Sting Of Death

Belly Of A
Swampitect

Sting Of Death
USA 1966
Directed by William Grefé
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers lurking like tendrils
of death wrapping around your heart.

Sting Of Death is the first film in Arrow’s lovely He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray boxed set and it was my primary reason for picking this collection up because, after all, who doesn’t want to see a movie where various people are threatened by a jellyfish monster? Well, after watching the movie, I suspect the answer is probably me but, hey, the concept sounded like it was a lot of fun.

The film is watchable and it has bright colours. It’s about a bunch of women going to stay with the father of one of their number, Karen (played by Valerie Hawkins) for their vacation. Her father, Dr. Richardson (played by Jack Nagle) happens to live on an isolated island in the Florida swamps and is a marine biologist, helped by his two assistants in the form of Karen’s love interest Dr. Hoyt (played by Joe Morrison) and the forever lurking, facially disfigured, hulking Egon (played by John Vella). And, yeah... I think the character’s name is supposed to invoke associations with Ygor and his ilk in the 1930s and 40s Frankenstein movies from Universal. Well, I say he’s disfigured but his bashed in right eye, which is supposed to be sealed shut, does kind of pop open and come a little unstuck in some scenes.

Okay, so the film starts off with the jellyfish monster destroying radio communication on the island and then grabbing a bathing beauty off the decking outside the front of Richardson’s place and pulling her to her death while the credits play out. There is a line around halfway through the movie where the Doctor asks where Ruth disappeared to and I think this is in reference to this character... who is otherwise not mentioned again throughout the running time of the film.

Then the girls arrive, as do some students who promptly chase the freakish Egon off with their hateful prejudices, before enjoying the second of two long dance scenes where Grefé seems to spend an incredibly long time focusing on the backsides of various bikini clad girls as they dance about to Neil Sedaka’s new song written for the movie, “Do The Jellyfish”. It’s not a good song but the various party shenanigans seem to distract the teenagers from noticing right away that the jellyfish man attacks a girl in the swimming pool right in front of them. Another teen is also badly injured and, due to no radio, the doctor sends him and all the students back to get medical attention but... yeah... they are attacked by a swarm of jellyfish controlled by the jellyfish-man and all die. And when I say jellyfish, what I mean is inanimate polythene bags tied up with dangling bits of string floating calmly on the surface of the water while various teenagers act like they’re being stung and in their death agonies. Yeah, the special effects are not high tech  on this one.

It all ends in tears after a few more deaths and people going ‘missing’ as, in a twist reveal (which really was a twist for me because, it was kinda lame and I must not have been paying proper attention), the Jellyfish man turns out to be Egon, who has perfected, among other things, the power to transform himself into a man wearing a muddied up diving suit with dangling tendrils and an almost completely see-through polythene bag on his head. I promise you, the jellyfish man looks a lot worse than I’m making him sound here.

There’s the usual resolution to this kind of picture and it’s not unwatchable... just not quite making it into the ‘so bad it’s good category’, as far as I’m concerned... although it certainly flirts with it at times. I do have a love for the atmosphere of these kinds of throwback pictures though... it’s colourful and it feels like it’s been shot in the 1950s, rather than being filmed the same year that The Beatles had their Revolver album in the charts. I’ve mentioned this in reviews of films before but it’s like certain filmmakers were kind of stuck in time and churning out exactly the same product in the 1960s which was more ‘of its time’ a decade earlier. I do like these kinds of films but, the movie doesn’t quite do enough to turn this into an absolutely essential piece of viewing, as far as I’m concerned... although I think it would be a good one for a monster themed allnighter with your friends, in between two more scarier pictures, to be sure.  

Of note is the big, black bruise on Jack Nagle’s head. He hit his head on the first day of shooting and the wound had to be explained away in the script. Also, when the bruise was wearing off in the shoot, this had to be augmented by having the make-up artist drawing in the bruise for various scenes. This is mentoned on the wonderful William Grefé documentary feature, which also comes in this set (reviewed by me here) and a few other anecdotes, two of which I’ll briefly mention here...

One involves the loss of the cable for the ariflex camera, overboard in the swamps before a day’s shooting was even started and this caused some headaches on the location during the day, a lot of hours were lost... remember, this was when Grefé could churn out one of these pictures in two weeks or less so time was a valuable commodity while shooting.

The other thing involves John Vella. I wasn’t kidding about that being a big polythene bag on his head so, on at least one occasion, when a shot was taking a long time to get done, he nearly suffocated through lack of air. Obviously he didn’t (or the film would be much more well known now, I guess) but you can pretty much see his head lurking within the bag, in many of the shots.

And that’s pretty much it for me on Sting Of Death. It didn’t quite hit the mark with me but, well, it was watchable and I did kinda enjoy looking at it to an extent... but it didn’t blow me away like I’d hoped. I’m really keeping my fingers crossed that it’s not, as some reviewers have said, the best of the movies on Arrow’s Grefé collection. Time will tell I guess.

They Came from the Swamp - The Films of William Grefé

Swamplimentary Tickets

They Came from the Swamp:
The Films of William Grefé
USA 2016 Directed by Daniel Griffith
Ballyhoo Motion Pictures/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Just a quickie, short shout out review to Daniel Griffith’s interesting documentary They Came from the Swamp: The Films of William Grefé. This plays, in it’s extended cut, on the last disc of Arrow’s nicely put together He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray box, which houses seven of this director’s quickie exploitation films plus this film as one of the extras. Now, I hadn’t heard of Grefé before this movie was put out by Arrow so I decided, much like I’d done with Severin Films’ Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection (although, obviously I knew who Adamson was), that I’d dip into the documentary first and at least find out a little more about the man before watching his works. And, frankly, if you want to know why I bought this in the first place, it’s the lure of one of Grefés early films, Sting Of Death, which has a really hilarious looking Jellyfish Man as the main antagonist... I mean, who doesn’t want to watch a movie about a Jellyfish Man?

The documentary, which I think was made independently of this release but has found a home in UK physical media distribution here, is basically a mix of the usual ‘talking heads’ interviews with people who knew/know Grefé and who tell some interesting anecdotes about their time on the sets of a handful of the director’s movies... not just the ones in this set (I suspect the UK release of a couple of the movies not included might fall foul of a certain ‘red flag’ for the BBFC in this country, so my guess is they didn’t try to release them all).

Of course, one of those talking heads... probably the person most featured for this documentary... is Grefé himself, who is now 92 years old (at time of publishing) and, from the looks of it on the IMDB, might still be working (he was filming episodes of a TV show in 2017 but I’m not sure if he’s still doing that or not). He certainly doesn’t look his age and he has some real stories to tell about his times leading up to him loving movies as a kid (especially those by John Ford), being bitten by the acting bug when he was young and going through the whole ‘Summer Stock’ experience before suddenly becoming a director, due to various reasons and opportunities. The talking heads also include some other directors, the most famous of whom is probably the Godfather Of Gore himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis, filmed for this documentary.

This is, as I said, a short review (and I’ll certainly be reviewing the films in this set at some point soon for the blog), but this full version of the film runs for just over two hours and includes little snippets of stories such as the man who was in the aforementioned Jellyfish Man costume, which basically had a big, semi transparent plastic bubble for a head, almost suffocating on set because of the lack of air supply. Or another as to how Grefé managed to get Rita Hayworth at a discount rate for The Naked Zoo in 1970. Or how he’d have to shoot many of his films in really short time periods like, writing one overnight and then shooting it in a week to make the drive-in release deadlines. It also mentions the time he was sought out, since he knew how to film Florida and worked with alligators etc, to do the second unit direction in various countries on the James Bond movie Live And Let Die (which he did, my review of that one is here), with the comment that, with the budget he had to work with as a second unit director on that movie, he could have made three films for.

Perhaps my favourite story (which fortunately has a happy ending), is when William Shatner is telling us about the time he was working as the villain in the movie Impulse. There’s a private detective in the movie called Karate Pete, played by Harold ‘Odd Job’ Skata from Goldfinger. Anyway, Shatner tells his story and it’s accompanied by the unused outtake footage of the very thing he’s describing. As he tells it... and as we see it... Shatner was supposed to hang Sakata’s character from his house and then, when Sakata is dangling there and gurgling in the noose, Shatner starts improvising and hitting him in the stomach etc, as the villain would do and then trying to pry one of the gurgling Sakata’s arms away from the noose. As we watch and as Shatner describes it, Sakata’s other hand starts reaching for his pocket to try and get to it to write a note or something. Then, as Shatner realises that the safety rig had been incorrectly put on Sakata and that he was literally choking to death during the sequence, he lifts him up (not easy with a man as big as Sakata) to try and stop him from dying as he calls to the rest of the crew, who rush on to get Sakata down. Wow, a close call for Sakata but the actor would work again for Grefé, opposite Richard Jaeckel in Mako - Jaws Of Death (a film that nobody wanted to finance but then, all of a sudden, the script became a hot property after Spielberg released Jaws).

And, yeah, that’s all I’ve got to say on this little gem of a documentary, They Came from the Swamp: The Films of William Grefé. I’m kind of looking forward to exploring some of the films in this set, although I suspect it may be a very hit and miss affair. I’ll report back on my findings on this very blog, of course.