Since the fatalistic conclusion of Easy Rider, few actors had as many downbeat cinematic endings as Peter Fonda did, with the explosive train collision in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry one of his depressive best that, at least, would go on to be anonymously immortalized in the intro to TV’s The Fall Guy.
Here, Fonda is the titular insane Larry who, along with a reptilian Adam Roarke, is part of a pair of groovy grocery store robbers who specialize in highly intricate — almost too intricate — capers that almost include the murder of a little girl, all to pay for their future NASCAR needs.
On this particular getaway, they’re additionally saddled with the filthy Mary (Susan George), a sexual conquest from the night before. As the trio speeds off in their incredibly impressive Dodge Charger with eccentric police tactics constantly trying to chase them down, including one dude in a high-performance interceptor and the quirky sheriff himself trying to run them over in a helicopter.
With Fonda at his coked-out best and George at her wide-eyed worst, they’re a couple with nothing but softball barbs to sling between them, with the saving grace of sorts being Roarke as a lizard with something of a heart-on for the stowaway.
But that out-of-nowhere ending, man … even for a Fonda flick, it’ll still shake the entire room. —Louis Fowler
Years in the making, Hollywood Horror House (aka Savage Intruder) represents the singular vision of Donald Wolfe — its writer, director and producer — in his one and only feature. That he never made another is a damn shame, but perhaps it’s not for a lack of trying. This one, after all, was funded by his Movieland Tours business, a virtual ad for which bookends the film, as a bus pulls up long enough for the driver (The Three Stooges’ Joe Besser) to point out the old mansion up the hill and in disrepair.
There lives faded matinee idol Katharine Packard (the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s Miriam Hopkins, in her final role), her days now drowned in vodka, fairy-godmother gowns and clouded memories of being somebody. Off the tour bus hops homeless hippie Vic Valance (John David Garfield, White Line Fever) and gets a job as Katharine’s live-in caretaker. She’s thrilled to have such a handsome young man around; he’s thrilled to have lucked into a meal ticket, even if that means becoming her sexual plaything. It does.
Katharine is completely oblivious to Vic’s true self: a Satan-worshipping, smack-shooting serial killer who favors the electric carving knife. A former foster child, Vic projects his considerable mommy issues onto Katharine the more he undergoes drug-induced freakouts-cum-flashbacks, rendered onscreen in rather intoxicating kaleidoscopic visuals using every color of the Crayola box — the 64-count with built-in sharpener, of course. These effects are quite good, as are the practical effects depicting viscous torrents of blood jutting from lopped appendages.
A lot goes on under the roof of Hollywood Horror House, a real generation gap of a film. It’s a study in contrasts, particularly of artifice and honesty, starting with a shot of the glamorous landmark Hollywood sign, revealed to be heavily decayed as the camera switches to a close-up. No instance is accidental; hitting most wickedly is a family enjoying a Christmas parade while an L.A. business behind them advertises in bright orange-red letters, “TOTAL NUDITY.”
On that note, Hopkins briefly bares her sexagenarian breasts in one scene, part of her total commitment to a bravura performance, because if the one-time Academy Award nominee held any reservations about appearing in a B picture late in her career (Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill being another), she doesn’t show it. In fact, given the awards success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Hopkins thought she had a solid shot at an Oscar nod.
Wolfe’s film is hagsploitation without the marquee name value. It’s also a nice surprise. The last half grows incrementally more sluggish as the cast thins … until Vic goes totally bonkers, and the movie willfully, wonderfully follows. —Rod Lott
Back in my zine days, sometime in the ’90s, I traded ad space for a handful of VHS dubs, bootlegs of flicks not available in America legitimately. One of these tapes was the Mexican movie Satanico Pandemonium, a nunsploitation film with a moral message: to not make a deal with Lucifer.
It’s worked so far.
Comely Sister Maria (the oft-nude Cecilia Pezet) is picking wildflowers one afternoon, as nuns did in the days of the Inquisition, when she meets Lucifer himself (the oft-sleazy Enrique Rocha). After tempting her with a very red apple, he promises to make her Mother Superior if she gives in to his unholy caterwauling.
Of course, she does, seducing the town’s young goat herder, forcing a nun to hang herself, and strangling the O.G. Mother Superior after unleashing a torrent of blasphemies. As a celebration, the remainder of the nunnery strips down and dances around in a Satanic bacchanalia that would make a medieval woodcut artist justifiably proud.
With not one, not two, but three shocking endings, Satanico Pandemonium — subtitled La Sexorcista for reasons unknown — has gained notoriety in the past 20 years as being the inspiration for Salma Hayek’s vampire queen in From Dusk Till Dawn. But, beyond that name check, the film stands on its own cloven hooves just fine, a bloody gem from comedian Tin-Tan’s director of choice, Gilberto Martínez Solares. —Louis Fowler
In the same vein as his book on sci-fi and horror films of the same era, Mark Thomas McGee covers a decade’s worth of JD and other teenage-targeted movies with Teenage Thunder: A Front Row Look at the 1950s Teenpics. After a meaty introduction to the subgenre, McGee gets to the main course: full A-to-Z reviews of enough movies to fill a few swell jalopies, with Elvis Presley, Mamie Van Doren and Roger Corman turning up everywhere. Rather than quoting other critics to give context on the films’ reception, McGee instead quotes the actual exhibitors, which yields some lines as vicious as any from a poisoned pen; says one of Teenagers from Outer Space, “better to leave the house dark for three nights.” The BearManor Media paperback squeaks through with a few glaring errors (one “Capital” Records is forgivable; multiple instances of Dick “Clarke” are not), but the book is so much fun, it’s nearly essential. To borrow the tagline from the poster for Rock, Pretty Baby!, it’s the most! The greatest! It’s crazy, man, crazy!
Where were you in 1962? If you were alive, perhaps in a theater watching To Kill a Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate or any number of landmark films the year brought. With Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies:, Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan make the case for those 12 months being an absolute peak for Hollywood celluloid. We’ve all heard similar claims laid for 1939 and, more recently, 1999, but 1962? Nope, never — not until right now. They don’t convince me — every year brings its share of four-star winners — but they do succeed in crafting a credible, critical narrative of an art form in transition, with chapters covering the foreign-film revolution, the loosening of sexual morals onscreen, the increasing influence of psychoanalysis and, naturally, the move from black and white to glorious Technicolor. In hardcover from Rutgers University Press, Cinema ’62 registers as a brainier take on Peter Biskind’s style, but not nearly as breezy and boisterous.
Spoiler Alert!: The Badass Book of Movie Plots is part screenwriting manual, part humor title and part graphic novel. From the minds of Stephen Espinoza, Kathleen Killian Fernandez and Chris Vander Kaay (the latter two of whom co-authored 2018’s Indie Science Fiction Cinema Today), the Laurence King Publishing paperback is nothing if not colorful. But it’s more than that, too, breaking down the beats of 38 film subgenres — e.g., Teen Sex Comedy, the Disaster Movie, the Superhero Origin Film, the Erotic Thriller, the Animal Attack Horror and so on — in three acts. The result is like a bunch of Mad magazine parodies of movies that don’t exist … except they kinda do! The authors have nailed the hundreds of clichés still permeating the pictures produced today. While the book is well-designed, its cutesy-verging illustrations belie the mildly wicked humor to be found in the word balloons. —Rod Lott
I’ve been in lust with notorious superstar Gloria Trevi since I first caught her film debut, Pelo Suelto, on a Spanish-language channel sometime in the mid-’90s. With her brazen sexuality and the willingness to exploit it, what better romantic icon for a lost boy with burgeoning erections and a love of catchy tunes?
What I didn’t know, however, is the hell she was being put through by her manager, Sergio Andrade. A music producer and sexual predator who ran his services like a religious cult, he constantly brought in scantily clad scads of young women to fill his hit-making coffers, as well as his eternal erotic pleasure.
The whole downbeat drama is documented in Gloria, featuring a highly praised performance by Sofía Espinosa as the acclaimed queen of Mexican pop. Starting as a street urchin looking for fame and fortune on the music charts, Trevi quickly comes under the spell of Andrade (Marco Pérez), grooming her into Latin America’s biggest star.
Eventually, it leads to a chaotic life on the run, filled with more perverse twists than a whole season of a telenovela, including dead babies, underage accusations and, ultimately, Brazilian incarceration. Answering many of the dirty rumors about what happened during this time, director Christian Keller does away with both sides of the story, instead telling Gloria’s version of the facts.
Espinosa miraculously becomes Trevi, with her raspy voice, torn shirts and intense demeanor; it’s horrific though to see this Mexican symbol of personal liberation and sexual freedom was actually a talented slave to the very life she sang both about and against. The film does her story absolute justice.
But, in case you’re wondering, she’s doing much better now, still making hits. —Louis Fowler
Since the fatalistic conclusion of Easy Rider, few actors had as many downbeat cinematic endings as Peter Fonda did, with the explosive train collision in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry one of his depressive best that, at least, would go on to be anonymously immortalized in the intro to TV’s The Fall Guy.
On this particular getaway, they’re additionally saddled with the filthy Mary (Susan George), a sexual conquest from the night before. As the trio speeds off in their incredibly impressive Dodge Charger with eccentric police tactics constantly trying to chase them down, including one dude in a high-performance interceptor and the quirky sheriff himself trying to run them over in a helicopter.
