never got magic shows like this on television in the UK in the seventies.

Anyway, his publisher wants him to procure a specific girl, Trilby, played by the wonderful Jane Brunel-Cohen. She is one of a number of strippers who work in a night club run by obnoxious pimp Roland, played by Paul Thomas (oh yeah, I’ll get to him in a minute). Svengali’s task is to bring the girl to his publisher Sir Stephen (played by Norman Pierce) in seven days’ time... because she has a pure, psychically charged soul she is not aware of... and hypnotically manipulate her while having sex in a black magic ritual with Sir Stephen so that she first kills Stephen on the stroke of midnight at the point of orgasm... and then kills herself so that his soul can be reborn in her body.

However, complicating things is the fact that Svengali’s body’s former personality is falling in love with Trilby. Shenanigans ensue and the film has a wonderful, laid back charm of its own as another girl also falls prey to Sir Stephen and his occultist friends, while Trilby and her fellow stripper and room mate indulge in lesbian sex ripped straight from the pages of an underground comic book she is reading. Finally, there's a threesome with their boss Roland... who is later put in a trance by Svengali and accidentally gets run over because of it.

There’s a bizarre double ending too, where Svengali’s former personality rescues the girl and everyone else dies... but, as they run off, another Svengali and all his friends are suddenly alive again, watching and laughing from the grounds of their big house. It’s a little like the end of Fellini’s Eight And A Half in tone, rather than a conclusion from which you are meant to gain any insight from, I think.

But, I found myself thoroughly entertained as it’s a nice little movie including an interesting score which has a kind of mild atonalism with creepy but charming synthesiser overlays on top of it in some sections. And some interesting personalities... despite what one of his co-stars says of him in the extras, Larry Hankin is a tremendous Svengali. He has hypnotic, expressive eyes and a kind of laid back attitude which really works for him and the movie. Jane Brunel-Cohen is absolutely amazing too, giving off ‘young Margot Kidder’ vibes and channeling that same kind of ‘naive innocent energy’. I can’t believe that her only other credit, apart from archival footage from this used in Adamson’s Doctor Dracula, was as a masseuse in Freebie And The Bean. This woman should have gone on to be a huge star, if there was any justice in the world.

And then there’s Paul Thomas. Starring in almost 400 adult movies and directing almost 500 of them to date, Paul Thomas is a porn star who also had a mainstream movie career around the same time, for a bit... you may recognise him as playing Peter in the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. And he gives a hilarious, 20 minute interview about his time on the film (one of his last mainstream movies) and his career in general. In one story he talks about the threesome involving Jane Brunel-Cohen and how she didn’t want his ‘hard cock’ touching her because she wasn’t a porn actress. He says that usually, on one of his porn shoots, the crew has to keep taking breaks to enable the lead male actor to be able to achieve and maintain his erection again for the next shot... which is a hard thing to do, apparently. Here, it was the exact opposite situation... he was so enamoured of the actress that he kept getting an erection and, since it was an R rated movie, they couldn’t afford to have his penis getting into the shots... so they kept having to take breaks to try and get his erection to cease and desist while piecing together the scene. It’s a great extra and worth a watch almost as much as the film.

And then there’s Doctor Dracula. Okay, so Adamson has a new, animated title sequence more in keeping with many of his other movies of this time. He grafts a completely new story onto it involving psychiatrist Dr. Gregorio (played by Geoffrey Land) who kills a lady at the start by biting her on the neck... as he’s really Dracula. The film uses bits of the Lucifer’s Women footage as a background canvass for Dracula’s efforts to stop the Bleeding Rose Society, now headed up by John Carradine in a number of spliced in scenes trying to look like they all belong with the original movie.

It’s about what you’d expect from one of Adamson’s more ‘hands on’ cut and paste jobs and some of the scenes kind of make sense and others don’t. Adamson’s characters are all played by completely different actors in fresh roles (including his wife Regina Carrol, giving some bad line readings in this) but he did manage to get Larry Hankin back for a few new scenes in an effort to integrate the two films together more credibly... including a scene where Hankin crosses two candles in an effort to kill Dracula, but dies instead.

The bizarre thing is... although Adamson adds scenes of women undressing and having baths... you never see any nudity in this cut of the movie. This includes all the footage recycled from the original film, where the sex and nudity has been completely excised from this ‘lowlights’ version. This must have made for some bizarre jumps in logic for people who hadn’t seen Lucifer’s Women. For example, when asked about the nature of what she does, Trilby talks about it just being a job and, unless you had seen the original cut where you see she works as a stripper in a night club, you might have been scratching your head at this point wondering what the heck they are talking about.

Similarly, the character of Roland is barely glimpsed in one brief scene from the start in this one... he’s been taken out almost completely. So when Svengali confesses in a throw away line to Trilby later that he’s killed him, the audience must have found it strange, to say the least, that this character had killed someone... especially since it’s someone they don’t know about. Cutting these scenes back into a completely different movie sure makes for a lot of problems here, that’s for sure. Not to mention the  comic moments of a night club audience watching a magic show then cutting to a close up of people like John Carradine, who are also suddenly supposed to be part of the same audience. Stuff like this kept me smiling, for sure but, not necessarily for the right reasons.

I found it interesting that both directors used posters in character's bedrooms from famous films but that, neither shot made it into each other’s version. In Lucifer’s Women, Trilby has a Sands Of Iwo Jima poster in her apartment. In Doctor Dracula, random female victim number ‘whatever’ has a poster for Cassavetes’ A Woman Under The Influence in her house. So we have one director acknowledging his admiration for classic Hollywood and Adamson showing his support of the contemporary independent scene. Good stuff.

At the end of Doctor Dracula, the film finishes with the cult all deceased and then, when Dracula gets into a car with one of his victim’s daughters (played by Susie Ewing), she blows the car up with a remote device in her hand, killing them both. Being as this is Adamson, I immediately recognised the shot of the car blowing up as featuring in at least one of his other movies. I’m not sure if it was recycled for this one or whether this was the first use of the footage but, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

And that’s me done on these two. I had a really good time with Lucifer’s Women and would recommend it... not such a good time at all with the Adamson, recalibrated Doctor Dracula version but at least it’s interesting to see how that director would take the material and reshape it, although I’d probably say steer clear of that version. Either way, Vinegar Syndrome’s welcome Blu Ray release of the 'two on one' edition is pretty good and worth the admission price, as far as I’m concerned. So thanks to them for their ‘Half Way To Black Friday’ sale, where I picked up a few of their titles.