Documentary

Drive-In Madness! (1987)

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driveinmadnessDrive-In Madness! doesn’t quite earn the exclamation point it gave itself, but it’s a nostalgic look at an American pastime that was well on its way out when this was made: during the home-video boom. And by “look,” I mean a freeform compilation of vintage coming attractions with pointless interview segments serving as glue.

Narrated by Poltergeist real estate agent James Karen, the 84-minute quasi-documentary leans heavy on the films of Al Adamson, with six of his flicks represented with full trailers, from Satan’s Sadists to Naughty Stewardesses — not a complaint. I don’t know if any rhyme or reason were present in director Tim Ferrante’s choices of what clips to include, but for the most part, it’s an unpredictable bunch that touches upon sci-fi (The Human Duplicators), mondo (Macabro), action (Girls for Rent), comedy (The Booby Hatch) and, oddly, made-for-VHS trash that never would play drive-ins (Psychos in Love).

driveinmadness1To no one’s surprise, horror makes up the most, from the overplayed (Night of the Living Dead) to the opposite (Deadtime Stories). None looks as terrifying as what passes for hot dogs in ye olde concession-stand ads.

The aforementioned interviews include scream queen Linnea Quigley, effects master Tom Savini, collector extraordinary Forrest J. Ackerman and Mausoleum MILF Bobbie Bresee, who has no qualms appearing before Ferrante’s camera in an outfit designed to bare at least her left nipple. Only a fraction of what they share is related directly to the drive-in experience; the rest struck me as pandering to the fanboys, albeit before the word existed. Those faults were not enough to keep me away from Madness!, however, nor should they to you. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

House of Whipcord (1974)

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housewhipcordDedicated to those “who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment,” House of Whipcord demonstrates why a woman never should agree to embark on a weekend getaway with a man she has known for less than a week: Girl, you’re so going to get hurt — and I don’t mean just your heart.

This lesson is learned by Ann-Marie (Penny Irving, Old Dracula), a 19-year-old French model smart enough to know who the Marquis de Sade was, yet dumb enough not to run far, far away when a man named Mark E. Desade (Robert Tayman, Vampire Circus) talks her up at a party. After one real date, he wants her to accompany him on a trip to see his parents. We call that a “red flag,” luv.

housewhipcord1Immediately upon arrival at the isolated countryside estate, Ann-Marie is stripped (of both clothes and possessions), bathed and “checked for vermin” by the manly matrons in charge of the place, which actually is an illegal correctional house for crimes against the moral code. Ann-Marie’s offense? Appearing nude in public as part of an advertisement. Punishments doled out by the loyal Whipcord staff include 40-lash floggings, rat-infested accommodations, uneven haircuts and, if you’re lucky, a good noose ’round the neck.

From Pete Walker (House of the Long Shadows), Great Britain’s brand-name practitioner of pulse-quickening, the film occupies a strange place of its own, somewhere between the Naziploitation subgenre and the women-in-prison picture, being too buttoned-up to belong to either. Heavier on suspense than scares, Walker seems more interested in the ladies’ attempts at escape than in depicting more salacious sequences. While the somewhat restrained (but still shocking) approach widens the film’s appeal and, yes, depth, it cannot stave off the Act 3 blues. Like its blind, old man with a cane (Patrick Barr, The Satanic Rites of Dracula), House of Whipcord plods slowly toward an inevitable conclusion once Walker strategically has set up all his chess pieces. Finally, he catches up to the viewer. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Nightmare City (1980)

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nightmarecityWhen Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later … premiered in 2002, nearly everyone reacted to its fast-moving zombies as if the director were the concept’s inventor. Wrong! Others had pulled that trick long before, including Umberto Lenzi (Ghosthouse) in the pasta-puker Nightmare City.

Rendered Superman-strong by a radioactive spill at a nuclear plant, Lenzi’s zombies move quick as ever, travel in packs, have faces that resemble day-old guacamole dip, exhibit a vampiric thirst for blood and, post-feeding, often wipe their mouths on their sleeves. (“Tsk-tsk,” tsks etiquette queen Emily Post from the grave.) Some come armed with guns, but the majority prefers weapons of the stabby variety: knives, machetes, axes and even the occasional scythe — if it cuts, it makes the cut.

nightmarecity1Also known by the ho-hum title of City of the Walking Dead, Nightmare City is no great shakes in the plotting department; it’s one attack right after the other. What separates it from so many similar pics of the era is Lenzi’s staging of said attacks in unusual places, starting with an airport-runway bloodbath witnessed by our TV-reporter protagonist (Hugo Stiglitz, Survive!). From there, the undead:
• interrupt a live broadcast of a disco/aerobics show, wherein one spandex-clad dancer undergoes an impromptu mastectomy;
• commit a siege on a hospital, where the reporter’s wife (Laura Trotter, Miami Golem) works as a doctor and one zombie sucks on a bottle of platelets as a baby would to Mom’s nipple; and
• crash an amusement park (Six Flags Over Apocalypse?), where a body drop from atop a coaster track is one of the film’s lowbrow highlights.

As with other entries in the Italian zombie subgenre, gore is the score here. Many a head is blown off, many more throats and/or torsos are slit, but of particularly gruesome note is a female character’s eyeball removal. Only the peeper-meets-splinter scene in Lucio Fulci’s epic Zombie the year prior qualifies as more upsetting. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Man Beast (1956)

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manbeastAs vast and desolate as the Himalayas it depicts is Man Beast, an abominable turd. In her film debut, Asa Maynor (Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) plays Connie Hayward, a young woman who hires Steve Cameron (Tom Maruzzi, in his one and only acting credit) to lead her high up into the mountains to find her brother before it’s too late.

Like a few other “distinguished scientists,” Connie’s sib has gone in search of the yeti — “a kind of people covered with hair,” we’re told — and yet not a single member of those expeditions ever was heard from again. For quite a while, viewers of this freshman directorial outing by Jerry Warren (The Wild Woman of Batwoman) may wonder if the missing men committed suicide simply to have something to do.

manbeast1Only two things happen in Man Beast: climbing and boring, in roughly equal measure. Although the movie is a mere 62 minutes, it seems to take hours to reach the bargain-basement creature of the title, who sits in the snow and carries a big stick that resembles a salami hanging in a deli. Upon first glance, it looks like a cosplay version of Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion; as Warren allows his monster to stumble toward the forefront, rejected Chewbacca sketches come to mind.

The whooshing of the wind bears more personality than the yeti or any of the human cast, making Man Beast a steaming pile of cryptozoological crap. When Connie cries the flick’s last line, “Take me away from here, Steve! Take me away!,” you will share the sentiment. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies

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madashellYes, the subtitle of Dave Itzkoff’s Mad as Hell promises a behind-the-scenes chronicle of Sidney Lumet’s Network. Yes, the reader gets that, but the author delves deeper than that, to the point of telling not just the making of the 1976 film, but its conception, release, impact, blowback, legacy and continuing influence.

Part of that is because the book is as much as story about Network‘s celebrated screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, as it is about the Oscar-winning movie. A magnificent writer of television, stage and screen, Chayefsky was also an incredible control freak who ironically had no control over his family life; he clearly cared more about the written word than his flesh and blood.

Always waiting for the other shoe to drop, Chayefsky could not ever truly enjoy his incredible success — Network would bring him his third Academy Award for screenwriting — and harboring a near-extreme paranoia couldn’t help matters; he believed a second Holocaust was imminent. Nevertheless, he was able to function to do his job, starting with his much-abhorred boob tube. But it was film we forever will associate him with, especially the one with which Itzkoff’s book is concerned.

Network, we know now, was prescient — and continues to be more so as the years tick by — and even in scenes that never made it past the page, which Itzkoff details. One such case I found astounding is when the UBS execs dream up programming that is supposed to be considered wild: a show adapted from The Exorcist and a soap about homosexuals. We already have the latter; the former is being developed.

That’s one of many juicy bits the Mad as Hell reader will learn, thanks to Itzkoff’s judicious digging. Others include the revelation that Peter Finch could not complete two takes of “the” speech, that Lumet considered firing Faye Dunaway well after filming had begun, the pronunciation error that the to-the-letter Chayefsky failed to catch, and how Ned Beatty lied his way into a role. (I’d include how Dunaway did her damnedest to alienate most everyone, but everyone already knows that.)

If you haven’t seen Network — first off, shame on you — do not read this book until you do. Those who have may not want Mad as Hell to end, particularly knowing the fate of a reinvigorated Finch before the film could be fêted as that year’s Oscars. Only in a coda examining how Finch’s Howard Beale character has given rise to the likes of Glenn Beck does Itzkoff — turning from storyteller to social critic — produce a paragraph that’s not intensely readable. —Rod Lott

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