Satan's Sadists

Uneasy Riders

Satan's Sadists
USA 1969
Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Not, surprisingly, riding the dust of Easy Rider, which came out around five months after this movie was released, Satan’s Sadists was nevertheless still trying (and apparently succeeding) to capture the biker gang youth market of the time. Now, frankly, I hate these kinds of movies about leather and jeans clad biker hoodlums riding, raping, murdering and generally terrorising their way across the streets and, in this case, deserts of America but, well, all I can say is that at least this film was a little more engaging than the previous Al Adamson film I’d seen in Severin’s beautiful Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray set... namely Brain Of Blood (reviewed here).

The film starts with some road shots of bicycles, some of which, I’m pretty sure, turned up again later that year in the Hell’s Bloody Devils recut of The Fakers (which I reviewed in various versions here). We meet the Swastika decalled Satan’s Sadists, led by their chief named Anchor, played by everyone’s favourite Jet from West Side Story, Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn’s 'look' in this film, in which he nearly always appears with red sunglasses and a big hat pulled down almost completely over those glasses, was apparently his own choice because he wanted to disassociate himself from this kind of movie with audiences. However, his name’s plastered all over the marketing, along with the fact that the film was shot, like The Female Bunch (reviewed here), on the infamous Spahn Ranch just before Charlie Manson’s ‘hippie killers’ went nuts and killed Sharon Tate. The marketing campaign for the film made much of this, apparently.

Okay, so we start off in a pre-credit sequence where Tamblyn and his gang... including Adamson regulars John 'Bud' Cardos, Robert Dix and, in an ‘introducing’ credit, Adamson’s future wife Regina Carrol playing the underappreciated, ‘besotted with Anchor’, sleazy biker chick... rape a lady and then kill her and her lover by pushing alcohol into their system and pushing their car off a nearby cliff. Again, I’m pretty sure it’s the same car roll and explosion used in other Adamson films such as Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here).

We then have Bob Le Bar’s opening title sequence which is, pretty much the only saving grace of the movie, I would say (and still it’s more interesting than Brain Of Blood). Adamson then takes a divergence to set up various characters. So we have Jacqulin Cole playing Tracy, who goes to work in a desert cafe while her three lady friends head off into the mountains to camp and pick up stuff for their college Geology lessons. We also have hitchhiker and ex-marine Johnny Martin, played by Gary Kent. He hitches a ride with a big city cop on vacation with his wife and they all find their way to stop at the same cafe where Tracy works with her boss, played by another Adamson regular, Kent Taylor. And by this point you kinda know they’re all just there to be fodder for the biker gang who, naturally, turn up and terrorise them all. The cop’s wife is raped and they, along with the boss of the cafe, are shot by Anchor. However, Johnny and Tracy escape after Johnny has killed two of Anchor’s clique who were guarding them. This is apparently the first film to have somebody drown by having their head flushed in a toilet.

And this is where the film almost got very interesting but, well... at least it doesn’t quite continue as these films often do, with more of the same. Well, actually some of the same but, after Johnny and Tracy have to abandon Tracy’s beach buggy, they head into the mountains to try and evade... Satan’s Sadists. So here the film becomes a cat and mouse game between the bikers and the two fleeing protagonists... which has a lot of potential as a kind of pre-Rambo 'outdoors trap' movie... and I wish maybe somebody would actually make that film one of these days. However, the bikers come across the three camping Geology babes and terrorise them instead, while two of the bikers continue looking for our main protagonists. This includes a character called Acid spiking everybody’s coffee with LSD and they all have what I can only describe as a soft focus, very tame, desert pseudo-orgy with an overly used camera zoom. So, yeah, it’s a terrible way of bringing a grimy, shabby sexuality into the movie which is in no way thrilling and, frankly, quite dull. Of course, Anchor decides to shoot the girls too but, at least he does it off screen at some point.

While said orgy is occurring, rejected Regina Carrol rides her bike through the desert until her inevitable crash and burn moment, which you totally knew must be coming, as she rides her bike off a cliff. I’m beginning to notice a bit of a trend here as Adamson’s muse Regina seems to be having the same kind of brutal death luck that Dario Argento’s former muse, Daria Nicolodi, used to have in his films.

And by this point, most of the gang have either accidentally killed each other or themselves (LSD fuelled death by a solo version of Russian roulette anyone?) before they even get near the escaping witnesses. Johnny does take care of a few of them, though, leaving Tamblyn to die the last as Johnny and Tracy ride off into the sunset.

While I’m extremely grateful to Severin for making Satan’s Sadists and many other Adamson movies available in their box set, this is a movie I’m guessing I’ll never watch again. It held my interest for what it was but I have no desire to watch slacker hoodlums terrorising innocent folk as a regular part of my cinematic diet. I think there may be a couple more biker movies in this set and I shall definitely check them out for this blog but, yeah, films like this one are not why I made the purchase, in all honesty. Nothing really against these kinds of pictures it’s just that they’re... not really my cup of tea. Steer well clear unless you love these kinds of films, would be my advice.

Five Bloody Graves

Yaqui Doodle Dandies

Five Bloody Graves
(aka Five Bloody Days To Tombstone)
Directed by Al Adamson
USA 1969 IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some very slight spoilers here.

It’s ‘Cowboys and Indians’ time again for Al Adamson, as he follows in his father’s directing footsteps to produce this luridly titled Western, written by the main male lead Robert Dix as ex-lawman Ben Thompson. Now, in a ten minute extra which includes an interview with Dix (it must have been made shortly before he died in 2018), I learned that Ben Thompson was an actual person and a bit of a notorious one at that. Dix said that, because he wasn’t as well known as some of the Western legends, he wanted to write something which would highlight this character. That being said, when I looked at an article on Thompson’s life in preparation for this review, the short episode depicted by this movie has no resemblance to anything that actually happened (including the back story about what happened to the character’s wife) and so it would be fairly safe to say, I think, that this is a highly fictionalised account at best.

Also, just for the record, the title of this movie, Five Bloody Graves, is a bit questionable too. There are plenty of deaths here (way more than five) and the last shot of the film includes... um... four graves. So, yeah, not sure where that title comes from but, still, it sounds pretty good to me.

Anyway, once again Adamson surprises me because... it’s not a bad Western in some ways. Although, perhaps unsurprisingly, it also has it’s problems but, I know Adamson was always proud of what he could do for the incredibly low budgets he was working with so, yeah, this is pretty good for the money. A low budget western but it has some very nice things in it to counter the terrible stuff.

This film deals with a Yaqui called Sartago, who once shot Ben Thompson’s wife on their wedding day. So Ben wanders the land looking for the Yaquis in the hopes he can get his revenge and, along the way, makes friends and enemies of various characters played by people like Vicki Volante, future director John 'Bud' Cardos (in two roles), Scott Brady, Jim Davis, Paula Raymond, Julie Edwards and Darlene Lucht. There’s even a role for the director’s famous father, Victor Adamson, playing a supporting character... I didn’t know what he looked like but I recognised him straight away as bearing a striking family resemblance.* Al Adamson also makes a quick uncredited cameo near the start of the film as one of the Yaqui’s trying to kill Thompson but, true to form, his character doesn’t survive more than a few minutes of the movie.

It also features John Carradine as a preacher who is a very strange character in that he’s very Christian but is not above sneaking a peek at a lady as she undresses nor, indeed, saving everybody’s lives when he pulls a derringer from behind his bible and kills the current threat. A decidedly ambiguous character who, like a lot of people in Al Adamson movies (I’m starting to discover), is not cut and dried when it comes to first impressions.

Another addition to the cast is Gene Raymond as the voice of death. I quite liked Dix’s somewhat poetic writing here and, although you never see the character of death, he gives a voice over commentary as he is the constant companion of Ben Thompson, riding on his (invisible) pale horse beside him wherever he goes.

Well... I say you never see death but, on the print which carries the Five Bloody Graves title, the opening animated credits sequence, which is pretty good for the low budget, features various skulls on a cartoon of the rocky canyons and the skeleton of death riding that very same pale horse. The music on the credits, however, sounds more like a 1940s horror movie and... after a while I realised why (I’ll get there in a minute, okay?).

Once again the cinematography here is by a young Vilmos Zsigmond and, it really shows. There’s some nice stuff done with double mirrors (Adamson seems to like using mirrors, I’ve noticed), a shot of Thompson approaching the camera from under a stationary horse and a truly spectacular series of shots where one cowboy is chasing another on his horse which does some amazing things with the way its focused and, frankly, just keeping up with these riders is an art in itself, I suspect. He also does that thing which I think is kinda ahead of its time, where he uses the camera pan to search for and then pick out a detail like a Yaqui standing on the edge of a cliff in the distance. That being said, there’s also a scene where he uses rack focusing on two characters facing the camera, changing from one to the other when each speaks, which is a bit excessive and was getting on my nerves a little, to be fair.

There’s a lot of bad stuff here too. For example, when a cowboy finds a squaw staked out and left for the ants, he rips her clothes off and then rapes her. After he’s raped her it cuts back to her and we see she is still wearing the clothes she had on when the cowboy found her... this is followed by a long shot of him throwing her clothes back on her body (now naked once more) before he puts two bullets in her. So, yeah... continuity, probably caused by a rearrangement of elements in the edit, is not good here.

And then there’s the music. There are a couple of scenes where I was watching the cowboys battle the Yaquis and, on the soundtrack, was the music they use for News At Ten, here in the UK. I was just waiting for the Big Ben chimes to go off at the end of each Indian raid. Apparently the piece of music is called "The Awakening" by John Pearson and that tipped me off why I didn’t see a composer’s name at the start. This movie is scored entirely by needle dropped library music and, it shows. It needn’t show but, honestly, whoever was running this music in didn’t know much about how you fit image to score, it seems to me. The music here is fine to listen to but has been used so inappropriately, with slow leisurely scenes where nothing is happening suddenly invaded by fast, jazzy action music for no apparent reason, for example, that it really harms the film in places because it’s so laughable. I understand the technique of trying to actually add pacing with the music (something Elmer Bernstein excelled at with his score for The Magnificent Seven)... but it kinda falls flat here, it has to be said. So, yeah, there’s that.

Other than that though... the actors are mostly pretty good in this one (especially Dix himself) and, while Five Bloody Graves is not a spectacular, or even great, entry into the Western genre... it’s not a bad watch and one wonders what Adamson might have been able to do with a bigger budget and a more leisurely work pace. I did find this one entertaining and I could easily watch it again. It’s a bit like a road movie infused into the American Western and it’s really not an odd fit at all.

*a very good friend advised me to tone down my
description of Al Adamson’s singularly arresting features. ;-)