Targets

Screen Hole
Screenplay

Targets
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
USA 1968
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Minor spoilers.

I’ve been wanting to catch up to Targets for a great many years and then, bizarrely, two turn up on Blu Ray in the same year. I’ve plumped for the one put out by the British Film Institute (which a friend gave to me for Christmas) over the Criterion edition because I understand it’s a slightly better version than its US counterpart.

Targets is the great director Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature, which he wrote with his then wife Polly Platt and also, uncredited, the late, great Sam Fuller. Bogdanovich was very much a protege of the ‘Roger Corman school of film-making’ and Corman let him make this one if he included 20 minutes of footage of Karloff from his own film, The Terror, 20 minutes of new Karloff footage and the rest of new non-Karloff footage. Karloff, riddled by ill health but working quite a bit at the end of his career, only had one more year to live himself, but he liked the script for this so much that he did three extra days unpaid, which allowed for him to be in the film's finale too (he was originally going to be killed off half way through the story). It’s often cited by many, not least by Karloff, as his last film but he did make another five before he died (although some of the Mexican ones that he did were not released until 1971).

You can see why Karloff liked this one. Not only is it a well written piece that has an atmosphere probably unlike a lot of what was being produced back in 1969, but he also gets to play a role somewhat similar to himself (although not in attitude, as Karloff loved making movies and was never out of work). He plays a version of himself here, though, Byron Orlok, who is very much a down on his heels, ageing horror icon who has had enough of the movies he’s been making (such as The Terror) and, after the film’s opening where he’s watching it in the screening room with the director (an extended role for Bogdanovich himself, who does really great as an actor in this, it has to be said), he announces his retirement and, indeed, a lot of the film concerns people trying to get him to not do that. He eventually gets persuaded into going to give a talk (where he’ll announce his retirement) at the drive-in premiere of the film on the following night.

Meanwhile, Tim O'Kelly plays a perfectly normal looking guy but... he’s a gun nutter. The old ‘right to bear arms’ rubbish which is still, unbelievably, in the American constitution enables this person to suddenly go off the deep end, in his own muffled way... he kills his wife, his mother and then goes on a killing spree. Ending up at the drive-in screening at which Orlock is going to talk to the crowd, picking off people in their cars by shooting through a hole in the screen. The two strands of the film slightly overlap at the start, where this character has Orlock in his sights when he is testing out a rifle he buys in a gun shop across the road from the film company... but the two strands go their separate ways, cross cutting until they come together at the end in a really wonderful scene where Karloff confronts the gunman near the end of the picture. I have to say, the ending didn’t go at all like I expected it to and... wow.

It’s a great film and a wonderful debut from the legendary director. Because of various similar shooting instances and massacres, not to mention assassinations, around the time of the film’s release, Paramount only released eight prints out into the wild and so it did very little box office at the time. All I can say is, I’m glad it’s being properly re-evaluated now because, well I’m a bit hit and miss with Bogdanovich myself but this one is definitely a solid hit for me.

I loved the slow pacing and the ‘unnecessary to the story’ details and footage, really reminding the audience nowadays of the sheer artistry of the American films back then, before directors in the US became obsessive about making every shot count towards a story beat. I also loved the muted colour palette in some scenes, juxtaposed to other settings of brighter tones when the two stories rub up against one another. For instance, a shot inside the sniper’s muted urban house with his family is suddenly cut against Karloff and his PA (played by the lovely Nancy Hsueh) in a restaurant where all the walls are brightly lit on jarring green and yellow, vertical stripes. The sound design is great too, doing that thing of dialling back or bleeding out and in when needed to highlight certain things, almost an expressionistic approach to the audio element.

Also, the film has no score, the only music being diegetic and the only actual ‘film score’ being heard in the sequences where The Terror is being screened... which is great because, in the fraught and suspenseful final act, when Karloff goes to confront O’Kelly, the score of that movie emphasises the on screen action of Targets nicely. A beautiful juxtaposition where the diegetic source stands in for the non-diegetic element which is missing.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Targets other than, Karloff is absolutely sensational in this and it’s no wonder that, in a memorable monologue half way through the film, which he did in one take, the cast and crew started applauding him as soon as the director called “cut”. This is a film I will definitely be coming back to and the new BFI release has plenty of good looking extras for me to explore when I do. A sensational picture, not to be missed.

Machete Maidens Unleashed

Machete Bolognese

Machete Maidens Unleashed
Australia 2010
Directed by Mark Hartley
Umbrella Entertainment  Blu Ray Zone A/B/C
(as a double bill with Electric Boogaloo -
The Wild, Untold Story of Canon Films)

I think I may be getting jaded as the years go by.

I bought this Blu Ray because I wanted to take another look at Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story Of Canon Films, which I saw as part of the London Film Festival back in 2014 (my review is here) and I got fed up with trying to find a UK Blu Release but found this one which, I suspect, is an Australian edition and which is double billed with an earlier documentary by the same director, Machete Maidens Unleashed.

Now, I knew this was about Filipino exploitations films and the title and image of a half naked woman swinging her machete seemed at least a little relevant to my interests. And, it has to be said, it is a finely made documentary but, like I said, I think I may be getting a little jaded about this sort of thing. Either that or I’ve just seen too many of these documentaries that they all blend into one now. Stuff like American Grindhouse (reviewed here) and Corman’s World have got a fair few overlaps and, I guess that’s inevitable when you’re looking at stuff like this.

That being said, if you’ve not seen things like this before it’s probably a real eye opener, even if it concentrates on just a few of the usual suspects to give it a narrative. I guess I’d never realised the strong links between the Filipino productions and the American companies like Roger Corman’s New World Pictures before. I had no idea that fairly famous, household name movies like The Big Bird Cage, TNT Jackson and Firecracker were Filipino productions, for example.

So, yeah, the film starts off by concentrating on the Blood Island films. Now I’ve seen those plus the various, well produced supporting extras from Severin Films already (and reviewed them here) so a sizeable segment on these seemed somehow redundant to me... and then it went into similarly themed territory with all the Corman stuff etc. So, again, it’s not them it’s me... I was expecting a fresh subject but what I got were retreads of things I’d seen tackled before. The documentary is decently enough put together with a fair few talking heads like Corman, John Landis, Joe Dante, Sid Haig etc and I’m happy to see them... I was just expecting something which would give me a big ‘to watch’ list of things and, of course, a lot of this stuff still hasn’t made it onto Blu Ray (or even DVD where the UK is concerned) so if you do find something you need to grab, the lack of a high quality sourced version of it can be a little frustrating, to be honest.

However, like I said, if you’ve not seen a lot of these films or documentaries then you will probably have a really good time with this movie. I certainly don’t begrudge the small price of purchase because, with both Machete Maidens Unleashed and Electric Boogaloo, the films are accompanied by a wealth of extras including, for each, a big compilation of trailers of the respective movies. I’ve yet to watch these two selections as yet (running a total of about two hours between them) but for me... well, I would have paid twice the amount just to get the contents of these extras so I’m pretty happy with this, it has to be said.

One of the things I did learn in this, from some of the American directors and actors who were filming over there on these things, was just how bad the working conditions were... lack of health and safety came up a lot. Plus, things got even more dangerous after the president declared martial law and it was hazardous to be out on the streets after curfew... and everyone seemed armed to the teeth anyway. The other thing I learnt from this was... Pam Grier seemed up for almost anything, which just makes me love her even more and if you want to read a great book about her, well then my review of her autobiography entitled Foxy - A Life In Three Acts can be found here.

I guess I did learn about the history of the situation too... the reasons why the American producers started working there (it was very cheap) and how that all came about. It was also interesting to see someone like John Landis talking about the fan culture surrounding some of the films people direct and how, when someone presents a theory to a director with what he or she was trying to achieve in their movie, the director would normally look at them and nod in acknowledgement but, inside, they were more likely to be thinking... and I quote Landis here... “What the f*** are they talking about?”.

All in all, then, I did have some fun and the film has an incredible opening title sequence using clips from some of the films posterised out in different colours, juxtaposed with bits of animated memorabilia and poster art etc. This maybe raised the bar and set my expectations a little too high but, yeah, a good section of titles.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. Easily a strong recommendation for people who haven’t seen or don’t know much about this material but it did seem somewhat less niche and commercial to me so, be prepared to coast if you’ve already seen a lot of info on this subject from other sources. Definitely worth getting the Umbrella Entertainment double bill Blu Ray though, if only for the extras. There’s some good stuff on there.

Foxy - My Life In Three Acts

Only Here For The Grier

Foxy - My Life In Three Acts
by Pam Grier and Andrea Cagan
Springboard ISBN: 978-0446548502

I first became aware of Pam Grier when I saw her in the films Foxy Brown and, my personal favourite of hers, Coffy. I later became aware of her in all kinds of films like Mars Attacks, Ghosts Of Mars and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, loving the ‘strong woman’ type of character she portrayed in the majority of the films I’d seen her in. About a year ago I became aware that she’d written (with the help of Andrea Cagan) an autobiography, Foxy - My Life In Three Acts... so I managed to get a hold of a really good condition, ex-library copy of the now out of print hardback edition of her book.

Now as I’ve said before, some autobiographies are great and fascinating accounts of the writer’s life and, others... well, they aren’t all that. This one, as it happens, is absolutely all that and goes the extra mile too. It seems bizarre that one can find entertainment value in a series of anecdotes about a person’s life experiences, especially since Miss Grier has had her share of tough times over the years but, there you have it. This one blew me away and I couldn’t put the thing down. It’s fast paced, inordinately interesting and has a lot of unexpected surprises tucked within its pages.

I don’t know how easy it must have been for the writer to talk about the two rapes she suffered... once when she was six years old by a bunch of boys and another at the age of 18 in what I can only describe as... a bad date gone wrong... but it shows right from the outset that she’s not one to hide things away and mince words, that’s for sure.

The book is chaptered and then split into three sections (or acts, I guess) entitled The Early Years 1949-1970, ‘Fros and Freaks 1979-1989 and Finding The Balance 1990-present (where ‘the present’ is roughly ten years ago). And it’s filled with fascinating stuff and also demonstrates a good sense of humour when she refers to a car turning over on the motorway with her in it at the age of three as... her first stunt. Everybody in the car was just fine and without a scratch... apart from a goldfish being carried which was presumably thrown from its bowl.

I was surprised to hear that, between the ages roughly of about 6 and 8, because she was the daughter of an airbase father and so would be constantly moved around with the family, she came to live over here in the UK at Swindon for a couple of years. This would have been the early to mid-1950s when London and other places in England were still trying to recover from all the bomb damage of World War II. But she absolutely loved it over here by the sound of it. Where, in America, the whole family was segregated and treated like second class citizens because of the colour of their skin, here they were accepted and Pam’s education in those years is something she really seems to look on as some of the most valuable experiences of her life. Which is nice. I also smiled to myself when I learned her first movie at a cinema was Godzilla (the 1954 one so, my guess is she saw it about 1955 or ‘56 in its US version).

She doesn’t, like a lot of film-makers writing about their lives, give much specific detail about the actual making of her movies and, to be honest, most of them are not even mentioned... but she does have some nice anecdotes from some of them. So her early films with Corman and AIP where she was shipped out to the Philippines are something which, unlike certain other actors and actresses of the time, she viewed as valuable lessons because you couldn’t get that kind of education and experience out of a book. And talking about an education... she kind of fell into acting almost accidentally, it seemed. Her only interest in the opportunities that were thrown her way when she joined up with those AIP, low budget exploitation pictures was about saving the money for her college fund. She wanted to get more educated although, I have to say from her attitude and eloquence talking about how she learned to dissect things like classical music and jazz when she was around 7 years old, I’m not sure she was desperately in need of much extra educating.

The book also shatters some silly myths by revealing, for example, her strong friendship with Tamara Dobson (of the Cleopatra Jones movies), when the media were trying to turn them into rivals (as pretty much the two leading ladies of blaxploitation, is my guess). But even when she was shooting movies, in between jobs you’d find her working in a drug store or some such to just keep the money coming in for her college fund. Somewhere around the middle of the book, though, as she gets more and more successful and famous, the talk about the college fund stops although, as the book goes on, you realise she does appreciate the pursuit of a good education and she is always finding new things to learn about and enrich her life with.

The other thing you find out is about her various lovers over the years. In the span of the book, she has about five significant others. I’m not going to mention the last couple but there are some amazing things in the book about her first three, more famous ones.

Her first big love decided to take up the Muslim religion and revealed his new name to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Bruce Lee fans and basketball followers will surely know this tall guy). However, after attempting to study the religion in the interest that she could convert and become his wife... well, Pam didn’t exactly take to it and you can certainly see why (and if not she makes it crystal clear).

Second big love was the even more famous stand up comic Freddie Prinz, who I’d only heard of through his dying fairly young but he’s something of a comedy legend. Again, though, there seems to be a pattern of tragedy in the path of Mr. Grier’s love life at the time and they all, in one way or another, treated her quite badly (and certainly not just the famous ones in that respect, either).

Her third big relationship was Richard Pryor. There’s a gripping ‘three strikes and you’re out’ accounting of the final period of their relationship including Pam being diagnosed with some vaginal problems which turned out to be because Pryor had ingested so much cocaine by that point that his semen was impregnated with it. It’s entertaining but tragic when she recounts how performing oral sex on him would make her lips go numb for the amount of drug residue on him. I’m probably explaining that badly but, you know, read the damn book, it’s fantastic.

It tells a little bit about the lead in to working with directors like Tim Burton and the bizarre chance meeting with Quentin Tarantino which helped land her Jackie Brown (completely unexpectedly) and also the big, long period in her life when she was fighting off cancer (and was once again treated quite badly by a boyfriend because of it). Not to mention a good amount of time talking about a show she did for a while which I’ll now need to check out sometime called The L Word. And there’s always lightness mixed in with the darkness, like the time she was thrown out of a nightclub with John Lennon and a few others after Lennon started throwing punches around. There’s even a photo of the apology card he sent her the next day.

Perhaps my favourite story, though, is how her horse started galloping uncontrollably (she’s a pretty good rider) on the set in the Colosseum for the Corman movie The Arena. One of the many places she and the horse went hurtling destructively through was the set of a new Fellini movie being made at the same time. Fellini was delighted by the chance encounter to meet her (and she him, of course, she’s a pretty cool film appreciating lass too, it turns out) and they ended up spending that lunch period together.

Of course, that’s just my personal highlight gleaned from Pam’s rich and wonderful book. Other readers will have their own but, even though she never reaches all her dreams (romantically, at least), her epilogue leaves the reader with a certain sense that she has found some peace, optimism and enlightenment during the course of her life. Which is a good space to be in, I imagine. Honestly, I’ve got nothing bad to say whatsoever about Foxy - My Life In Three Acts. If you like the actress then you’ll surely want to read this as it’s both one of the breeziest but also one of the more substantial, in terms of the content it covers, of the celebrity autobiographies I’ve read over the course of my life. So glad I picked this one up. Absolutely brilliant and it turns out the paperback is still in print. Seriously worth investing some time in, if you haven’t done so already.

Battle Beyond The Stars

The Seventh Steal

Battle Beyond The Stars
1980 USA 
Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and Roger Corman (uncredited)
Shout Factory US DVD Region 1

I guess readers below a certain age won’t understand why a film like Battle Beyond The Stars was a big deal with its target audience back when it was released in 1980. It is, after all, a notoriously cheap (although not by Roger Corman’s standards, since the film cost $2 million to make) remake of a classic which is 100 times better than either this or its more famous remake from 1960. Let me give the baffled among you a little bit of context though.

The “space opera” arm of sci-fi had just re-emerged at cinemas again, three years earlier, with the release of George Lucas’ classic Star Wars. There were a fair few bandwagon films like the theatrical release prints of the Battlestar Galactica TV show, Disney’s The Black Hole and the big movie budget version of Star Trek - The Motion Picture coming out around this time to cash in on the success, not to mention much smaller vehicles like Star Crash and The Humanoid. However, sci-fi films were still relatively scarce occurrences at the local cinema so any excuse to go and see the latest extravaganza was always taken. Some of the special effects may look a little ropey today (not as ropey as some of John Sayle’s dialogue in this one, for sure) but in those days it was state-of-the-art and every kid fresh from being reminded of the joys of science fiction from the release of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here), earlier the same year, would have rushed their parents out of the house straight into the cinema to see this one.

I loved it just as much as everyone else, of course. I think I ended up seeing it three times at my local ABC cinema (now a Tesco car park) and I even remember one of my cousin’s rare visits to Enfield to see it with me, one afternoon. I knew that Shout Factory had produced this deluxe edition DVD and snapped it up when it came out (in hindsight I should have waited for the Blu Ray) but it’s taken this long for me to make some time to watch it and, as you can imagine, I was curious to see how it held up nowadays.

The film starts off with the planet Akir (named after director Akira Kurosawa, for reasons which will quickly become apparent), home of Shad... as played by Richard Thomas (John Boy Walton himself), being threatened with destruction if the planet doesn’t give up its crops and resources to evil Sador (played with villanous relish by John Saxon with a “Donald Pleasance as Blofeld” style scar/make up enhancement on one of his eyes) on his imminent return to their star system after a small time period. All the residents of Akir know is dusting crops and lounging about in simple clothes but they dig out their technological relic of a starship, from decades gone by, and send John Boy, sorry, I mean Shad, out into the galaxy to rustle up a cheap, rag tag team of space mercenaries to return in their spaceships and help defend the planet from the evil Sador.

And if this is all starting to sound just a little bit familiar with you by now, you’ve probably recognised that this is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s original Seven Samurai. And the film very much follows the main, basic plot points of that movie but condensed into a much shorter running time and with some quite nice and often quite solid sci-fi decoration. I was surprised to see, as I watched this, that the film holds up a lot better than I expected it to after all this time and there are some nice little, well thought out details in this which are worth the price of admission.

Scenes, for example, such as those of one of the main female characters repairing a robot as she plays music by inserting a tape (or advanced technology equivalent of a tape) into a slot into the androids torso... so it can sing the contents to her as she works. Or Shad’s ship whose argumentative female personality talks to him and banters with him throughout the whole film... even going so far as to take matters into her own hands by destroying an enemy ship. When Shad points out to her that she just broke this movies conceptual steal of the first of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics (yeah, funny how everyone uses those... for good reason) she retorts something along the lines of , “Yeah. It’s a stupid law!”... which was quite a refreshing attitude at the time.

That ship, Nell, by the way, has got to be one of the most beautiful spaceships ever designed for a movie. Resembling, quite deliberately, a giant pair of boobs to rival those of one of the lead actresses (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get to her in a minute) it’s like a giant, flying, sea ship’s figurehead with the arms, legs and head cut off to just leave a beautiful torso that flies and swoops through space. One of the most unique and spectacular designs of 1980s science fiction by my reckoning. Corman must have liked it too because he recycled all the footage of it and used it as the main spaceship in at least two of his other science fiction movies subsequent to this... which is about right when you think about Corman’s notoriously groovy cost cutting measures on his movies.

There are some pretty interesting actors in here too, with George Peppard playing the Earthman “Space Cowboy” and hamming it up with the best of them like there’s no cheque in the post after this gig. Also, we have the addition of Robert Vaughn playing Gelt, a very similar character to the one he plays in John Sturges well loved 1960 Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven... asides from the “lost my nerves, cowardice” aspect of the character, which gets ditched here. In fact, some of the dialogue in Battle Beyond The Stars, and with Robert Vaughn’s character in particular, seems to have been lifted pretty much intact from The Magnificent Seven, it has to be said, There’s also a vague attempt to have Gelt inherit this movies equivalent of the Mexican kids who follow around Charles Bronson’s character at one point but, this is only a token reference and I’m not quite sure, to be honest, why they decide to use it here without following it up later in an appropriate sequence.

And, of course, no look at this movie would be complete without a mention of every young boy’s dream made celluloid flesh in the presence of Sybil Danning as St. Exmin of the Valkyrie. They manage to pop one of the most buxom and boobage blessed Austrian actresses of all time, give her some of the skimpiest outfits which make you feel like she’s going to just pop out by accident any minute, give her some specific lines about sexuality (which wasn’t that normal for something which was being sold as sci-fi space opera to kids) as well as giving her the most memorable and oft quoted mantra of the movie... “ Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending.” I’ll bet a lot of young, adolescent teens went home and thought about a whole lot more than space opera when they left the cinemas after seeing Sybil in this movie (yeah, me included).

There are two other things this movie is quite notable for, that I can remember.

One if that it employed a young James Cameron on the special effects crew (listed as art director but I’m guessing he was doing a lot on this production) and it’s reportedly where he met his future wife and movie making partner Gale Ann Hurd, which led to the directing of his second feature, The Terminator.

The other thing this film has is a terrific score by James Horner. Sure, it’s reused in numerous other Horner scores and also borrows from composers like Prokofiev, but however you view Horner’s rampant borrowings, there’s no denying that he writes entertaining scores and this is one of them. However, it's said he’s never been happy with the performance of the orchestra on this score so nothing other than the original album master has ever been used for score releases over the years... which is a shame because I, and a lot of other people, would love to get their hands on some kind of expanded remaster of this one. However, the obstacle to release on this one seems to be Horner himself so, at the time of writing this, it looks like there’s not going to be any movement on that front for a while (probably not in my lifetime, I expect, which is a shame... for me).

And what more to say about this one. At times it’s cringe inducingly embarrassing and at other times a certain worthiness shines through its small budget. It’s not the best movie in the world and it’s certainly not a good remake of Seven Samurai, but it is one of the better put together of the “ride the Star Wars band wagon” films that came out at the time and I’m sure youngsters, and the much older variety of youngsters, will get something out of it even now. And it’s surely worth it to see Sybil Danning rocking and almost popping out of those groovy costumes. One that should not go forgotten, I think.

X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes

X-Ray Milland

X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (aka X)
1963 USA
Directed by Roger Corman
MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1

Warning: Slow, paralysing spoilers partially revealed, 
the more you focus on this article.

Roger Corman directed X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes right in the middle of his successful run of Edgar Allan Poe ‘adaptations’. The film was shot in three weeks but I don’t know how long the pre and post-production schedules were. What I have always wondered though is if Roger Corman and comic book writer Stan Lee ever knew each other at the time because X: The Man With The X Ray Eyes was released in September 1963, the same month and year as the first issue of Stan Lee’s new comic book of mutants with superhuman powers, The Uncanny X-Men. Both feature main characters who shared a particularly unusual last name - Professor X in Lee’s comic was known by the name Professor Charles Francis Xavier while, in Corman’s movie, the lead protagonist, a surgeon played by Ray Milland, is known as Doctor James Xavier. As far as I know, I’ve never read of the rather obvious and influential link between the two creations and the fact that they came out in exactly the same month suggests that neither of these was particularly influenced by the other... but, still, one has to wonder.

I saw the movie on an old black and white TV approximately ten years after it was made. I was about four years old at the time and I think it’s fair to say the movie made something of an impression on me. I was quite haunted by the imagery of it (even in monotone), in fact, and I’ve subsequently thought about this film a lot over the years. I’ve always meant to get back to it. After purchasing a, relatively cheap, out of print copy on the Midnite Movie label, I’ve finally caught up with it again after all this time.

It’s funny... there are some truly nice visual effects with Ray Milland’s eye make up in this movie. I remember his eyes being just black because I didn’t have a colour TV to see them when they were gold, before they were black (or the red inserts right in the final shot) but still the images stayed with me. I didn’t even realise the film had been shot in colour until I cracked it open again the other night but it was good to see it again after so long.

I have to admit that, even though the film had obviously scared/scarred me when I was an infant, all I could remember from the film were those famous shots of Milland with his black contact lenses in. And I have to say, it still really gave me chills when I looked at it again.

The film is quite interestingly put together considering that a) it’s directed by Corman and b) nothing much happens in it.

It describes the arc of a character who invents a chemical delivered onto the eyes with an eye dropper. This allows the user to see... so much more than what is normally available to the limited human spectrum. And the effect of the droppers is cumulative. There are a lot of really cool POV shots where we see through Milland’s eyes and, as he concentrates his vision more, layers are peeled back as we, like him, discover what’s underneath. Of course, this is a Corman movie... so you do get a sequence where everybody is dancing at a party and Milland suddenly sees them all nude... an experience which lingers when he is in the hospital but which makes no sense on a visual level, in that people are still able to be hidden by objects in front of them (for the protection of the delicate audience) when in fact, Xavier would not necessarily see anything in front of anyone. And so on.

Anyhow, Xavier ends up accidentally killing a colleague and tries laying low from police as a freak circus act and local healer... until his love interest finds him and comes to get him. He then goes to a casino and wins a lot of money by seeing “what’s on the cards” before being chased by police for cheating. In the ensuing manhunt he wrecks his car and goes into a church where a sermon is in progress. From there you get the final, somewhat chilling scene (to me, I know most people wouldn’t find it chilling at all) and really, that’s about all that happens.

Milland is flat and lifeless in some ways... I always find him like that. But still, Corman’s interesting set-ups and the hypnotic droning of Milland’s delivery actually are an interesting combination. Corman does some interesting things visually, asides from the trippy x-ray vision effects which were an achievement themselves at the time. For instance, asides from his old trick of leaving a door in the background open so you can see through to another part of the set to give the shots depth, the scaffold of a load of test tubes in Xavier’s laboratory is something which Corman shoots through at one point, framing his lead actor and actress (played by Diana Van der Vlis) in separate sections... which is rather fun. Although, it has to be said, Milland does set a bad example for kids everywhere when he lights his cigarette with the end of a bunsen burner.

Similarly, there’s a brilliant piece of transition work in a shot where he flees the hospital he works in from the police after accidentally pushing his colleague through the window to his death. The camera concentrates on his feet running down several floors of stairs while various newspaper headlines flash up over this shot announcing the police discovery and the fact that Milland’s character has fled... taking you into the future while still remaining in the shot of him fleeing the scene. If this wasn’t clever enough... the downward motion of his feet suddenly cuts you right into a similarly motioned POV shot from inside the carriage of a Ferris Wheel attraction at a fairground, which immediately establishes the scene and moves the action on to a point where Milland has already been working there for a while. It seems like a simple thing in the film but... well it kinda blew me away when I saw it and, when you think about it after, it is quite clever, catapulting you through three different time frames within the narrative in, maybe, less than fifteen seconds. Good story telling technique in a purely visual way. I was well impressed.

Which is better than the script in many ways... which seems to be a combination of flat, scientific gobbledy gook coupled with sudden and “so-inspiring-you-want-to-slap-the-actor” bouts of poetic dialogue like “The flesh dissolved in an acid of light.” Let that be a harsh lesson to all those kids in the fifties, sixties and seventies who sent off for X-Ray Specs from the adverts in their comics. And hey, helpful advice to future generations travelling back to my childhood and beyond. Those X-Ray Specs were just strands of cotton over empty holes... which made your hand look vaguely white like it was maybe bones. Don’t waste your money!

For a film that has nothing really happening in it... I found myself actually quite hooked on this one again. Maybe not as much as when I was a four year old but, still, pretty gripping. The film has an interesting and totally appropriate, somewhat atonal but pleasingly understated, horror score by Les Baxter and although some of the delivery by the main actors is flat (supported by some excellent Corman regulars doing their thing at various points), there’s enough going on to keep you watching. Plus the various contact lenses Milland wears towards the final sequences in the movie are... well... at the very least, eerie.

X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes is Corman at his best and stands with films like Pit And The Pendulum, House of Usher and Tomb Of Ligea as opposed to his earlier shenanigans with movies like Attack Of The Crab Monsters (reviewed here). If you are into lurid science fiction which is happy to not over-cook the main concept and approach it from a, mostly, more subtle viewpoint than some of the other movies were doing in America at this time, then this one is definitely worth some of your time. And if you don’t like what you see? Well, if thine eye offend thee...

Not Of This Earth

Earth Every Penny


Not Of This Earth
US 1957
Directed by Roger Corman
Shout Factory Region 2

Warning: A few mild spoilers here 
if you are worried about such things.

The end of an evening for a young couple as a girl is driven to the edge of the park where she lives. Her boyfriend wants to take her to her door but she protests, wanting to do the last bit through the park on her own in case her dad sees them. So the boy drives off and she walks through the park only to be confronted by a large man with a typical 50s “man in black” UFO image... wearing the suit, a trilby, dark glasses and carrying a briefcase. The man takes off his sunglasses as the girl screams and, as we find out later, the man burns her eyes out with his thoughts and turns her brain all gooey. He gets down beside her, opens his briefcase, taps one of her veins with a needle/tube and starts filling the four vials inside with the girls blood. Is this man a vampire? A vampire from space, perhaps?

One thing's for sure, he’s... Not Of This Earth!

And then the opening credits roll and... well actually I really enjoyed this less than stellar slice of 50s sci-fi. I was looking forward to something really quite bad, to be honest, considering that Corman directed this little piece of space vampirism in the same year that he directed his amazing, has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed Attack Of The Crab Monsters (see review here). To be fair, it is quite bad but the story concept is quite respectable, 1950s sci-fi novel fodder (and therefore early 21st Century movie fodder, mark my words) and the movie is a lot more competent than what you would expect if you’ve seen that other movie.

After using what I can only call his special “eye-powers” to thought control a doctor, Mr. Johnson, the big, dark glasses wearing guy from the opening sequence, has a new long-term guest in his house in the form of the doctor’s young nurse, who has been sent to give Mr. Johnson his vital daily blood transfusion. Fortunately for the audience, Nadine the nurse is played by Beverly Garland, who is a typical 50s B-movie honey, which means she’s not hard to look at, and who I last saw in The Alligator People (reviewed here). When she gets there, she finds a few things about “Mr. Johnson” a little odd... like his surprise that she doesn’t want to be locked in her room overnight, which to him means she has a secure environment. Or why he hires a petty criminal as his personal assistant. And where do all his dinner guests, like the three homeless men he invited to dinner, suddenly disappear to?

When her boss doesn’t want to discuss certain details of her new patient, it’s down to her, her petty criminal co-worker and her policeman boyfriend to solve the mystery. When it turns out the mystery is killing humans for blood and sending it through matter transport beam to a planet dying from a nuclear war, with plans to subjugate the earth... things seem to be taking a turn for the worse. But things are going bad for “Mr. Johnson” too when a fellow alien lady (with characteristic dark glasses) comes to earth through his basement communication beam and tells him she escaped his dying world. Like him, she needs regular blood transfusions so he breaks into the doctor’s office with her to dose her up... not realising he’s accidentally got the “rabid dog blood” by mistake... I promise I’m not making this up. Chases and sequences of suspenseful B-movie terror ensue.

Yeah, okay, it does sound kinda bad and, truth be told, it’s not the most sophisticated B-movie I’ve seen... but this pulled a lot less clunkers than I was expecting and I could see someone like a very young Philip K. Dick getting into similar kind of territory in his short stories and early novels. The direction and cinematography seems a lot more palatable than the same director’s aforementioned Attack Of The Crab Monsters too and Ronald Stein provides another “broad strokes” sci-fi/horror score which ably supports the on-screen action. And when I say ably supports, I mean over-the-top as hell but, then, that is the perfect musical complement to this kind of movie.

The ending of the movie, too, was something I found pleasing on the eye (as corny as it is) and I have to say I was much more satisfied by this ending than I have been by a lot of other movies of this ilk. Although, the movie did miss a trick after the alien lady was infected by “rabid canine plasma” where they had her just dying rather than have her foaming at the mouth and tearing the sleepy town of Dullsville USA apart in a weird alien rampage. Maybe the budget was as non-existent as a lot of Corman’s other features at the time. I’ve just found out, though, that  it was remade twice more over the years... one version even starred the notorious Traci Lords... so maybe the budgetary constraints were lifted a little on the later versions (probably not, but I’m going to do my best to track these versions down). Maybe they even have a rabid, alien, dog-crazy attack in them... who knows?

If you’re looking for a sophisticated entertainment to challenge your brain for an hour or so then stay away from this one at all costs, you won’t find that kind of stimulation in this movie. If, however, black and white 50s sci-fi movies with “white contact lenses standing in for insidious alien eyes that will burn your brain right out of your head” are the kinds of movies you enjoy... then you’ll probably get a kick out of watching this movie. It’s not as awesome as the sheer rubbishness of Attack Of The Crab Monsters... but the dialogue does weave a certain charm which will take you back to more innocent times. Enjoy.

Attack of the Crab Monsters

Up For Crabs!


Attack of the Crab Monsters 
US 1957
Directed by Roger Corman
Shout Factory Region 1

Oh my gosh! This is just an amazing discovery.

I can’t believe nobody’s ever told me to watch this movie throughout the course of my life. It’s so hilariously bad and stupid it just might be one of the most entertaining B-movies ever made! I’m amazed Roger Corman directed this movie (rather than just produce it). It’s not even his directorial debut, he’d made a number of movies before this one. I’m just having a hard time comprehending that the man in charge of such an amusingly incompetent production was only a few years away from giving us his Poe “inspired”, widescreen classics which show infinitely more taste and restraint in one scene than the whole of this movie put together. Not as much fun as this though.

Okay... so this starts off really well with a crab themed, animated title sequence which is quite striking in its design and in some ways bears a lot in common with those elaborate end credits animations which have become all the rage over the last 7 or 8 years with modern cinema audiences. So what you’ve got here is a quite stylish title sequence followed by... THE REST OF THE MOVIE!

The rest of the movie is absolutely an insult to anyone’s intelligence but it does it’s insulting with such fearlessness that you can’t help be won over by it’s dumb charm. I can’t possibly describe all the magical uselessness of this movie... you really have to experience this film yourself. But I can at least give you some of the highlights so you know what you’re in for.

So let’s get to it...

A group of people, including many scientists, go to an Island to find out what has happened to the scientists who had previously been sent there to study the effects of “Nuclear Testing” in the general area. As they get to the island and row to shore, the second or third boat almost runs aground coming in to the beach. One of the sailors falls off the boat and... even though they could probably stand up and walk to the shore in this depth... the sailor falls down seemingly to the bottom of the ocean depths where a big eye in close up spots him and... does something. The sailor screams under water... as you would, I guess. The crew manage to snag the sailors body and haul him up but the limp rag mannequin they pull back on the boat is minus it’s head. Oh my gosh! Where has the sailor’s head gone... well nobody seems that much worried about it to be honest but one of the sailors does yell to his men on the boat to “Cover him!” One wonders if this order was perhaps a necessity of trying to hide the fact that said sailor was a cheaply constructed mannequin for the cameras as opposed to being a mark of respect but... well, maybe I’m just being over cynical. No worries, even worse tackiness and general incompetence is to come.

As the plane which brought the crew to the island (which is never seen in context with anything else in the story because it’s obviously just stock footage... something which this film does a lot, actually, in terms of not matching shots up or placing them in context) flies off to return in a month, it unexpectedly explodes and so the party of people are left stranded on the island with just their supplies unless they can get rescued. There seems to be no logical explanation as to why the plane would just explode like that but... hey, not to worry, nobody thinks to ask why it exploded anyway.

The acting is universally bad but half excusable since the script is absolutely abysmal and takes all the shortcuts it can in terms of expository dialogue... even including a long sentence or two which lists more or less every character who has come to the island (soon to be food for crabs) and their profession in the shortest time they can. Even a seasoned veteran might have trouble selling these kinds of lines and attempting to make them sound half convincing... the actors here seem to be less skilled at handling this kind of thing.

Pretty soon there are some violent explosions and some tremors which reduce parts of the island and open up a strange network of caves... and some of the dynamite has gone missing too, but too much later on in the story to make much sense as a reason for this series of tremors. A marine biologist and her husband take a dive in the ocean to find out... something. I still can’t quite figure out what but I felt safer when she went in the water wearing a cleavage revealing rubber suit because the way she was wearing those sweaters she was going to have someone’s eye out. As she and her husband swim around and then resurface, unscathed from the depths of the ocean (which seems to be situated perilously close to the beach again so how they could get near the depths of the ocean from where they surfaced is beyond me... all they needed to do was stand up) two things became evident. Number one is that the guy playing her husband may be quite wooden in his delivery but, he has an even hairier chest than Sean Connery! Seriously, I thought she’d been swimming with a shaggy rug until the rug opened it’s mouth and began delivering lines. Secondly, all the swimming about in the ocean was shot using a tank. It wasn’t shot “in” a tank in terms of where the camera was placed but at least the actors were in the tank. I know this because, aside from the top of the tank not matching the surface of the ocean in any way, shape or form, I noticed that at one point the girl was swimming past what looked suspiciously like some french windows. That would be the reflection of the french windows behind the camera in the glass on the front of the tank then.

People go missing (one falls down a big pit which has opened) and the blasting and tremors go on at semi-regular intervals, as demonstrated by some mild camera shake and some very bad “camera shake acting” where the humans are all over the place but the leaves on the trees don’t move. A crab comes to smash the house of the puny humans but the giant crab claw which  two of the party barely escape from does not tip them off that there was a giant crab for some reason. The “still a mystery” intruder nicks their food and destroys their radio... which is a bit strange because you find out the crabs are blasting away at the island to make it smaller so the humans have nowhere to run to. Why don’t they go back to where the humans are and just “crab them up good” there and then? Apparently because the crabs are scared of electricity, thats why! Um...

And what are those eerie voices from some of the missing people which keep appearing to characters, trying to get them to follow them? Why does one scientist shout down to his colleague from a cliff edge in close up but then, when the shot continues in long shot he is wearing sunglasses again, before cutting back to close up where the glasses are mysteriously absent? And why is it that, when a person runs through the cave system, he passes exactly the same bit of rock wall three or four times before reaching his destination?

Soon, some answers are forthcoming. The crabs are scared of electricity and crumble into dust when you pass a current through them, but are impervious to bullets and bombs... although cutting bits off them seems to have a successful outcome. The voices are the voices of dead colleagues who have had their brains eaten by the crabs and whose thoughts the crabs can transmit through any metal device in close proximity (rifles, belt buckles etc). This should have been twigged earlier, I feel, since the people behind the voices were never willing to appear and were always trying to get one or other member of the team to “meet them by that big pit with the caverns” instead of arranging a more sensible, less perilous rendezvous point. Soon, the scientists are wise to the crabs plan to whittle the island down to nothing (“There was a mountain over there yesterday. Remember?”) and it’s not long until we get into all out human versus crab warfare. The humans cut off the claw of a crab which has been temporarily stunned and take it back to study it. This gives rise to an absolutely hilarious scene later where a giant, puppety crab (these things never look even remotely realistic) is pretty much shaking his claw at the humans and screaming at them words along the lines of... “You cut off my claw puny humans. Ha! Ha! Well I can grow my claw back in just one day. Will you be able to grow yours back when I take your legs off. Bwahahahahahahahahah!” This film has talking, puppet crab monsters with “evilistic”* intentions... this film is a work of genius.

I’m not sure how much more I should go on about this. Maybe only to say that the end of the movie bears no small resemblance to the end of Quatermass And The Pit in its “final solution” to the crab problems and that, with only two survivors left on a small island, the happyish ending (with just unbelievably atrocious acting) is one of those endings where the producers obviously hope the audience don’t think about that conclusion too closely. Why? because you’ve got two characters stuck on a tiny piece of island with no food and no hope of rescue... that’s why! This is almost as far from a happy ending as you could get. Is slow starvation with, admittedly, a sunny beach to have uninterrupted sex on, any better of an alternative to being sliced up for crab meat and your brain absorbed into the minds of th crabs? I think not.

Attack Of The Crab Monsters is, it would be fair to say, something of a lousy movie... but it’s just the right kind of movie you can have a lot of fun with if you approach it in the right way. I’ve watched this twice now in the space of two days and I really don’t have time to be repeat watching movies. I can only recommend this shining bastion of crabby goodness to anyone who wants to scuttle along for a viewing. With just over an hour in it’s running length, it won’t pinch too much of your time.

Piranhas

Fish Me Quick


Piranhas aka Piranha USA 1995
Directed by Scott P. Levy
Prism Region 2

Why?

Eh?

Why? Why? Why?

Piranhas is a made-for-TV, Roger Corman produced remake of the original Piranha movie (reviewed here) which was first directed for Corman by Joe Dante.

Now the original film is not exactly a classic movie, in my eyes. Yeah, I know it has it’s supporters but, ultimately, there are a lot of other things I would rather be doing than watching that movie... unfortunately for me, watching this incredibly dull and superfluous remake is not one of them.

I was actually expecting this movie, with the benefit of almost a couple of decades of irony soaked up in the years between this and the original, to actually be a lot better and watchable than the original. Well, I’m sorry, but compared to this, Dante’s version looks like a modern classic. Honestly, if you’re going to do a remake of this material, you should at least attempt to come at it from a slightly different angle, surely. This remake is, if you can believe this, following the original script in almost (with some slight omissions) a shot by shot repeat of the first. It’s like the actors from the original version have all been taken over by seed pods from Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers and are sleepwalking through other people’s lines, zombie-like, without really even bothering to go through the motions... I was so surprised at my lack of interest in this movie while I was watching it.

There’s really not a great deal I can say about this one. The movie opens and the girl taking a swim with her boyfriend has way beyond magnificent and notably humongous bosoms but, frankly, even though this movie has a little more nudity and gore than the original, this young, opening victim brought the only two good and notable things about this movie directly into the foreground of the few shots she’s in. I’m afraid, though, that once you’ve had the opportunity to contemplate her glorious valleys... it’s all down hill after this. Possibly the only other talking point this movie has is that it’s one of the earliest roles of future sex bomb Mila Kunis, here playing the male lead's daughter... although she doesn’t quite share as much screen time as the girl who played Grogan’s daughter in the original.

Pino Donnagio’s score from the first movie has been replaced here by a score by Christopher Lennertz (who also scored the TV remake of Corman’s Humanoids From The Deep) which is, perhaps, a little more serviceable to the on-screen visuals than the former film’s was. Lennertz may well be an underrated composer and I’ll have to look into his work a little at a later date. It doesn’t really manage to elevate the movie into something more watchable however... well, okay maybe it does, but more watchable than what? I suspect this movie might well be the product of Corman wanting to hold on to the rights to the Piranha franchise by making something “quick and dirty” out of the material... in much the same way as he did for another company with his movie of The Fantastic Four (reviewed here).

I noticed the stop motion monster running around the “mad” doctor’s lab was absent in this one, which lends credence to my theory that it was never in John Sayles original screenplay and that Dante had just put that into the original so he could have a bit of a practice directing stop motion. That’s about the only thing I learnt from this movie though...

Well... that and the fact that my tolerance, as demonstrated by my capacity to sit diligently through even the most absurdly dull rubbish, has reached new heights/lows. If I can watch this and review it for my blog then I can probably just about sit through anything. But then again... just because I can do something, doesn’t mean that I should. Just in case you’ve been sleep-reading through this untypically short review... Piranhas, the TV remake, doesn’t get anything like a recommendation from me and makes the original cinematic ventures into similar territory seem like high art. My next stop is to watch the newer version, Piranha 3D, and pray that this doesn’t suffer the same kind of bad decisions going on in this production.

Fish me luck!

Piranha

The Long Fish Goodnight


Piranha USA 1978
Directed by Joe Dante
MGM Region 2

So I finally took a look at the Roger Corman produced, lets-all-ride-the-Jaws-bandwagon movie Piranha because, frankly, I can’t resist the allure of the Piranha 3DD trailer which has been doing the rounds (using a bust size to denote a movie’s chronology... genius) and so I want to see the previous four Piranha movies before this one gets unleashed in cinemas (that includes the first remake of Piranha if I can get it, the TV version called Piranhas). So that’s why, if anyone asks, I’m watching movies about fish with teeth.

However, there’s good compensation to be had from sitting through some of this twaddle. For instance, this first movie in the sequence is only the second feature film by a director you may have heard of... you know, Joe Dante? He’s a great director and some of his trademark signature points are already showing up in this one, such as the use of cartoons on television. It’s also got a few of his usual cast of character actors turning up to help him out including the one and only Kevin McCarthy in the role of a crazy over-acting scientist. Of course, he doesn’t run down a street shouting “They’re here! They’re here!” but, you know, good enough.

In addition to a raft of great character actors, the cast includes Bradford Dillman as the male protagonist Grogan (in kind of a lethargic Burt Reynolds mode) and TV's Jessica 6 from Logan’s Run, Heather Menzies, as the main female protagonist. In addition to these two, there’s also genre favourite Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, Pit and The Pendulum, The She Beast, Shivers etc) as a military scientist and ex-lover to Kevin McCarthy’s character. So there’s a real display of interesting actors (or at least “personalities”) to look at in this one.

And all this is wrapped up in a package scored by the popular Italian composer Pino Donnagio... it’s not his best score but it does have some interesting trademark flourishes and, though I’m used to watching Joe Dante movies when they’ve been scored by Jerry Goldsmith, I’d happily take Pino Donnagio as an alternative.

Oh... and did I mention it’s the first story and screenplay to make it onto the screen that’s been written by John Sayles? So, yeah... there’s that too.

Now you might think that, with all this incredible talent both in front of and behind the camera on this one, it means we have an absolute masterpiece of “death fish” mayhem on our hands. Alas, I’m afraid that’s not true. It certainly wasn’t as trashy or exploitational as I’d expected it to be but, with films of this nature, I find that a lack of sleazy fun injected into the proceedings is not neccessarily a good thing... it could have done with being a lot trashier in my book. Because of the quality of the artists involved, what you have is a movie which strives to be more than its budget allows and, though this is not neccessarily a bad thing, in some ways it’s to the movies detriment. On the other hand, it’s a not bad showcase/calling card for some of these artist’s talent so there’s that too. Worthwhile creatives have begun to forge a career off the back of this one.

There have been attempts made, probably by Corman post-rough cut I should think, to “trash the movie up good”... and I guess in some ways this works better than others. There’s an obvious flash-cut (if you’ll excuse the pun) where a body double has been unceremoniously cut into the footage to make out that Heather Menzies is flashing her breasts... this is so obvious and it kinda kills the mood. Doesn’t work well at all. Kinda makes you wonder what Heather Menzies was thinking, getting involved with a Roger Corman movie.

There are, however, a lot of plusses to the movie as well. For instance, a completely superfluous stop-motion animation a-la-Harryhausen styled miniature creature is wandering around Kevin McCarthy’s lab in some of the early scenes. It doesn’t interact with the human characters, just gets out of their way, and the human characters don’t see it at any point. Now it could be argued that this loosely animated character is there to show the demented nature of Kevin McCarthy’s experiments for the military (in almost direct contradiction to what he tells our main protagonists later) but my guess is that this little creature wasn’t even mentioned in the script. I think it’s probably Joe Dante practicing his craft for his future movies where knowledge of how to handle such scenes would be more than relevant. As it is, it’s a cute curiosity which adds another little layer of interest to this film.

Piranha is certainly, and perhaps surprisingly, not a terrible movie. Nor is it a particularly good creature feature, although to be fair to the producers... it was popular enough to spawn a sequel, a remake and then a rebooted franchise, so it was obviously liked by enough people to make these things possible. I wouldn’t personally go out of my way to recommend it to anyone but for fans of this genre of film (technically I think this counts as a horror film since the plot deals with a genetically altered and mutated school of fish) then it’s always going to be worth a watch and, certainly, for anybody interested in the early careers of some of the cast and crew, it’s a bit of a modern historical document. Fish around for a while in this movie and you might find something interesting.

The Fantastic Four (1994 unreleased version)

Four Play


The Fantastic Four
Germany/US 1994
Directed by Oley Sassone 
Produced by Roger Corman
Status: Unreleased

Well then. This is one of those films you’ve either never heard of, because the studio didn’t want you to know about it, or have more than likely snapped up as a bootleg copy at a comic fair in the intervening years. A bootleg or streamer of an unscrupulous website is probably the only way you’d ever get to see it, though, because it’s never been intended to be seen by anybody and it’s certainly never had any kind of commercial release or broadcast.

However, if you don’t already know the story behind this one then I’ll tell you all I know about it now. Skip to the end if you’ve already heard this one...

Constantin Films had the rights to make a movie of the famous Marvel Comics property The Fantastic Four, but the thing is (as I found out when I used to get interested in why comic companies would put out a single issue of a character after a decade before consinging said character back to comic book limbo  again for another decade or so), when you buy these rights they will eventually revert back to someone else who can then put them up for sale again. Basically, you have to show that you have used the characters you have bought the rights for in the media you intended to use them in or you will lose the option to hang on to them after a certain period of time. I think I’ve got that right.

So anyway, Constantin Films had these rights, but they didn’t have the budget to make a proper movie version of The Fantastic Four at that point in time... and the clock was ticking on their options because they didn’t have long before they had to show they’d done something with them. So they approached the legendary producer/director Roger Corman to make a quick movie out of the property with a teeny, tiny budget and not much time. So that’s exactly what he did.

Now none of the cast, crew or even the director knew that this wasn’t a movie being made for a paying audience. This means that everybody on this movie was doing the best they could which, frankly... after having seen the final product, is pretty scary to be honest. Now I don’t know how many retakes there were on this one but I do know that the film took approximately one month to shoot. Just one month. That should tell you a lot right there... and yes, I know some of Corman’s own, more brilliant masterpieces were done in less time and with even less budget but it’s like comparing apples to oranges here. Edgar Allan Poe costume epics are not going to have the same kind of costs as something which needs a massive budget, just for effects work alone, like a superhero movie. Especially a superhero “team” movie where each of the characters have different powers to deal with.

So okay... that’s the background!

The movie itself... well actually it’s not as incompetently put together as you might expect from my little build up. It’s quite bad but, frankly, if this had been shown on TV as a pilot episode for a new show back in the 1970s, it could have held its head up high with shows such as Spiderman, Logans Run or Planet Of The Apes (to name a few). However, what you have to remember and keep reminding yourself while you’re watching this version is... it wasn’t made in the seventies, it was made in the nineties... how in heck did the cast and crew think this was ever going to pass muster on any TV set, let alone as a “high profile” movie?

The film starts off with the four main characters as younger versions of themselves, with Sue and Johnny Storm being not quite teenagers yet... while Ben Grimm and Reed Richards pretty much looking the same as they do when the story jumps forward in time (Note to moviemakers: The addition of white sideburns after a jump in time does not automatically make a person look older!). Here we have the origin of Doctor Doom played out, kinda, although the guy playing Doom is actually pretty bad in this... but infinitely more watchable than the guy they got to play him in the later ones. In all fairness to the actors in this one, I think it’s best if I let their names go unmentioned in this review... they were all pretty solid TV actors who have done a fair bit of work (the gentleman playing Reed Richards even went on to play the back of the younger version of Sean Connery’s head in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade some years later).

After Victor Von Doom is frazzled, presume dead, we jump ten years to find that Johnny has grown up to be the right kind of age, Reed and Ben have stayed more or less the same and Sue Storm has somehow grown into a character played by a 33 year old actress, which makes her just the right age to be marrying Reed I guess but... really hurts your head when you try to figure out the timeline.

So anyway, cut a long story short, the four go into space, get mutated via cosmic rays, get captured by Doom, escape Doom, go to rescue Ben’s new crush (the blind character Alicia Masters) from an underground dwelling group of criminals who stole the diamond from the Fantastic Four’s rocketship which is what caused them to go wrong in space in the first place, then go back to clobber Doom. And that’s about it I’m afraid...

The story doesn’t make sense in a lot of places, it has to be said. And the dialogue is excruciating. The only thing that even half saves this version is the fact that the actors all managed to keep a straight face. The costumes really aren’t that bad, it’s the old blue with white highlights the group used to wear in some of the comics during the 80s and 90s... but the effects work which is needed to give the four heroes their powers is... well... it’s pretty weak.

The Thing is a suit with a few moving parts... it’s actually not that bad but not what I’d want out of the design (I much preferred the new one from the modern movies to this). Think, The Toxic Avenger but made out of orange rocks. The Invisible Girl is just done with crude but adequate fade outs. Mr. Fantastic himself is just using a few stretchy limbs which look quite bad (especially when his arm is all twirly and unmoving as he waves from a car after his wedding in the final shot... quite laughable in fact) but the way The Human Torch is handled is quite charming. Bad... but charming.

For most of the film his powers are just relegated to a fiery hand or arm which are cartooned over like a Disney production... but it’s quite fun and pretty to look at. When we finally get to see him go to the full body Torch, and it’s only the once, it turns into a complete cartoon rendition as he trys to fly in front of the path of some destructive cosmic force. What this sequence reminded me of almost exactly (and I wouldn’t be surprised if Corman’s lot didn’t use it as a template) was a similar scene in the very first 1940s Max Fleisher Superman cartoon (The Mad Scientist). So... like I said... not without its charm.

The film is, however, quite bad and some of the acting in here has to be seen to be believed. But worse than the acting is the score... it’s quite bad and innapropriate in a lot of places for anything other than a 1950s melodrama. The piano passages in this one were irritating me beyond belief and I just wanted it to stop a lot of the time. This is one score I wouldn’t be picking up, I think, even if it did ever get a commercial release somehow... for all I know it could’ve been tracked in from something equally as cheesy. It was credited to two professional composers, however, so it’s probably all original. Blimey! How far do you have to go to retain the rights to a bunch of characters? Maybe it was cheaper than buying library music... who knows. Music is always subjective though, so I won’t shout too loudly about this one.

At the end of the day, I was hoping this unreleased “gem” of a movie would be so bad that it kinda won me over. However, some sections of this are more competent than others and there’s no real “garbage” overload coming from this one. I’d recommend this one only to fans of the characters who want to see “what could have been” and to the rest of you I’d say “don’t bother with this one”... if you can find a copy to bother with in the first place, that is. It’s really just a curio and an interesting watch if you want to see what allowed Constantin to retain the rights to the characters and put enough of the budget in to be part of the modern incarnations of these characters at the cinema... and I’m glad they did because I thought those last two movies were pretty fun.

And, yes, I know I’m in a minority on that one.

Humanoids From The Deep

Fish Fish, Bang Bang

Humanoids From The Deep (aka Monsters) US 1980

Directed by Barbara Peeters

Shout Factory Region 1

Wow. I’ve been so wanting to see this movie from years and now, thanks to Shout Factory who have been releasing a whole spate of less than stellar Roger Corman produced classics (as this one is), I am finally able to grab a copy in a beautiful transfer with a tonne of extras. It could, of course, be argued that movies like this, Battle Beyond The Stars and Galaxy Of Terror are perhaps being given much more affection and deluxe treatment than they deserve... but you certainly won’t catch me saying that. Shout Factory have produced some of the most interesting titles on DVD over the last year and are beginning to have the same clout and reputation, to my mind anyway, that Anchor Bay used to have 10 or 15 years ago with their groundbreaking giallo and horror releases.

I once bought a bootleg recording of the now world famous composer, James Horner (but let me call him Jimmy), which was a double bill soundtrack of Battle Beyond The Stars and Humanoids From The Deep. Id never heard of Humanoids From The Deep but the score was pretty amazing (we were all lured by the young, early works of Jimmy Horner in our more innocent days) and I hoped that I’d one day be able to see the score within the context of the original movie.

Well that day is here and let me tell you that this movie is everything I’d hoped it could be. It’s trashy and terrible and unintentionally funny and, basically, as fun a time as you can get with a movie. I don’t know where to start but I’ve got to start somewhere so...

Let me mention the cast first. The film top-lines a pudgier and older than his heyday incarnation of Doug McClure. As the saying goes, at least with his composite Troy Donahue parody character Troy McClure, “You may remember him from”... well now... loads actually including TV shows like The Virginian but, primarily for me anyway, fond childhood memories of McClure in the 70s... as the main lead in shoestring epic fantasy movies like The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, Warlords Of Atlantis and At The Earths Core (reviewed here). Being in such films I wasn’t expecting to see him turn up in a Roger Corman movie filled with goriness and nudity.

But that’s basically what Humanoids From The Deep is... it follows the classic Corman recipe of frequent and constant bursts of sexuality and violence in a way that I was just not used to seeing adhered to quite so luridly before in a Corman movie... especially not with Doug McClure in the cast. Doug plays one of a group of fishermen in a small town who are having disputes with another group of fishermen over genetic improvements to the fishing (or some such... I don’t remember if I ever figured out what they were arguing about during the course of the movie but... who cares... sometimes you just have to let art wash over you, as they say), punctuated with fighting and racial tension.

Anyway, while all this disputing and fisticuffs is going on, the genetic tampering company in question are refusing to take seriously the warnings of one of their star scientists, played by the lovely Ann Turkel (still haven’t tracked down that Modesty Blaise pilot movie she made back in 1982), that they have accidentally created a race of fish people under the sea. Turns out that they should have listened to her because it isn’t long before the fish people... sorry, "the humanoids from the deep", are terrorising the towns population by killing first the dogs and then the menfolk and also, while said killing and terrorising is taking place, ripping the clothes off any handy female characters and raping them. Because that’s what fish people do when they see our women, apparently... they have sex with them and then bury them under the sand so they can have weird, fishy/human spawn lurking with intent.

There seems to be no end to the amount of fun this film can supply... not just with the constant nudity and violence but also because the way the characters are written is just so cliché that it would be very hard not to accurately predict within any given scene, just what arc those characters are going to follow in relation to each other. And all the time we have gruff and heroic Doug McClure to fight the marauding fish people and defend the bigoted, racist people who live in his town. It has to be said... sometimes you’re not sure if you should be rooting for the humans or the fish. But I honestly don’t think that matters, to be honest with you.

Since watching this movie last week there’s been a bit of a coincidence in that the first "official" score release CD of Humanoids From The Deep has been announced in a very limited 1000 copies edition. Can’t wait for that one to arrive. The other thing I found out is a real mind bender though. Turns out that Humanoids From The Deep was remade in 1996 as Roger Corman’s Humanoids From The Deep. Hmmm... seriously? This film needed a remake? I bet that one’s not half as much fun but I’m going to try and track it down anyway. I can’t vouch for the remake here, of course, but if you want to watch a fun filled romp with gore, violence, topless ladies and some of the most stupidest riffing on Creature From The Black Lagoon costumes fish people you ever did see... then Humanoids From The Deep is the movie for you. They don’t, quite, make them like this anymore.

Whack Job Races

Deathrace 2000 1975 US

Directed by Paul Bartel Optimum DVD Region 2

Death Race 2008 US

Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson Universal DVD Region 2

Caution: Spoilers in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear...

It’s been a good decade or more since I last watched a print of producer Corman’s notorious trash classic Deathrace 2000 and, since I’d never seen the remake, Death Race from a couple of years ago, I thought I’d do a double-bill of the two movies to see if I could make any comparative judgements between the two versions. As you’ll soon see (or know if you’ve seen both), it’s very hard to compare the two.

Deathrace 2000 was a film which had a kind of notoriety when I was a kid growing up in the 70s... I remember the caretaker of the school I went to getting into trouble because he’d screened it for a bunch of 9 and 10 year olds as part of their film club not long after it came out (the movie was rated X in the UK at the time). Unfortunately I was not in attendance at that particular screening and it wasn’t until the home video boom that I finally got my chance to see the movie. Looking at the current DVD release of it sure brought back some memories.

From what I can gather, Corman’s original film seems to have a reputation for being a mean-spirited, nasty film with those who have not actually seen it as it centres on the drivers of a trans-American road race where the players score different point values for any innocent bystanders they run over and kill in the course of the race. It sounds like a gruelling watch but I can assure you that Corman and Bartel’s film is pitched with it’s celluloid tongue wedged firmly in its cinematic cheek. A strong dose of humour runs all the way through the picture and, although certainly violent and with some quite inventive and, dare I say, witty and surprising kills in the movie, it demonstrates a very knowing attitude to the ridiculous, over-the-top concepts portrayed in the film and doesn’t miss an opportunity to laugh at itself and push things way beyond the point where you start to giggle at the ridiculous antics on screen. Even the names of some of the drivers will give you some idea... apart from Machine Gun Joe (a fairly early post-porn role for Sly Stallone) you also have character names like Calamity Jane and Frankenstein (so named because his body has had so many horrific car crash injuries over the years that they have to keep rebuilding him).

What people who haven’t seen this movie don’t realise is that, quite apart from the race-around-and-kill-everyone-in-sight aspect of the film, there is also actually a plot (the year 2000 was in the far future don’t forget and sci-fi stories were getting another breath at the cinema) involving a group of rebels against the government who sanction the Deathrace every year and their attempts to sabotage the games and kill the drivers... there’s also another layer to this involving Frankenstein (played wonderfully by David Carradine) and his navigator (the daughter of rebel leader "Thomasina Payne") with a little twist in the Frankenstein character right at the end that you won’t necessarily see coming... involving his political leanings as symbolised by a hand grenade (quite literally a HAND-grenade but you’ll need to watch the movie to find out more).

All in all, still a refreshing and funny, inventive movie which features large dollops of humour and solid 70s sci-fi storytelling, interspersed with even larger dollops of those homespun Corman values which make up the essential components of the age old Hollywood success equation... nudity + violence = good box office.

Which brings me nicely onto the kinda inappropriate “remake” from a couple of years ago. This movie only half satisfies the above equation in that it ditches the nudity and keeps in the violence... unfortunately it also manages to ditch the sense of humour with it. Now I’ll go up front with my verdict on this one and say that Death Race actually is not a bad movie... it’s a modern exploitation film in much the same way as most modern day action movies might be seen as such and it’s got some entertainment value and it’s really not that badly made... but why did they have to tout it as a remake (so much so that it says something along the lines of “based on the Roger Corman movie Deathrace 2000 in the opening credits)?

Seriously, the only things that this movie has in common with Deathrace 2000 is it has some people driving fast cars in it and two of the character names are the same (Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe). Unfortunately, because of the movies gestation and subsequent marketing, the audience is pretty much invited to make comparisons between the two movies which is a bad idea because, no matter how entertaining the new Death Race is on a visceral, modern action movie level... it’s just not got the same level of charm and wit as the original movie, even with the great Jason Statham (who is always watchable) playing the “new” Frankenstein.

This new version also does away with the idea of killing innocent bystanders for points... which was always one of the most talked about concepts of the original. Also, rather than racing across America... the races are held on an urban track in prison... since all the drivers in this version are convicts and the only people they’re trying to kill are other driver convicts. The plot is also a lot more personal and less about playing with big ideas than the original. Here, Jason Statham (a driving expert) is framed for killing his lovely wife by a prison warden who runs the race (played nastily by Joan Allen) so she can use him to double as the freshly deceased Frankenstein to maintain ratings of the live broadcasts of the Death Race. Prison yard posturing and Carmageddon ensues.

And from that paragraph you can just tell, can’t you, that they’ve watered down the original and gutted the concept of Deathrace 2000 like a fish!

Not to say the new one isn’t entertaining... it’s a fine entry in the modern trash cinema stakes and it does have it’s inventive moments... like the cars which power up various weapons and defences by driving over big pickup buttons in much the same way as a character in a video game will pick up various health and weapon power-ups. And, to be honest, the vicarious thrills engendered by this kind of movie are pretty much on the same level that the original movie was aiming for... so in some ways you can’t help but like the new Death Race just a little...

It just happens that the original movie revs itself up beyond 24 frames a second and forces the newer version off the side of the road in a heap of twisted, burning chrome...

But if you don’t need to pick one over the other then “doing the deathrace double” is a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Just keep a watch out for that smell of burning rubber coming from your DVD player.