All posts by Rod Lott

Horror

The Baby (1973)

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A planet where apes evolved from men? That strange, sci-fi concept of Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes is mere child’s play compared to bizarreness of the director’s outré exercise in suburban horror that is The Baby. Dudes, this one’s colored in all shades of fucked-up.

Newly widowed social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer, The Loved One) is assigned to investigate the Wadsworth family, headed by a frowny, chain-smoking matriarch (Ruth Roman, Strangers on a Train). Mrs. Wadsworth lives with her two daughters and one son, which isn’t all that odd until you realize that the boy, her “Baby,” isn’t a baby at all, but a fully grown adult (David Manzy) who never matured beyond infancy. He wears diapers and all.

Initially repulsed, Ann starts to ignore most of her other clients to visit this special case. She recommends Baby be put in a clinic — a suggestion that, to Mrs. Wadsworth, goes over about as well as that 10th vodka tonic. Weirdness grows as Baby cajoles his naive teen babysitter (“What kind of question is that? Of course I’m wearing panties. Don’t I always?”) into breast-feeding him on the job.

It all leads to an expected tragic ending, but what is not expected is how disturbing The Baby feels as a whole. It’s not just Baby’s chalkboard-nails crying fits that bother, but an overall pervading sense of unease, and yet somehow, this thing earned a PG rating. Unlike most horror films of the 1970s, it’s not fun — just remarkably confounding and unsettling. I recommend giving it a watch, if only so I’m not the only one so agitated afterward. —Rod Lott

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Action

Foxy Brown (1974)

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In a lily-white era where female matinee idols were Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn, Pam Grier became a groundbreaking alternative, in part due to her landmark role of Foxy Brown. While the film is also a blaxploitation classic, make no mistake: Grier’s too confident onscreen to be exploited herself, bare breasts and all. Regardless of the race element, it’s just a damn enjoyable AIP actioner.

In the not-a-Coffy-sequel to Coffy, Grier is the no-nonsense, clean-living voice of reason in a world of danger. She pleads for her brother, Link (Antonio Fargas, Huggy Bear of TV’s Starsky & Hutch), to get straight by leaving the blow-dealing biz behind. When he gets into trouble with a loan shark, Link rats out sis’ undercover-cop beau (Terry Carter, Abby) for the payoff.

When Foxy’s boyfriend is gunned down, she skips the grieving process and goes undercover herself, as a high-class hooker for the organization responsible. That way, she can exact revenge from the inside out.

Writer/director Jack Hill fought to get Grier in the title role, and it’s easy to see why: She commands the screen. She is the movie. She can play sexy and sweet, tender and threatening, and exude credibility no matter what mode she’s in — and that includes the finale, where she bestows the gift in the pickle jar. Only the embarrassing opening-credits sequence gives Grier anything to be ashamed of. —Rod Lott

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Mystery

Shock Corridor (1963)

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Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor is an unconventional mystery unlike any other, and not just because it opens with a quote from that ancient playwright Euripides. Newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck, The Crawling Hand) narrates the whacked-out, envelope-pushing drama, about his feigning a sexual fetish to enter mental hospital to solve a murder. It’s easier to do behind the door rather than peeking through the keyhole.

Johnny’s girlfriend, Cathy (a knockout and excellent Constance Towers, who reteamed with Fuller for 1964’s The Naked Kiss) is against the idea, but he sees infiltrating Ward B’s hall as the “magic highway to the Pulitzer Prize.” She’s also pretending in a way, spending her nights as a singing stripper, playing upon her audience’s lurid desires.

Inside the snake pit, Johnny has no shortage of suspects, because every patient is seriously unhinged, from the man who believes he’s a Confederate general (James Best, TV’s Dukes of Hazzard) to Trent (Hari Rhodes, Detroit 9000), who steals pillowcases and, despite being black, espouses white-supremacist rhetoric.

Predictable is one of the last adjectives anyone could affix to Shock Corridor — one moment, Johnny’s being attacked by women at dance therapy; another, Cathy taunts him sexually while appearing as a slumberland specter. This black-and-white exercise in abnormality about the abnormal is a fever-dream masterpiece, and its sterling reputation as a before-its-time classic more than deserved. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Fuzz (1972)

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I distinctly recall an early-’80s Tonight Show episode where host Johnny Carson brought the house down by creating a fictional, raunchy tagline at the expense of his guest and his upcoming film: “Burt Reynolds is in Heat.” Alas, I’m too young to know if Carson made a similar gag about a dozen years earlier for Reynolds’ 1972 procedural, Fuzz. Perhaps the late-night king saved it for the more appropriate Raquel Welch?

That sultry sex bomb plays Detective McHenry, the newcomer to the 87th Precinct, as created in Ed McBain’s series of crime novels. On her first day, the police station gets a call that the commissioner will be killed unless $5,000 is turned over. That’s the first step of a crime spree undertaken by this hard-of-hearing man who quickly proves himself to be a mad bomber.

In other plot threads, the men (and woman) of the 87th try to crack the cases of a serial rapist in the park, and two young men who douse hobos in alcohol then set them aflame. McBain’s books in the long-running series always juggled stories this way, ranging from the seriocomic to the serious. While not the first adaptation (that’d be 1958’s sober Cop Hater) Fuzz comes closest to matching the author’s indelible tone.

Credit goes to McBain’s own screenplay (under his real name of Evan Hunter) and his game cast. Burt Reynolds and Jack Weston go undercover as nuns, while lucky bastard Tom Skerritt goes undercover with Welch in a tight sleeping bag. Yul Brynner shows up only in the final third as “The Deaf Man,” and no one delivers a line like “Marvelous, empty-headed bitch” better than he. Even Russ Meyer fave Uschi Digard shows up, albeit on a big-bust loop in a porno shop. Like such shorts, Fuzz is slight and fleeting, but enjoyable while it lasts, so it’s a shame this didn’t become a franchise. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966)

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While rare, Hollywood on occasion births a sequel greater than the original: The Godfather: Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Hillbillys in a Haunted House. The latter is the 1967 follow-up to the prior year’s Las Vegas Hillbillys. Arguably, Vegas boasts more star power, but lacks Haunted‘s — how you say? — je ne sais quois. Ah, yes: gorillas and Joi Lansing’s garguantas.

Vegas does have Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren. As the appropriately named Tawny, Mansfield pops in and out of the movie, with each appearance accompanied by that percussive “bong” sound that signifies cups-poureth-over pulchritude. So there’s that. Director Arthur C. Pierce (Women of the Prehistoric Planet), I salute you.

After nearly 15 minutes of country music performances, a story takes root: Tennessee good ol’ boy Woody Wetherby (Ferlin Husky, a real-life singer probably more or less playing himself) is called to settle the estate of his newly croaked uncle, so he and near-illiterate pal Jeepers (Don Bowman) hop in a jalopy with an umbrella for a roof and head for Sin City. Woody has inherited the strip’s near-empty Golden Circle casino and bar … and an accompanying $40,000 in debts. If only he could get some quality singers to attract paying customers.

One comes built-in — and built — with waitress Boots Malone (Van Doren), who likes to sing and dance atop the bar, and attracts the eye of Woody: “She reminds me of a 2-year-old filly that’s ready to be tamed.” Woody dreams many more live music numbers; 007’s dentally challenged nemesis Richard Kiel appears as muscle; and everyone in the movie has so much fun, it ends in a pie fight. Glad to see someone had that much of a ball. —Rod Lott

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