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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Action

White Line Fever (1975)

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Apologies to Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever and its star, Jan-Michael Vincent, for wrongly assuming all these years that it was a film about cocaine. Sometimes the private demons of public figures can cause one’s mind to mix fact with fiction. (Submitted for my defense: that title, c’mon!)

Instead, the actioner — one of many hick flicks at the time to cast the CB-clutching working man as an American hero — concerns itself with corruption in the trucking industry. The character played by Vincent (1972’s The Mechanic) may sport a feminine-sounding name, but Carrol Jo Hummer is masculinity embodied: a war veteran, a Southerner, a family man, a blue-collar clock puncher. Returning from Vietnam to his Arizona home and his soon-to-be bride (Kay Lenz, 1985’s House), Hummer happily puts himself in debt “up the wazoo” to buy a rig and pursue his late father’s independent-trucking dreams. Dubbing his bucket the “Blue Mule,” Hummer brims with Brut-splashed zeal at the prospect of hitting the highway for an honest day’s pay.

His first stop is to see his pappy’s former partner (Slim Pickens, Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway), who works for a shipping biz run by the greasy, sleazy, sexist and racist Buck (L.Q. Jones, The Brotherhood of Satan). Hummer immediately gets work, but when he sees illegal slot machines and smokes being loaded into his rig, he refuses. While it’s the right thing to do, it’s the wrong decision in the beady eyes of Buck, who gets Hummer blackballed all over town. With a two-grand monthly payment to the bank weighing down his shoulders, but unable to make a haul, Hummer has no choice but to get even, and that requires getting his mitts dirty.

White Line Fever skillfully follows the Walking Tall template of rural revenge to appease audience expectations and to elevate Hummer to that rarified status of folk hero for the common man. (But to speak of the common woman for a moment, Lenz shines with good-natured grace and power in the first half, before a lazy soap-opera subplot tosses her character into the backseat.) The movie’s iconic, climactic shot of the Blue Mule crashing through the logo signage of the conveniently named Glass House represents an extended middle finger to corporate America and all its malfeasance.

I’m guessing Kaplan drew upon his education through the Roger Corman school of directing (Night Call Nurses) when he chose to shoot that stunt in slow motion, because that’s just the kind of thing the legendary producer would advise his students to do with their films’ visual orgasm: Put it all up on the screen. Technically, Fever is not a Corman picture, yet it operates in the same efficient manner as much of the man’s low-budget fare of that time: with more going on underneath its boom-boom-pow surface. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Kiss Me Monster (1969)

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An immediate sequel to the same year’s Two Undercover Angels, Jess Franco’s Kiss Me Monster again stars Janine Reynaud (The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) and Rosanna Yanni (Hunchback of the Morgue) as the Paul Newman-lusting Diana and Regina, the striptease-cum-detective duo known as The Red Lips. As is the case with its spy-spoofing predecessor, prepare for the monster-free Monster to make zero fucking sense.

Also prepare to be perfectly okay with that.

While in some glamorous Spanish city to perform their act, which involves playing the saxophone while clad in costumes right out of Bob Fosse’s cocaine dreams, Diana and Regina run into murder, spray-can narcotics, cool jazz, leisurely swims and bad guys clad in cloaks that, in the dark, could be mistaken for KKK uniforms. But please don’t ask me to relay the plot, because story points are, unlike most Franco starlets, impenetrable.

An occasional spurt of exposition fills in more blanks than are gained by actually watching that action take place, e.g., “I was taken prisoner by a group of queer virgins and was put in a cage. One of them worked me over with a whip. Then they let me out again, then they gave me a funny kind of whistle or something as a farewell present.”

You’ll just have to take the ladies’ word for it. Since both are beautiful (although at some angles, Reynaud channels Peg Bundy), Franco assumes (rightly) that the average male viewer will accept said word at face value. Because what lovely faces! What exotic locales! What colorful compositions! What outlandish scenarios! What the hell just happened!?! —Rod Lott

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Horror

Hunchback of the Morgue (1973)

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You’ve gotta give it to Paul Naschy. In Hunchback of the Morgue, the Spanish horror icon casts himself as a hideous freak reviled by all, and yet still finds a way to write his character into a nude bed-down with a ready and willing hot lady, per his usual.

Naschy’s sympathetic Gotho lives in a tiny town, where he clerks for the local hospital morgue. Everybody in the village seems to hate him — kids pelt him with rocks, doctors openly make fun of him and then Rodney King him — everybody, that is, except Ilse (María Elena Arpón, The House That Screamed), his friend from childhood. And she promptly dies.

For safekeeping, Gotho carries Ilse’s lifeless body into the bowels of the place, suggesting that Naschy and director/co-scribe Javier Aguirre (who partnered that same year for Count Dracula’s Great Love) have drawn influence not just from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but another great of Gothic literature: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Splayed across a slab of rock and open to the cave’s fetid air, her face is feasted upon by rats; when Gotho limps in to discover this ghastly sight, he torches them. Set aflame for real, the shrieking vermin cry hop about like Mexican jumping beans. (PETA would be most displeased.)

And that’s just scratching the oily, sleazy surface. Soon, one Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbés, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) enters the picture and enlists Gotho in obtaining the bodies of dead female prisoners for an experiment in creating artificial life. Orla succeeds, resulting in a growling, primordial poop monster that we don’t see until the final scene and seems to have shuffled in from a neighboring set. In other words, this movie has everything: the fabulous Maria Perschy (Five Golden Dragons); the equally fabulous and fleetingly naked Rosanna Yanni (Two Undercover Angels); brutes of men who spill beer all over their chins, as if their lips contain no working nerves; and ace detective work like this: “According to our investigation, he’s retarded mentally.” —Rod Lott

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