PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 845

Cult Of The Damned 1969 Kino Lorber DVD that was originally titled Angel, Angel, Down We Go. Written and directed by Robert Thom. Around 1960 Thom wrote a play for his wife Janice Rule. It never got produced so he changed it into a screenplay and sold it to Sam Katzman who got finance from AIP. They were the producers of the Thom scripted Wild In The Streets.

It's Thom's only directing job but he'd written several films that you might have heard of: All The Fine Young Cannibals, The Subterraneans, Wild In The Streets, Bloody Mama and Death Race 2000. Most people into genre films probably have seen the last picture but hardly any of his other work. Probably good in the aggregate. I've only seen the last three and don't plan to bother with the others.

Wild In The Streets is a bit of a cult classic but it's a big ol' mess of a movie. Cult Of The Damned is an even bigger mess and it's tedious to boot. WITS had a good song, The Shape Of Things To Come, and COTD has Angel, Angel, Down We Go. It's an absolutely appalling song and later in the movie there's another song, by the same band, that's even worse.

Holly Near plays the overweight and neurotic adult daughter of a rich guy and his wife. Jennifer Jones plays the mother and Charles Aidman plays the father. The parents are an awful pair of abusers and manipulators. Jordan Christopher is the lead singer in a band that was hired to play at Holly's 18th birthday bash and coming out party. Holly runs off with Jordan and his band. They have some adventures and Jordon seduces her parents. Lou Rawls, Davey Davidson and Roddy McDowall play Jordan's band members and friends. None of them are very interesting, they aren't the sort of people I would like to hang around with. All their tedious and pretentious antics are slathered in psychedelic claptrap and crap pop songs by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

The IMDb calls it a crime drama. What are they on about? See if you can spot any crimes, other than the film being presented to the public, by watching it. A link to a fair copy on YouTube is in the title above but be warned, the movie did crap at the box office and Holly Near called it "trash". To be fair to the film the family thinks Holly had been kidnapped even though there's no indication of it. Mom wants to go to the police but dad doesn't want any publicity, he's got his own detectives on the case. That's just the sort of writing that might have made the Los Angeles Times call it "a pretentious mess" although "it can never be said to bore." I say, "Oh yes, it can!" They tried releasing it the following year under the Cult Of The Damned title in a double bill with The Vampire Lovers. The Los Angeles Times said it was "a terrible piece of trash." It's the same LA Times reviewer, Kevin Thomas, which made me think that his first viewing might still be bothering him a year later. I thought it was also possible he's mad that they tried to fool the public with a re-title of the film. It's certainly something that annoys me. With all the trash talk I still wouldn't like to see the movie tossed into the circular file. It's good to see these sort of films, if only to appreciate a well made film.

Monster Hunter 2020 Written and directed by Paul W S Anderson. Based on a Capcom video game.

Milla Jovovich plays a US Army Ranger Captain, head of UN team that's searching for a team lost in the desert. Milla's team gets overtaken by a big desert storm that forces them through a portal to a new world with giant monsters. After the team is decimated Milla teams up with Tony Jaa, a native of the new world. He'd gotten separated from his own team of monster hunters when he was thrown from their ship. Ron Perlman is the head of Tony's team, he's in the opening scene and doesn't show up again until the third act. I would have liked more Ron.

There's plenty of monster fighting and it's loud and bombastic. At times I was wishing they had dialed it back a bit but there you go, it seems there's always a new 11. After Ron turns up we get a much better idea of what goes on in the new world and why there should be a sequel. It's got a nice look to it and a wicked sense of humor.  The new world is a beautiful place, much of it was filmed in Namibia and South Africa, but it's filled with horrible giant bitey things, so, not much of a tourist destination in my mind. I enjoyed the thing and would watch it again someday. I'll put the Blu-ray on my Wishlist and keep an eye out for a nice price decrease.

Murder À La Mod 1968

 

Murder À La Mod 1968 Written and directed by Brian De Palma. It's Brian's first feature length film, he'd directed a half a dozen shorts between 1960 and 1968. That's Brian and William Finley in the photo, the movie introduces William to the world. Some might know William from Phantom Of The Paradise which Brian directed in 1974. That's the first film of Brian's I've seen and that goes for William too. I've seen a good half of Brian's work but never got to be a fan. I only have 3 or 4 on DVD, most of them aren't what I want to watch once, let alone again.

According to the Wikipedia the film played in one theater, and disappeared. It was thought to be lost but reappeared in 2011 just in time to appear on the Criterion Blu-ray of Blow Out. A better De Palma film but one I don't feel any need to revisit.

The film's synopsis on the Wikipedia is one that's been copied onto several review sites. Here it is: Karen is a naive young lady who wants to help her boyfriend Chris, who is a struggling amateur filmmaker, to raise money to divorce his wife. Meanwhile, a jolly psycho prankster named Otto is stalking the building where Chris is shooting a low-budget adult movie to make ends meet. 

Seems pretty straightforward, huh. Not so much. It's a jumble of images and sounds, sometimes jarring, not all of them moving. It's like Brian's read a book on film effects and styles and decided to use as many as possible in each scene. It's hard to describe the complexity, you can see for yourself on YouTube, the link is in the title.

I did not think it was groundbreaking or anything. It reminds me slightly of The Monkees movie Head, but in B&W. I certainly was more receptive when I saw Head as a teenager, on seeing it 30 plus years later, not really that interesting anymore. You might like it more than me, it's certainly a curious thing.

Jerry Warren Collection 4

I made my own 4th collection of Jerry Warren masterpieces, movies that weren't included in the 3 volume series that was issued by VCI. These are all films I found on YouTube for the most part. Some are chopped up foreign films and some are all shot in the US by Warren, except for the stock footage he tosses into everything. It's like his salt, add a bit of flavor, that sort of thing. I'd seen most of them in the past, might have even blogged about them. Now that I've burned them onto a disc I can put it away with the other 3 volumes and forget about them.

Face Of The Screaming Werewolf 1964 Jerry hacks two Mexican movies to death and tries to revive them for the American market by linking their scenes with the poorly written and directed scenes he'd done himself. Consistently Jerry shows that he has no talent as a filmmaker.

Lon Chaney Jr appeared as a werewolf in the 1960 Mexican horror movie La Casa del Terror, his scenes are mostly what survives Jerry clown style editing. The other movie is La Momia Azteca, a 1957 Mexican mummy movie. It was the first of a trilogy of mummy films from Cinematográfica Calderón SA. The other two are The Curse Of The Aztec Mummy and The Robert Vs The Aztec Mummy. They were shot back to back and all three were released in 1957. There's a good DVD set of all three original Mexican films with English subtitles and  decent prints. Jerry had already chopped LMA apart in 1963 and released it in the US with new footage he'd written and directed.

Not surprisingly the movie makes little sense at times. It gets pretty harshly savaged in reviews and rightly so. Jerry is one of those filmmakers that is needing a savage beating with the de-fleshed skull of Paul Naschy. A fantasy of mine.

Frankenstein Island 1981 Jerry Warren wrote and directed. It didn't do well and Jerry though he hadn't made a modern enough picture. He cut it for a TV version and added some explosions. Yeah, that will disguise what shit job you did Jerry.

Some balloonists crash land on an island at sea. The place is under control of the Frankenstein family. Granddaughter Sheila captures the group and plans to turn them into zombies of a sort. One of the group is a doctor and Sheila brainwashes him to helping her keep her 200 year old husband alive. John Carradine plays the long dead, but spiritually alive, Dr Frankenstein. He communicates through Sheila's husband and appears as a floating head in a few scenes. They use the same short shot and change the dialog from scene to scene.

Goofy dialog made me laugh but the film isn't much by way of a comedy, it's just second rate.

Invasion Of The Animal People 1959 I already did a big post about the film's different versions.

Teenage Zombies 1959 Written and directed by Jerry Warren. It was filmed in 1956 and the IMDb Trivia pages says it may have been released briefly in 1957. The title and some of the score was ripped off from Kronos.

Katherine Victor is a mad scientist who's got here very own island. She's got a deal with the local sheriff to send vagrants and hobos as subjects for her experimentation. Some teens stumble on her set up and bring her project to turn Americans into zombies to an end. It's typical of Warren's inability to write dialog and make movies. Another stinker from Jerry.

Terror Of The Blood Hunters 1962 Written and directed by Jerry Warren. One of the lot that I hadn't already seen.

A subversive writer is sent to prison on Devil's Island where he gets to paint the Commandant's daughter. She wants to help him escape and take her with him. They bring his pal from the ship that brought him to the island and trek through the jungle to freedom. Griffith Park in LA stands in for the jungle with the aid of some stock footage. Pretty ambitious a project for Jerry, it's a slight bit better than most of his films, but as usual it comes up below average.

The Incredible Petrified World 1959 Written by John W Steiner and directed by Jerry Warren. It was filmed and completed in 1957 but it took until 1959 and 1960 to get released.

John Carradine is a professor who sends 4 people into the ocean in a diving bell. It gets disconnected and disappears. The crew find themselves still alive in a subterranean cavern. They meet a shipwrecked sailor  who's been there for 14 years. A rescue mission is sent to look for the castaways and eventually they are rescued. It's a dull thing, not enough monsters or terror for my liking.

The Cycle Savages 1969

The Cycle Savages 1969 Written and directed by Bill Brame. It's the second film on the Midnite Movies DVD with Angel Unchained. Bruce Dern is a creep, he's part of a motorcycle gang of like minded garbage. People in the town are terrified of them and the cops are pretty weak ass. An artist sketches the gang at play and gets roughed up for it. That isn't enough in Bruce's tiny paranoid mind, he wants to cripple the artist's hands. That'll stop him. There's other bits of raping and looting going on and eventually some vengeance against the gang is delivered. It's a bit unpleasant and not that well made. It's not better than average for a biker movie. Neither of these are great but AU is more watchable.

Psych-Out 1968

Psych-Out 1968 Story by Betty Tusher, screenplay by E Hunter Willett and Betty Ulius, directed by Richard Rush. Dave Clark produced the film and László Kovács is the cinematographer. The 2003 MGM Midnite Movies DVD has the 82 min theatrical release of the film, there's a more recent release that has the director's original cut that clocks in at 101 mins.

Susan Strasberg is a deaf woman visiting San Francisco, she's come to find her brother. He's an artist who's dropped out, her last connection was a postcard from him saying God is in a sugar cube. Hippies, aren't they funny?

Susan meets up with Jack Nicholson and some of his friends. They befriend her and tell her they'll help her look for her brother. They take her around to their place. Susan sees a piece of her brother's art in the studio of the band's poster artist. That gives her a name, The Seeker, a name her brother is now using. Turns out someone knows he's living in a junk yard. Trouble is there's hippy hatin' scum on the streets and don't like The Seeker. There's trouble ahead with those pricks. Not that much has changed in that department since those days in the 60s. Hippies attract angry red neck scum no matter where they seem to settle.

 

They eventually find the brother but it goes pretty bad at the end. Drugs and the hippy life style are not so desirable in this film. The whole communal living thing isn't for me, especially when no one helps clean up.

I don't know if I'd need to see the longer version. You can see the short version here, though it is a good bit fuzzy, you can see the longer director's cut here, it looks very nice. Not a film I would want to return to very much. Still it was well enough made and the music by the Strawberry Alarm Clock was fun. Jack and Susan are joined by some other cast members I knew, Dean Stockwell, Bruce Dern, Ken Scott, Garry Marshall, John "Bud" Cardos, Harry Jaglom and Adam Rourke.

The Trip 1967

The Trip 1967 Two versions of the script were written by Charles B Griffith before producer director Roger Corman had Jack Nicholson write the final screenplay. Roger took LSD to see what it was like to trip. Corman spent a $100,000 to make the movie and it made 6 million for AIP.

Peter Fonda is a TV commercial director, he takes LSD, with Bruce Dern acting as his guide. He starts in Bruce's house but gets paranoid and leaves. He wonders down to the Sunset Strip, stopping at some nightclubs. He meets people who take him places. Eventually he comes down when the sun comes up.

It's sort of captures what a trip is like. Parts of the film try to recreate the audio and visual experience from the POV of the tripper but it's such a personal thing that each person is going to have a different experience based on their set, setting and size of the dose. Tripping by yourself isn't always the best idea, the experience lasts several hours, and varies in intensity, that having an experienced person along is helpful.

It's colorful and noisy, there's plenty of places to see and a fairly entertaining cast with Dennis Hopper, Susan Strasberg, Salli Sachse, Dick Miller, Peter Bogdanovich and Gram Parsons. It's not got much story, it's more an experience. I got the 2003 release, it's on a Midnite Movie DVD from MGM, paired with Psych-Out. There's a fairly interesting commentary by Roger Corman. Not one I'm going to rush back to see again to soon but glad to have seen it.

Friday Night Movies 812

Dr Frankenstein On Campus 1969 Robin Ward plays Frankenstein, some might remember him as the boring guy from Starlost. Here he's the boring guy on campus. He's been tossed out of one University for experimenting and he's moved to Canada to get thrown out of another university. This time he's been sort of framed by the local radicals, he was passed a joint just as someone took a picture, then it got published. The others at the swinging party were reprimanded but allowed to stay at the school. Frankenstein then gets his revenge by killing some of the radicals that set him up. It's pretty piss poor and not worth watching.

Wrestling Women Vs The Killer Robot 1969 A mad scientist has invented a robot that he can program to kill. He's kidnapping scientists help in his evil project. The police join up with a couple of wrestling women to catch him. Not very entertaining. The slowness of the story isn't enhanced by the repetitive scenes of women wrestling. Not the best of this sort of thing, below average.

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things 1971 Two criminals on the run are hiding out in Miami. Stanley is really immature and a problem, Paul is disguised as his aunt, he tries to keep Stanley from fucking up. It leads Paul to killing people who find out too much about them. He should have just killed Stanley, it would have saved him a lot of aggravation. Well below average, not one I'd probably see again.

Trashy Teen Double Feature

 

The Alley Tramp 1968 Director Armand Parys is a pseudonym for Herschell Gordon Lewis. Jean Michel wrote the story and Paul Gordone wrote the screenplay. It's Herschell's 24th film, he hasn't improved much since he started, and he won't over the next 14 films.

The story is about a 16 year old girl who can't dance. Julia Ames plays Marie under the name Anette Courset. She's not a very good actress but she's only appeared in 3 films. The other 2 are both HGL films, Blast-Off Girls and Just For The Hell Of It. There's a copy of B-OG on Daily Motion in two parts, one & two.

Marie gets all horny from seeing her parents having sex. Next thing you know she's banging her third cousin and things go downhill from there.

It's not much by way of original, the script is only so-so and the acting is fair to poor. There's a good bit of nudity, including a brief flash of some bush, but the sex is pretty tame. There's not much by way of story, I laughed at the inappropriate moments and got to the end. It's below average but it doesn't care. It's meant to put butts into seats, lured by the bare titties.

Over 18...And Ready 1969 Screenplay by Don Lambert and directed by Lloyd Allen. Basic story of a young woman who arrives in Hollywood looking to be a star, the twist is she wants to star in a sleaze film. She hooks up with a sleazy producers. Her first role is in a nudie movie, her first scene is one where she gets whipped. The guy directing film is even worse than the guy directing this film. Soon she's having all sorts of sexy fun off screen. There's more nudity than acting ability here, the story is weak and the script doesn't help anyone. I wouldn't rush to see this one again soon.

Sweden: Heaven And Hell 1968

Sweden: Heaven And Hell 1968 An Italian pseudo-documentary of the Mondo kind written and directed by Luigi Scattini. It's all fake news here, or at least much of it's made up bullshit and staged scenes. Some of the people filmed in the streets are bound to be real persons. You can find out for yourself, there's a link in the title above to a decent copy of the movie on YouTube.

It's sort of amusing, but not for any intentional jokes. It's a constant dig against Sweden's open society, from a guy who comes from the supposedly highly religious country that spawned that human sperm bag Berlusconi. There's a fair bit of nudity in the film, clusters of young naked Swedish ladies running about in the snow and by the sea.

One odd thing that popped up was a segment of Piero Umiliani's international hit Mah-na Mah-na. Turned out he supplied the music for the film and this is the first place it appeared. It would later appear on The Muppets, The Benny Hill Show and The Red Skelton Show.

Red Peony Gambler 2 Gambler's Obligation 1968

Red Peony Gambler 2 Gambler's Obligation came out in 1968 and it's known as Hibotan bakuto: Isshuku ippan in Japan. Norifumi Suzuki directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Tatsuo Nogami.

Sumiko Fuji returns as Red Peony Oryu, a gambler trying to resurrect her fallen house. She travels about and stays with people until the local baddies are all dead. Kind of like Zatoichi but with less blindness. Tomisaburô Wakayama returns as the comedy relief machine but he's not really that integral to the story.

This time it's another gang take over that needs some attention. Red Peony joins forces with another loner to wipe out the cruel crime boss. There's plenty of gambling and a good bit of action. Hardly anyone is getting out of this one unscathed. Good solid movie, well worth a look.