The Screengrab : roger corman

Not Readily Available on Legally Authorized Commercial DVD Release in the Continental United States: Jack Nicholson's "Drive, He Said"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]

Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.

Like Richard Farina's 1966 Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, Larner's novel (which takes its title from a Robert Creeley poem) was published early enough in the 1960s to later seem prescient about campus unrest in the Vietnam era, and both books were turned into movies that were released in 1971, by which time the campus protest movement had peaked in the wake of Kent State. Nicholson's movie was filmed in Eugene, Oregon on and around the state university. William Tepper, who looks here like a stork-legged cross between Abbie Hoffman and the Robert De Niro of Mean Streets, made his movie debut as Hector Bloom, a star basketball player who is called out by his coach (Bruce Dern) for having an attitude problem. Hector, who could have any girl on the campus he wanted, has pulled the genius move of having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is married to a professor played by Robert Towne, who had also labored in the Corman factory as a screenwriter (The Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia) before writing a couple of movies that gave Nicholson two of his most memorable roles, The Last Detail and Chinatown. (Towne took the name of his Chinatown hero, J. J. Gittes, from Harry Gittes, a friend of Nicholson's who co-produced Drive, He Said. Though the script for this movie is credited to Larner and Nicholson, both Towne and Terrence Malick are said to have taken an uncredited crack at it.) Things turn out badly, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. It turns out that Olive's husband is an overly cerebral, phlegmatic type who knows perfectly well that Hector is balling his wife--it's not easy to miss--but wants to impress everyone with how well he's taking it; a part of him is sort of proud that the great athlete deems him worthy of cuckolding. Olive eventually pushes both of them away, telling them that they're "both big babies" who "deserve each other."

The surprising crosscurrents between the actors caught in this triangle, and also between Tepper and Dern (whose tightly focused performance as the hard-ass coach is some of the very best work he's ever done) capture what's best about Drive, He Said and suggest what Nicholson might have been able to bring to movies if he'd stuck with it as a director. Tepper himself gives an extraordinary performance as an inarticulate but deeply troubled man with the manner of a put-on artist and a romantic soul. (After Drive, He Said bombed, Tepper did some TV but disappeared from movies for a decade. In the early 1980s, he turned up in Miss Right, a comedy that reunited him with his co-star Karen Black, and he had supporting roles in the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Tom Hanks-Adrian Zmed comedy Bachelor Party, and hasn't been seen on-screen since.) Nicholson shows a free but sure hand with the cast, which also includes Michael Warren (of the TV series Hill Street Blues) and, in smaller roles, David Ogden Stiers (lean and hirsute and recognizable only by his voice, even though he's attempting a cracker accent), Cindy Williams, and June Fairchild, beloved to many for her role as the woman who snorts Ajax in the Cheech and Chong movie Up in Smoke.

For all that's brilliant (or at least brilliantly promising) about Drive, He Said, it's easy to see why it tanked in 1971. Nicholson doesn't seem to have any idea how to shape the material into a cohesive hold, so it feels like a succession of sequences rather than a movie, and the audience is left to get its bearings on its own. Probably a lot of people sat through as much of it as they could stand without ever getting them. There's also the subplot involving Michael Margotta as Gabriel, Hector's roommate, whose character must have struck some people as embarrassingly dated even in 1971. Nicholson fails to establish any basis for a relationship or even any kind of emotional bond between Hector and Gabriel, but what does come through is that, while Hector resists bending to the demands of The Establishment, Gabriel can't even consider it, and the pressure is driving him crazy, at a time when it was fashionable to view going crazy as a noble quest. Gabriel never has a quiet moment in the movie; he's always attacking the M.P.s during his draft induction physical, taking a sword to a TV set after screaming, "They staged the moon landing in Phoenix, Arizona!", throwing commodes out of second story windows, etc. At the climax, he tries to rape Olive, during an assault on her house (and body) that he (maybe with a little prodding from the director) stages as if it were a night of bad experimental theater, and after that doesn't work out, he walks naked into the campus biology lab and sets free the various critters caged there. It must be said, though, that even here Nicholson keeps a tight enough rein on Margotta's performance that only intermittently does this stuff play as foolishly as it sounds. (And in the scene in the lab, there is one glorious caught shot of one of the freed mice appearing to try to make out with one of the frogs, which spurns its advances and hops away.)

Nicholson didn't direct another movie until 1978's barnyard comedy Goin' South, in which he also starred, and that wasn't until after he'd added The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor) to his resume. After he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Nicholson began telling interviewers that his ultimate dream was to take home one more Academy Award, for Best Director. He pretty much stopped saying that after his third and, to date, last film as director, The Two Jakes, slithered out from under a rock in 1990. An attempted sequel to Chinatown from a fresh Robert Towne script that Towne had tried and failed to make himself five years earlier, it was the kind of movie that absolutely had to have propulsion and a clear plot line, and once again, Nicholson didn't know how to put it together so that the sum would amount to more than a pile of scenes strung together. Maybe it's not that surprising that, with so little practice sitting in the director's chair, Nicholson had gotten no better at what he had been hopeless at twenty years earlier, but he had also lost his touch at guiding his fellow actors: he couldn't even get a decent performance out of himself.

You'd have to be crazy to suggest that Nicholson took the wrong road after savoring that explosion of applause for his performance in Easy Rider. Chances are that Drive, He Said (which played at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival) wouldn't even have gotten as much attention as it did if its director hadn't been a movie star, and if Nicholson hadn't worked as hard as he did at his acting career in the early 1970s, he might not have stayed a movie star for long. (Peter Fonda, the real star of Easy Rider, sure didn't.) As it is, he became the biggest, most durable star of his generation. But he did have something special when he directed Drive, He Said, and it's a shame that, when he reached for it again, it had dissipated.

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

FARGO (1996)

Any number of Coen Brothers movies revolve around bumbling get-rich-quick schemes, many of them involving kidnapping, but few characters in film history have gotten in as far over their heads as car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). Jerry’s not looking to make a big score just for the sake of accumulating wealth; as the movie begins, he’s already in deep financial doodoo, although we never find out the exact nature of his troubles. To his credit, one of his schemes is not so boneheaded: a property investment proposal he brings to his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson. In fact, the plan is so good Wade decides to take on the investment himself rather than lending the necessary money to Jerry – though he does offer a nominal finder’s fee. In Jerry’s mind, this betrayal may make his alternate plan more palatable – arranging for the kidnapping of his wife and bilking Wade out of the ransom money. This plan goes much, much worse, however, and before it’s over Wade and his daughter are dead, Jerry is led away in handcuffs and Steve Buscemi is fed into a wood chipper. All that for a little bit of money. (SVD)

THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Stephen Frears’ tight little modern noir is immeasurably aided by strong efforts at every level: the source novel is one of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson’s best, the screenplay is provided by Donald Westlake, another crime novel pro, and of course, the cast is dynamite, from the leads to bit parts to Pat Hingle’s chilling mob boss, Bobo Justus. But one of the least-noticed thematic bits of brilliance is how it treats the different layers of confidence games, and how getting rich quick through the art of the con means very different things to different people. John Cusack’s Roy Dillon is strictly a short-con operator: pulling little hustles, tricks and sleight-of-hand jobs that keep him in nice suits and decent hotels as long as he keeps moving. His mother, the determined Lilly, is much more the get-rich-quick type, handling her mobster employer’s money as he manipulates the outcome of horse races through cleverly spread-out bets. And the seductive Myra Langtry is a long con type – although she’s reduced to hustling, her specialty is big-money cons that take months or years to pay off, but when they do, they pay off in the millions. It’s a fascinating look at the economics and expectations of the day-to-day life of the habitual criminal. (LP)

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)

There’s no heist in David Mamet’s House of Games, but there are more cons than one film should be able to support. That Mamet’s debut delivers its endless barrage of tricks and ruses with exhilarating proficiency is a tribute to the writer/director, whose interest in hard men living hard lives and pulling off very hard endeavors is encapsulated by this tale of a psychologist (Lindsay Crouse) lured by a master crook (Joe Mantegna) into a web of lies. As with most of Mamet’s work, women – in this case, Crouse’s protagonist, the lone female in a story full of men – don’t fare very well. Yet there’s something fascinating about the way the writer/director stages Crouse and Mantegna’s duel as a sort of primal battle of the sexes, the latter’s attempts to swindle the former coming off as a conflict of both gender and education (she the intellectual, he the graduate of the school of hard knocks). House of Game’s psychological warfare may not always be pleasant, but the head-games played by Mamet remain magnetic, so skillfully constructed and executed that one relishes the opportunity to be duped. (NS)

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)

This Roger Corman sci-fi flick stars Ray Milland as Dr. Xavier, whose experiments give him the special X-ray vision that he first uses to turn a suburban dance party into his own personal stag show, only to find himself reduced to plying his trade at a carny operated by Don Rickles. Finally, though, Xavier makes the trek to Vegas to use his creepy peepers to clean up at the tables, using perhaps the best method of outsmarting Sin City that the movies have ever come up with, since it doesn't require knowledge of advanced math or buying a suit for Dustin Hoffman. We eagerly await the day when some gifted film student has the brainstorm of doing, as his thesis project, a mash-up of this movie and Scorsese's Casino, so that the haunted Xavier can flee from Don Rickles only to find himself running into Don Rickles. How could Hell be any worse? (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Unwatchable #49: “Laserblast”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Unwatchable Week rolls on with one of our periodic substitutions. The actual #49 movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list I’ve been working from all along is the 1989 Bo Derek sex comedy Ghosts Can’t Do It. Oh, how I wish I could find this movie, but there doesn’t appear to be any trace of its existence left on earth besides a handful of reviews and a four-second YouTube clip of Derek in a wet t-shirt. This is a tragedy that any self-respecting film preservationists should devote all the resources at their disposal toward rectifying. After all, we’re talking about a movie that swept the Razzies, taking home Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Derek) and Worst Director (John Derek). I demand a fully restored Criterion Collection edition by year’s end, but in the meantime, we have to find a replacement for today’s Unwatchable installment. As is my policy, I have consulted the current version of the IMDb Bottom 100 list and selected the first entry that does not also appear on my version of the list.

That turned out to be Laserblast, an early effort from producer Charles Band, who was essentially the Roger Corman of the VHS era. Glancing over his filmography, I see that Band has spent much more of his career exploring our primal fear of dolls and puppets than I would have guessed, although these days he’s turned his attention to the largely untapped “scary gingerbread men” genre. In 1978, however, aliens were all the rage…and Band and his first-(and only-)time director Michael Rae were not about to buck the trend.

Even if, like me, you have a soft spot for cheesy ‘70s sci-fi, you’ll be hard-pressed to extract much entertainment value from Laserblast. The fun begins with a couple of Play-Doh aliens vaporizing a rather vampiric-looking fellow wielding a laser cannon. After this brief but oh-so-tantalizing burst of sci-fi action, Laserblast turns into a horny teenager movie, as young Billy Duncan (Kim Milford) wakes from a dream only to find his slutty mother is off to Acapulco again. The lonely boy tries to visit his girlfriend Kathy, but her crazy grandpa (Keenan Wynn) who thinks he’s still in World War II chases him off. Billy wanders out to the desert, where he finds the abandoned laser cannon. This completely turns his day around, as you can imagine. He starts blasting cacti and sand dunes as any of us would, little realizing the effect this alien artifact is having on him.

Exposure to the weapon turns Billy’s skin an unhealthy shade of green, and he develops some sort of seeping chest wound that calls for a cameo from Roddy McDowell as the town sawbones. I’m sure Mr. McDowell was just happy to be in a cheesy ‘70s sci-fi movie that didn’t require him to sit in a makeup chair for seven hours, but he doesn’t bring a whole lot to the party. Billy continues to mutate, much to the dismay of Kathy, the local law enforcement, an investigating government agent, and Billy’s high school tormenters (including cinematic uber-nerd Eddie Deezen in his motion picture debut).

The dramatic conclusion finds Billy hitching a ride with a hippie driving a VW bus and using his trusty laser cannon to blow up a Star Wars billboard. (Now that’s chutzpah.) His rampage is cut short when the Play-Doh aliens finally catch up and give him a taste of his own medicine. I’ll say this much for the aliens: they may be cheaply made, but at least they have personality, which is more than I can say for Billy or any other human in the movie. Otherwise, Laserblast has little to offer besides periodic explosions and a chubby girl in a bikini eating cake. I know some of you are into that sort of thing.

Previously on Unwatchable:
50. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix
53. Baby Geniuses
54. Meatballs 4

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)

In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1971)

The Italian horror director Mario Bava is associated with the atmospheric diabolism and haunted crypts of such films as Black Sunday (1960), but with this contemporary murder mystery he, too, helped to create the slasher genre. This in itself is not the kind of accomplishment that gets you a Congressional Medal of Honor, but Bava's film (which is also known under the title Bay of Blood, among many others) shows just how stylish and entertaining a body count movie can be. It also demonstrates how impossibly convoluted the plot of a gory carny ride can get. But the sick joke ending is worth all the confusion experienced on the way there.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

Movies are a collaborative art. That's worth keeping in mind even with regard to movies that don't often get mentioned in the same breath as the "A"-word, such as this Roger Corman production, a cheeky, low-budget variation on the violent-sports-as-metaphor-for-a-disintegrating-society idea that was treated with bloated solemnity in the big-budget Rollerball. Much of the cheekiness comes from the director Paul Bartel, whose other films (Eating Raoul, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) showed him to be a man with an eccentric, campy wit. They also showed that he had a tendency to concentrate more on keeping himself amused on the set than delivering a movie that could actually hold someone's attention from beginning to end. Bartel thought that Corman ruined this sci-fi satire, about a futuristic, government-sponsored auto race in which the contestants rack up points for the number of people they run over, by filling it with reshot bloody inserts to make it more violent, but Corman apparently thought that Bartel's cut was too toothlessly whimsical for its intended audience. Given the track records of both men, Corman's viewpoint must be respected, but the fact is that Bartel's goofy sense of humor helps to account for this movie's standing as one of the more enduringly enjoyable products ever to roll off the Corman assembly line. It also captures David Carradine, who plays the star racer Frankenstein, in his charismatic B-movie star prime, and Sylvester Stallone, as his thuggish, clam sauce-smeared rival, in the closest thing he ever had to a prime.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

One of the most persistent fictions about grade-Z exploitation cheapies like this deranged Phil Tucker anti-classic is that they’re exciting. Sure, they may not be artsy like some fancy-pants European auteur crap, goes the argument, but at least they give you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, if you were foolish enough to pay a buck for Robot Monster, you would find it entirely bangless. For a story that involves a sinister alien menace – well, okay, a lumbering extra in a diving helmet and an ape suit – eradicating the entire human race except for one family, the movie contains exactly zero thrills and chills. Ro-Man spends around 43 minutes blundering around the San Fernando Valley chasing after a handful of people who don’t seem all that concerned with having to rebuild the human race, and puts the lie to the notion that these movies could at least do action right. So who cares? Well, you will, sort of. Robot Monster is one of those movies that manages to rise below its incompetence, coming across as so much worse than it has any right to be, even with its fifty-dollar budget: it clearly would have been awful with ten million to spend. Like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, its appeal comes not from being good on any level, but from being so bad that you can’t believe it was actually made. Once Ro-Man starts blabbering about the existential crisis he’s having for no particular reason after having killed three billion people, asking at what point on the graph must and cannot meet, you just shrug and let yourself go along for the ride. You sure as hell aren’t in the presence of greatness, but you’re in the presence of a sort of transcendent badness, and, well, that’s something.

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho might seem to be an odd fit for a list like this, what with its being an acknowledged classic by a major Hollywood director. Obviously, it's very different from the run of exploitation films. Except that it's conceived as a choice specimen of the form, right down to its toes. Hitchcock was just coming off the lavish production North by Northwest, and the idea of doing a quick, down-and-dirty low budget movie must have appealed to him on a number of levels. But he had also been reading Variety and examining the box office returns of the new independent thriller producers such as William Castle and Roger Corman, and some perverse streak of vanity in him might have compelled him to show that, even though he'd become rich and world famous, he could still grab an audience by the short hairs as well as any punk with a Bolex. After he began to explore the idea of adapting Robert Bloch's novel about a killer based on Ed Gein, his studio, Paramount, helped point him in the right direction by refusing to make the movie because it judged the material to be "repulsive." So Hitchcock funded it through his own company and made it on the Universal lot using the regular crew from his TV series. Hitchcock had also used his TV show to develop a public image as a poker-faced ghoulish comedian, and when the movie was ready for market, he extended that role into a performance as a Castle-like showman, which enabled him to signal to his audience what kind of movie to expect while mostly avoiding spelling out plot points that would have killed the movie's surprises. The movie itself features details, such as the opening scene with Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging around their motel room in their underwear, that for audiences marked it as part of the exploitation genre, which served the dual purpose of making it seem more "modern" that Hitchcock's lavish, color, big-studio implausibilities and making viewers feel that they knew where they were, the better for Hitchcock to pull the rug out from under them. For Hitchcock, making his version of a cutthroat horror film on the (relative) cheap must have been a kind of intellectual experiment, like making a movie within the confines of a lifeboat or filming Rope in a series of continuous ten-minute shots. Hitchcock would later toy with the idea of making a movie in the streets with hand-held cameras, in imitation of the French New Wave, but instead, for the rest of his career he kept to his big-studio, big-budget methods, with mostly diminishing returns.

SEE! the psychedelic frenzy of Part One! FEEL! the erotic madness of Part Two! TOUCH! the tantalizing terror of Part Three! TASTE! the demonic broth of Part Four! SMELL! the far-out funk of Part Five!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)

Oh, sure, Pink Flamingos has the shit-eating and the egg lady and Hairspray’s the big fat crossover hit, but to my way of thinking, Female Trouble is probably the masterpiece of John Waters’ cinematic career, an epic faux biopic spanning the life of Divine’s iconic Dawn Davenport from adolescence to the electric chair by way of High School Confidential, Butterfield 8 and the weirdest episode of Batman ever. Shock value has always been Waters’ aesthetic and if, say, you were to attend an all-night marathon of his early films tripping your balls off on LSD (like, uh...this friend of mine did once), your jaw would remain in constant droppage at the cavalcade of perversion, blasphemy and scrub-your-brain imagery on relentless display, from Flamingos’ notorious “singing asshole” to Desperate Living’s hung leather goons “digging for gold” in aged Edith Massey’s queenly honeypot. But Waters’ brand of exploitation is so funny and cheerful that, in the end, his off-putting worlds take on a cozy familiarity and you feel nothing but affection for his crackpot characters and the actors who play them, especially Massey (we miss you Edie!)...and never more so than in Female Trouble, which features an endless stream of quotable lines, memorable moments and a brilliant comedic performance by Divine who, as Dawn, not only does flips on a trampoline and trashes Christmas morning like a hell-spawn tornado ("I told you cha cha heels!"), but also gets s/himself pregnant, gives birth and bites through the umbilical cord. Top that, Streep!

MANSON (1972)

This true-crime film, the movie equivalent of one of those instant paperback accounts of tabloid horrors that have been largely displaced by the Internet and reality TV, has the special, weird distinction of being perhaps the only old-Times Square favorite to be nominated for an Academy Award. (It lost out in the Best Documentary Feature category to Marjoe, religious-con-man-turned-Earthquake-cast-member Marjoe Gortner's self-expose, which was almost as sleazy but a lot more self-aware.) Co-directed by Robert Hendrickson, who never made another film, and Laurence Merrick, whose previous credits included The Black Angels and a gay-porn vampire movie alternately called Dracula and the Boys and Does Dracula Really Suck?, it employs a mix of interviews, news footage, home movies and "recreations", with plenty of emphasis on the freaky hippie-orgy scene it imagines as having gone down at the Spahn Ranch. The movie is less concerned with explaining what happened or why than in infecting the viewer with a sense of unease, based on the idea that it all might not be over; it was, after all, made at a time when plenty of Charlie's followers were still living in society and not yet arthritic. The soundtrack, which is made up of dreamy-sounding '60s trance-rock, some of it taken from the Family's own recordings and some of it composed especially for the soundtrack by a couple of Manson's former associates, adds considerably to the overall creepiness. So did the news, in 1977, that Lawrence Merrick had been murdered by an unbalanced stalker, a development that the film's publicists were not shy about hinting at having possibly been delayed "retribution" from the Family.

HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)

This biker flick, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Rourke, is about as good as the wheeler genre got. It's certainly better than The Wild Angels, the Roger Corman movie that kick-started the genre and, um, Easy Rider, the counterculture statement that grew out of it. As in Easy Rider, Nicholson plays the audience representative, a fed-up working stiff who impulsively throws in his lot with the biker gang, but here we get to enjoy him for the length of the whole picture. Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by Richard Rush, who would later become best known for the cult film The Stunt Man starring Peter O'Toole -- but the more important reference point here may be that he'd already worked with Nicholson on the West-Coast-hippie-scene movie Pysch-Out. (The list of future Hollywood luminaries who worked on the movie also includes the stuntman Hal Needham and the late, great Hungarian-born cinematographer László Kovács, back when he was billing himself as "Leslie Kovac".) The movie also boasts a wordless appearance by Sonny Barger, the president of the Oakland, California chapter of the Angels, who is also credited as "technical advisor". The movie was made during a brief window when the Angels were willing to work with people who professed to be interested in telling their "story", before they withdrew after becoming rankled about being exploited by sundry show-business types, such as Roger Corman, who they felt screwed them over on The Wild Angels. Add it to Corman's list of accomplishments that he left the members of a self-styled outlaw motorcycle gang with a bad taste in their mouths.

THE INTRUDER (1962)

Roger Corman directed this tabloid melodrama about racist rabble-rousing, from Charles Beaumont's adaptation of his own novel. William Shatner plays a leather-lunged agitator from "the Patrick Henry Society" who arrives in a Southern town torn apart by school desegregation and hits the ground running, making hateful speeches and stirring up trouble. Corman has been known to say that this is the one movie he made in his exploitation-movie prime that he lost money on, always with the implication that he got artistically ambitious and made something too good for his target audience. On the contrary, opines Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express: the film failed in its initial release simply because "not many distributors in [Corman's] distribution network wanted to play a film that used the word 'nigger' every few seconds." Corman wound up selling the movie to a rival exploitation master, Mike Ripps, who made a bundle on it by linking it up on a double bill with another Southern melodrama, Poor White Trash, and devising a two-headed marketing campaign, selling the movie to Northern black audiences under the title Shame and to Southern audiences under the name I Hate Your Guts. Of course, it was its star's later promotion to Starfleet Captain that helped Shame to achieve belated, self-contained lift-off. The movie and Shatner's character lack depth -- it's just a picture of a hateful blowhard, with no psychological layers -- but Shatner's youthful brio gives the picture energy, and after he turned into William! Shatner!, grindhouse audiences loved to come out to screenings of the movie so they could see James T. Kirk toss around the "N"-word.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

This man-eating plant movie, which Roger Corman directed from a script by Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote A Bucket of Blood, The Wild Angels, and Death Race 2000), is kind of awe-inspiring as some kind of ultimate example of just what Corman and Griffith were prepared to throw into the pot to keep one of their stews cooking. (Accoring to Griffith, Corman instructed him to concoct a script as soon as the sets became available, and that he immediately went to work spitballing ideas at Corman, who rejected several proposals before Griffith came up with the man-eating plant idea, by which time, Griffith recalled, "We were both pretty drunk.") Largely shot in two days -- the amount of time Corman had to use the sets, which were left over from another, completed production, before they were torn down -- at a cost of about $30,000 and with a running time of just seventy minutes, Little Shop's performances range from Corman regulars such as Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller, doing their character-guy shtick, to the Borsht Belt delivery of Mel Welles as the flower shop owner Mushnik to Jack Nicholson's unrestrained bit as a masochistic dental patient. The movie's sheer freakishness kept it alive on TV and the drive-in circuit until Nicholson became a star, an unexpected development that instantly turned it into an unlikely classic. It would, of course, go on to be adapted into a 1982 Off-Broadway musical that was in turn adapted into a big movie musical in 1986. None of which did Corman any good, because he had such sad hopes for the movie's commercial prospects that he never bothered to copyright it, allowing it to slip into public domain.

Warning! No one will be admitted after Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953)

By high school, I’d seen plenty of artsy foreign films and indies (not to mention a decade's worth of Saturday morning creature double features on UHF), but I’m pretty sure Glen or Glenda? was the first real exploitation flick I ever saw (at least on the big screen), followed by a half dozen more during a day-long marathon at the late-lamented Off The Wall Cinema in Central Square, Cambridge. Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s impassioned fauxcumentary -- about a man (Wood himself) who can work better, think better, even play better, and be more of a credit to his community and his government, in satin undies, a dress and a sweater of finest angora -- was unlike anything I’d ever seen, less a work of art than a Rorschach snapshot of a fringe perspective far beyond mainstream standards of taste, commerciality and talent (in...uh...the traditional sense). Before long, I knew everything about Ed Wood, Jr. and his merry band of misfits, but few cinematic experiences in my life, before or since, have been so bizarrely disorienting as my baffled first encounter with the spectacle of stampeding buffalo superimposed over Bela Lugosi’s impassioned command to “PULL THE STRING!” Wood may have only been exploiting himself (and, I suppose, Lugosi), but respectable Hollywood movies are rarely this fascinating, sincere or unique.

THE TRIP (1967)

Roger Corman was never slow to jump on a trend, so it’s no surprise that he was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the 1960s. Ever the consummate professional, Corman sampled the drug while camping at Big Sur and by his own account, had a mighty fine time doing so. Nevertheless, in the course of his diligent research he had come across some mentions of what the hippies termed “bad trips,” and felt compelled to present a more balanced picture of the hallucinogen’s effects than his own experience had provided. Peter Fonda stars as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. The man is not possessed of a soothing bedside manner, to say the least. All seems to be going well for Groves at first; he stares at his hands and entertains deep thoughts about the significance of the phrase “living room,” and experiences vivid hallucinations in which he runs around the sets from Corman’s old Poe movies. (Even while experimenting, it seems, Corman never took his eye off the bottom line.) Groves’ trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he’s killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. He proves to be an even worse judge of character than we’d previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. He also has a proto-Robert Downey Jr. moment when he wanders into a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches TV with a little girl until he is chased away. None of this strikes me as a ringing endorsement of the drug, but apparently it was still too ambiguous for distributor AIP, which added a “shattered mirror” effect to the film’s final shot of Fonda, against Corman’s wishes.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven’s later successes made him a genre icon, but it’s the director’s early, bare-bones efforts that delivered his canon’s most inspired chills. That’s certainly true of his skuzzy, deranged calling card The Last House on the Left, which commingled camp, dirt-under-fingernails brutality and one stunner of a twist. Spitting in the face of the peace-and-love generation’s idealism about humanity’s goodness (and rife with hoary urban panic), Craven’s debut mimics Bergman’s The Virgin Spring save for that film’s happy ending, its initially goofy amateurishness – full of ham-fisted cross-cutting, silly songs, and a group of fiends who seem better fit for a sitcom – soon giving way to stark, vicious brutality. After two girls are slaughtered for trying to procure some pot, their murderers coincidentally show up at the house of one of the victims’ parents, who quickly deduce who the strangers are and what they’ve done, and decide to do something very, very violent about it. Cheap, graceless and often shocking, Craven’s film is in many ways quite inept, but it’s the memorable carnage that’s truly, intentionally awful.

IT'S ALIVE (1974)

Ever want to have a baby? If so, make sure to avoid Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, which trumps Rosemary’s Baby as the ‘70s horror gem most likely to turn couples permanently sour on the notion of procreation. Though the director’s first mainstream success, few scary movies have been as underrated as Cohen’s masterpiece, an undeserved fate one can only assume has something to do with the corniness of its creature’s rubbery appearance and two sequels that did little to enhance its reputation. With a no-frills, slightly surrealistic approach that heightens his tale’s emotional immediacy, Cohen blisteringly exploits the myriad anxieties that accompany the impending birth of a child, which in this case proves to be a mutant monster begat by a middle class couple. A physical expression of its parents' neuroses (as well as ecological ruin), the creature’s rampage is stoked for typical genre scares, but Cohen doggedly keeps the focus first and foremost on the inner conflict of the creature’s father (John P. Ryan), torn between an instinct to care for, and a burning desire to kill, his unholy progeny.

MS. 45 (1981)

Few exploitation cinema auteurs are as skilled as Abel Ferrara, and few exploitation films are as grimly proficient as Ms. 45, the director’s nasty, nimble tale of a female avenger taking her fury out on NYC’s chauvinistic male population. Ferrara’s down-and-dirty aesthetic lends some high-voltage seediness to his story about a mute seamstress (Zoë Lund) who’s raped by two different men in one afternoon and responds by going Charles Bronson on any guy unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her feminist fury unleashed, Thana becomes a simultaneously sexy and scary angel of death, singlehandedly embarking on a campaign of terror that ultimately leads to a mesmerizing finale in which she carries out her bloody work in a nun’s costume. Far from merely an exploitation hack, Ferrara arranges his frame with a master’s eye, conveying his story’s central gender conflict in a raft of expertly orchestrated compositions, all while addressing his own Catholic hang-ups and – as implied by his cameo as her maiden, masked attacker – taking a decidedly ambiguous stance towards his anti-heroine’s rampage.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...insurance policies are available in the lobby!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Marx Brothers

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In a provocative piece in the Guardian, Danny Leigh uses the ongoing "Punk 'n Pie" program at BAM to ask, where are the great punk movies? At BAM, as in many a retrospective or critical study, punk movies are movies that deal with punk music as a subject, whether as performance movies or biopics or documentaries or anthropological field trips, or movies that are populated by celebrities and hangers-on from the "scene", such as the now-forgotten Downtown detritus cranked out by '80s filmmakers such as Beth B. and Scott B. and the young Susan Seidelman. Leigh writes that "quite apart from the questionable merits of the films concerned, I've always thought there was something grimly pedestrian about the way such a firecracker cultural moment should be represented by something so drab as a canon at all. And yet wheeled out every so often for an audience of ebbing nostalgiacs are the same old dusty reels, those already mentioned joined by or interchanged with the grim Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, cosy Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, and/or the various filmic portraits of the Clash, principally the near-unwatchable curate's egg Rude Boy and the Joe Strummer tribute The Future Is Unwritten."

Mind you, it was ever thus with rock music, which in its first flush of exploitable excitement was packaged in a shelf's load of movies that collected performances ranging from the leading acts of the time, bound together with the flimsiest of connective tissue. To see what this kind of movie might look like if it were good--which is to say, if it were made by people who lacked contempt for the music and its audience--the world would have to wait for 1978's American Hot Wax, made at a time when its biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, were, in rock 'n' roll terms, practically senile. (In fact, one of the best ways to tell these movies apart from those made by the greatest punk bands is that the punks, coming along after the official invention of pop culture, tended to get involved with projects that were self-consciously, conceptually screwy. Not content to make a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, the Ramones agreed to make what was supposed to be a cheeky put-on of a cheesy high school musical for producer Roger Corman, though independent taste tests found it hard to tell it apart from the real, semi-spoofy thing. The idea behind Rude Boy, featuring the more politically minded the Clash, seems to have been to let the guys the fans wanted to see play second fiddle to uncharismatic roadie Ray Gange, the designated stand-in for all the little people out there to whom the band's music means so much. As the hilarious but seemingly well-intended Wikipedia entry for Gange notes, "In his one and only well-known film appearance, Gange displayed a variety of expressions, although some have pointed out that they all look somewhat similar to the one at the start of the film which shows him waking up and looking out the window.")

There are some great rock performance films, but it's hard not to feel a special affectionate respect for those movies that somehow come across as "rock movies" to their core because they seem to embody something essential to the spirit of the music, even if the music in the movies scarcely captures its essence. Thus Walter Hill's The Warriors is a better "rock movie" than Jailhouse Rock, even if nobody in his right mind thinks that Arnold McCullers's version of "Nowhere to Run" deserves to shine the shoes of Martha and the Vandellas'. And the '50s mutli-performer rock film that holds up best today is Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, not because Tashlin was especially sympathetic to the music but because a man who'd cut his teeth putting Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis through their paces had a built-in appreciation of that which was not culturally respectable. (Truth be told, the singing cast member who seems to elicit the highest degree of respect from the director is Julie London, who was more likely to be recruited by NASA than she is to ever be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.) Leigh argues that "if a film has any aspiration at all to being 'punk' then it cannot be about a band - any more than surrealist cinema can be represented only by biopics of Dalí and Breton...Indeed, it's one of the stranger aspects of British punk films that, if it's debatable whether any ever had anything genuinely punk about them, it's certain that none ever captured the sense of punk. Not punk as a mere footnote in the history of guitar rock, but punk as a democratic shifting underfoot best expressed by the misfits in the audience." As examples of films that do catch hold of that snarling spirit, Leigh nominates the Marx Brothers circa Horse Feathers (featuring Groucho's anarchist anthem "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"), Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (which takes its title from Neil Young's tribute to Johnny Rotten, and which a not-yet-detoxed Hopper took over directing after being cast as the heroine's daughter), "the anti-corporate self-immolation of the Monkees' Head; the volatile brevity of Punch Drunk Love and the outsider portraiture of John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet." He also drops the name of Eraerhead, and there he will get no argument from me.

Punk shares affinities with the concept of "termite art" championed by the late Manny Farber, and traces of the stuff itself can be found in many of his favorites, from the ratty, volatile action films of such directors as Don Siegel and Sam Fuller to the art-conscious apocalypse of Godard's Weekend, which suggests both the splenetic fury of bands such as the Pistols and the icier, critical-intellectual stance of Gang of Four and Wire. (There are echoes of the latter approach in both Alan Clarke's Elephant and more recent films by Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes.) The Ramones recognized Todd Browning's Freaks as kindred spirits, leading the way to the pre-multiplex films of John Waters and also to Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Re-Animator, and all those midnight flicks that were born with one foot in the art house and one in the gutbucket. And of course the aforementioned Luis Bunuel anticipated punk both with the Surrealist shock effects of his earliest work and his unflinching depiction of those clinging to the bottom of society in such films as Los Olvidados. Although a movie that seems punk to its core still comes along every so often--Matthew Bright's Freeway leaps to mind--it's generally easier to think of movies that anticipate the movement than movies made since 1976 or so that reflect its ideals, probably because nothing kills the spirit quicker than deliberately straining to do it justice.

The case of Alex Cox, who probably worked as hard to create a punk cinema as any director working in the last twenty-five years or so, may be instructive. In his first feature, the 1984 Repo Man, he delivered the ultimate sick joke of Los Angeles punk, complete with a self-parodying appearance by the Circle Jerks and a tossed-off homage to Kiss Me Deadly. In Straight to Hell and Walker, he exposed the connections between punk filmmaking and the dusty fever dreams of Sergio Leone and the Sam Peckinpah of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, a director who never saw a scene of blood-soaked carnage that he didn't figure could be improved with just a few more buzzing flies. But when Cox set out to deliberately recreate the hallelujah days of British punk in Sid and Nancy, he made a soft, nostalgic, dishonestly self-pitying film with speeches about the music's importance and Gary Oldman's sweetly sleepy, harmless Sid Vicious. His closest American counterpart may be Penelope Spheeris, whose Decline of Western Civilization documentaries had a sharp, smart edge entirely missing from her attempts to take punk mainstream in such films as Suburbia (1984), a standard-issue misunderstood youth film with a Mohawk, and the highly regrettable Dudes (1987), which set some kind of record for toxic obnoxiousness just by sticking Jon Cryer and Flea in the same film frame. Part of the thrill of punk is that it tends to pop its head out when and where you least expect it. Well, not literally where you absolutely least expect it, because there's not a lot of it in Spheeris's 1994 version of The Little Rascals.

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

HAYDEN CHILDS' GUILTY PLEASURES:

ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

I'm generally bad at guilty pleasures lists because I'm not really embarrassed about my taste in pop culture, bad or good. However, some more serious-minded movie critics might mock my love of these movies. So, for your pleasure, instead of just laughing them off, here's why I like these movies. Rock & Roll High School is a Roger Corman film starring P.J. Soles as the world's biggest Ramones fan, Riff Randall. It's directed by Allan Arkush, who went on to helm such thoughtful, profound movies as Heartbeeps and Caddyshack II. Mary Woronov, the former Velvet Underground/Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancer, plays the tyrannical Principal Togar. And the Ramones play the most awesome and beloved band in the world. In the real world, they were indeed awesome, but nowhere as beloved as this movie indicates, which is what we in the business call "a crying shame." Anyway, Principal Togar has boundary issues and enjoys burning albums and generally overstepping her authority. So when the Ramones arrive in town, all hell breaks loose at her school. There's a subplot about a pretty nerdy girl getting the dorky jock guy, but it's slight enough to pass by without sticking to memory. What's important: footage of The Ramones in their prime. And then the school explodes (spoiler!).

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973)

I seem to love this movie, which is a mostly indefensible horror-Western starring Clint Eastwood. See, this town's got some bad mojo because they paid some bad dudes to kill off a crusading sheriff and then they double-crossed the bad dudes. And now, a few years later, the bad dudes are getting out of prison. Who could have foreseen this? Since when have prison terms come to an end? So, Eastwood appears out of nowhere at the beginning of the movie and immediately starts killing men and raping women because he's a real man, not some namby-pamby liberal who doesn't kill and rape. Naturally, the townsfolk decide that this guy is the guy to help them beat the bad dudes (this is also the reasoning behind the PATRIOT Act), and they go along with his increasingly insane demands because... uh, I don't know. One guy balks and Eastwood kills him, too, so I guess they're scared or something. Eastwood's character is never named, and the end of the movie suggests that he is either a supernatural entity or a semi-famous celebrity with a high opinion of himself. The supernatural angle ought to be some comfort to the women he raped in town, because ghost-rapes don't count. Or so says Camille Paglia. In the swinging spirit of bad '70s movies, both of the women are really into him after he, y'know, violates them anyway. Progressive! So, yeah, this movie is indefensible. And pretty dumb. And yet I watch some of it every single time I catch it playing on TV, which is pretty much every third night. Does this make me a bad person? My religion of choice says yes. Another note: the Wikipedia page for the film includes a picture of Eastwood on his horse with the helpful subtitle, "The stranger on the white horse is symbolic." Thanks, Wikipedia! You're the best.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)

Li'l Jimmy Stewart is a golden-hearted guy with a heart of gold. And I don't know if I mentioned it, but he's a guy. This movie takes place in the 1930s, and only white guys like Li'l Jimmy could be Senators in the 1930s. And most were! At least, those that didn't live in Hoovervilles. The upper crust, if you know what I mean. Our humble director Frank Capra believes the best of the common upper-crust man, or at least, he knows that people will pay good money to hear that they're better than those fat cats in Washington. So Li'l Jimmy (known as Mr. Smith in this movie) goes to Washington as a Senator. But those bad fat cats are up to something nefarious. Something to do with earmarks or bridges to unknown destinations or some fat-cat stuff like that. But they didn't count on Mr. Smith and his golden-hearted maverick ways! Although we don't know what party (Republican!) Mr. Smith is in (Republican!), he bucks the fat cats in a crazy, awe-inspiring filibuster. Yes, a filibuster! The parliamentary procedure whereby a legislator talks for an infinite number of hours about anything that strikes them. It's crazy and awe-inspiring, I say! And much better in montage than real time. Anyway, blah blah maverick blah. After 45 straight days of talking (while the awestruck galleries fill up with spectators, because what person in their right mind could resist an extremely privileged white guy talking about whatever comes to mind for hours upon hours? I get chills just thinking about it), Li'l Jimmy is turning into a broken shell of a man. But then! The indulgent Vice-President presiding over the Senate (or is he the Senate Majority Leader? I don't know. Or care.) smiles at him. And IT'S ON! Suddenly Boy Scout-proxies are trumpeting the news all over his state! And in the face of his waning blather, all the bad-guy fat-cats admit that their earmarks are no match for his mavericky ways and then they all cheer and elect Sarah Palin to be President. WOW! Someone give this movie an award!

Shoot, I forgot to say what I like about all this hokum. But I think the clip says it better than I could.

HOOPER (1978)

In the coveted Oscar category of Burt Reynolds Movies Involving Rocket Cars, there's little that can stand up to Hooper. Directed by former stuntman Hal Needham and starring Reynolds, Sally Field, Jan-Michael Vincent, Brian Keith, and Robert Klein, it's an attempt to recapture the successful hicksploitation (thanks for the term, Scott!) of the previous year's Smokey And The Bandit. Reynolds plays the greatest stuntman who's ever lived, who finds himself being pushed into an extensive stunt involving multiple explosions and the aforementioned rocket car. Despite the constant jokey macho bullshit in the movie, Hooper features a surprisingly tender and complex relationship between Reynolds and Field. And there's a lot of darkness in the depiction of the downside of stuntman life. Who would have guessed that constantly hurting yourself and risking danger could have potentially dire consequences? Not me.

SWEET TALKER (1991)

I've never actually seen this Aussie romantic comedy starring Karen Allen during her lost years, but the soundtrack was composed and performed by cult musician Richard Thompson. Coincidentally, I wrote a book about an album by Mr. Thompson and his ex-wife called Shoot Out The Lights and, seeing as how the holiday season is almost upon us, I thought I would mention it here. Self-promotion: the guiltiest pleasure of all!

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Hayden Childs

From Outer Space: The Short Career and Strange Legacy of Tom Graeff

Phil Nugent — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In an L.A. City Beat cover story, writer Ron Garmon explores the tortured soul and doomed career of Tom Graeff, one of those low-budget auteur figures whose cult is based on a single film. For good or bad, the film is Teenagers from Outer Space, which Graeff wrote and directed in 1959, when he was thirty. The movie stars "David Love"-- A.K.A. Chuck Roberts, known to his mama as Charles Robert Kaltenthaler--as the most sensitive member of a crew of extraterrestrials who land in Hollywood with plans to turn the Earth into a breeding ground for their "flesh-eating gargons", i.e., Godzilla-sized, flesh-eating lobsters. The movie, which came to the attention of a new generation in part through its induction, in 1992, into the ranks of the turkeys roasted on Mystery Science Theater 3000, has earned Graeff the nickname "the gay Ed Wood", a connection that he unwittingly helped along by casting a round, folksy actor named Harvey B. Dunn, who also appeared in Wood's Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls, and The Sinister Urge. (Graeff may also share with Wood the distinction of having been paid big-budget tribute by Tim Burton; the alien weaponry in Burton's Mars Attacks! carries an echo of the flesh-melting ray guns that are used by the bad guys in Teenagers from Outer Space.) Graeff's achievement, such as it is, becomes a bit more impressive when you consider just how little he had in the way of funding. He stole shots all over Hollywood, used a stock musical score, and managed to secure the services of his cast for free, and then some: one of the film's investors was Bryan Pearson, who appeared in the film as the hatchet-faced villain Thor (under the name "Bryan Grant".) Pearson, who apparently had some crackpot notion that he might get paid back, had to take Graeff to court, seeking repayment of his investment and a percentage of the profits, after Graeff sold the film to Warner Bros. (The judge awarded him repayment of his $5000 but cut him out of benefiting from the film's profits; apparently, there actually were some.) Maybe because of the production's obvious penny-pinching and the fact that it has the feel of a misguided labor of, well, love, for many years it was assumed that Todd Graeff and "David Love" were even the same person, and Love's sincerely goofy screen presence and the idea that this handsome doofus might have been calling the shots off-camera probably added to the paroxysms of laughter that Teenagers from Outer Space has long inspired. It wasn't until an article appeared in the zine Scarlet Street in 1993, a year after the movie premiered on MST3K, that it became general knowledge that not only were Love and Graeff (who appears in the movie as the Jimmy Olsen-style eager-beaver young reporter) two different people, but they were an item. The two first hooked up in 1954, when Graeff cast the young actor, then billed as Chuck Roberts, in a 16-minute campus recruiting film he directed for Orange Coast College. (Vincent Price supplied the spoken narration.) That same year, Graeff made his first and only other feature, a little-seen comedy called The Noble Experiment.

Graeff went on to develop his script for what was originally called Killers from Outer Space while serving as Roger Corman's assistant on Not of This Earth. Unfortunately, Teenagers didn't get him any offers, and not long after WB acquired the film, Graeff apparently had some sort of breakdown and tried to re-launch himself as a religious figure. He took out ads in the Los Angeles Times announcing that he had seen the light and claiming that he had lined up a series of dates to deliver Christmas sermons at three churches; this resulted only in his getting thrown out of several prominent centers of worship in Hollywood, and to add insult to injury, the Christian Defense League helped squelch his petition to have his name legally changed to "Jesus Christ II." In 1970, the 41-year-old Graeff committed suicide, after several attempts to restart his film career, including a disastrous public campaign to sell a screenplay he'd written, Orf, for what would have then been a record-setting sum of $500,000. The only real job he managed to wangle in movies after Teenagers was as editor of a 1964 John Carradine picture, Wizard of Mars, quite a comedown for a guy whose first reaction to his movie career stalling was to take a stab at being the messiah. "“I think the failure of Teenagers destroyed him in a lot of ways," Jim Tushinki told Ron Garmon. "He wanted to do things, to be somebody, and I think he suddenly realized filmmaking wasn’t going to do it and he needed to be something much bigger in order to change the world. Nobody knows what happened to Chuck Roberts, but he vanished sometime after Teenagers. Chuck’s leaving probably caused a lot of heartache for Tom and this was on top of the failure of the movie, so, around about Thanksgiving, Tom began hearing voices, seeing things, receiving messages from God. He decided in order to really make a difference, he had to be Jesus Christ.” Tushinksi is at the head of the Tom Graeff Biography Project, where visitors are encouraged to share any information that might have that will be valuable to Tushinski as he works on a proper biography of Graeffe, provisionally titled Smacks of Brilliance. More meditations on Graeffe can be found at this site, while the Internet Archive offers Teenagers itself available for download..

Honorable Mention: The Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:45:00 GMT

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)

This is the original screen version of the H. G Wells story that has more recently been filmed and re-filmed under the title The Island of Dr. Moreau. While the Brando-Val Kilmer version is to be respected for its pure freak-out quality, this early talkie is still the most effective in terms of conviction and scare power, mainly because Charles Laughton's performance as Moreau is one of the all-time great prototypes of the mad scientist: a bloated power junkie with Fu Manchu facial hair and a fondness for the whip, he inspires none of the "Gee, he meant well!" sympathetic understanding that, say, Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein earns even at his most overwrought and barking mad. It's a measure of how strong a presence Laughton has here that the shop steward of his crew of half-human mutants is played by Bela Lugosi, only two years away from his own screen triumph as Dracula. Years later, after the roles dried up and the drugs took over, Lugosi would be a sadly depleted version of his former self, but at this stage in his movie career, you had to be one convincingly satanic son of a bitch to wade into his turf and start handing him orders.

INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)

This independently produced sci-fi horror movie was directed by William Cameron Menzies, best known as an art director and production designer so imaginative and assured that even the perfectionist (i.e., anal to the nth degree) producer David O. Selznick had absolute trust in him. When Menzies directed the 1935 sci-fi movie Things to Come, from a script by H. G. Wells, the futuristic design swallowed up the story, but here, the stylized look of the film does a bang-up job of conveying the paranoid hopelessness of the hero, a little boy who looks through his bedroom window one night and sees something weird coming in for a landing, and then has the devil's own time trying to find a trustworthy and open-minded authority figure who'll listen to his complaint that his mom and dad aren't...themselves. This one sets the standard for the subgenre of the scare movie seen through the eyes of a kid, a kid much like all those pop-eyed little ragamuffins in the audience.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

This Warners film may be less well known now than the 1953 remake House of Wax, which was in 3-D and also helped launch the horror phase of Vincent Price's career. But this version is the one that really packs the goods. Lionel Atwill is the scarred-face sculptor whose waxworks sure do look realistic as all get out; Fay Wray, who had earlier teamed with Atwill in the 1932 Doctor X, gets to show off the lung power that made her the original scream queen for the first movie era when you could actually hear the screams. Also, the fact that this is a Warners movie means that it's more contemporary and lively than the Universal classics, which sometimes seemed to have been made to utilize a lot of Bavarian-villager costumes that the studio had picked up on the cheap. Like Doctor X, the representatives of the straight world here are wisecracking newspaper reporters, a constant of Warners films, because they had so many actors on the payroll who couldn't play anything else. And it's in color, but an early, unreal shade of Technicolor that adds to the sense of unease: the people look as if they've been hand-painted even before they get dipped in wax.

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)

An especially choice example of the sci-fi film as monster movie: while the 1982 John Carpenter remake earns its props for the amazing special effects work by Rob Bottin, this one is hard to beat for the old-school pleasures of watching its hyper-competent, well-oiled crew of military men and scientists, plus a babe and a lovably slap-headed, wisecracking reporter, go about determining the best way to cope with the arrival of a homicidal "intellectual carrot" from outer space. (The carrot was played by James Arness, for twenty years the star of TV's Gunsmoke, and odds are that this is the closest he ever came to getting to play an intellectual.) Special kudos to Robert Cornthwaite for taking one for the team by playing Dr. Carrington, thus creating the indispensable but hard-not-to-snicker-at prototype of the "man of science" who, in this and a million sci-fi movies to come, would rush between the monster and the guys with the tanks and the flamethrowers and deliver a speech that goes something like, "Wait! Wait! This visitor has come to us from a civilization far advanced than our own! It must have had a good reason for hollowing the president out and using him as a hand puppet!"

TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964)

This was the last of the eight movies that Roger Corman directed based on the works, or at least the titles, of Edgar Allan Poe, and while it would go against everything Roger Corman stands for to suggest that practice may have actually enabled him to get better at something, this probably is the best of them. It may have helped that then-unknown Robert Towne wrote the script, but Corman also got some wild fever that compelled him to splurge on actual outdoor locations in the English countryside, which give this film a rooted, atmospheric quality and an edge over the ones set mostly inside a cardboard castle. Elizabeth Shepherd is fine as the doomed romantic heroine, and Vincent Price, the mainstay of the Corman-Poe films, cuts a striking figure in his top hat, black cape, and John Lennon sunglasses.

TIME OF THE WOLF (2003)

Just as The Fly showed us that cinema can transform something as banal as the fear of sickness into phantasmagoric terror, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf showed us they can wreak utter horror out of something as ordinary as simple helplessness. Haneke’s nickname is “the Master of Everyday Horror”, but what is in many ways his most effective film doesn’t take place in his usual everyday setting of bourgeois comfort. That’s where it starts, as a couple find strangers occupying their cabin in the country; but it soon becomes clear that they’re fleeing something extraordinary. Haneke never tips what has caused a widespread breakdown of law and order: it could be a war, or an environmental disaster, or a plague. But one thing is clear: from this point forward, everyone is on their own. Authorities have disappeared, and people like Isabelle Huppert and her two young children find themselves at the mercy of the goodwill of others – a quality that, it soon becomes apparent, is decreasingly available. Nothing much happens in Time of the Wolf: it’s not gory, it’s not sensationalistic like many post-apocalyptic films, and most of its violence is implied rather than seen. But the more society falls apart, even in microcosm, with prejudice, sexual violence, strongarm tactics, and the specter of deprivation always increasing, the more the film creates a horrible, almost unbearable sense of unease. It may be Haneke’s most human film, as he seems to actually care about the fate of his suffering creations; but it’s also one of the bleakest, most depressing films ever made.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Phil Nugent The Ripper, Dr. Jekyll & Leonard Pierce

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

Ozsploitation! “Turkey Shoot” (1982)

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

In the U.S., it was released as Escape 2000. In the U.K., it had the provocative title Blood Camp Thatcher. The original Australian title is Turkey Shoot, but by any other name, it’s the eleventy-zillionth exploitation movie to be inspired by The Most Dangerous Game. What we seem to have here is a post-apocalyptic society, or at least a dark, dystopic future of some kind – it’s a little hard to tell, because the opening fifteen minutes that would have explained what’s going on were never shot due to budget cutbacks. I don’t suppose it matters much; suffice it to say that there’s an oppressive regime in place operating prison camps for “re-education and behavior modification.” So-called deviants are rounded up, stuffed into yellow jumpsuits and dumped into these camps to perform back-breaking labor, learn to conform and receive abuse at the hands of the guards.

Among the latest arrivals at Camp 47 are Paul Anders (Steve Railsback), Chris Walters (Olivia Hussey) and Rita Daniels (Lynda Stoner), all of whom are selected to participate in the “turkey shoot.” They will be released from the camp (with no weapons) and given a three-hour head start, after which camp leader Charles Thatcher (Michael Craig) and his chief enforcer Ritter (Roger Ward, best known to U.S. audiences as Fifi from Mad Max, but perhaps more familiar to Aussies from the 80s TV series Professor Poopsnaggle) will hunt them. If the prisoners make it to dawn alive, they are free to go. If Thatcher and company catch up to them, they will die graphically violent deaths.

Turkey Shoot was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, a towering figure in the realm of Ozsploitation. (We’ll encounter more of his work later in this series.) You might even call him the Down Under Roger Corman, and if not for its Australian setting, Turkey Shoot could have been shipped straight out of the Corman factory. (It’s a cousin to the “sports of the future” genre that includes Corman’s Deathsport – a genre I wrote about in this High Hat piece.) The Aussie flavor is somewhat lacking, what with the major roles going to imported almost-stars Railsback and Hussey, and the overall production is rather uninspired (although Trenchard-Smith deserves at least some credit for pioneering the co-ed shower facilities later appropriated by Paul Verhoeven for Starship Troopers). The gore is graphic, if cartoonish: machetes split skulls, machine gun fire separates heads from bodies. The most fun part of the DVD is the making-of documentary, in which none of the participants (including the director) has anything good to say about the movie. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before.

Bonus Attraction: A mutant beastie in half-assed Planet of the Apes makeup is ripped in half by a bulldozer.

Rating: Two Foster’s

Previously on Ozsploitation!:
Dark Age
Razorback

How Not to Interview Faye Dunaway: Latest in a Series

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

At the Guardian, Xan Brooks has a diverting account of how he came to get ejected from Faye Dunaway's presence while conducting her "first British press interview in nearly 20 years ". Dunaway is across the pond for the Raindance Film Festival showing of her latest film, Flick, a horror movie directed by David Howard. Brooks opens his account by describing how Howard listed for him all "the things I am absolutely not to ask her. Firstly, there must be no mention of Mommie Dearest, the Joan Crawford biopic credited with destroying Dunaway's career. Nor must I ask her about Andrew Lloyd Webber, who bumped her from the Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994; or about her adult son, who may or may not be adopted; or about the cosmetic surgery that she may or may not have undergone. Is that it? 'Yes,' says Howard. 'I think that's the lot.' He turns out to be wrong." Brooks veered into a minefield when he chose to ask her about Roman Polanski's Chinatown and how much reports of tensions on its set might have damaged her career. ("Oh," Dunaway says, "The Roman thing.") When our intrepid correspondent asks the ladylike Dunaway if it's true that she once threw a cup of urine at her pint-sized director, the interview wraps itself up in short order.

Before the meltdown, Dunaway gives what sounds like an amusing performance, half elegant and half dippy, as an aging star who may only be a faded name to younger moviegoers and who seems surprisingly intent on being judged a creature of regal dignity. In Flick, she plays "a one-armed Memphis cop on the trail of a zombie Teddy boy." Brooks marches right out onto thin ice at the start, mentioning that Howard has said that in casting her, "he was taking his lead from Roger Corman, the B-movie producer who made a habit of hiring older Hollywood legends such as Ray Milland to appear in his movies" Dunaway's response: "I think he was going for - not old Hollywood, let's not say that. But maybe a little of the old-style glamour." Despite the dragon-lady demeanor that made Dunaway stand out in the '60s and '70s and that made her a neat fit for both the role of Joan Crawford and the nostalgic setting of Chinatown, Dunaway describes her breakout role as Bonnie Parker as the one "that's closest to me. I was a southern girl and so was Bonnie. We share the frustrations of living in that small, limited environment - dying to get out and move forward in the world. That was part of my makeup as a girl." Cut short though it was, the conversation does give you a feeling that you might have glimpsed something about Dunaway, and why she hasn't done better at staying afloat in the last couple of decades: women have to fight to stay alive in Hollywood, and Dunaway, who clearly has the resources to be a fighter, doesn't want to be seen that way: it conflicts with her surprising desire to be seen as a lady. She doesn't seem to grasp that Brooks is trying to help her out, not trap her, when he suggests that the nasty stories told against her for having been difficult might "come down to a case of Hollywood sexism, I ask her. After all, nobody ever complained about her former co-stars Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando being a little bit wild or rebellious. But Dunaway doesn't bite: she can't think what I mean."

Fantastic Fest Review: “Not Quite Hollywood"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Granted, I haven’t seen everything, but it’s hard to believe there’s a more outrageously entertaining movie at this year’s Fantastic Fest than Mark Hartley’s “Ozsploitation” documentary Not Quite Hollywood. Virtually the entire history of the Australian film industry from its inception in the early ‘70s to the rise of home video in the late ‘80s is crammed into its 110 minutes, with a decided emphasis on drive-in fare over gauzy period pieces. And what drive-in fare it was – based on the evidence here, the Aussie exploitation movies were faster, cheaper, gorier and downright crazier than their American counterparts.

In the beginning, there was no Australian film industry outside the occasional international production such as Age of Consent with James Mason. With the introduction of the R rating in 1971, all of that changed. It began with lewd and crude sex comedies like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and the very popular Alvin Purple series, featuring Fosters-swilling Outback yahoos getting it on with large-breasted, very nude women. By the middle of the decade, these movies had given way to action and horror pictures, most of them little-known in America. Aussie Roger Cormans like Brian Trenchard-Smith and Antony I. Ginnane churned out exploitation films with titles like Turkey Shoot, The Man from Hong Kong, Dark Age and Dead-End Drive In.

Apparently there wasn’t much in the way of regulation and oversight in those days; as we learn from interview subjects ranging from Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries to – of course – Quentin Tarantino, the makers of these films had few qualms about staging car crashes on public roads or setting their actors on fire. The stuntmen were up for seemingly anything, as you can see in the trailer below. (The official Not Quite Hollywood site has a number of vintage trailers for these films as well.) As with the Corman factory, a number of “respectable” filmmakers got their starts in Ozploitation, including Simon Wincer, Bruce Beresford and of course, George Miller. A few productions had sufficient budgets to import an American star or two, such as Stacey Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis for Roadgames and (most memorably) Dennis Hopper for Mad Dog Morgan.

Admittedly, this subject matter is right up my alley. As I never fail to remind you, my book Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema (which makes a great Halloween present) deals with the Southern-fried drive-in movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s, so watching Not Quite Hollywood was like stumbling upon a hidden mirror universe of that era. The Aussies even have their own word for redneck – “ocker” – and certainly a fetish for automobile culture to rival our own. (They also have spectacular, desolate locations, great accents and funny words like billabong and didgeridoo, and for these reasons and many others, I plan on catching up on some of these movies by launching a new weekly Ozploitation series here at the Screengrab, starting this Thursday.)

Not Quite Hollywood isn’t perfect – for all its encyclopedic breadth, it barely touches on the Aboriginal actors in Aussie cinema – but it’s a raucous, informative and often very funny roller coaster ride through a neglected time and place in film history.

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Vintage Trailer Review: The REAL Death Race 2000 (1975, Paul Bartel)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Now that you’ve got the taste of the shitty big-budget in-name-only remake festering in your moviegoing mouths, let’s talk the real Death Race 2000, with all the violence and sleazeball goodness you love from Bartel, Corman & Co. It’s got a post-Caine Carradine, a pre-Rocky Stallone, and of course, The Real Don Steele. Not to mention plenty of vehicular mayhem and a high body count. Pretty much anything you could ask for from a dystopian car picture. If you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for? The trailer, you say? Ask and you shall receive. Enjoy!

My Troma Summer: Part One

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Last week, indiewire.com announced that Troma, Inc.’s, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, “debuted” at New York’s Village East End Cinema with “a finger licking good per-screen average of $10,700,” thanks in part to the typically relentless promotional efforts of the film’s director (and Troma founding father) Lloyd Kaufman, who “dressed as a chicken” and picketed the theater prior to the premiere.

Troma’s brand identity and marketing have always been at least as entertaining as the cinematic output of the defiantly independent (formerly) Hell’s Kitchen “studio.” Since the production company’s inception in 1974, Yale graduates Kaufman (and his partner, Michael Herz) had no illusions about the carnival huckster nature of their enterprise: the name TROMA itself is (allegedly) an acronym for “Tits R Our Main Attraction,” in honor of the duo’s early slate of sex comedies, including Squeeze Play and Sizzle Beach, U.S.A., featuring a then-unknown, now presumably mortified Kevin Costner.

In 1989, I was working in a Cambridge, MA video store (Central Square’s late lamented Action Video), and only knew Troma through memorable titles in our “cult” section like Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke’Em High and, of course, the essential Toxic Avenger series.

At the time, I was on the lam from Harvard University, having skipped all my finals in a passive-aggressive attempt to free myself of the liberal arts grind and concentrate on my one true love: movies. As it turns out, it’s harder to flunk out of Harvard than one might expect, but my stunt worked well enough to get me put on academic suspension for a semester, allowing me plenty of free time to dabble in LSD, feud with my horrified parents and, in my spare time, attempt to become rich and famous.

Despite tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, countless hours in the halls, libraries and career offices of academia and Harvard's reputation as a networking paradise, I hadn’t managed to schmooze up a single show biz connection there, and had no freakin' clue how to get started in the movie business (or, indeed, any other business).

I'd heard about Roger Corman, whose legendary low-budget productions had been the training wheels for actors and directors like Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, and hoped, while alphabetizing the titles in the Action Video cult section, that Troma, Inc. would be an East Coast indie boot camp equivalent.

And so I sent my resume to the address on the back of one of the weird Troma video boxes and waited...

...while halfway around the world, Lloyd Kaufman was gearing up for his next big project, a Japanese co-production that was about to become the most expensive film in Troma history.

To Be Continued...

Hazel Court, 1926--2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The British-born actress Hazel Court has died at the age of 82, at her home near Lake Tahoe. A leggy redhead with a figure made for period gowns, Ms. Court had a face of such unearthly perfection that, were she young and working today, she would probably be given the honor, along with a few other supernaturally beautiful women, of competing for the romantic attentions of some flabby loser in a movie that has Judd Apatow's name in the credits. Instead, she was a pin-up queen and became a familiar face on TV, but is best remembered for work in horror films by Hammer Studios--The Curse of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee--and Roger Corman during his Edgar Allan Poe phase. She co-starred with Vincent Price in three of the latter, Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Raven, a very strange comic take on the material that must have taken its main inspiration from Corman's having managed to get Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff on the same set at a time when he also happened to have film in the camera. (The cast was rounded out by the young Jack Nicholson, who in this company got to pass for The Normal One.) In one of its few actual links to the poem that is its credited source material, the movie also cast Ms. Court as "Lenore", the lost love of the hero (Price), who turns out to not in fact be dead but to have run off with an older, more powerful wizard (Karloff). The best thing about The Raven may be that it gave Ms. Court, who spend an awful lot of her time in these movies standing around looking gorgeous waiting for the chance to need rescuing, a chance to be regal and bitchy--at one point, she laughs enchantingly while Karloff threatens her own daughter with a red-hot poker--in a way that left a lasting impression on many a young movie-watching poetry enthusiast.

Hazel Court was married to the Irish actor Dermot Walsh for fourteen years, from 1949 until their divorce in 1963. A year later, she married the American actor, Don Taylor, who set met on the set of one of the four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and who she was with until his death in 1998. After remarrying, Court retired from movies to focus on her family, as well as to develop a second career as a sculptor. She also wrote her autobiography, which is to published, under the title Hazel Court Horror Queen, later this year. Her very last film appearance was in a bit part in the third film in The Omen series, 1981's The Final Conflict, where her character is listed by IMDB as "Champagne Woman at Hunt." "Champagne Woman" wouldn't have been a bad superhero name for Hazel Court.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him. At the time, it must have seemed that this had worked out pretty great for Crowe; as a reporter, he really did cozy up to the rock stars he covered and wrote flatteringly about them (out of what seemed to be real awe for his subjects, rather than opportunism), and the connections he forged couldn't have done him any harm on his path to becoming a big Hollywood writer-director. But resisting Bangs's advice that he learn to temper his sweet enthusiasm with some distance and skepticism--to care more about his art than about others' feelings--he may have done some harm to his ability to extend his range as a filmmaker. In fact, after Crowe's last couple of movies, and the last couple of anthologies with Bangs's material in them, Bangs's career is probably the healthier one now, and he's been dead since 1982.

Howard (Walter Huston), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Howard, the ancient prospector (and proto-ecologist--witness his speech about leaving the Earth "the way we found it"), suggests Yoda crossed with Gabby Hayes, and may be the platonic ideal of the figure of the Western codger who sometimes seems half-mad but has great stores of wiliness and gumption. Drafted by a couple of tenderfeet to bring his experience to a gold-mining venture, he makes his pupils rich, while adhering to the rule that defines so many movie mentor figures: namely, his sage advice does him more good than the people to whom he offers it. When last seen, the old man is preparing to return to the Indian village where he can live out his golden years receiving the royal treatment in exchange for serving as the locals' "medicine man." Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs, the malcontent who scorns fair treatment for his mentor, makes his fortune but gets his lead lopped off before he can haul it back to civilization, while Tim Holt, who treats Howard with the respect that is his due, stays alive but loses his riches and has no recourse but to go back to being Tim Holt.

"Subway Ghost" (Vincent Schiavelli), GHOST (1990(

Lanky at six feet four, with a thick shock of untamed dark hair surrounding a bald pate and a long face like melted ice cream, Schiavelli (who died in 2005) was often cast for the shock effect of his appearance, whether he was playing an asylum inmate in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or a high school teacher in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (where the news that he has a hot-looking wife is good for a laugh). His role as a nameless and very touching spectre in Ghost gave him the chance to play an uncharacteristically direct and fiery character, and he rose to the occasion so fully that, for a few scenes, he actually brought something wholly unearthly to a movie that's mostly about comforting the audience by showing it that death is just another stage of life. Schiavelli seems to know different: being stranded among the living has turned him into the most alienated figure imaginable, and after he's consented to help the hero master his abilities, he abruptly takes his leave, as if he'd just remembered that the movie he's in is meant for those who are sweeter-natured than he has any interest in being.

John (Bruce Dern), THE TRIP (1967)

Never slow to jump on a trend, Roger Corman was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the late 60s, casting Peter Fonda as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. This is like buying the parenting manual by Lynne "mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn" Spears. Nonetheless, Groves agrees to take the drug under the supervision of Dern's unnerving weird-beard character John, and off we go into the lava lamp school of druggy filmmaking — pretty colors and shapes, strobe lights and colored gels. At this point, your more responsible LSD guide would put on some trippy tunes and maybe show you some groovy album covers, but John just sort of snivels and grins and makes Groves feel even more nervous and paranoid with his "hey, it's just a normal ol' chair, buddy" routine. It's even possible that Corman meant John to be a comforting presence, but happened to be out shooting second unit footage for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters the day the casting director learned Dern was willing to work for a sleeping bag and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches. Anyway, Groves' trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he's killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. Then he proves to be an even worse judge of character than we'd previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. Just say no, kids.

Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), REPO MAN (1984)

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud, the veteran repo man embodied in all his shambling, world-weary glory by Harry Dean Stanton, who schools our young anti-hero Otto in the tricks of the trade. Bud does have a code, though, and in a movie that ranks among the most quotable of the last three decades, he is a veritable font of direct and concise street-level wisdom. In other words, fuck Yoda. Here are the five elements of the Repo Code we've chosen to live by, and we learned them all from Bud.

5. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

4. It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective people are gonna think you're packing something.

3. Look at 'em – ordinary fucking people, I hate 'em. An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

2. Only an asshole gets killed for a car.

1. Repo man's got all night, every night.

--Phil Nugent; Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.

Video of the Day: Richard Matheson is Legend

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

I Am Legend opens this Friday; the Will Smith vehicle is the third adaptation of the famous science-fiction story by Richard Matheson. No stranger to Hollywood, Matheson has been working in television and cinema since he got his first job as a writer with The Twilight Zone. In this interview, he discusses his long career, his relationship with everyone from Rod Serling to Roger Corman, and the astonishing feat — which not even Stephen King can match — of having every single one of his novels adapted into a film. — Leonard Pierce

Sayles Speaks

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The contemporary American independent filmmaking scene as we know it was born some thirty-five to forty years ago, and John Sayles has as much right as anybody to claim midwife status. Any aspiring filmmaker whose films aren't designed for mainstream success would do well to consider the Sayles business model, whereby the director saved the funds he got from writing TV-movies and Roger Corman genre flicks and plowed them into his own low-budget productions. Now, as John Anderson reports in The New York Times, Sayles and other indie directors of his generation are facing a new problem: moving towards their sixties while continuing to work outside the industry and courting an audience that thinks of "indie film" as a young person's game. (In the new documentary Lynch, the sixty-one-year-old director of Blue Velvet can be seen courting an Internet audience, renouncing film for digital video and, with respect to getting funding, declaring his eternal gratitude to the French.)

Independent filmmaking is a much more crowded field than it was when Sayles and his longtime co-producer and life-partner Maggie Renzi made The Return of the Secaucus Seven, and while distributors and the entertainment media pay lip service to the aging established names, what they really want is a piece of the hot young newcomer whose debut inspired some buzz at Sundance. Reflecting on the difference between then and now, Sayles told Anderson, "The good thing, is it's a lot easier to make a movie than it is used to be. When we started, there was no high-def video, for instance. We made our movie and nobody had ever heard of that: 'You just made a movie? How can anyone just make a movie?' If your film simply had sprocket holes, the four companies that were not studios — there were four at the time — would come and look. . . Now, Sundance gets 5,000 feature films every year, and there are 5,000 filmmakers from the last year who are still trying to make films. Every distributor in America could show a different movie every day for a year, and there are only so many screens that show non-Hollywood stuff, and only fifty-two weeks a year, so. . . there's a huge amount of competition." Sayles's new film, Honeydripper, is set in a blues bar circa 1950 and features a predominately African-American cast — which is to say that it won't make Harvey Weinstein's mouth water. But Sayles and Renzi remain adamantly grass-roots in their approach; their plan is to attract word-of-mouth business by pitching to blues fans and black churchgoers. Renzi believes that the audience for their picture is out there: "They just need to be invited back into the theaters. . . My challenge to . . . [the distributors] is, 'Can you come up to the new mark?' Because the old mark isn’t working anymore." — Phil Nugent