Following The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and The Return of Dr. Mabuse, Gert Fröbe’s Inspector Lohmann is nowhere to be found, presumably off to grab a hoagie or four. Also nowhere to be found: Dr. Mabuse! Well, if he can get his German grabbers on the invisibility machine invented by the aptly named Professor Erasmus (Rudolf Fernau, The Mad Executioners), that is.
Whereas Mabuse (the returning Wolfgang Preiss) desires the doohickey for his usual world-domination agenda, the academic utilizes it to spy on the stage actress he’s obsessed with (Karin Dor, The Bellboy and the Playgirls) incognito. This gives us several amusing shots of hovering binoculars from a box seat at the opera … although he could just walk onstage, being unseeable and all.
The third film of producer Artur Brauner’s six-flicks revival of the German supervillain, The Invisible Dr. Mabuse largely plays out at the trapdoor-laden theater, where returning FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) joins commissioner (Siegfried Lowitz, The Sinister Monk) investigates a poison-gas murder committed by Bobo the Clown (Werner Peters, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and eventually learns of Mabuse’s dastardly scheme, aka Operation X.
And X marks the entertainment. From multiple drops of a guillotine to someone’s face melting like Velveeta, director Harald Reinl (Chariots of the Gods) throws a ton at the screen. Lucidity may not result, but the pulp-science antics make for a fun break in the series — something of a one-off. —Rod Lott
Of all the wavering output of the early 1970s independent studios, most of the Apple Films catalog have been the hardest movies to find. Usually, I have to go for bootlegs, downloads and other shady dealings.
That’s strange, because it was part of the Beatles’ far-reaching Apple Corps, a freewheeling production company investing in records, books, electronics, and numerous Pop Art items that have filled the dumpsters of time. In the end, Apple Corps was a good deal gone bad, with really only the music remaining. Apple Films’ only big hit was Yellow Submarine, maybe also Let It Be. Other films like Born to Boogie and The Concert for Bangladesh are essentially forgotten.
Which brings me to Son of Dracula, the apparently world’s “First Rock-and-Roll Dracula Movie!” according to the advertisements. It’s a take on the vampire mythos starring songster Harry Nilsson and ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, who also produced. But that’s not the most surprising thing about this — instead, this is: It was produced by Jerry Gross, the guy behind Mondo Cane, Teenage Mother and The Black Godfather.The father of the backbeat and the father of cinematic slime, together again!
One dark and ultimately confusing night, Count Dracula is assassinated by an unseen hand and his midget friend. Afterward, Merlin (Ringo Starr, in perhaps a prequel/sequel to Magical Mystery Tour?), the guardian of the netherworld, is summoned to his vampiric concubine to give birth to an immediate scion.
A hundred years later, Nilsson’s new count, Count Downe —ugh — comes to town in a stylish motorcar wanting a lay of the land. After going over some astrological charts with Merlin, he heads to Piccadilly Circus, performs a rousing cut of “At My Front Door” for the bar patrons and, appropriately, sucks the blood of the buxom maiden. So far, so good!
In case you were wondering, the backing band has Ringo on drums, as well as rock luminaries Peter Frampton, Leon Russell, Keith Moon and John Bonham. Where was that supergroup in the early ’70s and beyond? That’s the movie I’d like to see.
Son of Dracula instead shows Count Downe wanting a life-changing operation to make him a mere human. He does it, of course, to find his one true love. To mark the occasion, Downe has a party, with his hit song “Jump in the Fire” riding up the charts and heating up my speakers. During his preliminary operation, Dr. Van Helsing pulls Downe’s vampire teeth and commits other somewhat-laughable tortures.
This is where the movie loses me: Frankenstein’s monster attacks the Count, aided by a werewolf, a black cat, and, once again, a midget, for, I’m guessing, some revenge plot that seems to try everything while doing nothing. Look, by this time, I don’t know what’s happening, but the music is really good! True to form, it’s truly top-notch, top-shelf and above-board, as it should have been.
Directed by famed cinematographer Freddie Francis, the story and screenplay, the production values and the very bad acting — Nilsson’s nonexistent on-camera talent should live without you — is why most audiences avoided this in droves.
While Dracula and Frankenstein fanatics are not in any way clamoring for this home release, Son of Dracula has never been distributed on any home media format, leaving Beatles completists and Nilsson apologists in the lurch. It’s not very good, but I’d take a big box set with a pristine copy of the film, a 180-gram vinyl soundtrack and other associated memorabilia, like a swatch of Count Downe’s cape to make our own solo-Ringo dreams come true. While we’re at it, how about getting Ravi Shankar’s Raga reissued for my own personal edification … please? —Louis Fowler
Surrounded by the detritus of ever-accumulating fast-food wrappers, rideshare driver D — just D, thanks — might be the saddest bastard of all the freelance motorists on the Vrmr app. He’s behind on rent and utilities, and has a new mouth to feed at home. With each trip to the tank running him $90, he can’t get ahead, no matter how many hours he puts in on the road.
Enter a passenger (scene-stealing Adam Goldhammer) who reps a competing startup app, promising D (Nathanael Chadwick, The Last Porno Show) earnings of thousands a night driving for them. It doesn’t require a fancy car — just utmost discretion and following orders to a T, lest D lose $50 per missed command.
If you assume taking the job makes D complicit in criminal activity and abhorrent behavior, well, duh! And therein lies Self Driver’s fun, as D tools around town, running dubious errands and picking up questionable fares, all while Antonio Naranjo’s score nearly wraps tension into White Lotus-tight knots. With the script’s one-crazy-night setup, writer/director (and editor) Michael Pierro grants his first feature a significant After Hours vibe, right down to its Möbius-strip end, although leaning more into the lane of danger.
If only D were a quarter as likable as Paul Hackett. Sure, Griffin Dunne’s character in that Martin Scorsese black comedy lived in a buffer bubble of yuppiedom, but he wasn’t an asshole by trade. That’s my one nagging issue with the otherwise impressive Self Driver: Its protagonist is a full-time asshole. D’s rude to customers; his car is a pig sty; he urinates in public — none of which endear us to him the way abject poverty alone would.
Still, as D, Chadwick is well-cast. So are all the actors portraying riders of varying sanity and sobriety who flit in and out of his backseat until day finally breaks. Among them, Christian Aldo and Catt Filippov (both Last Porno vets) stand out as, respectively, a high-strung drug dealer and an enigmatic young woman bearing angel wings. I know, I know: That last one seems like a metaphor so on-the-nose, you can taste the Afrin drip. But before that can happen, Pierro’s indie takes a major turn you won’t anticipate. —Rod Lott
Between the unsettling visions of the great beyond and an unwavering devotion to depicting a dark, sad reality, The Sacred Spirit rides the line between unexplained phenomena and drastic sobriety. And not in the way you might think.
You see, Spirit is about the innocent layers of a fractured soul. Eventually, it gets to a rotten core that slashes and burns everything around. It’s a reverse ugly-duckling scenario that still shakes me after the credits rolled.
José (Nacho Fernández) is a simple guy who works at a small-time tapas bar with quirky regulars and personable clientele. After closing, he’s part of a UFO cult that believes spacemen are coming back — and very soon. While the community wrestles with finding a missing girl — José’s niece, mind you — he comes off like a somewhat dopey, but harmless crackpot.
Meanwhile, lamenting the loss of their beloved leader, the cult members trek to his grave on the town outskirts to pay their respects. There, José drops a child’s pink-bunny backpack into the river. While the police investigate, José takes his other niece, the missing girl’s twin, to an “astral plane” discussion, telling her stories about a UFO coming to take them away that evening to live in paradise.
It doesn’t happen, but what does is far worse.
At first, Spirit is about crazy UFO culture and their followers’ belief systems. But as the New Age group Sacred Spirit’s “Yeha-Noha” plays over the end credits, it’s methodically razed the whole area to ash in beauty and shame, purification and purification.
Chema García Ibarra’s bait-and-switch direction is close to the crazed realism depicted in Jose’s UFO books, with the Sphinx and other Egypt-centric items he imagines in his life. If you go into this wanting a flying saucer debate among the backroom crazies, sorry, it’s not here. The SacredSpirit is a calm, almost mumblecore depiction of analog beliefs in a broken world. —Louis Fowler
Vanishing Point’s Barry Newman takes the wheel of Fear Is the Key as John Talbot, a man who has nothing to lose — because he already has. In the first scene, he’s mid-conversation via radio with his wife when her plane is shot down, killing her.
Cut to: rural Louisiana. Now, Talbot gives zero fucks. While driving through the Deep South, he runs afoul of the law and ends up hauled to court. So he simply shoots his way out, taking an unlucky spectator named Sarah (Suzy Kendall, Circus of Fear) hostage.
Stealing a ’72 Ford Gran Torino, Talbot kicks off an extraordinary car chase with a brassy Roy Budd score. Seriously, this sequence is an all-time great, nipping at the trunks of Bullitt and The French Connection. It’s great distraction to keep viewers from realizing screenwriter Robert Carrington (Wait Until Dark) lets a whole act pass before letting us know what the heck Talbot’s even doing in Louisiana, much less start plotting.
Sarah’s the daughter of an oil baron (Ray McAnally, Taffin) with several heavies on his payroll. Rather than send Talbot six feet under for kidnapping, they enlist him on a deep-sea salvage mission for millions in jewels. The scene when Talbot glimpses their target on the ocean floor is a thing of beauty — so breathtaking, it’s odd director Michael Tuchner (1971’s Villain) soon found himself toiling for the tube.
Something of an outlier for an adaptation of Alistair MacLean, the novelist responsible for every existing movie with “Navarone” in its title, Fear Is the Key hums with quality. Although Newman is not the “SUPER COOL DANGER-FREAK” as the Australian one-sheet proclaimed, he’s a reliable presence and — necessary for highly flawed heroes — affable. At his side, Kendall possesses great beauty, great lungs for screaming and an awful Louisiana accent.
John Vernon (Dirty Harry), Dolph Sweet (Brian De Palma’s Sisters) and, in his first film, that Sexy Beast Ben Kingsley nail their supporting roles. Apropos of nothing but Key’s overall quality, their characters bear incredible names: respectively, Vyland, Jablonksi and Royale — no cheese whatsoever.
An unheralded crime film awaiting discovery, Fear Is the Key transitions baby-butt smoothly from action to adventure while staying sublime all the while. —Rod Lott
