All posts by Rod Lott

Kitchen Sink

The Big Cube (1969)

Leave a comment

WTFAt the curtain call of her latest play, acclaimed, yet over-the-hill stage actress Adriana Roman (played by former Madame X, the legendary Lana Turner) announces her retirement. As the prologue for The Big Cube, the scene could stand in for the uneasy career transition Turner and her Tinseltown peers experienced when New Hollywood pushed boundaries and buttons, and in doing so, shoved Old Hollywood’s melodramas and musicals out of the way. The elderly white men who ran the studios sought to capitalize on the youthquake they never understood, resulting in supposedly “with-it” pictures that succeeded only in demonstrating how sorely out of touch said studios were.

At least their failures put some choice cuts of camp on our plates, The Big Cube included.

Adriana trades the theater for playing the part of well-to-do wife of über-wealthy Charles Winthrop (Dan O’Herlihy, Halloween III: Season of the Witch). The news doesn’t sit well with his daughter, Lisa (Swedish actress Karin Mossberg, The Uninhibited), whose accent is explained away by Daddy having shipped her to a Swiss school following her mother’s death. Lisa leads a life of Riley, partying with airheaded pal Bibi (Pamela Rodgers, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine), who suggests things like, “Hey, large idea! Let’s call half a dozen guys and have an orgy!” and ditches her dresses when she gets sky-high.

At one groovy soirée, Lisa catches the eye of slimy med student Johnny Allen (George Chakiris, West Side Story), who manufacturers LSD in the university lab for his social circle. And when Johnny learns Lisa’s loaded, well, she catches his other eye, too. Just as Lisa warms to her new stepmother, her father dies. Per the sizable Winthrop will, Lisa is set to inherit a trust of $1 million unless she gets married and if Adriana consents to the union. Which she does not. Being human sleaze, Johnny hatches a scheme: Dose Adriana with enough LSD to drive her crazy — and perhaps even to her death.

Here is where the title of The Big Cube comes into play, priming viewers for its craziest sequences as Chilean filmmaker Tito Davison, helming his first and last Hollywood film, attempts to portray LSD trips, both from an insider’s and outsider’s POV. Johnny mansplains acid to Lisa with the you-don’t-say words of “You see sounds. You hear colors,” and Davison tries his damnedest to put that way-out feeling onscreen. I’ve never touched the stuff, but something tells me it’s more like the kaleidoscope of primitive special effects and less like the shot of Chakiris chunking a rock at your car windshield.

Anyway, the kids’ attempts to gaslight the ol’ bag give Turner the green flag to emote histrionically, as if she broke the glass marked “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, JOAN CRAWFORD.” And that comparison is apropos because The Big Cube nearly qualifies as “hagsploitation” — if only it weren’t quite so colorful, dressed in puffy shirts and weighted down with horoscope medallions. It’s like the soap bubbles of Valley of the Dolls as filtered through the clutched pearls of Reefer Madness, but not as fun as either. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Summer of Fear (1978)

1 Comment

Having delivered horror classics with his first two times at bat, Wes Craven followed up The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes with … the made-for-TV movie Summer of Fear. Oh, well. So much for hat tricks.

Fresh from Exorcist II: The Heretic, Linda Blair stars as Rachel Bryant, just your average apple-cheeked, small-town girl who loves two things: her boyfriend, Mike (Jeff McCracken, One Man Jury), and her horse, Sundance. To that list, she’d like to add her cousin, Julia (Lee Purcell, Mr. Majestyk), who comes to live with the Bryants after the girl’s parents are killed in an auto accident, depicted through stock footage under the opening credits. According to Rachel, Julia is “kinda pretty.” Julia also kinda collects teeth.

That’s because she’s a witch, which Rachel is able to surmise through the help of their rural town’s local occult expert (Macdonald Carey, Shadow of a Doubt), not to mention all the weird shit that goes down involving Julia. For starters, Sundance flips out in her presence. And she undergoes a massive makeover from drab to dazzling — all the better to steal Mike when Rachel mysteriously awakens with gnarly blotches all over her face the morning of the big dance, not to mention a gradual seduction of her uncle (Jeremy Slate, The Centerfold Girls). And she doesn’t appear in mirrors. And hey, did I mention the teeth?

Summer of Fear is based on Lois Duncan’s young-adult novel of the same name, which may account for why the telefilm feels so watered down. It’s not as if the networks didn’t allow their features to get mean, as prime-time classics like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Trilogy of Terror already had attested. This work’s attempts at terror are paltry at best and hysterical at worst, such as when Sundance goes bonkers during a horse show, pulling Rachel — or a stuntman in a curly wig — through so many fences and tarps that the scene wouldn’t be out of place in a Naked Gun sequel.

Although Blair is Summer’s above-the-title talent, the pic belongs to Purcell, who gives a pretty committed performance as the relative from hell. While not quite a saving grace, she impresses — and no one else does, not even Fran Drescher in a start-of-career role. How Craven got roped in to such a half-baked supernatural soufflé would be an excellent question if the answer weren’t so obvious: money. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Corruption (1968)

Leave a comment

One of the best film books of this decade is Julian Upton’s Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, which opened my eyes to, well, some of British cinema’s curiosities, obscurities and forgotten gems. I finished the book with a to-watch list with more titles than life will allow me to get around to. One toward the top, however, was Corruption, a mad, mod variation on France’s wildly influential Eyes Without a Face.

From Black Gunn director Robert Hartford-Davis, Corruption casts Hammer horror icon Peter Cushing as “the famous surgeon” John Rogan, who has quite a lovely fiancée in Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Revenge of the Pink Panther), a model whose camera-beloved face is scarred hideously when a scuffle at a party knocks a photography lamp onto her right cheek. Ridden with guilt, Dr. Rogan experiments furiously until he’s able to restore Lynn’s va-va-voom visage via dead tissue. The procedure is unethical, yet utterly remarkable … until it no longer is and the scarring resurfaces.

The trick, of course, is that in order to make the procedure stick, he must acquire living human tissue. And for that, of course, he must resort to murder.

That’s where Corruption becomes really oddball, because seriously, where else can you see Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin wrestling with a topless prostitute? Although the good doctor becomes quite adept at beheading babes, the film is not quite the festival of sleaze as advertised; in truth, it is not too far removed from Hammer’s level of gore: now near quaint.

With horns blaring and sweat dripping, there’s an urgency and immediacy to the scenes in which Dr. Rogan claims his victims, but for true Corruption, look to Lynn, who increasingly pushes her hubs to kill for the benefit of her beauty. By the second half, the gorgeous gal has gained an ugly heart. Similarly, Hartford-Davis’ film loses its luster in the last half hour, when it trades Georges Franju’s aforementioned Eyes for Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, but with a laser. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Reading Material

Reading Material: Short Ends 10/29/18

Leave a comment

When Peter Stanfield publishes a book, it’s a cult cinephile’s cause for celebration. Having examined pop 1950 cinema and pulp fiction in past titles, also for Rutgers University Press, the UK film professor cranes his neck at Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972. Like so many other types of teenpics in which the likes of Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff specialized, the biker movie was short-lived and derided by critics; as Stanfield notes, “Repetitious, poorly made, and morally putrescent” was the name of the press’ repeated game. Only a few dozen were made, and fewer are remembered today, but he ticks through them snobbery-free, as if each one were an important piece of a time-capsule whole — and they are (which is rarely to be confused with “good”). Excepting a couple of instances of repetition (like the parentage of Nancy Sinatra, Peter Fonda, et al.), Stanfield revs up another winner. Outside of the woefully out-of-print Big Book of Biker Movies, this is the best work on the subgenre yet.

Die Hard. Predator. The Hunt for Red October. Federal prison. Okay, so you can’t win ’em all. But in the late 1980s, the gifted director John McTiernan was poised to become a Hollywood all-timer by knocking out three well-received smash hits in a row. Then Last Action Hero happened, and no amount of Die Hard sequels could save the rather precipitous slip of legal misfortune that followed. Arkansas-based freelancer Larry Taylor recounts every step in John McTiernan: The Rise and Fall of an Action Movie Icon, and while the McTiernan saga is interesting, Taylor’s book is a missed opportunity. Disappointingly, yet not surprisingly, Taylor was unable to interview McTiernan for the McFarland & Company release, so he relies on others’ previously published articles to build the narrative, sometimes straining for drama when the beats simply are not there. It reads like an extended press-kit bio with the occasional “huh, didn’t know that” kernel of info.

Part of Edinburgh University Press’ ReFocus series of essay collections on film auteurs, ReFocus: The Films of William Castle provides a dozen essays on the man who wanted to “scare the pants off America,” but also wound up in monster kids’ collective hearts. Castle became the Alfred Hitchcock of the B movies, but the book does not ignore his early career anonymously toiling in noir and Western programmers. Of course, once editor Murray Leeder and company turn their critical eye to Castle’s gimmick era — one of such matinee classics as The Tingler, The House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, etc. — is when it hits peak interest, and the book argues his ballyhoo can still be felt today in upsold-theatrical formats like IMAX. Additional chapters explore Castle’s role “playing” himself, how he played with gender at a time when it was decidedly not in vogue, and the line that can be drawn directly from him to John Waters. Texts on Castle are far from dime-a-dozen, so fans who take the filmmaker seriously owe it to themselves to get this. —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.

Horror

Blood Lake (1987)

Leave a comment

By all accounts, Blood Lake appears to be a movie. A camera is present, and people pretending to be someone else do things in front of it. They also say things in front of it, although not always in its general direction. Somebody then assembled those things into a chronological fashion. Another somebody made music for it; yet another slapped credits on both ends. The result was duplicated onto VHS cassettes that members of the public rented for a set period of time and inserted into their VCRs, presumably for purposes of entertainment.

And yet, even after lowering expectations to the substandards of shot-on-video, straight-to-tape projects, I’m hesitant to call Blood Lake a movie. The story lacks story beats. Dialogue seems to be improvised; lighting, an afterthought. With one exception, its actors were not and are not actors. But at least it is in focus, question mark?

Although one Tim Boggs is credited as director (and never to be again), the driving creative force is writer, producer and leading man Doug Barry. As the mulleted, muscled Mike, he’s one-half of the dude bros (the other being Mike Kaufman’s Bryan) who have Trans Am’d their respective girlfriends (Angela Darter and The Ripper’s Andrea Adams) to a weekend at Cedar Lake, a real spot in southeast Oklahoma, where this thing was filmed — er, recorded. Also in tow are Mike’s tween brother, Tony (Travis Krasser), and Tony’s girl friend and hopeful “sex partner,” Susan (Christie Willoughby).

They drink beer. They waterski. They drink more beer. They waterski again. They urge little Tony to nail Susan, which sounds incredibly uncomfortable because it totally is. They drink more beer. People are killed by a fat guy in overalls who looks like Billy Jack ate Jenny Craig. (He’s played by the ironically named Tiny Frazier, whose car-sales business is thanked in the closing credits — and that’s only the second strangest thing you’ll read there, thanks to a special-effects shout-out to “An Act of God.”)

My heart should belong to Blood Lake, for three primary reasons:
• SOV ’80s horror is “my jam,” as the kids say.
• Ditto for the era’s slashers shot in my home state of Oklahoma: Blood Cult, Terror at Tenkiller, Offerings, et al.
• Throughout grade school, Krasser and Willoughby were among my brother’s best friends.

And yet, I don’t. Blood Lake not only tried my patience, but actively grated on my nerves. It’s hard not to feel that way when nearly every scene agonizingly unfolds in real time, whether the characters are shootin’ the shit on the dock (three minutes), playing quarters (five minutes) or engaging in the aforementioned waterskiing (10 minutes). What should be the simplest conversations would flummox even Robert Altman’s sound editors; take for example, this exchange of Mike and his lady bidding two lake rats adieu after a night of drinkin’, tokin’ and jokin’:

“Hey, thanks a lot for tonight, it was fun.”
“All right.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Thanks for coming by. Y’all be careful.”
“Okay, buh-bye.”
“Take it easy.”
“Yeah, we’ll see you all tomorrow.”
“Be careful.”
“All right.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Bye-bye.”
“See you later.”
“Bye.”

And I’m sure I missed a couple.

The most entertaining made-for-VHS horrors come chock-full of accidentally ridiculous and hilarious lines. Because Krasser’s aggressively rapey act is neither, Blood Lake has one scene that made me laugh aloud. The rest of the movie is like being the fly on the wall of a lake house, and everyone in the kitchen is too lazy to grab a swatter to put you out of your misery.

As detailed in Richard Mogg’s wonderful book, Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995, the story behind Blood Lake is far more compelling than watching Blood Lake. If Barry thought he was crafting the country’s next hit slasher, he was delusional and yet missed a target so easy to hit that the result is too misguided to deserve the label of “derivative.” Flick Attack contributor Richard York put it best: “Not enough blood. Too much lake.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.