All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1977)

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In the Jules Verne adaptation The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one word in the Spanish production’s title is grossly inaccurate. Can you guess which?

After acquiring a map purported to share the whereabouts of you-know-what, Professor Otto Lindenbrock (Kenneth More, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw) embarks on a mission to you-know-where, by way of Mount Sneffels — a landmark that could not sound more stupid, except that it does with each subsequent utterance. Accompanying the professor are nancy-boy Axel (Pep Munné, Girl with the Golden Panties), who narrates, and muscle-for-rent Hans (Pieces’ Frank Braña), who is paid in sheep. Inviting herself is Glabuen (Ivonne Sentis, China 9, Liberty 37), who is not only the professor’s rock-collecting niece, but Axel’s girlfriend.

Although Juan Piquer Simón (the aforementioned Pieces) went to the lengths of helming his film in an actual cave, don’t expect any sort of spatial geography, other than knowing the characters want to descend. At one point, Axel’s voice-over mentions “an exciting adventure,” despite no proof of such onscreen. And I say that knowing full well the movie features such sights as giant mushrooms, man-eating tortoises, cave-dwelling dinosaurs, bath-toy sea monsters, a Kmart King Kong and a lava-spewing volcano — and yet, very little of all of the above. It’s a real patience-frayer.

In terms of production design, costuming and men’s grooming habits, Simón nails the 19th-century look, although the cast’s prim-and-proper affectations and behaviors suggest a setting more Hereford than Hamburg. Performance-wise, More is the most grounded; Munné and Sentis, overly theatrical; and Spanish cinema legend Jack Taylor (Edge of the Axe) literally sits through much of his minor role.

While Fabulous Journey (aka Where Time Began) is not the worst Verne adaptation I’ve seen, it’s photo-finish close. With feasible naïveté, it hews so faithfully to the novel that it emerges stuffy and starched. Lob whichever insults you’d like at Simón’s other, less respectable Verne picture, 1981’s Mystery on Monster Island, but boring, it is not. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Bride (1973)

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Alternately released as The House That Cried Murder and, more notoriously, Last House on Massacre Street, Jean-Marie Pélissié’s The Bride is an unassuming horror thriller worth a trip or two down the aisle.

Head over heels in love, Barbara (soap star Robin Strasser) can’t wait to marry David (Arthur Roberts, Midnight Movie). She’s even designed and built them her dream home, a midcentury modern number that looks like a semester’s worth of geometry homework. So what’s the problem? Well, David works for her doting dad (John Beal, Amityville 3-D), who looks unfavorably on her choice of suitor: “What I’m saying is,” he tells his daughter, “I think he stinks.”

Father indeed knows best, because at their wedding reception — repeat: at their wedding reception — David ducks upstairs for a tryst with another woman, Ellen (Iva Jean Saraceni, Creepshow). Finding them in flagrante delicto, Barbara impulsively wounds David with scissors and flees the scene. Two weeks later, she’s still off who-knows-where, while David is looking to get divorced and already shacking up with Ellen. That’s when the eerie phone calls and eerier acts of aggression begin …

Popular opinion has it that any horror movie with an MPAA rating below the R bares no teeth. While that may be true for today’s offerings more often than not, it’s stunningly narrow-minded for product from the early 1980s and on back. The Bride is the perfect example why. Affixed with a whistle-clean PG, it may be a simple story told in a frugal 76 minutes, but it hits the right buttons as it does so. The script by Pélissié and John Grissmer — who went on to give us the incredible Blood Rage, which features snippets of this film playing at the drive-in — thrives on a macabre sense of humor, while Pélisse — in his one and only directorial chore — proves he can stage suspense effectively; one shot in David’s dream sequence, with Barbara poised like a spider waiting to pounce, stands out as chilling.

Although Saraceni is a bit shrill, the no-name actors do Pélisse proud. As shameful as it is that he never helmed another feature, even more so is that Strasser goes unheralded for a strong, layered performance. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Revenge in the House of Usher (1983)

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Right away, Revenge in the House of Usher renders itself suspect due to three things:
• referring to its source material, an Edgar Allan Poe short story of about two dozen pages, as a “novel”
• misspelling that legendary author’s name as “Edgard Allan Poë”
• being written and directed by Jess Franco

Book ’em, Dano.

With characters named Harker and Seward — not to mention the film’s theme of blood transfusions — Revenge makes one wonder if Bram Stoker deserved Poe’s credit. Both authors’ bibliographies rest in the public domain, so either fits the typical Franco budget.

Franco fave Howard Vernon (The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) is Dr. Eric Usher, who invites his favorite med student, the aforementioned Harker (Robert Foster, Franco’s Night of Open Sex), to come hang at his cool castle. Old, crazed and near death — basically, Dennis Hopper in Hoosiers — Usher asks Harker to continue keeping Usher’s reanimated daughter (Françoise Blanchard, The Living Dead Girl) alive with fresh blood transfusions. As Usher confesses to his mentee, he’s killed many women — but, hey, it was “for science,” so all’s good, right?

As Usher spills his secrets, Franco cannily fills the running time and fortifies his bottom line by reusing footage of Vernon as the title character of The Awful Dr. Orlof, the filmmaker’s black-and-white breakthrough from 1962. Thrifty! And those scenes make up the only good parts of Revenge in the House of Usher — which is weird, considering this flick has an assistant with one comically large eye, not to mention Lina Romay Lina Romaying herself all over the place.

It may be impossible to overstate how boring this movie is, with a story that crawls at the pace of a snail — one that’s been showered in salt. Unofficial though it may be, the Orloff franchise has its ups and downs. This one is the below the basement, more Eurosnorer than Euroshocker. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Ellery Queen’s Operation: Murder (1986)

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When VHS was all the rage, the VCR game was, alas, not. But dammit, they tried — some more than others. Spinnaker Video appears to have put all its chips of effort toward the kick-ass cover of Ellery Queen’s Operation: Murder, because the tape’s half-hour whodunit is half-assed at best.

Highly intelligent in the novels and also highly likable in the Jim Hutton-starring TV series of the 1970s, the Ellery Queen of this “You-Solve-It VCR Mystery Game” is just a smug jerk. Played by Michael Solomita, the unofficial detective enters the Doorn Memorial Hospital office of Dr. Minchen (Don Dill), who sparks immediate regret in viewers with this greeting: “Ellery Queen, by thunder! What on earth brings you down here? Uh, still snooping around?”

Indeed, Queen is, asking questions about rigor mortis in diabetics, to which the doc replies in a near-singsong, “Just a fortunate coincidence, I happen to have diabetes on my mind this morning.” Totally normal response.

It’s all related to Queen’s latest case, concerning the hospital’s comatose benefactor (Helen Cuftafson) being strangled to death before surgery, but after she changed her will. From a playboy little brother to a mad-scientist researcher, likely suspects abound, each thrown at you in time-heavy exposition too quick and too dull to properly absorb. At eight points in the story, a clip-art screen informs you to “PICK a RED or BLUE CARD MARKED EVIDENCE.” I can’t imagine anyone having the patience to play this game more than once.

Although based on a real Queen novel, The Dutch Shoe Mystery, the catchpenny Operation: Murder is amateurishly acted and staged. At the beginning of my professional journalism career in the early 1990s, I was assigned to observe a murder-mystery party at a local bed-and-breakfast. Quasi-cosplaying, the attendees all looked the part, but had little to no idea of what they were supposed to do. Across the parlor, I spotted an elderly woman with a stooped back shuffling my way. Clutching a tiny notebook and pencil, she looked me in the eye and said only three words: “Got any clues?” I replied I did not, and she wandered to the next person in vicinity and asked the same. That’s what Operation: Murder is like, except mercifully shorter. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Mag Wheels (1978)

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If Dazed and Confused had been made not by Richard Linklater, but by its most burned-out characters, the result would have to be Mag Wheels. It would just have to.

In reality, this scrubby, unfunny teen comedy was written and directed by softcore porn’s Bethel Buckalew (Below the Belt) in an attempt to go legit. Also released under the pre-Mark Harmon title of Summer School, it’s produced in part by Batmobile designer George Barris, who more or less cameos as himself, as he did the year before in Supervan, a more enjoyable vehicle of vansploitation.

Although the little-known Mag Wheels is largely meandering, its main concern after four-wheel fetishization is a love triangle so simple, its points are mapped on the movie’s poster. Expelled from school for truancy, pretty Anita (one-and-doner Shelly Horner) takes a waitress job at the local skate park’s concession stand. Through no fault of her own, she attracts the eye of cool dude Steve (John Laughlin, The Hills Have Eyes Part II), which irks his spoiled-brat girlfriend, Donna (Verkina Flower, The Capture of Bigfoot), who accuses, “You’re all horned up after that hoozit!” (Admit it: Horned-Up Hoozit is your favorite Dr. Seuss book, too.)

As Steve and Anita get cozy, Donna gets back at him in the most logical way: anonymously calling the police to bust him for dealing cocaine. He’s not. The resulting scene is played as hilarity. It’s not.

But the barely watchable Mag Wheels isn’t really about that. Other things it’s not really about, yet features in large measure: gang initiations, lesbian truckers, beach Frisbee, sexual assault, joint toking and cube gleaming. Eventually, the ladies square off against the men in a life-or-death game of tug o’ war using trucks against vans atop a cliff. It’s not really about that, either, given their cavalier attitude toward death. It’s about attracting young audiences with the promise of seeing flashed tits and sweet paneling; viewers get both and yet nothing at the same time. —Rod Lott

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