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.

Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson

What Lay Beneath

Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life
and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson
USA 2019 Directed by David Gregory
Severin Films  Blu Ray Zone A/B
As part of the Al Adamson -
The Masterpiece Collection 32 film Blu Ray set

I’ve only, at time of writing this, seen one of Al Adamson’s movies before. That was the incredibly bad but hugely entertaining Dracula Vs Frankenstein (reviewed, succinctly, by me in my early days of this blog here). However, there were a few I had on my list to try and get hold of but then Severin, who are a label worth reckoning with, released this limited edition, very long term project they’ve been working on for... well something like a decade, I think. And it’s really expensive too... probably the most expensive set I've ever bought. I finally pulled the trigger on this thing right before it sold out because... well I’d saved money from not travelling during the coronavirus lock down and it was likely that I would never again have the opportunity to see these films unleashed all in one place at the same time... 32 movies. So I wept into the remains of my tattered wallet, bit the bullet and ‘done the deed”.

This set also features this brand new feature length documentary film... Blood And Flesh - The Reel Life And Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which was directed by David Gregory, who had made Lost Soul - The Doomed Journey Of Richard Stanley’s Island Of Dr. Moreau, which I watched and reviewed earlier this year (right here). Now, normally I would leave the documentary in a new set until after I’d watched all the other films but I figured, in this case, since I knew so little about Adamson (but had heard some disquieting rumblings), that it might be worth watching this thing so I could get an overview of his career and the strange way he finished his life.

Turns out Adamson was the son of an old, early Hollywood cowboy star/director called Denver Dickson (Victor Adamson) who turned down an offer with Universal studios in favour of making his films for his own production company. He had numerous movies coming out just at the tail end of the 20s and into the 30s, 40s etc as well as appearing uncredited in many movies and TV shows over the years up until his final appearance in the aforementioned Dracula Vs Frankenstein (he appeared in 285 productions according to the IMDB). So I guess the world of B-movie show business was somehow in Al Adamson’s blood when he started trying to direct/produce and also appear in his own films.

He was very much one of those kings or princes of the American made exploitation films and I guess you would think of him in the same breath as people like Herschell Gordon Lewis or, in some ways, a poor man’s Roger Corman, with even smaller budgets than Corman but making pictures which did very well on the drive in circuits in the 1960s and 1970s. This documentary details his story with interview footage from producers, friends, co-stars and even some of his stars, such as the legendary Russ Tamblyn, who was in a few of his movies like biker gang film Satan’s Sadists, Black Heat and the Dracula Vs Frankenstein movie. It also has appearances by Adamson himself in archival interview footage which must have been taken not too many years before the ghastly death mentioned in the title.

It shows many of the people who he worked with in some capacity or another such as... well lets just do a little list to whet your appetite...  Colonel Sanders (the real one, promoting his Kentucky Fried Chicken in one of Adamson’s shoots), Charles Manson (he shot one of his movies on the ranch shortly before, or possibly during, the famous murders), John Carradine, Jim Kelly, Lon Chaney Jr, J. Carrol Naish, George Lazenby and even Forrest J. Ackerman. Some of these are seen only in clips from the director’s movies and some of them in archival footage. And it’s a rare treat listening to some of the stories his friends and crew tell... many of them who were working for ‘experience’ and no fee on Adamson’s shoots. It’s also amazing to discover that he was working with the likes of such famous cinematographers as Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács very early on in their careers too.

Additionally, there’s the tale of the unseen footage, enough for three movies, where Adamson was called in to make a dramatised documentary film about UFOs. He was a total non-believer in the stuff until, it’s alleged (and then the various interview subjects clam up when they realise the camera is still running), he was taken to meet a fully documented alien/human hybrid person and that, after a while, everyone backed away from the film they had been making because they all thought it was too dangerous because... yeah, government and ‘other worldy’ intervention.

It’s also tells of the tragedy of his losing his wife Regina Carrol, who starred in most of his films, to cancer a few years before Al’s untimely death. Followed by that tragedy itself as Al was hammered to death by a friend who he was hiring to work on a ranch he was living at, only to be buried in a bag under where the old jacuzzi was, which had been ripped out and replaced with his corpse before being cemented in and having tiles laid out over the top of him. The last part of the documentary plays like a police procedural set of interviews as friends, relatives and various law enforcement officials talk you through the details of how the missing director was finally ‘discovered’ and how they found the culprit living in Florida with his latest girlfriend and her young child, safely bringing the killer (who denies it to this day but the evidence seems pretty damning) to justice (of a kind).

And, yeah, it’s certainly an interesting narrative... usually when a documentary of this kind surfaces, it doesn’t end with the director getting murdered in a way which wouldn’t look out of place in one of his own, sometimes gory movies. It’s a hell of a way to finish up a movie which suddenly takes a turn in a different direction from the way it started out and, of the two documentary films I’ve seen by David Gregory, as interesting as that other one was, I think this one is even better. It really is a nicely put together, informative and straight-on look at one of those ‘maverick’ directors, if I may use the term, who probably wouldn’t be remembered in a lot of people’s top ten movie lists but who certainly gave the backdrop of American cinematic culture an added layer of questionable texture and who is... unforgettable in his own way.

Of course, it goes without saying that Severin’s amazing new box set is crammed full of extras for each and every film (including this documentary) and is beautifully packaged as a book in a slip case with the fourteen Blu Rays housing the 32 films in a series of double page spreads including poster artwork from the films, not to mention a sizeable bound book talking about these, also housed within the slipcase. And if you don’t want to shell out for this full retrospective career of the man’s work, painstakingly restored by Severin in ways that you wouldn’t expect films like this to be enthusiastically resurrected, then this documentary can also be bought as a stand alone release from the same company. If you are into the history of exploitation films of all kinds... secret agents, blaxploitation, horror, sexy stewardesses and various examples of ‘niche’ moviemaking, Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson is probably something you’re going to love. Definitely worth checking out, that’s for sure.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Services Rendered

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

1969 UK

Directed by Peter Hunt

EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Warning: Some pretty heavy spoilers if you’ve never seen this masterpiece before.

“I love you. I know I'll never find another girl like you. 

Will you marry me?”

James Bond, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

C’mon, admit that you never expected to hear those words spoken or those sentiments conveyed in a Bond movie? But this is no ordinary Bond movie, you see. This is probably the most unique and, frankly, greatest Bond movie ever made... and it’s very different from any Bond movie made before or since. Although it comes from a very traditional Bond vintage of craftsmen.

Let's start with the film’s director Peter Hunt, who also happens to be the first person you see in this movie, reflected in a metal plaque for Universal Exports as he walks past it from screen right to left. This is the man who changed the course of editing, to some extent, when he broke all the rules on Dr. No which, along with all the EON Bond films prior to this one, he edited. The style of editing on this one is another step forward (a bit too much of a step forward, I think, for the motion picture industry at the time) and, although it wasn’t edited by him this time around, I am sure he was probably passing enough notes or sitting in with editor (and long term future Bond director) John Glen to be somewhat credited for the innovative cutting on this picture.

This one is certainly something of an oddity of a Bond film in terms of continuity too. As you will see if you read some of my future reviews (and some of my early ones) in this series on Bond films, the Bond team did themselves no favours in some of their decisions which quite often resulted in difficult continuity anomalies. This movie throws up just such an anomaly because Peter Hunt chose to make a movie very close to the original Ian Fleming novel, rather than carry on from You Only Live Twice. However, the story hangs on the idea that Bond and arch villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld have never actually met face to face before. There’s no way Blofeld could recognise 007 for this infiltration game to work... but clearly, in the previous film You Only Live Twice (reviewed here and not based on the original novel in anything other than name, really) they were chatting away together in the same room. So the film-makers obviously want you to forget that little detail and maybe take this as something of a restart to the series rather than a continuation. But it’s a strange choice if that was indeed the thinking behind this one because one could argue that it’s a reboot... except for the fact that all the way through the film the director is reminding you of the past Bond films in an effort to make the general public forget that Sean Connery had left the series and accept George Lazenby as, in the words of the trailers, “The new James Bond. The different double-oh-seven!” in relation to all the movies that had gone before. 

There are scenes, such as Bond’s first meeting with Moneypenny which serve to underline the fact that this new Bond is supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, the same but different and a sequence where bits of old musical scores are played as Lazenby picks up props from those earlier films serves to ensure the audience doesn’t forget its links to the past. There’s even a scene with a midget whistling the tune to Goldfinger and a credits sequence that utilises clips from the previous 5 movies added into the mix and, if that weren’t enough, a brilliant moment at the end of the pre-credits action sequence where Lazenby breaks “the fourth wall”, glances at the audience and complains that “This never happened to the other feller!”

So definitely a strange choice to do the book as it is, with the two characters, Bond and Blofeld, never having met before. Not the last of the Bond anomalies but certainly one of the more showier ones.

So anyway... master editor Peter Hunt gets to direct a Bond movie and decides to do On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (a book Fleming wrote while Dr. No was being shot) just like the source material and, after a hard time casting, with George Lazenby playing Bond. Let me tell you now that Lazenby’s Bond is every bit an impressive performance as Sean Connery’s incarnation of the character. A lot of people at the time turned off to this performance in this film, I think, because it was the first time the producers had experimented with casting a different actor in the lead role of the series... and people were probably expecting the same kind of approach that Connery would have given it. Well, in my humble opinion (and I really love Sean Connery’s take on the role) they may not have got Connery, but they certainly got James Bond. Lazenby’s performance, obviously due to the writing to some extent, is a much more feeling and emotional Bond and a lot closer to the Bond we meet in the very first novel, Casino Royale, than any other actor to have played him to date, as far as I’m concerned. He walks and talks right, can do the action and also handle the romantic interest.

A fair portion of this must obviously also be landed at the feet of Peter Hunt. He set out to strip the gadgets away from Bond and give us back the man and it really works. This Bond movie has a sense of being a movie for “grown ups” going for it all the way through, bearing in mind that the comic book action and larger than life situations are also, obviously, very much present. It just feels more serious and less throwaway than any of the other Bond movies and I suspect that of all of the series, this one is probably the least appealing to the youngsters. 

It’s also, although I hate to use the term but feel I must when brevity creeps in, a bit of an art movie.

Peter Hunt’s shot designs and transitions are just so impressive. You will find shots such as Bond drinking to the health of Her Majesty, reflected back in the glass covering a painting of her reminding the audience of Bond’s “For Queen And Country” line of work while showing them sharing the same plane of space in one economical shot. Another brilliant transition sees a replay of Tracy (played brilliantly by The Avengers girl Diana Rigg... and future The New Avengers girl Joanna Lumley is also in this one) being dragged from under an avalanche by Blofelds men projecting from the windows Bond is looking out of, signifying Bond’s thoughts and what turmoil is in his mind while he waits for the United Nations to make a decision as to Blofeld’s demands. Plus a cool transition where a daytime, almost birds eye view of a busy swimming pool, changes into the same shot but at night and devoid of people, with the neon sign of a casino reflected in the water to set up the next scene. 

Then there is the brilliant shot in Draco’s office where Bond throws a knife into a calendar behind Draco (played by Gabriele Ferzetti)... what follows is sheer visual genius and it’s all accomplished with one shot making use of differential focus (or rack focussing as it is sometimes referred to) in a more creative way than it usually is on film...

Draco turns away from the camera to look at the knife on the wall behind him. As he does so, he raises his glasses to his eyes and in exact time with that movement, the camera shifts focus to clarify the knife on the wall. After a second or two, Draco turns back to camera, lowering his glasses and, again, in exact timing to this action of lowering his glasses, the camera shifts focus back to exactly where we were at the start of the shot. I was pretty knocked out by that the first time I saw a print of this in widescreen, I can tell you. Forgot to listen to the dialogue because my brain was still reeling.

There are many visual wonders in store for potential viewers of this film including a brilliant colour palette on some of the interior/studio bound scenes which evoke those 1950s and 1960s classic Hammer film colours and which, for the second, snow bound part of the movie, are an interesting contrast in terms of white, grey and blue neutrals verses a lively selection of greens and positively Bavaesque purples.

The editing, especially during the fight sequences, is extremely creative and very impressionistic. This is very much in evidence in the pre-credits sequence fight on the beach, where characters choppily shift position and perspective a tad at each cut, ramping up the speed and intensity of the fist hits and splashes of water so the viewer, especially on ones first watch, is left similarly as dazed and confused as the actual on-screen participants in the fight. It’s all very much about creating an impression of the intensity of a fight, rather than showing everything blow by blow, in a much more fragmentary fashion which, I suspect, would have been very popular in Japan at the time, seeing the route the Japanese went in the late 20th Century with some of their editing.

The sound design, like all the Bond films before this, is also quite brilliant and, as can be expected, Hunt pushes past the constraints of what you would expect to hear going on again. If the fights scenes are visually impressionistic, for example, then the fight outside Draco’s office near the start is similarly creative. With high volume echoes and phase loops etc all dropped into the action to give an almost surrealistic interpretation of the on-screen visuals. A fight much later in the movie takes place in a shed filled with loads of hanging bells and the cacophony of sound which is used to punctuate punches, so to speak, is amazing and serves well to aid the claustrophobia of the actual reality of the fight. This is very much the culmination, both aurally and visually, of the fight Connery’s Bond had with Robert Shaw on the train in From Russia With Love. The fist fights in the Bond films rarely match this intensity again in the series.

Pitched against all this heavy ‘action intensity’ is an equally intense love story between James Bond and his future wife Teresa, who he marries near the end of the movie. The love story starts the film, tails off with Bonds infiltration of Blofelds mountain top lair and then comes straight back in again for the third act of the film... 

One of the greatest moments of any Bond film comes when “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” (my all time favourite Bond song) is playing and Bond is running from Blofeld’s team of villains. He looks lost, scared and out of luck... and then Teresa (aka Tracy) skates in to the rescue... not only to the rescue, in fact. Her character does all the driving in the getaway/stock car chase and helps, among many other wonderful sequences such as her brilliant dialogue with Telly Savalas’ version of Blofeld, make this one of the strongest portrayals of a female character in screen history, not to mention the most potent female character in a Bond movie. There’s absolutely no doubt in your mind by the end of the movie why Bond wants to marry her. There’s even a ‘romantic montage’ sequence which is probably about the only time that’s ever been done in a Bond movie, I reckon (I’ll probably prove myself wrong on that point now as I continue to watch the Blu-Ray set I got for Christmas but... we shall see).

And then, of course, there's another more famous sequence that sets this Bond film squarely apart form any other Bond film (although the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale tried hard to recapture this lightning a second time, it seems to me... and failed somewhat). At the end of the movie, on their way from the wedding to their honeymoon, Bond stops to remove the flowers from their car and said car is perforated by bullets, courtesy of Blofeld and his ‘shooter’, Irma Bunt. Bond rushes around to the driver’s seat to give pursuit, only then realising that Teresa has taken a bullet to the brain and lays dead before he can even hold her to die in his arms. 

This is the saddest and most powerful ending of any Bond movie and, if you’re invested in the characters enough, there will be tears.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the greatest Bond film, directed by a man who really knew how to put a Bond film together. It’s criminal that Lazenby never got to do another movie in the series... and just as bad that director Peter Hunt never got to direct another Bond either. If you’ve never seen a Bond film before or always shied away from them because of some of the sexist attitudes in them (which, in all fairness, are still very much in evidence in this particular masterpiece) and are thinking of maybe seeing one of them some time... then this is definitely the one to look out for. And it’s got a John Barry score which will completely knock your socks off.

Peter Hunt, George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas and John Barry... nobody does it better.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E