Wonder Woman (1974)

Crosby, Steals and Bashed

Wonder Woman (1974)
Directed by Vincent McEveety
USA 1974
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Wonder Woman, the 1974 TV movie (yeah, unsold pilot in sheep’s clothing), was not the first attempt at trying to put William Moulton Marston's iconic character on screen. Around the time of the hit 1960s Batman TV show, a short pilot had been made for executives to consider green lighting it, very much in the campy, comedy mode of the Adam West show. The general public never saw that attempt though, until it surfaced more than a couple of decades ago on YouTube but, this 1974 version starring Cathy Lee Crosby as the titular character was seen by the public, who largely ignored it, I think and, having now finally seen it for myself, I can fully understand why.

This was, however, the first time Warner Brothers had attempted to translate their newly acquired DC comics to the screen and, in the US, it aired as one of many weekly mystery movies on ABC television under the umbrella collective of The Wide World Of Mystery (I believe The Night Strangler, the second of the Carl Kolchak TV movies was ushered in on the same weekly show and was also part of this three year run... Kolchak reviews coming later this year).  In the UK, however, it just happened to air one Saturday afternoon when I, the writer of this blog was, alas, a six year old on holiday somewhere like Eastbourne or Bournemouth and, when we got to the flat we were staying in that week, we caught about ten minutes of it on the television there... I was very annoyed I’d missed it because we hadn’t bought the TV papers that week since, heck, we were away on holiday. Also, it’s not like I could’ve videotaped it then either. Home video recorders weren’t available on the commercial market as yet and certainly we’d never heard of them (and wouldn’t know about them for over another decade). So I’m glad to be finally catching up with what I missed all those years ago... it kind of feels like an outstanding box has been ticked. Which makes it even more of a shame that it’s really not very good.

Okay, so this was produced at a time when, in the comics, Wonder Woman had been revamped and had all her powers taken away so she was just an espionage agent. By the time this aired in the US, DC had cottoned on to how badly they’d treated their character and reinstated all her powers and original mythology. This pilot seems to be a compromise in that, apart from a special introduction to the character on Paradise Island, where she goes out into the world of men because mankind needs her, she also has no special powers... just gadgets and it makes you wonder why the world of men needed this blonde version of Wonder Woman at all.

The brief island scene acts as a kind of pointer to the character’s origins and also sets up a character called Ahnjayla (played by Anitra Ford), who is obviously going to be the heroine’s equally un-superpowered but combat skilled nemesis in the outside world. And then, quick as a flash, we cut to the fact that Wonder Woman, under the guise of Diana Prince, has somehow immediately landed a job under Steve Trevor (played by Kaz Garas, in a performance which is possibly memorable for all the wrong reasons), for a top government intelligence agency. He seems to half know Diana is Wonder Woman, looking the other way when she stays off work for the dentist to go out into the field, where she keeps him apprised of her progress on the case (obviously, this is what you always do with your secretaries). But that’s okay, because all the villains, even when she’s out of her unusual looking Wonder Woman jumpsuit, also know exactly who she is. I guess that’s why she doesn’t try to disguise herself in any way when she’s Diana... um, yeah, I was already ten minutes in and I didn’t know what the heck was going on.

The plot revolves around a villain, played quite charmingly by Ricardo Montalban... and his partner, played with no charm at all by Andrew Prine... who have stolen top secret books from five countries listing the identities of all their secret agencies, which he is trying to ransom back to the American government. Um... one has to wonder why the whole plot exists because, once somebody has those names, surely you can’t trust any villain to not tell anyone he likes. It’s a strange plot suited to more innocent times, I suspect... or at least innocent in TV land where such things made sense in the early 1970s, I guess.

And the rest of the film is just Cathy Lee Crosby using her espionage gadgets and cunning to foil the plan. She does mention her invisible plane so that was obviously, like Ahnjayla (whom she has a fight with later in this film), be something which was supposed to feature in future episodes. But her superpowers are definitely out of the running as she has to do things like get a waiter to bring a saucer of milk to her hotel room so that the deadly snake attached to her leg would be tempted to go for a drink... or try and shove her way out of a compressing room death trap (which at least looks good as it’s got red, beige and blue mud running down the walls and seems quite spectacular for a villainous device). Also, Wonder Woman does wear her bracelets but she can’t catch bullets with them... instead, they hold a wristwatch, can act as a tracker and also be set to explode as required. So, yeah, this is not Wonder Woman as she was in the 1940s, nor as she is today. The musical score is not nearly as brilliant as the 1975 TV show either... really quite unmemorable, it has to be said.

Now, Cathy Lee Crosby is actually quite good in this... or at least as charming as Ricardo Montalban and it’s a bad break for her, I think, that she was landed with such a bad script and, certainly in terms of the character’s super powers, a budget which would never do justice to them anyway. But she’s bright and efficient and has a nice smile. She looks the part, even though that part is a severely compromised ghost of the character she could have been. Apparently, a young hopeful actress called Lynda Carter auditioned for this part but was rejected... I guess she had better luck the second time round a year later, when the version of Wonder Woman which made her into a household name was set in motion (and you can read my review of the Lynda Carter show here).

And there’s really not much else to say about this one. All the logistics of the way the character interacts with those around her in this version of Wonder Woman seem hasty and ill thought out. Not too much of it holds up to any kind of scrutiny and there’s not much to offer from the show that you couldn’t see in any other espionage themed show of the 1970s, in vehicles such as Charlie’s Angels or A Man Called Sloane. If you are interested in the character of Wonder Woman and how she evolved in her TV and cinematic forms, then this is an important one to watch for sure... but you’ll probably be more than just a little disappointed in it. For everyone else, well, it’s really not got all that much going for it, it’s sad to say.

Grizzly

Truth Or Bear

Grizzly
USA 1976
Directed by William Girdler
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

“...another contemporary American
phenomenon that’s truly moronic.”

That’s how Woody Allen described the authorised novelizations of movies in his phenomenal film Manhattan and, I have to say, I’d pretty much agree with that. I grew up reading the 'above average' novelisations of old Doctor Who stories and, of course, when the ghost written novelisation of Star Wars came out, with its 8 pages of full colour photos in the centre, I was bitten by the bug the same as everyone else. It didn’t take me more than about six years to realise just how stupid that idea was, though. I mean, I guess they’re still technically literature but... I don’t know, I certainly give them a wide berth these days.

That being said, I used to thrive on tomes acquired ‘on the cheap’ from second hand bookshelves back in the 1970s (and 1980s for that matter) and one of those novelisations I acquired was the adaptation of Grizzly by Will Collins. I’d never seen the film as the rating would have been too high for me at that age (I would have been about 8 years old) but I do remember thinking to myself, even then, that this movie had obviously been made as a bandwagon attempt to cash in on the previous year’s Jaws (which is also a movie I’d not been old enough to see at the time... although I did have a rubber shark in my toy box).

The reason I mention this novelisation now is because, like a lot of those things either written from an early script before the film was completed (look at the Marvel comic strip adaptation of Star Wars the year it came out if you want to see all the stuff that was cut out of that movie, as an example), it never really matched the film completely and sometimes you’d find something interesting going on. Of course, only if you’d seen the movie and... well I hadn’t. The reason this one sticks in my mind fondly, however, is because it’s the first time I’d been made aware, via a blonde ‘model’ character in the book, that a woman’s pubic hair would naturally match the hair colour on the rest of her body. Of course, that makes perfect sense but... it’s not something I’d ever thought of before so... something of a quirky and somewhat sexy memory from my childhood, I guess.

Now that I finally come to watch the movie on a relatively new Blu Ray release from 88 Films, I have to say I am somewhat disappointed that this scene is nowhere to be found in the movie. Instead, we have a scene where a lady park ranger (the film is set in a state park with lots of forest and campers) takes a shower in a natural waterfall and gets gored up by the title creature. In her underwear. Because, if you take the time to strip off and go and walk under a waterfall, you’re certainly going to leave your bra and knickers on to get wet aren’t you? Well apparently so. This movie follows a 1970s aesthetic where female nudity should be kept off screen but it’s okay to see people’s limbs flying off in various directions... not to mention a horse's head in one memorable moment during the running time.

This film is... not good. Looking at it now for the first time, in a truly excellent widescreen transfer, I have to wonder why it was the top grossing independent film of the year... a status it kept for two years. I guess the answer was it was based on Jaws, to a certain extent and is hitting similar ‘moments’ that the far superior Spielberg movie delivered in a much more stylish package.

The film is full of people you recognise but don’t know, too. Sure there are character actors and there are even less famous character actors and what we have here, I think, are specimens of the latter. People like Christopher George, Andrew Prine and Richard Jaeckel are on hand to track down and attempt to kill the nefarious, giant sized grizzly bear of the title. Joan McCall is the love interest but she’s not in it much and, after the sexist Christopher George tells her character she can’t come on the hunt with him and his rangers, she dutifully sits the rest of the movie out from about the half way mark. Which is really strange, I thought.

The film starts off with Andrew Prine driving his helicopter around and explaining to some officials about the park/nature reserve for the benefit of the audience. We then follow the helicopter in a montage through the opening credits and the audience is immediately hit with Robert O. Ragland’s nauseatingly syrupy main theme as we see... just way to many shots and angles of a helicopter flying, after a static shot with extra camera jitter which no transfer is going to be able to correct. The music isn’t bad all the way through the movie, with some Jaws inspired rhythms, dissonance and synthesiser work... but it does get quite terrible whenever melody comes up. We then have Christopher George briefing his men in what could be the most short and redundant briefing ever committed to a movie. I mean, why gather up all your men if you’re just going to say the equivalent of “Be careful out there.”?

And then it becomes a 'by the numbers' Jaws remake but with no sea and with some terrible writing and acting on hand a lot of the time. The various gory demises, mostly of good looking women, are clumsily done and all in the edit because, as you might expect, the bear they had on hand was going to be going nowhere near the rest of the cast and crew other than its handler. So all the shots of the actual bear in no way match up to the sequences they are edited into... for example, you might see a clumsy ‘man in suit’ close up of a fake bear arm or snout coming into shot, followed by a gruesome picture of gory aftermath and... a cut back to the immaculately coiffured bear who has absolutely no traces of blood on him at all. Crazy stuff. So the waterfall scene I talked about earlier, is literally a shot of the arm reaching from within the waterfall followed by a shot of the water turning red to emphasise how horrible it must all be if you ever find yourself being attacked by a furry arm. Indeed, the second victim of the movie even has her screams looped on a repeat on the soundtrack for a good while in a move to emphasise the sheer non-shock of what you might have just seen while also... well, who knows? Maybe it’s trying to sound like an echo... one of those echoes that never fade and just sound like a bad sound sample repeated over and over.

There’s a lot of silly things on offer in this movie, to be honest and, if I was being just a little more charitable, I might say it belongs in the ‘so bad it’s good’ camp and... I’m not sure it isn’t.

After all, this is the film where I learned that the main occupation of people who go camping is to run along in single file, frolicking at high speed while wearing their heavy back packs. I mean... what the heck is going on here? This can’t be accurate. Is this what campers do? I think not.

There is a nice moment when, upon hearing the bear expert’s report that it must be a giant grizzly that’s doing the killing (in place of Richard Dreyfuss’ shark expert in Jaws), the head of the park (who refuses to close the park, just like the mayor in Jaws) says that the expert is talking about science fiction. About the only witty piece of dialogue writing in the whole movie occurs when Richard Jaeckel replies... “Science, yeah! Fiction, no.” He is, presumably, paraphrasing Bela Lugosi in the 1934 Universal version of The Black Cat where he famously replies to the accusation of “supernatural baloney” with... “Supernatural perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” This was a really nice touch, it has to be said.

Other than that, though, this phenomenally successful independent movie, somehow comes off as a low budget TV movie at best, in my view. Complete with gory violence, bad editing, mismatching bear shots and a lot of point of view work from what I can only describe as a perpetually growly bear cam substitute. I wouldn’t, in all honesty, recommend Grizzly to anybody but I am kinda glad I saw it and I can see how it would be a good film to slip into a drunken, all night movie session with friends... so a feeling of community spirit can be achieved by everyone having something silly to mock. So, yeah, it might be true to say it’s a grisly movie in terms of what it does to drain the stamina from its audience, as much as it is a grizzly one.