All posts by Rod Lott

Western

Jack the Ripper Goes West (1974)

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First things first: Jack the Ripper Goes West is a bullshit title. Second things second: I concede it is infinitely more marketable than the film’s original title, Knife for the Ladies, which simply sounds like the misheard end result of a kindergarten game of Telephone.

In the desert town of Mescal, the men and women are all agog and abuzz over losing yet another perfectly good prostitute to murder! The latest victim had her throat slashed not only horizontally, but postcoitally. Now that somebody’s homicide spree has hit the magic number of three and the cantankerous sheriff (Jack Elam, The Cannonball Run) has no cotton-pickin’ idea who’s responsible, Mescal looks yonder to St. Louis to hire curly-haired detective Edward R. Burns (Jeff Cooper, Circle of Iron), basically a Hercule Poirot for cowpokes. Investigatin’ begins; stabbin’ continues.

There’s nothing wrong with grafting the Whitechapel legend of London onto the dusty landscape of the American Western; mixing and melding of genres is encouraged. But director Larry G. Spangler (The Soul of Nigger Charley) and his writing team (one-third of which is Academy Award winner Seton I. Miller, screenwriter of such classics as Here Comes Mr. Jordan and The Adventures of Robin Hood) have no idea how to lasso that into a compelling story. Evidence of this shows in the picture’s schizophrenic nature, undecided if it should go whole-hog mystery or horror or whathaveyou. No amount of eye candy from Diana Ewing (Play It as It Lays) or glee gained from the bonkers performance of Ruth Roman (The Baby) can make up for Spangler’s cattle-drive pacing, which is why the funny ending isn’t worth the sit to get there.

If you’d like to see a true Ripping yarn with equally psychotronic leanings, watch Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper instead. Heck, or just watch the one with David Hasselhoff. Either leaves this in the dust. —Rod Lott

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Action

The Day of the Wolves (1971)

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Seven criminals are recruited to pull a job. They are known to one another only by an elementary code and sport the same cool-guy disguise. Sound familiar? There’s no way that a TV broadcast of The Day of the Wolves managed to escape the eyes and psyche of a young Quentin Tarantino.

As ringleader, No. 1 (Jan Murray, 1967’s Thunder Alley) assigns his assembled men numbers instead of names, instructs them to don fake beards and black gloves, and runs them ragged through two days of training for a three-hour job he promises will net each of them no less than a $50K payday: robbing the entire desert town of Wellerton, population 7,420. When questioned how such a small group can pull off such a big heist, No. 1 explains with a shit-eating grin, “One wolf can maul a whole flock of sheep. Imagine what seven can do.”

Unbeknownst to the crew, their otherwise perfectly planned crime coincides with the forced resignation of the town’s longtime chief of police (Richard Egan, The Big Cube) for purely political reasons; just because he’s lost his badge doesn’t mean he’s lost his will to protect and fight. Imagine what one can do.

If only it weren’t so obscure, the Arizona-lensed Wolves would be taught as a textbook case of what a resourceful filmmaker can do with the barest of resources. Although I’m sure writer/director Ferde Grofé Jr. (The Proud and Damned) would have stacked the deck with marquee names if he could have afforded it, the homogeny among the criminals doesn’t require it. Indeed, it seems almost deliberate that only one of the hired guns, No. 4 (Rick Jason, The Witch Who Came from the Sea), bears a discernible personality. What the film lacks in finesse, Grofé mitigates with an inventive setup, a crackling pace, a corker of an ending and action action action. Imagine what one can do. —Rod Lott

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Action

The Arena (2001)

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Cross Gladiator with any episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. Then cross that with Playboy’s Erotic Fantasies II and you have yourself The Arena, a grim and inept Roger Corman production. A remake of the 1973 Corman production starring Pam Grier, this newfangled Arena stars not one, but two Playmates of the late 1990s, Karen McDougal and Lisa Dergan.

Respectively playing Jessemina and Bodicia, the girls are sold as slaves to the evil governor. Their duties are to clean the gladiator arena and serve as unpaid whores. But when the gov catches all the women having a heated catfight in their hut, he drafts them for a public cage match, because who doesn’t want to see girls, well, fight like girls? After the first girl-on-girl event, the soldiers celebrate by doing some strange Hokey Pokey dance. All the gladiator scenes are shot in that annoying shaky-cam “style,” but at least there is blood: a beheading, a man cut in half, another shot through the mouth with an arrow — and that’s just the first 10 minutes!

I think it says a lot about the film — the first in English for Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) — when even its sex scenes bore. But thanks to the bubble-butted McDougal’s exposure, I learned that boob jobs and bikini waxes were far more prevalent in ancient Rome than we were taught in schools. Predictably, she and Dergan are awful actresses; the stilted conversations between them are so pained and forced, it’s like watching two Valley girls struggle to talk about anything other than shoes or boys. And when it comes down to it, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

The supporting cast includes the now-stereotypical feminine, John Lithgow-type of a governor; a tough bald guy who always sniffles; and a hunky dude who looks and acts like Kevin Sorbo with a head injury. Everything is tinted blue or yellow — just like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, but without purpose or reason to exist. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Winter a-Go-Go (1965)

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Virtually the Ski Patrol of its day, Winter a-Go-Go marks an attempt by a major studio to muscle in on a minor’s success — namely, the cash cow that AIP was milking and milking among the collective teats of the youth market with its blanket of Beach Party romps. But leave it to the Columbia suits to not quite comprehend the simplicity of the can’t-miss formula; ignoring AIP’s surefire Frankie-and-Annette dynamic, Winter a-Go-Go opts for Frankie and, well, Frankie.

Jeff (William Wellman Jr., High School Confidential!) has just inherited the ramshackle Snow Mountain Lodge in Heavenly Valley, and his horny best bud, Danny (James Stacy, Double Exposure), possesses the entrepreneurial skills to help launch it, starting with recruiting female employees solely off qualifications of the 36-21-36 kind — a scene so lecherous, it’s practically a preamble to the TV series Mad Men. (Would you expect less of a comedy whose opening credits follow a bikini-clad skier down the slopes?) They arrive to find the lodge under layers of dust and disrepair — one stop more inviting than The Overlook Hotel, and nothing a quick, coed cleaning musical number can’t fix!

With segregated rooms (by gender, so save your outrage until the end of this paragraph, SJWs) and a bar serving nothing harder than Coca-Cola, Snow Mountain 2.0 is open for business! That business would be monkey business, if this movie had been made 20 years later. Since it wasn’t, T&A is absent, leaving director Richard Benedict (Impasse) to make do with a double-slipper pedestal bathtub’s worth of soapy subplots, ranging from Jeff being unable to pay rent to Jeff being clueless that his adorable, dream-girl secretary (Beverly Adams, Torture Garden) is all a-goo-goo over him. There are even some that don’t involve Jeff, like Danny stealing a stereotypical Chinese chef (H.T. Tsiang, 1966’s The Swinger) from a competing hotel — okay, now you can be outraged!

Audiences unaccustomed to this style of teenpic may be caught off-guard by any number of elements in need of carbon dating, from the pajamaed characters’ spontaneous group decision to rush downstairs to do the “Hip Square Dance” in the middle of the night, to now-antiquated lingo, such as one young man’s compliment that the spiffed-up Snow Mountain Lodge “is a gassy place!” And if today’s viewers can’t get past such instances, Winter a-Go-Go’s charms will be lost on them. AIP could have churned out this kind of thing in its sleep — and had, just half a year earlier with Ski Party, the fifth Beach Party sequel. While Winter is the lesser of the two, plenty of room for both exists in your heart … as long as you don’t Google whatever became of Stacy. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Orloff Against the Invisible Man (1970)

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That Awful Dr. Orlof gains a second “F,” but loses usual director Jess Franco, in Orloff Against the Invisible Man, fifth or so in the loosely bound sex-science series, depending on whom you ask.

Having received vague word that someone has fallen ill at Professor Orloff’s castle, Dr. Garondet (Paco Valladares) wants to get there to render aid, yet requires assistance. Complicating matters is that damn near every villager shudders at the mention of Orloff’s name and refuses to help. Once the good doctor finally arrives, he learns that Orloff’s daughter, Cécile (Brigitte Carva, in her one and only role), sounded the medical alarm under false pretenses: No one there is sick.

Well, not physically, perhaps …

Cécile is concerned about her father’s mental state. However, when Dr. Garondet consults Orloff (Howard Vernon, The Diabolical Dr. Z), the professor says essentially the same about her! Orloff then proceeds to sell Dr. G a lengthy explanation, which we see play out in extended flashback. It involves his latest and greatest experiment: making an invisible man!

Orloff created him out of revenge for his colleagues’ years of scorn and insults; director and co-writer Pierre Chevalier (The Panther Squad) created him because having a transparent foil sure cuts down on your monster movie’s budget. Alternately known as Dr. Orloff’s Invisible Monster and too many other titles, the film is full of such rudimentary effects as floating household (castlehold?) items and, increasingly, more prurient ones, like ripping off ladies’ clothing. The only thing more unintentionally amusing than a young women’s roll in the hay with an unseen partner comes at Against’s end, when we get a peekaboo at that see-through rascal. You’ll laugh at the reveal.

You also wouldn’t know Franco was not involved if you happened to miss the credits, because not only does Vernon reprise his Awful role, but Chevalier (purposely or not) imitates Franco through awkward pauses, out-of-focus close-ups, OB-GYN-style gazes and general nonsense. As a nearly harmless lark, this Eurohorror flick of suspect aptitude packs a nutritionally empty wallop to the ol’ pleasure sensors. —Rod Lott

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