Horror

Flesh Feast (1970)

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Poor Veronica Lake. The Hollywood icon starred in Preston Sturges’ classic Sullivan’s Travels, burned brightly opposite Alan Ladd in several films noir and earned screen-siren status thanks to That Hair. Yet her career ended as no one anticipated: looking 20 years older than she was, applying maggots to the screaming face of Adolf Hitler.

I speak of the ignoble Flesh Feast. Despite the title, it’s not the doing of H.G. Lewis; if it were, it wouldn’t be so forgotten. Flesh Feast is, however, the first film for writer/director Brad Grinter, who soon enough served up an even bigger turkey — in more ways than one — with Blood Freak.

Lake’s Dr. Frederick uses the aforementioned maggots as the Botox of the day. By manipulating the color spectrum or some bullshit like that, she’s able to make the larvae munch on that savory human skin, effectively de-aging her patients.

While most of the movie takes place in a house — Dr. F does her magic in the basement, as her lady clients bunk upstairs — but begins at an airport where some poor schmo in a phone booth is fatally stabbed by the end of a passing janitor’s mop.

Confused? You should be. It all ties to Dr. Frederick’s arms-dealing boyfriend, which is how the flaccid Führer eventually gets involved. Cadavers are stolen. Limbs get sawed. Corn liquor is suspected. Don’t try to wrap your head around it, because I don’t believe Grinter bothered to. This thing is as scrambled as eggs in a Category 5 hurricane. Let’s put it this way: It sure could use a turkey man-monster.

At one point, the good doctor is asked what a noise was, which she explains away with, “Oh, just alley cats and trash cans.” The same applies to Flesh Feast: That racket? Why, p’shaw, it’s nothing. Pay it no mind. —Rod Lott

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Sex

Her Odd Tastes (1969)

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Heard the buzz? It’s just Marsha Jordan’s vibrator. At the movie’s start, she rubs the battery-burnin’ device all over her face and head, which is not how it’s supposed to work. Not for nothing is this titled Her Odd Tastes!

Credited (and misspelled?) as “Marsh Jordon,” Ms. Jordan positively #girlbosses her way through as dildo saleswoman Christine. After she and her sister (Capri, College Girls Confidential) examine one another for precancerous lumps, Christine is nearly raped by a knife-wielding medical researcher studying pleasure. She’s saved by a book publisher who proposes she continue testing her attacker’s theory by retracing his thrusts steps collecting, um, data worldwide.

Christine does, starting in Hong Kong, where a prostitute injects her with opium. In South Africa, she attends a party where everyone wears masks, à la Eyes Wide Shut, not realizing the shindig is actually a satanic orgy — replete with a mascot goat’s head!

Dazed, Christine stumbles around (stock footage of) safari animals before she’s found by a game hunter and his wispy-mustached son, Mark. Because Mark’s girlfriend turned out to be a boyfriend, the anguished young man nurses a broken heart, until Christine lets him nurse her sizable bosom, among other activities. When the father tries to muscle in for sloppy seconds, Mark shoots so Dad can’t score.

Finally, in Nairobi, she oils up with a greasy sheik and his belly dancer for a threesome. Admits Christine, “My life is just one sexual merry-go-round.”

And how. Like the wrestling sequences in Santo movies, the sex scenes go on far too long. That said, Jordan is nearly as screen-scorching here as in The Divorcee and Marsha the Erotic Housewife, the latter of which shares writer/director Don Davis with this globetrotting romp-de-bomp. Therefore, I will be visiting the set for impromptu auditions once I finish building my time machine.

And speaking of bizarro contraptions, the film ends with the publisher mounting Christine atop a horizontal-enough La-Z-Boy recliner. Lightning strikes; the chair explodes; they die; the end! As these things go, Her Odd Tastes is a scream. But shhhhh, lest you wish to wake the wife and kids. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964

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While Roger Corman’s reputation of frugality holds merit, it’s all too often considered synonymous with “talentless,” which simply isn’t true. Whenever someone has questioned Corman’s competence as director, his cycle of Edgar Allan Poe films for AIP has served as my go-to defense. Genuine art and entertainment reside in that octet.

Chris Alexander needs no such swaying; he’s been all-in since childhood. Now, the Delirium magazine editor and filmmaker himself (Necropolis: Legion) devotes an entire book to the subject in — take a breath — Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964. Annnnnd exhale.

For anyone already in Alexander’s camp, myself included, the Headpress release is a must-own.

Whether Tales of Terror or Tomb of Ligeia, each movie earns its own chapter. Without fail, each chapter is split into three sections: a synopsis, an interview with Corman, then Alexander’s analysis — let’s just call it a review so you don’t discount the work as pud-pulling academia. Alexander may be prone to hyperbole on occasion, but the mofo can write.

Of these sections, the interviews are the book’s raison d’être. Corman graciously gives credit where it’s due, primarily to production designer Daniel Haller, cinematographer Floyd Crosby and screenwriter Richard Matheson. (Oddly, future director Nicolas Roeg’s exquisite photography on The Masque of the Red Death goes undiscussed.) Without bad-mouthing Mark Damon, Corman also dispels the actor’s claim of directing The Pit and the Pendulum.

In the same gentlemanly manner, Corman reveals how he got Vincent Price to emote on the proper wavelength on the first film, The Fall of the House of Usher; how Ray Milland measured against Price, who was unavailable for The Premature Burial; how Peter Lorre’s style threw off Price and Boris Karloff on The Raven; how he worked around Karloff’s health issues; and what he thinks of AIP turning an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation into a Poe pic with a mere slap-on quote and title switcheroo for The Haunted Palace.

Because the interviews are presented Q&A-style, the reader can hear Corman’s every word in their head — even when he talks about the act of orgasming.

For the cycle’s last couple of entries in the cycle, the credit pages contain some inaccuracies — more likely due to layout. Visually, though, Corman/Poe is generously illustrated throughout. Of particular value is a full-color appendix of posters (Poe-sters?) from all around the globe, plus novelizations and comic books. —Rod Lott

Get it at Headpress.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Shin Ultraman (2022)

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Gotta give it to the 40-meter silver-shiny superhero Ultraman: He sure as hell doesn’t look 55! It helps that Shin Ultraman is a spit-polished reboot, following the similar sober treatment director Shinji Higuchi gave another kaiju legend in 2016’s Shin Godzilla.

A government agency, the S-Class Species Suppression Protocol (SSSP) works to protect the country against giant monsters, which have a habit of popping up everywhere. Through the eyes of new transfer Hiroko (Masami Nagasawa, Godzilla: Final Wars), we witness how SSSP reacts to the sudden appearance of a mystery metallic man (“Ultraman” to you and me) who emerges from the sky to kick the asses of such destructive creatures as an invisible horned thing that feeds off electricity and a lizardy whatsit with a whirring drill bit for a head.

Under the sneaky pretense of an alliance, an evil electromagnetic extraterrestrial named Zarab (voiced by Kenjirô Tsuda) warns officials against our hero and drafts an Ultraman Elimination Plan. Take a look and let’s circle back to see if we’re aligned, okay?

As fun as Shin Ultraman’s battle sequences are, what sucked me in was the oil-and-vinegar working relationship of go-getter Hiroko and her solitary-minded, no-nonsense partner (Takumi Saitoh, Japan’s Cube remake). They’re essentially the Mulder and Scully of this world — accurate, given the original Ultraman spun off from the Ultra Q sci-fi mystery TV series, a single-season wonder. Their problem-solving and office politics make for the sort of things to which Hollywood would give short shrift.

Almost inconceivable in this Marvel age, Higuchi brings his baby in at under two hours — partly because it’s not awash in mythology requiring viewers to have seen some untold number of movies and series to follow. Whether you have fond memories of running across reruns on your local UHF station (as I do) or you struggle to ID your Ultraman from your Infra-Man (also me, once upon a time), Shin Ultraman is constructed as intelligent, often rousing entertainment for all. It goes without saying the effects are first-rate, as the Toho studio has this style of flick down to a science. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Tales from the Apocalypse (2023)

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Although Tales from the Apocalypse is a collection of shorts versus a proper anthology, its five stories share a factor: indifference. At least all but one look fantastic, and that odd man out serves up rust-colored desolation on purpose.

In William Hellmuth’s Gravity-esque Alone, the bunch’s best, the sole survivor of an exploded ship is marooned in a lifepod, sucked close toward a black hole by the second. As she nears certain doom, she converses with a cartographer who picks up her mayday signal. Coming to grips with possible death post-devastation also carries Damon Duncan’s Cradle, so stacking it atop Alone was not the wisest choice, even if it does have a cool robot spider.

Sporting the aforementioned layer of grime is Gabriel Kalim Mucci’s Lunatique, free of dialogue as an armored woman hunts a creature on a windy planet the color of dirt. From Susie Jones, the YA-influenced New Mars posits a future of forced marriages upon teens. Finally, Lin Sun’s Earth 2035 considers the difference between AI and humans: “Humanity,” says a doctor in a moment intended as Deep and Important, but lands as a pretentious punchline with the impact of a greeting card.

Nothing wrong with sci-fi being serious, but the contents of Tales from the Apocalypse (aka Episodes from Apocalypse, despite “apocalypse” being debatable) hold little wonder or imagination. On a purely technical level, they succeed with effects often superb. However, I can’t shake the feeling I was watching calling cards and demo reels rather than shorts where scripting merited as much attention. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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