Whiskey Mountain

Kill Hillbilly

Whiskey Mountain
USA 1977
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Whiskey Mountain is the last of the movies featured in Arrow’s fine He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray box set. Now, I’ve had some fun with many of the movies in this set, most or probably all of which I would never have seen if it hadn’t been for this new collection. You can see from the poor state of some of these ‘restored’ movies that they must have been not very far away from ‘full on’ vinegar syndrome setting in on the film so, I’m grateful to some of the Blu Ray companies out there for rescuing these things before they disintegrate altogether (now if someone could do this for all the Flash Gordon serials etc, it would be a big help... the DVD versions aren’t good enough).

That being said, I think Whiskey Mountain, which I suspect is a kind of Deliverance rip off (I’m guessing since I’ve never seen the Boorman movie) is, I have to say, the least interesting film in this collection and the one I didn’t get much out of. Part of the reason may be the subject matter... families terrorised by hillbillies is right at the top of the list of movie types I really wouldn’t bother watching, right up there with home invasion movies (which I also, mostly hate).

The opening credits is of the two male leads taking part in a scramble bike race and Grefé leaves music off the soundtrack, preferring instead to catch the sounds of the engines during this sequence which sets up the two best buddies before following them into the main plot. This one tells of two protagonist couples, Bill & Jamie (played by Christopher George and Linda Borgeson) and Dan & Diana (played by Preston Pierce and Roberta Collins). They go off in their car, with bikes in tow, into the mountains of North Carolina to find the local myth of Whiskey Mountain because Jamie’s grandfather has drawn a map for her of where he and his friends hid gazillions of Civil War rifles and many cases of whiskey during the war. The antique fire arms are now worth around a thousand dollars apiece to the two if they can find the stash.

However, it turns out that the mountain is also being used by a bunch of drug dealers and hillbillies, who try to scare the family off when they are camping in the mountains by setting light to their cars and putting them at risk at various points. Our intrepid heroes eventually figure out they are being terrorised by human antagonists rather than nature biting back but not before they are all taken prisoner. The boss of the group, played by John Davis Chandler, who was so good in Grefé’s The Hooked Generation (reviewed here) and who also had a small part in Mako - Jaws Of Death (reviewed here), is going to kill them later but is cursed by bungling hillbilly gang members who play around and do stupid things when he’s not around. They rape the girls in a lengthy sequence where Grefé distances the audience from the action by having polaroids self develop on screen of what is happening to them as the soundtrack plays out the screams of the girls. It’s actually a fairly tame sequence by moderns standards but something about Grefé’s way of showing it but leaving it mostly to the imagination of the audience makes it a little unsettling, to be honest. But, as I said, I don’t really enjoy these kinds of movies that much.

Eventually the two guys escape and get away on their motorcycles, riding to the nearest town to call the sherif in to help them rescue the gals. Alas, the sheriff either doesn’t believe a word or is in league with the drug gang (it’s not quite made clear) and so the guys are forced to stock up (illegally, due to sheriff intervention) on guns and head back to the mountain where Dan is killed but Bill rescues the gals and kills everyone else. The film ends with a less than ambiguous freeze frame where the sheriff returns in a helicopter and you realise that Bill might not have many more seconds to live himself but it’s a recall to the time, in my mind at least, where Grefé finished off The Naked Zoo (reviewed here) with a freeze frame which suddenly throws the whole outcome of the film in question in the space of about a second or two before the credits roll.

And I wish I had more to say about this one but this one just didn’t light my fire like certain others in the box did. Grefé directed just one more feature film after this but not for another 18 years. I don’t know how successful Whiskey Mountain was but I’m guessing not all that. Looking at the timing of the movie, it was released into cinemas two months after George Lucas’ original Star Wars movie and, yeah, I think what Lucas unleashed onto audience expectations after this kinda changed cinema, for bad or good is something I’m still undecided on but, I really think films like Whiskey Mountain wouldn’t have stood much chance in the clamour from a  movie going audience infused with the spirit of space opera.

And that’s me done with Whiskey Mountain... the least of the films in this set and not one I’d probably recommend to most people unless they were studying this subgenre of movies. That being said, though, this whole Arrow Blu Ray package is definitely worth picking up because there are films here which, while not absolutely gobsmacking in their impact, are both very interesting and probably not very well known to the average cinema goer... at least not over here in the UK. So would definitely point cinephiles who think they’ve seen everything in the direction of this boxed edition because, yeah, some interesting takes on various kinds of movie making, for sure.

Girls For Rent

Whacky Chases

Girls For Rent
(aka I Spit On Your Corpse)
USA 1974
Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some spoilers... if you care about such things in an Al Adamson movie.

So next up in my journey through Severin’s beautiful box set Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection is Girls For Rent and, like a lot of his films, I really wouldn’t take this one at face value based on any expectations inspired by the title or marketing campaign. It has very little to do with the prostitution racket, for example... that’s just a backdrop to kickstart the actual story of the movie. That being said, it’s not a dud as such and, in some ways, is one of his more entertaining movies.

It starts of with a bunch of lady prisoners working on a road, two of whom create a diversion. One of them, Sandra, played by hardcore porn actress Georgina Spelvin, runs in one direction and is being chased off by a guard. A whole large bunch of the prisoners manage to escape in the prison van and... then just drop out of the story. You never find out the fate of all the other ladies who escape. Meanwhile, a car is waiting by a road and another girl, who is a syndicate enforcer named Erica, played by Rosalind Miles, can see Sandra is having trouble getting to her rendezvous point so she pulls out a six shooter, attaches a silencer, followed by some other bits and pieces, to turn it into a really cool little rifle-pistol of some kind... and then shoots the guard, allowing Sandra to catch up to her so she can whisk her off.

Sometime a little later, Erica takes Sandra to see her boss Marino, played by Adamson regular Kent Taylor, who had conceived the plan to spring Sandra from jail. He wants her to join his mob which runs prostitutes and thieves and he puts her in charge of his assassination division. Her first job is to head up the assassination of an important client who also uses his hookers... so Sandra and Erica persuade the film’s main protagonist, a sex worker called Donna (played by Susie Ewing), to slip the client a pill to make him groggy under the pretext that they need some incriminating photos of him and to signal them to come into his place when he slips under. Unknown to Donna, though, is the fact that Erica knows he has a weak heart and this pill will finish him off... which it soon does. However, while Sandra and Erica are driving the corpse away, Donna decides to split and heads off on the road to Mexico, to hide with a friend of her sister.

So that’s all just the main set up and... this is where the movie takes its split away from any expectations you might have been having about what kind of film it was going to be and suddenly turns into a chase movie for the rest of its running time. And there are all kinds of shenanigans once Donna forces the pursuing Sandra and Debbie off the road. Almost everybody in this film is dogged with bad luck. Their cars keep breaking down in the desert, or a car is stolen or a truck runs out of gas. After escaping an old man played by Robert Livingston (from The Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses, both of which you can find reviewed by me here), who captures Donna to have sex with his backwards, hill-billy son (who doesn’t even understand what sex is), she eventually ends up trying to get to the nearest inhabited town with a guy called Chuck (played by Preston Pierce from Angel’s Wild Women, which I reviewed here), but the two hit gals catch up with them and have an old cowboy movie style shoot out in the rocks (which of course, comes very naturally to Adamson given his family lineage and sensibilities... read my review on the outstanding documentary about his bizarre life here for more details on that). I won’t say much about the twists and turns of the ending but I will say that very few characters survive the film and leave it at that... which seems to be a pattern in Adamson’s work from this period, it seems to me. I think these movies have a bleak, nihilistic tone to them which I suspect, from the stories told by the people who loved working with him, didn’t necessarily reflect his personal outlook.

That being said, I understand he really didn’t get on all that well with porn actress Georgina Spelvin on this shoot, especially since she refused (not unreasonably in terms of health and safety I suspect) to do certain scenes in the original planned demise of her character. That being said, due to her career in pornography, she is able to provide the kind of nude scenes associated with this kind of movie, although Adamson always seemed uneasy with shooting them, it seems to me. So, for instance, there’s a scene where Erica and a topless Sandra get in a fist fight and take out three guys before stealing their car, which was nicely staged and looks good on film. There’s also a scene where she’s sexually riding the old guy’s backward son and, just as he reaches orgasm, she blows his brains out with her six shooter. So, yeah, she was obviously down with the nude scenes (as is Susie Ewing in one memorable moment) but, well lets just say that Adamson never worked with her again on a project.

The film has the occasional interesting photographic flourish reminiscent of some of Adamson’s earlier films where he was using ‘future famous’ cinematographers... like a shot through a wine glass half covering the face of a corpse... but mostly the film is very much a road movie and there’s a more kinetic and ‘just shoot what you can get’ feel to the proceedings. Surprisingly, though, this doesn’t do the film any harm and I have to say I was quite taken with Girls For Rent. I could see this one doing really well as a double bill with something like the Japanese classic Sex And Fury and I may well show those together myself for some friends one day. One of Adamson’s more interesting movies, for sure, in a career which, so far for me, has proven to be full of ups and downs. However, the movies were usually so cheap to make that they did rack up huge profits and I believe the same can be said of this one.

Angels' Wild Women

Spahndemic

Angels' Wild Women
USA 1972
Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Story spoilers... if you’re worried
about such things on an Al Adamson movie.

Angels' Wild Women pretty much goes under the guise, at least as far as it’s marketing is concerned, of being a biker movie... something like a version of Adamson’s The Female Bunch but with the girls trading their horses in for motorcycles. In fact, it’s not really got much in the way of connecting tissue to The Female Bunch (reviewed here) other than sharing some actors and, of course, once again being shot on the Spahn Ranch, presumably after the Manson Murders had happened by this point (I’ll get onto that in a minute). And, while the film certainly deals with characters who are almost all part of the biker counter-culture of the time, the emphasis is not on their motorbikes to an extent that it really transforms the plot much and, neither is the ‘female’ cast of characters pushed as being that strong or liberating (other than an opening sequence where three of the ‘Angels’ take revenge on a couple of guys who have raped one of their own). I mean, it’s not that they’re superfluous to the plot in any way (such as it is, there’s not much of one), it’s just that they don’t really get much more screen time than the various male characters so... yeah, the title and advertising of this bunch of characters seems a little bit inappropriate to say the least. Not that this is an unusual occurrence in an exploitation film but, for example, nobody ever refers to any character, male or female, with the name Angel and the women in this picture aren’t exactly all that wild either, it has to be said. Okay, I literally, just after I published this, realised the placement of the apostrophe in the title was a bit dodgy and so, as I corrected my title, I realised that the implication is that these are the girlfriends etc of the "Hell's Angels" or some such outfit... so that maybe makes a bit more sense.

But it is an engaging mess of a movie and it doesn’t go down the ‘biker hooligans’ route that a lot of the exploitation fare of the time seemed to do. This one has two rival bike gang owners who hate each other enough to have an overly long fist fight near the start of the picture... but love each other enough to work against their common enemy at the end and may well be brothers (although I could have got the wrong end of the stick there). The two brothers are main male protagonist Speed, played really likeably by Ross Hagen (his only film for Adamson) and Turk, played by Preston Pierce. They are joined by a cast that includes regular Adamson stalwarts such as Kent Taylor, the lovely Vicki Volante, Jill Woelfel and, of course, Adamson’s wife Regina Carrol.

When Speed gets called away to join the gang in a ‘men only’ motorcycle/beer swigging shindig out of the county, the girls end up on the Spahn Movie Ranch and, for the first time that I can remember in an Adamson movie, we actually see its name on a big sign. Now Adamson and many of his cast and crew had already shot a few pictures on Spahn, around about the same time Charles Manson and his followers were doing their thing and so they would have known these people. Here, Adamson fully cashes in on his experience of the mood of the place because, the guy in charge of a hippy commune at Spahn Ranch in the film, who takes the girls in for a day or two, is called King and he looks and acts just like Charlie Manson. So this film is pretty much a look at the cult of Manson in some ways, in that he’s not the loving, peaceful person he presents himself as and he ends up, more or less, accidentally killing one of the girls and locking two of them in... then murders one of them who tries to escape and accidentally sees him burying another of his victims.

Eventually, Regina Carrol manages to escape, gets Speed and the gang, and they all return to the ranch to have a big punch up with Manson.... um, sorry, I mean King and his followers. Alas, they are not in time to stop Speed’s main squeeze from being sacrificed in a pseudo-satanic ritual. Speed and Turk pursue the fleeing King on their bikes and Speed rides his bike off a handy cliff and uses it to smash the windscreen of Kings car, sending him and his henchman careening to an explosive death.

And, it’s not a completely terrible film, to be fair. I didn’t rate the framing or cinematography that much but the editing is interesting and the film feels fairly loose (apparently a lot of it was improvised) so the scenes of the big gatherings of beer swilling biker boys etc capture a certain state of mind and slacker mentality which is appealing. There’s one scene which irritated me a little, although I appreciate the cameraman was trying out something different. There’s a conversation between two characters in deep focus with the out of focus branches of a tree or bush between them and the camera. Unfortunately, the soft focus leaves totally cover the faces in the shot for the majority of it and, while I appreciate it’s a deliberate aesthetic decision, it really didn’t do much for me other than annoy me a little, truth be told (and I normally love this kind of deliberate obscuring of an image).

Another point of interest, other than a cameo by Adamson as the director of a war movie in the early stages of this film... or a passing reference to the Satan’s Sadists of the movie of the same title (reviewed here), would be a certain fun sensibility to the fight scenes. For example, in the long, drawn out fist fight between Speed and Turk, they keep trading blows and muttering a lot under their breath and, the style of it, I’m pretty sure, seems influenced by the fight scenes in those wonderful old Italian Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies, where the dubbed voices of the actors provide almost a low key running commentary around the punches. Similarly, the big punch up on the Spahn Ranch near the end of the picture could almost be lifted, again, from one of those Spencer/Hill movies... although it seems a little inappropriate by this point in the film because, by now, three people are dead and the stakes seem to be just a little too high for these kind of ‘macho fun’ shenanigans.

Another thing I noticed was Adamson’s continued recycling of elements from his previous films. I honestly thought the obvious, upcoming car crash was once more going to be that car rolling down the cliff again... well, it was, it was just a different car and footage this time around. However, I did notice that in some scenes, while the bikers were whizzing around or someone or other was chasing or punching someone, the music from either Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) or Smashing The Crime Syndicate (reviewed here), or possibly both, was tracked into the movie. It’s great music but possibly not the most appropriate for the action here and, yeah, it popped me right out of the experience as soon as I heard it.

And other than that... I don’t have much else to offer on Angels' Wild Women. As pseudo ‘motorcycle gang’ movies go, it doesn’t have the nasty, intimidating feel that a lot of them have and I found myself liking Speed too much to not have a fair enough time with it. I’d probably watch it again at some point and although it’s nothing special, it’s a better Adamson flick than some of the others he was making around this time.