PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Das Phantom Von Soho 1964

Das Phantom Von Soho 1964 Based on the novel by Bryan Edgar Wallace, screenplay by Ladislaw Fodor, directed by Franz Josef Gottlieb. A German production with location shooting in London. In the US it was titled The Phantom Of Soho and a dubbed version has been in the public domain for a while. It turns up on those cheap DVDs from places like Mill Creek and Alpha Video.

A fairly decent version of the German version has turned up on YouTube. It's worth a gander for the Krimi fan or those who've seen the US version and liked it.

Someone is killing business men who visit the strip clubs of Soho. The police are having a heard time tracking down the killer. There's plenty of suspects but clues are few and far between. The chief of police gets a bit of an assist from his friend, a lady who writes mysteries.

A good solid crime story with a good cast. I liked the locations and sets. An entertaining film that's still so after 3 views. I looked at the first several minutes of the English dubbed version and the dialog is very similar to the English on the subtitles.

The Mummy And The Curse Of The Jackals 1969

The Mummy And The Curse Of The Jackals 1969 Written by William Edwards and directed by Oliver Drake.

I picked up a bootleg DVD second hand because I notice that the movie had John Carradine in it. He doesn't show up until the last quarter of the 80 min movie and he's only in it for 5 mins or so. Still, that might be the best thing about the movie. For the most part it's so poor in every way I couldn't bring myself to give it more than a 1 on the IMDb.

The story has Anthony Eisley come under the curse of the mummy of an Egyptian Princess called Akana. He's got her sarcophagus, and a second sarcophagus with another mummy in it, in his rundown house in Las Vegas.

Princess Akana comes alive after Anthony spends the night with her mummy. The overnight stay enables a curse that turns him into a werejackal under her power. Agitated, Anthony runs out of the house and kills a couple of Las Vegas cops. The Princess gets her orders from the god Isis. The ambitious god wants to see a return to power but the script fails her and her plans dissolve with the Princess at the end of the movie.

The mummy also comes alive and it's the fattest mummy I've seen in a long while. There's several scenes of the fat mummy and the werejackal running about downtown Las Vegas. The fat mummy winds up in a nightclub where he kills two dancers.

I can't stress how poor it is. You can see for yourself, there's a copy of the movie on YouTube, link in the title above.

The Wild Ride 1960

The Wild Ride 1960 Screenplay by Ann Porter and Marion Rothman, directed by Harvey Berman. The third of the films on the Biker Triple Feature DVD set.

Jack Nicholson plays the spoiled son of a well off family.  He's such an asshole and a danger to society. He plays chicken with a cop, the cop crashes and winds up in the hospital. No dash cams back in the day and the cop never regains conciseness before dying. The cops know it was Jack but they can't prove it. He spends the movie acting like an asshole and pushing his weight around. After he kidnaps his best friend's girlfriend and causes the death of his friend, Jack turns himself in to the police. It's a big bag of heavy handed melodrama that isn't that interesting. I'd give it a miss the next time.

The Rebel Rousers 1970

 

The Rebel Rousers 1970 Written by Michael Kars, Abe Polsky and Martin B Cohen, directed by Martin B Cohen. It's was Martin's only directing job. He wrote one more film, Humanoids From The Deep, and produced handful more. The Rebel Rousers was filmed in 1967 but not released until 1970. The Rebel Rousers is part of the Biker Triple Feature DVD set.

Cameron Mitchell comes to a small coastal town looking for his girlfriend, she ran away because she's carrying his child. On the street Cameron runs into Bruce Dern, a friend he hadn't seen in some time. They say hello and Cameron moves along to find his girlfriend. He finds her and it turns out that she's played by Diane Ladd. They visit a while and go for a drive.

Bruce is part of a motorcycle gang that includes Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nicholson. Bruce is the voice of reason in a gang that is happy to loot, rape and pillage. Bruce isn't there when the gang decides to bother Cameron and Diane while they are parked. Things turn violent and even Bruce's intervention doesn't stop Cameron from getting a mighty beat down.

Things get worse as the bikers get more and more out of hand. Eventually the locals rise up, shoot Jack, and drive the bikers off the beach. Not enough bikers died that afternoon. They really were dicks. Not the kind of people I would like to hang around.

It's alright, nothing stands out as special, other than the interesting cast. I doubt I'll watch it again but I'll keep the DVD anyway.

It's A Revolution Mother 1969

It's A Revolution Mother 1969 Written by Thomas Casey and directed by Harry Kerwin. This scruffy documentary is part of a three film set called Biker Triple Feature, all three films on one disc, I got it from Amazon for 8 bucks, it's still for sale. The other two films are fictional and star Jack Nicholson. The film is called Biker Babylon on the DVD.

 

It's a Revolution Mother looks at the youth counterculture of the late sixties. There's plenty of raw footage shot live on the street and it's entertainingly narrated by some unknown guy.

The film starts with the New Jersey motorcycle club The Aliens. There's some sitting about and talking, cut with plenty of motorcycle riding. Then the setting moves to a big march on Washington and the delivery of a bunch of white coffins filled with placards worn by the marchers. The placards have names on them, names of the fallen soldiers from the Vietnam war. 

The last segment of the film moves to a more upbeat place, a sea of mud in Florida with a big 30 band rock festival. Oddly they never mention the name of the festival but there was a big one in Miami at a racetrack in December 1968. I'm betting that it's it based on some quick internet sources, especially after seeing some of the aerial shots.

It's a nice snapshot whether you agree with the sentiments. Glad to have seen it.

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.