Jills of Jack Hill (Part 1): BLOOD BATH, MONDO KEYHOLE, PIT STOP, SPIDER BABY

It's hard to say if Jack Hill 'gets' women. The grandfather of Pam Grier WIP (Women in Prison) films, he's never shied from lurid sex-sensationalism, but at the same time never belittled, demonized, or fully objectified women and almost always balances retribution, vengeance, and character growth/catharsis heavily over egregious insult. Sex is positive, empowering, and drug addiction's highs and lows vividly rendered, and art uber alles. So whether he's a feminist or counterrevolutionary chauvanist, he's one of the all-time great drive-in auteurs, and this has been the golden retrospective summer of the Hill: so many of his films were released on Blu-ray this spring-summer, we now the entirety of the Jack Hill oeuvre cleaned up in--mostly--HD sparkle, and fit to marvel at. And there's great Hill-Drenner commentary tracks galore. In case you don't know, Elijah Drenner makes a great interviewer with a palpable Hill appreciation that doesn't muddy over into pompousness, like Peter Bogdanovich's tracks for a lot of Hawks Blu-rays. I know Bogdanovich loves Hawks, and knew Hawks, but explaining 'little jokes' in them as if some pithy New Yorker cartoon to a bored 12 year-old, sucking the wind out of them in the process. Drenner conveys his love for the films without that kind of deflation, so that clicking over to them during the film it's like your kicking back watching it with them, rather than enduring a lecture at the end of a hard day in a classroom with overhead lighting.

The new best friend of the Hillian, Arrow has returned the full beauty of black and white film to Hill's late 60s opuses depicting man and cute girls engaged in industrious activity: PIT-STOP (racing), SPIDER BABY (carving), and BLOOD BATH (painting) and in bleached color but with vivid reds and greens, SWINGING CHEERLEADERS (pouting). The DVD company Scorpion put out SORCERESS from 1982, Hill's last film, and if you're Hawksian then you're also Carpenterian and thus Hilliard too, because if you add Carpenter and Hill together you get Hawks, more or less, and if ever a man was holding a bull by a tail, you're it.

Well, I'm too frazzled with excitement to clarify  so I'm gonna just lay it all out in the grand style of the canon forefathers, chronologically. And then when the smoke clears and the flying tiger bat god of SORCERESS disappears back from whence he came in the sky, we will know....

For the longest time this weird dysfunctional variation on time-worn Corman themes was confusedly mixed up with its original Eastern European cut, Operation Titian, the English version --partially mulled over by Coppola--but to no one's satisfaction, as Portrait in Terror, and then used again by Hill (and changed around with added footage by Rothman later for TV as Track of the Vampire). All in all with the Arrow Blood Bath four movie set we can unpack it all, and note a fine example of how Coppola may be a genius but when he worked for Corman all he knew how to do was spend money and leave a mess for Jack Hill to clean up because this movie may not make a lot of sense, but it rocks so hard, bro, like the other filmed-on-Venice, CA beatnik horror dream poems of the black and white era, Dementia (1955 ) and Night Tide (1961). Using the local carousels, strange buildings and cavernous boardwalk under zones with rolling tides like the sands of time, and the infinite with seaweed-wreathed mermaids washing up dead in the nets and then appearing in a basement jazz club, playing out the drag of the current on the bongos, or whatever.

 DVD Review: A+

If this was the first 60s skin flick 'roughie' you saw, you might think it was a pretty reputable and artsy genre, certainly Hill doesn't phone it in. A job he took for producer John Lamb, it's in low budget black and white but it still looks groovy. Even if it is about a skeevy rapist pornographer (played with no small amount of gusto by Nick Moriarty), it's never brutal or traumatizing. Under Hill's elegant style we're never quite sure if these girls (he meets them via personal ads or through the shoots he photographs for his various filthy magazines) are real or just the equivalent of a Penthouse Forum "true story". Either way, rather than being all Dragon Tattoo of Thrones it takes on the surreal impact of a post-sync sound dream art film (ala, say, Dementiaor Carnival of Souls) to help us distance it more into some kind of perverse erotic fiction rather than a brutalizing Videodrome "sharpening up." Eventually our pornographer gets what's coming to him more or less, and his elegant wife (the very sexy and alluring Adele Rein) up to this point so hopelessly bored and sex-deprived she winds up shooting heroin and making love to herself in the mirror (a very groovy scene) winds up finding a big gross orgy fit for any erotic wanderer (way less oppressive than the sterile dearth of imagination on hand in Eyes Wide Shut), even if she arrives with guy dressed as Dracula and rocking perhaps the most terrible Transylvanian accent in the history of time immoral. In his commentary Hill lets us know the actor's a helluva fella but seriously, it's almost as nauseating as the human salad bar or drunken shaving cream pool party. Even so, ever on the look-out for that beatnik artistic arrest (see Blood Bath, babe) Hill gets the night's reflection on the shaving cream coated surface of the pool after all the revelers have straggled off to bed and the ripples stop, and well, its texture reflects the lights like some kind of murky 3-D ant's eye view of a flat ice cream soda idling in a midnight bus boy bin. In short, it's dream poetry.

It's not in anamorphic but don't let that dissuade you, darling. Between the photography and the gorgeous Reine you're bound to find something you like, and if it gets boring you can listen to the lively commentary between Elijah Drenner and the man himself, Jack Hill, who explains Lamb's penchant for ripping off pornography mail order customers, as in his sex LPs (based on footage in the movie, it's clear Lamb's behind the mysterious Tortura album that used to be a tripping "favorite" in my old hippie house). A great presence on a lot of Hill commentaries, Drenner's adoirt at keeping the focus on the action onscreen and the pair have a fine rapport (as opposed to the kind of commentaries where they get off on long tangents and whole reels fly by with no connection). We learn Lamb shot the excellent underwater stuff with a camera he specifically designed as he was cuckoo for scuba, and big game hunting! What a man, a John Huston crossed with David F. Friedman and better than at least one.

The lovely Vicky Wren (Reine) in their ultra hip 60s LA pad (dig the Brady Bunch style stone wall)

Psychotronica DVD review: B (non-anamorphic great Hill/Drenner commentary)


Apparently this was filmed originally in 1964 but held up 'til '68 and subject to a rash of title changes, man, supposedly shot for $65,000. over 12 days, I mean shit, I'd pay that out of my own pocket just to have this film in existence, I love it so goddamn much, and I know I'm not alone. I bought it on Blu-ray from Arrow and it was worth it even if I already had three or four different versions, from a fuzzy VHS duped it back in 1989, up through the regular VHS in '93 or something and the first DVD in whenever which wasn't so hot, and then the Hill approved DVD that looked terrific in whenever and now the Blu-ray and each time it gets frickin' better looking and more and more a classic of the macabre to put all horror macabre comedies to shame, to rival with the best horror comedies of all time, maybe the best. I only hope one day we'll see such a lovely restoration upgrade on other as of yet only semi-upgraded rarities in the zone like Old Dark House (1932) and The Ghoul (1933). What else? (See my piece on it back in the day, with Blu-ray update yonder, though I ain't never yet been able to write about it to my full satisfaction. I'm always like that about films I love so much I can't distinguish them from me anymore. (full review)

Arrow DVD review: A+


The second best movie about racing after Two-Lane Blacktop, this has sporadically slurring Brian Donlevy as a shadowy race promoter who sees something special in surly drifter Rick (Richard Davalos), to the point he even bails him out after Rick wipes out into a store window during a street race. Donlevy gets him a job at a junkyard where Rick can build something fit to get smashed up in Donlevy's 'figure-8' race track, a combo real race and demolition derby as the track crosses itself in the middle, necessitating traffic driving right through each other and many times not making it all the way without a smashup. Damn cool idea, especially if you find NASCAR incredibly boring.

Like Hill's Spider Baby (which was filmed in 1964 but didn't get released til 1968) the year before, this came out at a time when black and white was dying at the drive-in (unless --like Night of the Living Dead, it offered something shocking and new enough that the b&w worked for it, the way found footage worked for Paranormal Activity) and its a shame too because now on this geee-yorgeous "director approved" remastered HD Blu-ray from Arrow, the full measure of what 35mm black and white film can do is revealed, putting it up there with Repulsion as far as capturing a late night surrealism that seems to shimmer holotropically. The dark of real night (for the most part) is beautiful, dark and deep (if you have a good HD TV or projector, especially).

As for the story, if you don't even like figure-8 eight racing there's a generic but effective bluesy rock score over montages of lovely little junkyard shots as tires are hauled in around and hoods and parts and bonding, the sort that any artsy filmmaker, edgy photographer, or Antonioni if people connected; the snotty Rick's character actually grows as he moves from combative and surly to the other drivers to being nice and joshing around, which is an an unusual character change within a montage sequence, a ballsy but effective strategy to consecrate a more fluid persona within both Sid Haig's wild man racer rival, Sid Haig's girl (Beverly Washburn, his sister in SPIDER BABY), who goes on a date with Rick, so Haig beats the shit out of him and trashes his car - he's a maniac! But when Rick doesn't rat him out to the cops our Haig realizes he's misjudged our boy and apologizes. Little does he know Rick is keenly aware of the proper temperature for revenge. Meanwhile another rival racer's mechanic girlfriend is played by the future Ellen Burstyn (above). Billed as Ellen McRae, she's a wow here with a dry low key persona that suits Hill's equilibrium to a Valvoline-splattered tee, you can tell she's going to go onto big things (The Exorcist was five years away). Their romantic clinches amongst the Imperial Sand Dunes are a master class in how to use day-for-night without it looking ridiculous.


I'd go so far as it to say it's more Hawksian than Hawks' own RED LINE 7000... fuck yeah I'd say that. And it may be Haig's finest hour. Mind you it never claims to be better than it is. But for fans of the Hill, it's manna.

Arrow Blu-Ray - A+ - Another great Hill-Drenner commentary, gorgeous restoration, da woiks
--
TO BE CONTINUED