Carnival Magic

Goodbye Mr. Chimps

Carnival Magic
USA 1983 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

You know, it would be easy to just ridicule Carnival Magic for various reasons and, looking at various mentions on the internet... many have. I’m really not going to do that but, if you want the crazy Al Adamson style outrageous bits as a fast fix before I add my own two cents (or two pence as it is over here in the UK), then I’ll cover them right now by just saying that the film features, as a character, a talking chimpanzee... and nobody really questions the fact that the chimp can talk other than the evil vivisectionist doctor who is brought in to add the drama and conflict for the second half of the movie. The chimp, called Alexander The Great (or Alex) in the movie was played by Trudi The Chimp (and is credited as such in the movie) and was really a bit too old to be working in films at this time. Chimpanzees tend to get fairly cranky and fierce as they reach a certain age and, it’s my understanding from watching the documentary Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson  (reviewed here) that the chimp did send one or two of the actors to the hospital during the filming.

So that’s the silly stuff out of the way and, yes, it’s good silly stuff and worth its weight in gold. Now let’s look at the rest of it.

Carnival Magic was a rare family film made by Adamson, his penultimate released movie and one of two ‘family projects’ which were nothing like any of his previous exploitation films. It turns out, a travelling carnival is what we in the UK call a fun fair so, I’m glad I got that cleared up in my head. It also seems to have a circus attached to it.

It was the last film to feature his wife and muse, actress Regina Carrol, before she succumbed finally to cancer in the early 1990s. Now, I’ve seen Carrol be both bad and okay in Adamson’s films but she’s actually very good here in the minor role of Markov’s assistant. Markov is the magician of the carnival, played by Don Stewart. He’s a friend to Alex, who is his co-performer in his magic act. Regina Carrol’s character Kate is obviously interested in Markov, who is portrayed as some kind of truly magical shamen-like superman in the film... but Markov can’t get over the death of his former wife. It’s my belief the early romantic overtures between Kate and Markov which don’t quite erupt here were being saved for the sequel, which is perhaps why Regina Carrol is slightly sidelined here... she was presumably going to be a major element in the next movie and at the finish of the end credits the sequel is even teased with a message saying... “So long for now. See you next year in More Carnival Magic.” Honestly, I wish that had happened because a) Carrol possibly does her best and most naturalistic work here in an Adamson film and b) because, surprisingly, I genuinely liked this calm, gentle family film.

The film itself starts off with credits over the carny folk setting up the fair and then shows various customers joining the proceedings. It’s a fair which is down on its luck but the owner, Stoney (played by Mark Weston), has his daughter Ellen (played by Jennifer Houlton) and his publicist (who are developing a romantic relationship) to look out for him. Then he discovers his magician, who he is about to fire, lives with a talking monkey and, of course, the act draws people in from far and wide and the carnival is a major success again. Then there are a load of shenanigans like Alex the chimp taking one of the customers cars (with a young lady sleeping in the back seat) and leading the local police on a merry car chase but, despite his destruction of private property, this seems to have no consequences in the scheme of things at all, with a throwaway line in the next scene mentioning that the chimp is on six months probation for driving without a licence.

And then there’s the whole evil doctor who, with the help of an alcoholic, abusing tiger tamer... kidnaps the chimp and takes him to his vivisection lab. Alex, when rescued, does actually die from what looks like suiciding on nearby poison but, due to Markov’s inadvertent medicine man powers, he’s up and around again by the end of the picture. And there’s really nothing remarkable about the film but it is very engaging and I had a quite moving time with it actually, given it’s also the last film with Regina Carrol in it.

And, after a delayed release in 1983, three years after it was made, it slumped immediately at the box office and very quickly vanished without trace. It was considered a lost film as no prints of it were known to exist. End of story.

Almost.

A decade or more later, when a cinema was a venue for some punk rock concerts and they were looking for films to screen behind the bands as they played, somebody discovered the five cans of something hand labelled up as “Carnival Fucking Magic”. In an extra on this Blu Ray disc, part of Severin’s Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set, the story is told of how the film was screened silently behind the band and the crowd were suddenly much more interested in what the heck was going on in the film than the various music acts. So a cinema owner rescued it and it started turning up in a few performances and garnering something of a cult audience (even making the cut of the horribly disrespectful TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return).

The vinegar syndrome on the cans was pretty bad but Severin (possibly with the help of the company by the same name s the condition, Vinegar Syndrome, who it seems have helped out with some of the prints and extras in this mighty set) have done an absolutely excellent job of restoring Carnival Magic and it looks almost brand new for most of the film. I knew nothing about this movie but I’m pleased I’ve seen it as I do like gentle, pleasant films which drift along at their own pace. Would I recommend it to anyone? Well, probably not unless you’re really into Adamson but, like I said, I had a really good time with it and I do think some people will get something out of it. It seems to have a small following of people who are passionate about it... perhaps for the wrong reasons but, that’s okay, the movie is now at least being seen by people. And that’s usually all a director wants.

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.

Jessi's Girls

Stormin’ Mormon

Jessi's Girls
(aka Wanted Women)
USA 1975
Directed by Al Adamson
Manson International/
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some spoilers within.

You know, as I rummage my way through Severin’s beautiful Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, I’ll occasionally come across a hidden jewel. For every terrible Brain of Blood (reviewed here), Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here) or Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here), there’s an unpolished gem of a movie such as Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here), Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here) or The Fakers (Smashing The Crime Syndicate, reviewed here). Jessi’s Girls is one such precious stone of a movie. I mean, sure, it’s ragged around the edges... this is an Al Adamson film after all but, it’s engaging and pacey and makes for a good evening’s entertainment, for sure.

Now, I’ve not seen Bad Girls (got the Goldsmith score though, so I should get around to rectifying that situation in the near future, I guess) but, from the looks of the plot outline, it doesn’t stray too far from this rape/revenge western and I can’t help but think the writers/producers might have had the memory of this one in mind when they went forward on that movie.

After a not too inspiring opening title shot of Jessi’s Girls riding the open country, Adamson gets straight down to the plot when we meet the young, mormon couple of Jessi (played brilliantly by Sondra Currie) and her husband, travelling on their lonesome in their covered wagon. As they set up camp and try to get a fire going, we are treated to Jessi bathing naked by a waterfall and then doing sexy things with her main man before they are approached by the old timey Western equivalent of a thuggish, Al Adamson style motorcycle gang (but, you know, on horses).

In a particularly unpleasant sequence, the husband is tied up while the seven or so bandits take turns raping Jessi. They then shoot both Jessi and he husband dead and go off on their merry way. But what’s this? Jessi’s still alive after receiving the wound in her shoulder and, after digging the bullet out with her hot dagger (bizarrely, the shell is still in its casing which, according to IMDB... and presumably history... is not the kind of bullet wound you would get in the Old West), she starts walking her way out of the desert until she comes across a homestead and, in her primitive and brutalised state, she is befriended by the grizzly guy living there, who teaches her how to shoot so she can pursue the filthy scoundrels. He even gives her his shotgun, which he calls ‘Judy the equaliser’.

Meanwhile, as Jessi is being taught good shooting and such and such by her new ‘vengeance coach’, Adamson cross cuts the footage with three other events to set up the other members of... Jessi’s Girls.

First up we have wanted outlaw Rachel McBride played by Jennifer Bishop, riding in the desert with her somewhat damaged horse. A marshal, called Clay, catches up with her and takes her in. It’s at this point for the sake of not driving myself mad, that I have to point out that Clay is referred to by other characters as either ‘Marshal’, ‘Sheriff’ or ‘Deputy’ quite randomly throughout the entire running time of the movie. I don’t know why but I can only guess that the script kept changing or they were shooting different revisions each day and so his character, who is quite definitely a lawman (of sorts) has a kind of vague title. He does seem to be running things though so, for this review, I’ll just continue to refer to him as... Marshal Clay.

Next up we have prostitute Claire (or sometimes Clara, depending on what script was being read on the day, I suspect), who is played here by Al Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol. For some reason, she starts shooting at a client after a good night’s sleep (portrayed by Hugh Warden, the same guy who played the heart attack client in Girls For Rent, reviewed here) and so Marshal Clay next arrests her.

Finally, we have Ellyn Stern as Kana, who gets left behind by her gang during a bank robbery, by the same bunch of bandits who attacked Jessi and her man at the start. So, of course, Clay arrests her too and puts her in a jail cell with the other two girls, ready to take them on the long, cross country trip to ‘territorial prison’ the next day.

And, naturally, the next day when he and a deputy (who also refers to him as deputy?) are trying to transfer the girls, it’s also Jessi’s first day of riding around, trying to catch up with the gang what ‘done her man in!’ She kills the deputy, wounds Clay and recruits the girls, grabbing the marshal and taking him with them for a bit so she can dress his wounds and 'sex him up for information' as to where the infamous gang hide out... which is apparently a ghost town feared by lawman and bounty hunters alike at Copper Creek. She lets Clay escape and the girls start off on their way there in pursuit of both justice and, also, the money from a recent bank robbery... the slight twist being that the robbery was the same one that Kana was at, who is the main squeeze of the gang’s leader.

After a fair amount of sexing, rogue bandit/indian killing and various other exploitation elements such as a fist fight between Kana and Claire, which is actually quite well staged and has some satisfying sound effects... we end up with the surviving three girls all arriving independently at Copper Creek for the big showdown. At the end of the confrontation it’s only Jessi and Clay, who has been following the trail of corpses left in the gal’s wake, to gun it out because... Clay just wants the bounty on the gang all to himself. The last shot is a humdinger and makes a nice, abrupt ending to the movie and, seriously, I would have easily watched a sequel to this one if somebody had thought to make one.

It does look rough and ready, for sure and, yeah, the cinematography isn’t monumentally stylish (although the fastly edited, frenetic hand held stuff in the fistfight I mentioned earlier gives a nice, kinetic feel to proceedings). But it does have a bunch of good performances at its heart which elevates things past the limitations of the script and the budget, with Sondra Currie being especially good in this movie, holding things together and looking, in my eyes at least, like a young Julianne Moore. The scene where she is raped is something she’s especially good in, as you see her eyes deaden to her plight as she loses her innocence and this intensity informs her fierce performance for the rest of the picture.

Also, the stunt work in that final gun battle, which includes Claire’s memorable last words as she is shot down, “It still beats whoring for a living!”, is actually pretty good. Some of these guys take some pretty hard and spectacular falls and I was especially impressed when Jessi does the old spaghetti western gag of lighting sticks of dynamite with her cheroot and blowing up a big wooden tower with a stuntman still standing on top of it... falling to earth midst the splintering wood fragments. Some nice action which, I dunno, feels kind of raw in that good way that you think, maybe some of today’s action directors could learn a thing or two from, by looking at movies like this once in a while.

So there you have it, Jessi’s Girls is definitely an Al Adamson diamond in the rough and I’d have no qualms about recommending it to anyone. I absolutely loved it and will watch it again no question, if I don’t run out of time first. If you’re going to do a rape/revenge Western then this is definitely the way to do it.

The Naughty Stewardesses/Blazing Stewardesses

Bosoms And Boeings

The Naughty Stewardesses
USA 1973 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Blazing Stewardesses
USA 1975 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Well... okay, so softcore sexploitation pictures aren’t exactly my usual stomping ground (not necessarily by choice) so I thought I’d review the next two films in Severin’s gorgeous Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection as a double bill as they comprise The Naughty Stewardesses and its direct sequel, Blazing Stewardesses. Now, as it happens I made the right choice because, although as you’ll see, I grew into the spirit of the first film very quickly... the sequel is a huge mess of a production which I probably wouldn’t have had enough to say about (especially good things) to sustain its own review anyway so... okay, lets start with the first movie.

The Naughty Stewardesses starts off with a nice enough, very 1970s feeling animated title sequence identifying the stars of the film in little photos plus moving handbags and wing insignias. And, then we move into an opening set up of three of the four title stewardesses... including Marilyn Joi as Barbara... on a plane, talking about various sex positions engaged in while flying (and now I’ve got my eye in with Al Adamson’s films, I can tell you one of the passengers in this scene is an uncredited Regina Carrol). I have to mention right here that the interiors of the airplane sets are pretty much as authentic looking as the spaceship interiors on Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here)... that is to say, not at all. One of the girls incites one of the pilots to demonstrate that ‘it’ can be done standing up. Meanwhile, a woman on her way to her day job in a ‘massage parlour’ picks up a hitchhiker and explains she’ll soon be joining an airline company as a stewardess. Her name is Debbie, as played by Connie Hoffman and... I’ll get back to her in a minute because she’s one of the reasons this film didn’t just fall flat on its face with me.

Okay, so the film goes from bad to worse as we have a birthday party where a guy is wheeled in, covered in icing like a cake, for one of the girls and there's lots of red blooded male sex antics which are pretty much on the level of Porkys (another film I’ve always kinda hated). And at this point I was pretty much telling myself, ‘This is for the blog, I should sit through this’ when... things suddenly take an upward turn and the movie gets really engaging and, also, kind of dark in places. There’s several dollops of nudity and over the top exaggerated sex of course, which are always very welcome but, I believe Adamson couldn’t direct a sex movie if he tried and I know he was very reluctant to do this movie but, yeah, this jettisons the adolescent overtones very quickly and his soft core sequences have all the credibility of a modern Japanese porn film which, if you’ve ever tried to watch a snippet of one, you’ll know is pretty ridiculous.

Debbie, it turns out, even when shedding her clothes for the odd scene, is actually both a tragic and sincere character. She moves in with the other three stewardesses and then meets, on one of her first plane trips, a very rich, old World War Two vet who saves the life of one of the other passengers. His name is Brewster, played by the old Western actor Robert Livingston (who surprisingly, considering his age here, gets the lion's share of the simulated sex scenes too). Anyway Debbie becomes friends with Brewster and, afterwards, accidentally meets an amateur photographer/taxi driver who takes some nice modelling shots of her. However, this is where things all go wrong for Debbie because, photo-boy really isn’t all there. In fact, even as he accompanies Debbie to a party and gets offered a job shooting a porn film, Locked Loins, by a director of such movies, we can see that he might be a bit of a psycho.

And then he also turns out to be a member of a terrorist organisation called the People’s Liberation Army. Along with the porn director, he kidnaps Debbie and two of her fellow stewardesses and takes them to a cabin, to ransom back to Brewster for fifty thousand dollars. Why they would have the rendezvous point so close to where the cabin is would be anybody’s guess but when Debbie escapes and gets involved in a little chase across the snow, I have to say that it looks like the same landscape that Adamson used for the final scenes of Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here). Brewster brings one of his rifles and, accompanied by the fourth of the stewardesses, who he’s also sexing up on the side, he shoots the psycho dead and it all ends in tears.

And it’s a not bad film, in all honesty. Between Adamson’s bleak turn and the performances of Marilyn Joi (billed in this and the sequel as Tracy King) and especially Connie Hoffman as the thoughtful Debbie, I was actually quite taken with this movie once I’d got the first ten minutes out of the way. One of the expectations in this kind of film, I would guess, would be that the girls would all be fairly dumb but the four stewardesses are all quite intelligent, strong female roles who just happen to enjoy sex... which really helps the viewer engage with the various ‘almost but not quite sexy’ elements of the movie. Again, like early Adamson actress Vicki Volante, it’s a shame that Connie Hoffman only made a handful of films because she really has amazing screen presence in this. Possibly her best known role was as a recurring character called Orange in two episodes of Starsky and Hutch.

There are the usual strange choices you seem to find in all of the Adamson films I’ve seen so far, such as the attempted rape of Debbie by the impotent psycho photo boy at the cabin where he’s holding the girls for ransom, being scored with music that sounds like it came straight out of a 1970s funky action movie. And, knowing the director as I do now from this box set, I wouldn’t be surprised if that is exactly where it comes from. I don’t know who came up with the idea of a ‘weird sex device’ handcrafted by Brewster, which is just a basket chair which yo-yos up and down from the ceiling but, as seen in this movie, it’s pretty impractical and not something I can imagine selling very well at a sex shop.  There are also a lot of ‘filler’ montages of the girls wandering around various locations like Las Vegas and so on which are actually quite easy on the eye and... also something I am accustomed to seeing now in this director’s movies. One thing is for sure, though, this is not your atypical ‘sex romp’ and, while the same can also be said for the sequel... um... yeah, lets get to that one now.

Okay, so after the phenomenal success that The Naughty Stewardesses got at the box office, Adamson was asked to helm a sequel... which he did in the form of Blazing Stewardesses, with three main performers coming back in the form of Robert Livingston, Connie Hoffman and Marilyn Joi reprising their characters from the first film. A third stewardess, who doesn’t take her clothes off in this film, is Adamson’s wife Regina Carrol, playing a completely dumb version of a stewardess, complete with comical voice and, frankly, although I’m sure this particular performance has its admirers and certainly had my jaws agape, it’s definitely scoring high on my ‘what were you thinking?’ chart of bizarre acting choices in a movie. It’s like watching a road accident in horror and fascination as it plays out right before your eyes but, to be fair, that’s totally appropriate to this mess of a movie, which does the same thing on all levels.

Although there are two nude scenes near the front end of the film, none of them feature the title characters and that’s pretty much it for any pretence of a) being the sex romp it’s purported to be and b) having anything to do with airplanes either, apart from the first ten minutes. Instead, after Debbie finds her future husband in bed with a another girl, she gets an invite for her and her two stewardess friends to host the opening of a new gambling ranch that her friend Brewster has opened. They accept and arrive at the ranch, along with a load of customers but, complications ensue as a bunch of cloaked and masked marauders have been hijacking Brewster’s employees and also making sure the gambling equipment he buys doesn’t make it to the ranch. If this sounds like an old timey western plot to you, that was definitely Adamson’s intention. The opening titles has cartoon figures of bikini clad stewardesses dancing around in front of shots of cowboys (presumably the title was also trying to cash in on Blazing Saddles). Even the music in the scenes with the ‘bad guys’ plays out like a 1950s Republic western score and, again, knowing Adamson that might be exactly where he purloined the cues.

Behind the plot, unknown to the others, is the madam of the neighbouring whorehouse The Beehive, played by an ageing Yvonne De Carlo, of The Munsters fame. Also on hand are... the two surviving members of The Ritz Brothers, who hadn’t been in a movie since 1943 (The Three Stooges were originally lined up for this and I believe even rehearsed some of their material but were unable to do it due to ill health and ultimately death). Now, I don’t know what The Ritz Brothers’ act was but I get a pretty good idea of it from their antics here and they do a little dance, plays cards badly, get vaguely sex addled by Regina Carrol and share a giant sandwich. I’m not sure now that I would ever watch a Ritz Brothers movie after seeing this but... you never know.

So there’s not too much of the stewardesses in the film at all, just a lot of mostly bad comedy routines and some ‘sped up’ cowboy chase footage. Other things on offer are a dodgy looking arab who we cut back to every now and again, as he tries to find oil on the ranch and, somehow, Adams manages to work in one of those exploding, rolling car shots of footage from one of his earlier movies. If this film actually hit enough right notes it could rightly be called a ‘laugh riot’ but, honestly, there wasn’t any laughing coming from me and, although I found the film interesting (like watching a train wreck happen right next to you), I’d have to say it’s one of the worst films I’ve ever seen from this director. It totally hits the wrong notes throughout its running time which is a shame because, as I said, the first film was actually quite engaging.

So that’s it for me with these two. I’d recommend The Naughty Stewardesses to anyone who knows what they’re getting into and I’ll almost certainly watch it again some day. Blazing Stewardesses is a terrible mess, however... I really would give that one a hard pass. One of the extras in this is a nicely researched mini documentary about the real life phenomenon of the air stewardess and their iconic role in popular culture called Fly Girls - The Stewardess As Lifestyle Icon In The Golden Age Of The Exploitation Film, written and narrated by the living legend film programmer and writer Kier-La Janisse (I reviewed one of her amazing books on film here). It’s an interesting look at the subject matter and, frankly, worth it’s weight in comical gold for the brief shot at the start which shows Ms. Janisse in a stewardess unform herself. Another nice addition from Severin, also included on the disc, is the Adamson directed ‘gluing scenes’ from the unrelated release Bedroom Stewardesses (which I haven’t had time to watch yet but I’ll get to it at some point, I guess). So yeah, one hit, one miss and I’ll get to some more Adamson ‘masterpieces’ soon.

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.

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.

Brain Of Blood

Headcase Hostages

Brain Of Blood
USA 1971
Directed by Al Adamson
Hemisphere/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Story spoilers, as if you’re really concerned
about those things on an Al Adamson movie.

Out of all the Al Adamson movies I’ve explored, as I slowly make my way through Severin’s outstanding Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection Blu Ray boxed edition, Brain Of Blood is probably the dullest and least interesting of the titles I’ve watched so far. It’s also a duplicate, because the film was also included in Severin’s very welcome Hemisphere Horrors boxed set, which I hadn’t got around to watching yet. Actually, this is something Severin have done a couple of times now because their upcoming boxed behemoth, The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee, also has a film which they premiered in their Hemisphere Horrors set, albeit the later release has gone from a 2K scan to a 4K scan (not sure what that means really but I assume that just means it’s better quality).

So, yeah, while I’ve seen some halfway decent/good Adamson films so far and, of course, some truly awful ones... Brain Of Blood just seems a bit of a non-entity in terms of... I just wasn’t bothered one way or another about it. It’s just a bit ‘meh’... which in this case I’ll use as an acronym for ‘Merely Egregiously Humdrum’. And it really shouldn’t be because the plot of the film is really quite staggeringly silly and executed in a ridiculously bad manner. Both these elements coming together should mean for a mockingly enjoyable time but, apart from the whole rat thing (I’ll get to it), I couldn’t really muster up any enthusiasm for this one.

This one starts off in the far away, fictional land of Kalid, as the ruler of the country lays dying. He promises Adamson regular Regina Carrol that she will rule his land at his side, once he has undergone a serious operation which she and Dr. Bob Nigserian (played by Grant Williams) have arranged in America to save his life. So Dr. Bob and friend Mohammed (played by Zandor Vorkov, who played Count Dracula in Adamson’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which is in this set but which I already reviewed in an earlier DVD incarnation here) go to the US to seek out brain specialist Dr. Lloyd Trenton (played by Kent Taylor) and his assistant Dorro (played by Angelo Rossitto), to perform the operation to transplant the leader’s brain into another body and then use plastic surgery on said body so that the people of his country are none the wiser about their ruler’s death.

Okay, so something that you need to know here is that the operation can’t be completed until the leader of Kalid has died. However, leading up to his death he has been treated with a special serum to help keep his brain alive after death, otherwise the operation can’t be performed. So let me just run that one past you again for the sake of clarity... the guy has to have died but his brain must be alive. What the heck? What are they saying here? This already makes no sense. Just anaesthetise him and cut it out while he's alive already!

Okay, so when they get to the US, after helping Trenton remove the leader’s brain and placing it in handy storage (with wires poking out of it, to preserve it for a bit), Bob and the others are sent on their way... to be taken out by an assassin hired by Trenton, who is secretly working with Regina Carrol’s character, to put the leader’s brain into someone’s head and rule the country with him. Wait... wasn’t that the plan all along anyway... why all this killing? Anyway, the only survivor of the assassination attempt is Bob, who chases the assassin later but can’t get to him before the assassin is blown up in his car by Dorro. Meanwhile, the body donor is a bit beaten up, so Dr. Trenton puts the brain into the former body of his ‘disfigured by acid’, simpleton, strong, giant pal Gore.

When Bob finds out, the chase is on as Gore’s personality somehow also resurfaces every now and again, even though his brain has been disposed off. Bob is knocked unconscious in the same dungeon that Dr. Trenton keeps his blood donors in. His blood donors being chained up girls including the lovely and tragically wasted actress who was an Adamson regular at the time, Vicki Volante. Finding herself, of course, in an identical situation and for the same diabolical reason, as her earlier character in Al Adamson’s Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here). Actually, the drawn out scenes where Vicki Volante has escaped her shackles and is wandering around the underground, dungeon chambers is almost atmospheric and, although still pretty dull, I find Volante’s face fascinating (she should have been snapped up by Hollywood to become a major star rather than retire early, methinks) and this is probably the most watchable part of the movie for me. Then there’s the rats...

So although all the human occupants of the dungeon are raggedy and dirty, there are two pretty clean looking rats. When Dr. Bob finds himself in the dungeon with Vicki’s character Katherine, she tells him she’s been bitten on the leg by a rat. Being a good doctor, Dr. Bob then decides to slit open her leg with his handy penknife, where she’s apparently been bitten... and suck out the venom, before bandaging her up. Wait, what? Hold the phone. Isn’t that what you do with a snake bite? Since when are rats venomous. Okay, so she might get rabies but, poisoned? I reckon the good doctor just wanted to suck her leg and I can’t blame him but, still, this is getting ridiculously surreal now (well, more surreal than transplanting people’s brains, anyway).

Almost instantaneously, Vicki becomes the doctor’s love interest but escapes with a stray, random young boy who lives in the general area and stumbles onto the brain monster guy. I don’t know why she keeps the boy because, surely this kid has his own mother to go home to. Anyway, she goes off and there’s a chase where both good guy Dr. Bob and also Regina Carrol get killed. Then Bob’s body is used to rehouse Kalid’s leader and he has plastic surgery to ensure he looks like exactly the same actor who played him in his original body (aged skin as well, which is quite ludicrous considering the reason for the surgery in the first place, now I come to think of it)... ruling Kalid with the evil Doctor as his new head of Scientific Research for the country.

It’s a bleak ending but I couldn’t care less by the time I’d reached this point. Brain Of Blood is, so far, my least favourite inclusion in this quite thorough set and I can’t, in all good consceience, recommend it to anyone. I can, however, recommend Severin’s Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection in general because it really is a stupendous presentation and I am learning so much about how you recut and re-market films for different audiences from it. So... onward I go.

Psycho-A-Go-Go/Fiend With The Electronic Brain/Blood Of Ghastly Horror

Echo Of Terror

Psycho-A-Go-Go
1965 (1961) 84 minutes

Fiend With The Electronic Brain
1965 (1961) 97 minutes

Blood Of Ghastly Horror
(aka The Man With The Synthetic Brain)
1967 (1971) 86 minutes

USA Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Okay... I’ve dispensed with my usual punny title for this review in memoriam of a film which never made it to the screen and no longer exists in its original form. Early in his career, Al Adamson directed a ‘jewel heist gone wrong’ picture called Echo Of Terror but it didn’t get a release. From then on things get complicated and it’s why I’m reviewing what seems, at first glance, to be three films on here rather than just the usual one. Please let it be noted that the dates above are the IMDB ones followed by the dates that Severin give the productions (which, as you can see, are completely different release years)... so, I’m not sure when these things got actual releases but you can see ‘roughly’ when they were released.

Adamson was advised to spice up Echo Of Terror a little and so he inserted some go-go dancers and developed the lead actress character further than in the original version of the film. This release, Psycho-A-Go-Go, is so called in reference to the character of Joe Corey (played with relish by Roy Morton), who is a man who displays ‘turn on a dime’ violent behaviour traits and who kills a few people in gruesome ways in order to try and locate the jewels he and his colleagues lost in a failed heist, before terrorising a man’s wife and child and... yeah, okay, I’ll get to all that in a minute.

Anyway, Psycho-A-Go-Go played at some drive-ins but didn’t get a lot of success so, in an attempt to sell it to another investor, Adamson was asked if he could somehow turn it into a science fiction movie. So... he enticed John Carradine and one other, plus two of the original actors back (four actors in total account for the sequences in question) and filmed some footage which turned it into something resembling science fiction (again, read on to the individual reviews below and I’ll get there). This version was called Fiend With The Electronic Brain. Still with me?

Then, much later, Adamson was persuaded that he might be able to get some mileage out of a horror film version of this so, he jettisoned half of the already augmented version (but still kept most of the Carradine scenes) and used the remaining footage as unbelievably long flash back sequences inside a new framework story in which he cast a number of actors, including his wife/muse and regular actress Regina Carrol, to construct a totally different narrative. Well, apart from the bits which are totally the same... which accounts for about half the movie. This time around it's very much in the schlocky horror movie vein of the times and the new title for this bizarre hybrid became Blood Of Ghastly Horror.

So, yeah, like I said, complicated but what I’ll do is I’ll review each version in turn and hopefully, by the end of it, it will make more sense to you. These versions of the movie are all presented on Disc 2 of the wonderful Severin boxed edition of Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection.

Psycho-A-Go-Go
The film starts off with an extended and presumably added scene of Tacey Robbins playing Linda Clarke, singing at the nightclub she works in, backed by a guitar group and some wonderfully enthusiastic go-go dancers. Then we go into the failed bank heist, which includes director Al Adamson in an uncredited part. He doesn’t have more than ten minutes in the film though as the Joe Corey character shoots him in the face and leaves him dead at the scene while they try and make their escape. An innocent man on the street accidentally makes off with the half a million in jewels which were temporarily dumped in the back of his truck and he goes home to meet his wife, Linda. Yeah, that’s right, he’s the husband of the nightclub singer at the start and he takes Linda and her daughter out to the venue to watch the performance, giving the child a 'singing minstrel’ doll for her Birthday.

Unbeknown to him, his daughter has discovered the jewels which he wasn’t even aware of and she hides them in her doll. Anyway, later on, after his wife takes his daughter away on holiday, taking a greyhound to some mountainous territory, Corey and his gang catch up with him (the psycho killed the secretary of the firm where the robbery took place and got his truck plates and address from the office). They grill him, find out from a girl at the club (who Corey also kills) where his wife and daughter have gone and then Corey takes the boss’ plane to get ahead of the two ladies and meet them at the other end... where he proceeds to terrorise them for information too. Lots of twists and shenanigans and the film climaxes in an extended chase scene among the snowy mountains, where Linda’s husband and their cop buddy rescue her. Corey, the psycho, plunges to his death after taking two gun shots.

And the film is kinda terrible but, you know what? It’s really watchable and I can see why some distributors thought Adamson had it in him to be a good director. The cinematographer on this version is a young Vilmos Zsigmond before he got famous in his profession and it really shows. Between him and Adamson, the movie... despite the damage to the print (as always, Severin have done their best with multiple elements)... actually looks quite good and I actually found myself riveted to the screen. A lot of the actors can’t act, for sure, but some of them can, especially Roy Morton, who makes a wonderfully unstable personality in the lead villain role. There’s some really intense silent movie acting from him on close ups of his face as he strangles the lady from the nightclub which really gives the film a huge dose of insanity when it calls for it. Also, the cop friend, played by Joey Benson, turns in a nice, wise guy performance and also saves the day at the end of the flick, shooting Corey twice when called for.

There are some nice compositions, sometimes using vertical splits and other times finding ways to make the framing interesting. For example there’s a nice shot where Corey is grilling the nightclub girl for information in her apartment and there is a huge mirror on the right hand side of the screen. They turn away from it and face it in various combinations but, no matter where we are in that particular shot with them, we can always see both the front and backs of their heads... it’s a nice set up.

It’s one of those films which, despite when it was made, feels like it’s halfway between two decades in terms of cinematic style... a bit like how Dr. No feels like it’s almost into the full on James Bond film formula but also still feels half mired in the romantic fifties. This film gave me the exact same vibe, where all these actors and actresses have a kind of look to them like they’re stepping right out of the 1950s but, actually, the dialogue and attitudes of some of the characters are at odds with that. I actually liked this version and would be happy to watch it again. Alas, I kind of did... twice more but, for me, Psycho-A-Go-Go is the best version of this movie in this collection. So, on to...

Fiend With The Electronic Brain
Okay, so this is the exact same film but with three major differences which really balloon out the running time. These are three inserted scenes starring John Carradine. The first two scenes which are spliced in at various places in the narrative include Joey Benson back as the detective, who goes to see John Carradine as Dr. Howard Vanard, the head of neuroscience in the local hospital. I know he must be a neuroscientist because he is pouring chemicals from one beaker into another in his lab and he has one of those old Universal monsters, Kenneth Strickfadden electrical devices in his laboratory... so, a typical hospital set up then. Seriously, how are people supposed to take this credibly in the 1960s?

In these scenes, Carradine explains how Corey was a soldier turned into a vegetable by shrapnel damage to his brain in the Vietnam war and, to save his life, he tried out his new invention, an electronic component which he implanted into his brain to give him a proper life again... the downside of which is his violent psychopathic tendencies. Benson’s character is not sympathetic to him but at least, in this version of the movie, he knows what he’s dealing with (yeah, because this gels really well with the jewel heist plot, right?) and we even get a flashback in the second sequence showing Corey on the lab table with his brain being reactivated via an electrical current in a manner not too dissimilar to what you would get in many a mad scientist movie.

The third insert scene with Carradine also features Morton as Corey, who now pays a visit to the doctor right after he kills the night club girl... where he also ends up killing Carradine. All the rest of the scenes in the movie play out exactly as they did in the original and those are the only inserts which I could detect in this new, hybrid version. It doesn’t play nearly half as well with these insert scenes but, heck, they got their slightly science fiction toned movie, I guess.

But it doesn’t stop there...

Blood of Ghastly Horror
(aka The Man With The Synthetic Brain)
Blood Of Ghastly Horror starts off as a completely different film. After a typical ‘horror movie’ style opening credits sequence, we are right away treated to a new framing story where a yellowy green faced zombie is on the loose in the streets, killing various people by... well, not by the traditional zombie way but by strangling them. This makes me think that the IMDB date on this one is closer to the truth because the Severin date would place it after the influence of George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead and there is no flesh eating going on here. I really don’t know and I wish there was a book on the director still in print so I could check on these things.

Anyhow... two women, a man and two cops are ‘strangled up good’ by the zombie and the comical expression on the face of the first woman killed is a sight to behold. They might as well have just said “cross your eyes in a whacky manner and stick your tongue out”... because that's exactly what they got. The deaths are seriously lacking any credibility here.

Then we cut to two police officers in their office in the homicide division. Alas, their office in ‘homicide’ just seems to be two desks plonked down in a nice quiet apartment in a tower block but, hey, what do I know about the working methods of the police? After receiving a note (written ‘cut and paste’ ransom note style, for no real apparent reason) reading “All will die for Corey”, accompanied by the severed head of their zombie slain colleague in a box, one of the cops tells the other about “the Corey case’ from a few years back. Enter one of many truncated scenes from the previous versions of the film (minus the Go Go Dancing but still including all the added John Carradine inserts) which serve as multiscene flashbacks to the new, ‘real’ story. These inserts pop up five or six times around the new narrative and I guess the ‘flashbacks’ take up at least half the running time of the movie.

Then Al Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol playing the daughter of the dead Dr. Vanard (John Carradine), turns up to talk to the detectives to coincidentally tell them about a disembodied voodoo voice she has been hearing in her apartment in the few days she has been vacationing in America before returning to France. This puts them on the alert to watch out for her and enables them to, eventually, come to her rescue after she is kidnapped by the father of the original Corey character... you know, the psycho who dies in all three released versions of the film? Well, anyway, dad’s been using his pet zombie, which he made from his studies in voodoo medicine, to ‘revenge kill’ all the people responsible for his son’s death. At this point, I should probably point out that absolutely nobody killed by the zombie in the movie bears any resemblance to anybody in the original film... but why let that get in the way of a terrible plot device, I guess. So, in a fairly creative moment where Adamson keeps zooming away from his wife’s face and defocusing, cutting shot and applying a new layer of make-up before refocussing for the zoom in (stop and repeat three or four times), Corey’s mad voodoo scientist dad turns Ms. Carrol into a zombie but, luckily, she manages to retain her human senses long enough to grab the red potion to change her back before the second policeman (his partner is strangled by the other zombie), turns up to rescue her.

Lucky the vengeful father told her all about ‘the red liquid’, in between telling her more of the back story of the character of his son, of course (cue another long ‘flashback’ sequence from the end of the previous two versions of the movie).

And that’s that and, frankly, it’s a mixed bag. None of the insert footage matches up with the style of the former movie and, presumably, Zsigmond wasn’t around to work his magic with the camera in the subsequent versions. Similarly, the horror story scenes in this third version employ a different composer with a completely different feel to the light, jazzy heist and go-go music of the scenes from the original picture. Overall I’d say that the two later versions are just silly, bad movies more reminiscent of the Adamson I know from such movies as The Female Bunch (reviewed here) and Dracula VS Frankenstein (reviewed here). The original release version, however, Psycho-A-Go-Go, held my interest more and I kinda, against my expectations, had a really good time with it. So, take your pick I’d say but, thankfully, Severin have done what they can to preserve the history of this film(s) and, yeah, their boxed edition is really living up to my tentative expectations of it so far. Time will tell, I guess, if it continues.

The Female Bunch

Sucker Bunch

The Female Bunch
USA 1971 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some spoilers I guess but,
you know, it’s an Al Adamson movie!

Last year I talked about ‘Blu Ray boutique label extraordinaire’ Severin’s labour of love boxed set, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, when I reviewed the accompanying new documentary film, Blood And Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (review is right here). Well, it’s finally time for me to crack open this, sadly out of print, box set of thirty two Adamson feature films with the first movie in the set (doubled up on a disc with the aforementioned documentary)... The Female Bunch. For the record, I’m going to review all of these movies in the order that they’ve been put together in the set (as opposed to both the release date order and, indeed, the production order... which is also an entirely different and more fluid thing).

The film starts off with the following warning from Severin: The Female Bunch was scanned and restored from several faded 35mm release prints of varying physical condition. The negative is believed lost. Every effort was made to use the least damaged sections of each print to ensure the best possible image quality throughout.

And they’re probably right to do that because, although it’s a nice, clean transfer, it looks like it’s in terrible shape but, frankly, with a film like this, that quality kind of adds to the whole grindhouse charm of the thing. When Tarantino and Rodriguez did their Grindhouse double bill movie, they decided to add a distressed look to their movies... here Severin get the effect for free, from the various prints actually having suffered from a heck of a lot of wear and tear. What they don’t do is give you a word of warning about how bad the movie is but, that’s okay, I was kind of expecting it anyway and, you know, it’s kind of a ‘so bad it’s good’ movie anyway.

The film starts of with a man and a woman in an open top car driving along a desert road, pursued by a bunch of women on horses (yeah, that’ll be The Female Bunch then) and a gal shooting at them from a light aircraft. Their tyres get shot out and they make a run for it, finding a cave to hide in but not before the guy is shot, receiving an energy sapping wound just below one of his shoulders. The girl removes his shirt to get a look at the wound and screws it up into a disposable bundle. She then takes off her shirt to wrap around him which, to be fair, is what all the young ladies in these kinds of movies seem get around to doing anyway. Might as well get it out there early, I guess.

Anyway, as she stands in the cave in her underwear, the guy asks her “How did you get involved in this mess?” Which is a phrase that suddenly loops around on the soundtrack about six times as the camera zooms in on her face. After almost a minute of this, maybe, I kinda got the idea that this is a framing device and indicates a flash back as the girl, Sandy (played by Nesa Renet) lapses into voice over and tells how a string of hard luck and a failed romance with a night club singer played by Don Epperson ended up with her being discovered by her friend Libby (played by Adamson’s long standing muse Regina Carrol), half passed out on her bed after taking a bunch of pills in an effort to kill herself.

So Libby does what any good pal would do... she takes her blindfolded to a ranch in the hills so she can take an initiation test of being buried in a coffin, so her half psychotic friends, The Female Bunch, can take her on as one of their own... a bunch of women who live in freedom on their ‘no men allowed’ ranch , living off the drug money that their boss, Grace (played by Jennifer Bishop) uses for their expenses. Frankly, these are an antagonistic and unsympathetic bunch and just why the heck Libby hangs out with them is anybody’s guess. And there they live at their ranch, terrorising a local Mexican while, at the same time, tripping over to the border most nights to party it up at the local Mexican bar and having ‘sexual relations’ with various guys (asides from their man-hating boss, who prefers the lady flesh).

It’s here that one of the girls gets it on with one of the film’s two, very well known actors. Russ Tamblyn plays Bill, who is given a map to how to get to the ranch and this particular girl’s room so they can get it on again later in the week. However, with Grace’s ‘no men allowed’ policy, when the two are caught, The Female Bunch rough up Tamblyn and brand his forehead with a cross.

I’d just like to say that, for a lady who has a ‘no men allowed’ on the ranch policy, it seems somewhat strange that she has a stable hand/drug stash security guy who lives on the ranch with them, in the guise of Lon Chaney Jr in the last film he ever shot. Not the last film he was in that was released (that would be Adamson’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which I reviewed quite a while ago here) but the last film he actually shot, six months after that one (he died in 1973). This makes no sense of the ‘no men’ policy whatsoever, of course, because the last time I checked, Lon Chaney Jr was definitely a man but, oh well, artistic licence I guess. It’s a sad performance because he has a raspy voice and that’s because of the radiation treatment he was having for his throat cancer. Of course, after hearing an anecdote from one of the crew on an accompanying extra about how the film was shot in a ‘Dry State’ and how he would have to go out every day to another county to bring back Chaney Jr’s quart of vodka that he drank every day, I can’t but help think that the excessive amounts of alcohol may also have something to do with how his voice sounds in this one but... yeah, throat cancer and it’s very sad.

Grace maybe starts to question Chaney Jr’s ‘definitely a man’ status too at some point because, after he hassles her for sex once too often, she hits him on the head with a hammer and has a horse drag him into the desert to die. Then she goes on a bit of a killing spree because, Mr. Tamblyn is understandably upset with having a big cross branded onto his forehead. He gets a friend to drop him at the ranch (the same guy who is shot at the start of the movie and inspires this whole extended flashback of a story) and tries to ‘revenge rape’ Grace. For his trouble he gets a pitchfork in the back and his friend, when he comes to pick him up, gets tied up and left in a barn while the girls decide what to do with him.

Then, with almost no foreshadowing whatsoever, Sandy decides to leave the group of psychotic ladies, releases him and they do a runner, finally catching up to the story and ending the flashback, leading into the last five minutes of the movie which I won’t spoil here for you but which features the return of another character from earlier in the film in a kind of ‘deus ex machina’ rescue moment.
 

And the film is pretty interesting. There’s lots of naked boobage revealing a variety of different nipple types (if that’s what you’re into) and a bizarre propensity by the director, I felt, to shoot everyone just a bit too close up. There’s lots of rolling around in the hay and, even though it’s certainly not as explicit as most modern movies, it does feel genuinely grubby and sleazy as the movie plays out. The tone of it is a little like watching Russ Meyer’s revered classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (reviewed by me here) but with a lot more women and, somehow it's a lot less better shot. Also, I’ve complained that the art of using a zoom lens properly is something which has really gone out of style in modern motion pictures. Let me assure you though, if more directors used a zoom lens as often and as badly as Al Adamson does in this picture, then its no wonder people would want to bury the technique.

There are some bizarre things in here that are fair;y questionable. One of the girls shoots another up with heroine (or something stronger), for example and then, instead of it dulling her senses, they have trippy lesbian sex. I know it must be trippy because the director uses one of those lenses (I’ll call it a fly’s eye lens because I don’t know what I’m talking about) where the girls are in the same image in little shots combined all around the screen. So, yeah, it’s trippy and wild, man.

Another thing of note and, alas, ridicule is the ‘day for night’ sequences when the girls visit the Mexican saloon. Much as I hate those filters, I have to say that the second time they go to the place it seems like the film crew just forgot to put the filters on the camera. Oh no, wait... they did for that shot, but not for that shot... no it’s gone again. Night and day change pretty quickly in Mexico it seems (every few seconds in some cases).

The soundtrack on the film, by a guy called Jaime Mendoza-Nava, is not very good. It plays like a bad, mid-sixties American Western score and, for all I know, it might well have been one. But it does add to the bizarre atmosphere of the flick in some way... just not in a way to effectively raise the level of the imagery, is my take home from that.

Something of note is that the majority of the film was shot two years before it was released, in the Summer/Fall of 1969, at the infamous Spahn Ranch. So, yeah, it was while the Manson Family were occupying it and there’s a chilling story on an accompanying extra by one of the film crew about, well, a very lucky escape they think they possibly had with the young ladies who killed Sharon Tate.  Pretty heavy stuff. One interesting piece of trivia from one of the actresses, Leslie McRay, on a bonus feature, is that she was actually the poster girl for the iconic shot of a girl with a lizard superimposed onto her for one of the many posters for Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (movie reviewed here). I always assumed it was Florinda Bolkan who was on that poster but, no, it was this young lady... so that’s an interesting bit of trivia I’ve never been able to pick up from anywhere else.

All in all I’d have to say that, while I found a lot to ridicule in The Female Bunch, I did have a pretty good time with it and it certainly won’t be the last time I watch this one. I can only recommend this wonderful set and I’m so glad I talked myself into investing the cash. That’s one down, 31 left to go.