Reading Material

The Manson Family on Film and Television

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If, God forbid, you’re anything like me, upon seeing Ian Cooper’s The Manson Family on Film and Television, you might think, “Are there really that many movies about Charles Manson to merit a whole book?”

The short answer: No.

But if the scope were expanded to include those projects that were inspired by the Manson family’s reign of terror in the summer of 1969? Well, then my answer would be a resounding “yes!” And since that is what Cooper has done, that’s a “yes,” my children.

It’s a damn good book, too, on a subgenre about which you didn’t even know you wanted to read. With a blend of the historical and the critical, of course Cooper covers the 1976 TV miniseries Helter Skelter, still the definitive pic on the subject (so definitive it forever typecast star Steve Railsback as a loon), as well as the Oscar-nominated Manson documentary from ’73.

However, what makes the McFarland & Company paperback worth the price to cinephiles is the exhaustive coverage of the exploitation industry’s various entries into the thematically related sweepstakes (although, it should be noted, the book is not exploitative). The net spreads wider than one might think, from well-known cult classics like David E. Durston’s I Drink Your Blood, Michael Findlay’s Snuff and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left to such lurid and languid obscurities as Wrong Way, Because of the Cats and the X-rated The Love-Thrill Murders, starring Troy Donahue.

To this day — and even tomorrow, with Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set for 2019 — the Manson murders still inform and inspire entertainment, like the horror hit The Strangers and the wretched DTVer Wolves at the Door. From Kenneth Anger to Diane Sawyer, from animation to pornography, no cinematic piggy appears to have escaped Cooper’s probing pen. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Kitchen Sink

High School Confidential! (1958)

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WTFTwo years before producer Albert Zugsmith had Sex Kittens Go to College, he went undercover in High School Confidential! (Exclamation his.)

A juvenile-delinquent exposé of sorts, the film centers on snot-nosed transfer student/perennial senior Tony (Russ Tamblyn, Satan’s Sadists), who arrives at Santa Bellow High with a wad of cash and a roll of weed. As the faculty members get schooled on the ravages of marijuana addiction, Tony tries to claw his way to the top of the town pushers’ org chart, as well as into the pants of not-so-good girl Joan (Diane Jergens, Island of Lost Women), the main squeeze of BMOC J.I. (John Drew Barrymore, Death on the Fourposter). Ironically, the woman who really wants to bed Tony is his soused ’n’ sexy aunt (Mamie Van Doren, 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt), whose home apparently came prebuilt with its own wah-wah-wah soundtrack.

Helmed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man), High School Confidential! is one of those teen pics in which all the students are played by actors at least a decade removed from the classroom. It’s also quite the time capsule, with an overuse of “crummy” (second only to the narration of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) and slang weighing down every line of dialogue, e.g., “That’s the way the bongo bingles.”

In other words, I loved it! Both the Fast Times of its day and Reefer Madness if made by skilled craftsmen, the film is a now-alien world of crew cuts, Beat poets and race-ready jalopies. Tamblyn is delightfully smug; Van Doren is off-the-charts sexy; and the ace cast also includes Teenage Werewolf Michael Landon, Plan 9’s Lyle Talbot, The Little Shop of Horrors shopkeeper Mel Welles, Charlie Chaplin sidekick Jackie Coogan and Jerry Lee Lewis as himself, singing and playing the piano in the back of a moving pickup truck and probably hoping for a Junior High School Confidential! This one’s tops, chum. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

Dracula (the Dirty Old Man) (1969)

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A public service announcement: “Alucard” is “Dracula” spelled backward, which you likely already knew, and not because the opening credits of Dracula (the Dirty Old Man) tell you. But that they do is indicative of how low the bar of wit is set.

Played by this-and-only-this actor Vince Kelley, Alucard awakes (hardly elderly, but whatever) and, under the auspices of re-opening a mine, lures a businessman named Mike (Billy Whitton, Mission: Africa) to his cave and turns him into a werewolf right out of a K. Gordon Murray-presented Mexi-matinee. Now christened anew as Irving Jackalman, Mike runs errands for his vampire boss — or errand, singular: Abduct young women and bring them to Alcuard’s lair to be tied up, stripped down and bitten on the boob. At 69 (!) minutes, the sexploitation quickie basically depicts this scenario half a dozen times — lather, rinse, repeat — with none of the ladies having breasts large enough for the count’s liking.

Somehow, I have managed to avoid mentioning the movie’s craziest aspect until now. It is not that Dirty Old Man is almost entirely dubbed, but that Alucard is, for no detectable reason, now a painfully unfunny Catskills comedian (redundant, I know) in the nerve-grating vein of Jackie Mason. Even if your ears have been professionally vacuumed by an ENT seconds before showtime, you’ll still wonder if perhaps there is something you missed.

There is not. Unless you fail to notice the C-section scar on a brunette victim Jackalman dry-humps because you are too distracted watching the poor woman struggling to contain her laughter at the absurdity of it all — and that’s before his postcoital Green Stamps joke! I would not be surprised if the dialogue were crafted Johnny-on-the-spot in the recording studio, because ultimately, what is said is irrelevant compared to what is shown. This is the stuff of a men’s pulp magazine come to life, and writer/director William Edwards delivers on that: sooo stupid, yet sooo fun. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Action

Texas Detour (1978)

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Don’t mess with Texas, as the state’s motto goes. Which is not to say Texas won’t mess with you.

So it goes for Clay McCarthy (Patrick Wayne, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger), driving from California to Tennessee in his souped-up van so he can do his stuntman work on a location shoot in Nashville. Tagging along are brother Dale (Mitch Vogel, The Reivers), because he wants to be a country music star, and sister Sugar (Lindsay Bloom, Sixpack Annie), because the primary antagonist needs someone to leer at and harass. Unfortunately, no sooner have the opening credits finished when a truck of redneck prison escapees forces the McCarthy siblings off the road and robs them of their wallets and wheels. Welcome to the Lone Star State, ya hear? Texas Detour might as well point them to Macon County.

Help — and eventual trouble — arrives in Beau Hunter (Anthony James, Soggy Bottom U.S.A.), a lanky, petulant rich kid who gives them a ride and a roof while they wait for the town’s apathetic sheriff (R.G. Armstrong, White Line Fever) to locate Clay’s van, provided he ever starts searching. Beau introduces the McCarthys to his sis (Priscilla Barnes, Mallrats), who goes gaga for Clay, and his dad (Cameron Mitchell, Gorilla at Large), who does not. Needless to say, the West Coasters learn about Southern-fried “justice” the hard way — none more so than the sweet Sugar, but judging from the weight writer/director Howard Avedis (Mortuary) gives various misdeeds, the theft of Clay’s van ranks higher than sexual assault.

Given that Texas Detour is an action movie from the era in which American culture fetishized vans, color us nonplussed. Story doesn’t propel Texas Detour forward, and yet Avedis keeps it moving in that direction, straight and steady. As immensely pleasurable as its leads are genial, the hicksploitation pic comes vacuum-packed with such drive-in-friendly confections as a motorcycle race, a car chase, Barnes’ bare chassis, a decent-enough Flo & Eddie soundtrack, a bar decorated with clown paintings this side of John Wayne Gacy and — what else? — Cameron Mitchell being all Cameron Mitchell, cigar ash on his shirt like so many flecks of Cheetos. —Rod Lott

Thriller

Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

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Displaying the lens-flared glaze of your grandmother’s favorite CBS prime-time procedural, Warner Bros.’ direct-to-video Deep Blue Sea 2 swims into sharksploitation-friendly waters … and sinks straight to the ocean floor. Directed by Darin Scott (Tales from the Hood 2), the belated sequel to Renny Harlin’s 1999 hit arrives with a title sequence that thinks it’s in a 007 movie, complete with a shapely scuba diver in silhouette and a jaw-droppingly horrendous ballad. A sample of the theme song’s IP-wedged lyrics:

Tread into the riptide
Falling from the light coming through
Trading dreams for nightmares
The undertow of gloom in the blue
Drowning in the deep blue sea

Folks, the movie only manages to metastasize from there.

Dr. Misty Calhoun (Danielle Savre, Boogeyman 2), a marine conservationist with a ridiculous name and a push-up bra, is offered five years’ funding to consult on a project with a big pharma firm. The research takes place at a tiny complex off the coast of South Africa. There, Rx giant Carl Durant (Michael Beach, Insidious: Chapter 2) runs intelligence-enhancing experiments on highly lethal bull sharks. He teaches them to swim in formation and obey simple commands, with the help of drugs and a training clicker not unlike the one wielded by Chris Pratt to coach dinosaurs in Jurassic World. Here, it’s clicked by Trent Slater (Rob Mayes, John Dies at the End), a living Ken doll sewn into a wetsuit.

Just as in the original film, Durant’s experiment goes awry, but now with markedly less convincing effects and the boneheaded addition of baby sharks that will remind viewers of Baby Groot. Savre, Beach and Mayes fill the movie’s respective blanks left by Saffron Burrows, Samuel L. Jackson and Thomas Jane, aping their character traits and mannerisms, yet only after stripping them to a single, flat dimension. Every scene, every story beat, every camera filter acts as a deliberate recall to Harlin’s picture; Scott even shamelessly tries to duplicate Jackson’s famed holy-shit moment. The sets look like a best-guess facsimile, were Deep Blue Sea fortunate enough to be adapted into an amusement-park attraction. All that’s missing from Scott’s wretched sequel is LL Cool J’s parrot.

Well, that’s not true — entertainment is also a no-show. Whereas I’ve seen the ’99 Deep Blue Sea three times, I barely could stomach a single viewing of Deep Blue Sea 2. I’ll give the sequel this, though: It stopped at 94 minutes instead of going to 95. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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