Allergy season comes upon us, the deft poisoning of the senses that comes from the double threat of congestion and allergy medication-caused depression that used to lay me low in the time before SSRIs and OTC Claritin. Now it doesn't even matter - for some of us - spring is time to be an indoor child, wheezing in the dark with comic books and old movies while the tanned kids cavort in the pollen. I, who spent a week writing about what was wrong with Shape of Water, now find myself up against it. Only in the 70s, on Amazon Prime, can true solace be found.
Thanks to Prime's inexhaustible trove of forgotten gems from time amoral, we can go back to groovy 70s monster movie childhood, before the rise of VHS, spandex-and-butcher knife SOV hair metal despair - which the younger generation finds nostalgic but I find wearying. The truth is back there, in the 70s. On Prime. And I'm bringing a small coterie of students with me. Will you be foolish enough to be one of them? Amazon Prime has given us all the fertile muck one might ever wish to trudge through.
It doesn't even matter that 95%of them are forgotten for a reason.
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| my bible at nine |
Part of moseying down here in the basement bins of time is to find the influences of the influence. each so influential we tend to forget them. If we look deeper amidst the eddies and levies of the Prime, we find all the crazes the 70s had that mainstream time has forgotten, especially Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster and The Abominable Snowman. The 1974 film Legend of Boggy Creek was the Blair Witch of its day - spawning a whole subgenre, as well as the documentary Mysterious Monsters which obsessed us kids and played independently for years at matinees I could never quite get my mom to take me to see (despite its G rating; Boggy too was a G). And I had the paperback edition (upper left). Its success led to a slew of bigfoot-themed movies--re-enactment documentaries that flooded drive-ins and matinees- eclipsed only by Jaws and the move from the forest to all things aquatic.
So now you have it, along these two tangents we have enough to build this massive ten. Dig in.
Special Note: As usual, I've provided screenshots and letter grades for image presentability. Whenever possible I've avoided showing the monsters in these films- the better to enable the Val Lewton unseen factor as long as possible, of course that doesn't apply to our first item.
One last thing too - where possible I've also kept to the spirit of the decade, breaking this list into three parts, the afternoon kid-friendly matinee, the evening teenager make-out drive-in, concluding with the late night grindhouse third-on-the-bill weirdness.
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It may not be good, but it's everything great about the 70s as my generation remember it (spaceships, sexy young adults, dinosaurs, lasers), and none off the bad (kids, parents, buzzkill morality). Marooned on a planet just like earth millions of years ago, a groovily-dressed co-ed crew from a crashed space craft eke out a living against a whole food chain of stop motion dinosaurs that stand as a reminder that before Jurassic Park there were no such things as 'velociraptors'. (Seriously, I would have remembered them as I was huge into dinosaurs all through the 70s, and they'd be here, too. Frankly, I think Spielberg invented them for the movie.)
Whether you go for it will depend on your age and taste: the stop motion animation is fairly good for the budget, somewhere between Ray Harryhausen's and the ones in Land of the Lost; the foxy costumes evoke some 70s daredevil stunt gymnastics team --the men have open shirts and the women include: lovely Nylah (Pamela Bottaro), in a yellow midriff, white hiphuggers, long straight black hair; Mary Appelspeth, eaten much too soon; and Derna Wylde, who's seduction strategies expand well past the entire crew, sweeping up all hapless young male viewers. As for the men, there's a real macho boldness vs. cowardly caution thing at play, reminding us of how, in the 70s, the emerging women's lib movement found more affinity with the Burt Reynolds macho men than the wussy liberals. Planet helps us remember why - he made us--children and women--feel safer. He'd guard you by fighting - not by running or pacifying. As a kid in the 70s, living 24/7 in immanent danger, it was this theme that made TV series like Danger Island episodes on Banana Splits, and The Land of the Lost (all the hiding in caves, etc), so compelling. Every game of tag had a 'base' but not these.
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The Amazon Prime transfer is taken from what looks like a public domain dupe but will nonetheless look no worse than it would if you caught on UHF TV back some Saturday morning in 1978. An eerie synthesizer score by Lamers and O'Verlin and a fairly frequent ratio of dinosaur attacks vs. in-camp bicker-and-bond stretches makes up for any inconvenience. Terrible? Sure, but good enough I actually tried to find a decent DVD to order where the image isn't so washed out and blurry (Retromedia 20th anniversary release is OOP but available on Amazon at $300. Derna and Nyla must have really made an impression!)
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From its opening montage of woodsy twilight shots set to a mournful folk ballad, there's a compelling low-key inexorability to this influential mix of local witness interviews and re-enactments of what happened in Fouke, Arkansas, in the 1950s-60s when a certain Sasquatch-style monster has been smelled, seen, heard, shot at, run from, and most of all talked about around campfires and country stoves at night and in the mornings while looking at damage done to screen doors and big footprints left in the swampy loam. Acted often by the the actual witnesses themselves in their own homes in the same areas it happened, there's a real immediacy to it all as if the film itself is some mimetic charm to keep the beast away. Told with a vivid urgency balanced out with a low key modesty natural to the region, the result is an effective mix of the best elements of both re-enactment and interviews that manages to be double scary rather than half. The film was a huge word-of-mouth hit whose influence is still observable today on half the shows on cable.
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To that end, the old analog fullscreen TV VHS dupe quality of the Amazon image, may actually make it more effective--adding to the authentic rusticity of it all, evoking old nature shows like they'd have on back in the 70s during the grassroots boom (see thus great collage of Ranger Rick, Waltons, Little House and Wilderness Family covers / posters). The focus is always on the natural world enabling--rare in a semi-documentary-- an eerie sense of ever-mounting twilight and onrushing darkness (2). The crappy quality enables a Blair Witch sense of helplessness, depicting a time and place with so little light pollution that a monster could be five feet from your door at night and you wouldn't see them, where to get help from a neighbor during entails hightailing it a mile through the swamp in the middle of the night, with the men off on jobs the women all home nervously sewing while the hound dog whines and mysterious howls echo outside and the cabins are as cramped as the outdoors vague and hostile.
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The success of Boggy was such that four years later, they were still coming out with these semi-true "expedition / flashback" bigfoot-themed movies, and of all those that followed, this is probably the best. Chicago University anthropology majors Rives (John David Empire of the Ants Carson) and his 'Nam vet buddy Pahoo (backwoods character actoor mainstay Dennis Fimple) head down to the Bayou as a sasquatch research project and get intertwined with locals and a creature. The scenery is all actual bayou, the locals and the town have a perfect mix of friendly and suspicious. \
It would be better if it was color corrected (you can tell future John Carpenter's regular future DP Dean Cundey's picaresque magic hour establishing shots would clean up real nice) but what the hell Amazon gives us a nice HD transfer from the Code Red source, but the source material is terribly preserved (blacks washed to a fine greenish fog) con mucho celluloid scratches, pocks, etc. - but hey, in the words of Bleeding Skull's Joseph Ziemba, "imperfection only adds to the backwoods whiff. The Black Lake setting wouldn’t feel the same without it. " And speaking of whiffs, the stole is showlened by ole Jack Elam's local 'edge of town' drunk (he loses his buddy to the creature in the prologue). Everyone who's 'been there' will feel sympathy for Elam's trying to convey the threat of a giant hairy monster to a cop while you're so trashed you can barely turn off the ignition and stagger into the holding cell.
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Still the climax with the boys running headlong into the monster, their scattershot response and the weirdly open ending is very unique as is the strangely intimate bond between these two lads-they're not quite at the level of improv drunken bonding that Fonda and Oates had in Race with the Devil, but their heads are in the right low-key place (Carson makes great low-key use of lines like "What's with you and hamburgers, man?"). A refreshing change too is the way the build up involves the meeting and interviewing of so many character actors, and the film stopping for little bits of business (like a back porch country song between bigfoot witness Peckinpah regular Dub Taylor on harmonica and the writer of the film Jim McCulloch Jr. on guitar) and weird moments of futzing (there's a bit with a "Keep off the Grass" sign outside the jail).
This slow pace might seem like a way to pad the time, but it was typical of the more relaxed pace of 70s nature-set movies and makes the sudden violent action more resonant. Other films in this post-Boggy subgenre (like 1976's super-boring Sasquatch, also on Prime) err too much on the side of rusticity, presuming a drawled field journal note-based voiceover and languid shots of bearded guys unpacking sound equipment off their mules will make up for the lack of actual thrills. Black Lake gets the mixture just right, and I like that the monster is never humanized or earning of sympathy, nor fully seen. It's simply an unknowable crafty thing that protects its territory in the most direct and brutal ways. So all in all, eerie noises, slow-building suspense and a good 'in-the-moment' actorly rapport that gives every moment a chance to land, a score mostly consisting of library cues, banjo licks and Stavinsky stabs, what's to strongly dislike?
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The stop motion on the beast is good and the pacing --even with all the tired bits of local color and a throwaway side story of a stranded magician and his cute assistant (who decide to pretend their daytime fishing trip is occurring at night, on the off chance the post-production people will tint in some day-for-night filtering. No chance). As with the last film, the soundtrack seems lifted straight from the library, but in the end... who cares? It's saved by the gorgeous mountain lake setting and the lustrous new HD transfer that gets the mist rising off the morning lake so completely you can see the rainbow in the shimmer.
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5. DAY OF THE ANIMALS
(from: "Leslie of the Heretics") Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors and real animals--especially vultures, hawks, a cougar, a crazy dog pack, and a tarantula--the scene where the hawks and vultures maul the bitchy girl is terrifying because those birds are real, and they're right there in the shot, and her unease is palpable.
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So let's talk. I know you may think this list has low standards but here's some examples of those that did not make the cut: SASQUATCH, ISLAND CLAWS, BIGFOOT, MONSTER and BOG were all films I wanted to review next, but hell, they were were either too boring (BIGFOOT and its mellow semi-documentary vibe) or murky (ISLAND CLAWS - images above) or just too half-assed (BOG) to finish. Enter their dubious confines at your own risk, or proceed along with me on this safe guided tour, where image is reasonably vivid and crisp or at the very least the content (as with Boggy) suits the form.
--
Luckily these next two films look and are divino.
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Up to now we've been hanging out in the USA, in local areas like Bouke Arkansas or Crater Lake, but we mustn't forget all the imports from Italy that rounded out our drive-in and grindhouse triple bills. This endurable gem from ace genre-blender Sergio Martino, The Great Alligator is a great choice for that, for it blends Italy's then in-vogue primitive cannibal genre with Jaws via a giant alligator god who wakes up and starts eating tourists at a newly opened resort deep in an unnamed jungle (It was filmed in Sri Lanka, though the natives are notably diverse). The resort's capitalist owner Mel Ferrer tries to keep it all quiet and avoid a panic, but visiting photographer Claudio Cassinelli sees the writing on the wall and wants to alert the tourists. Resident anthropologist Barbara Bach, rocking the same wet 70s bathing suit white shirt combination Jacqueline Bissett indelibly sported in The Deep two years earlier--agrees. Too late! That night, well, hell breaks loose on land and by sea, with Bach tied to a sacrificial raft, Claudio desperately trying to untie the wet knots, as all hell breaks loose downriver between angry natives and hungry gator.
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Amazon used to have a much worse print of this streaming - it seems to have been quietly upgraded. Fans can now better appreciate the pretty waterfalls and the well-lit climactic outdoor night scenes of nonstop carnage as everyone spills into the drink, the giant alligator starts devouring people like he's going for a competitive eating record. The idea of tourists dying if they go on land (by the angry native's flaming arrows) and by gator teeth if they stay in the water (and if they try to do in-between are impaled on the spikes of the gator-proof fence) is pretty original, and Martino never resorts to that laziest of devices--stock nature footage inserts--for his monster attacks. The gator itself might by only marginally convincing (its legs don't move; its eyes don't blink) but he's still awesome - the jaws go up and down atop screaming extras splashing gamely, and Martino knows how to film the melee so it's clear, fun, crazy rather than traumatic, confusing, shrill and dull like so many others of its ilk.
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With several great if obvious miniatures, a sprawling, well-directed cast (including go-to ginger moppet Silvia Collatina, Lory del Santo, Anny Pappa) and plenty of stunts, miniatures, and termite details in abundance, especially in the ornate gator-themed wicker headgear and breast plates of the natives and in the rich sound design which weaves Stevio Cipriani swirling cocktail score gamely into a tapestry of thumping diegetic jungle drums, funky electric guitar, chanting, birdcalls, screaming and then ---suddenly -- inside the melange of noise -- a tiny splash along the water surface that quiets humans, birds, drums, on a dime- and sends the audience and natives alike jerking in its direction. What's a giant gator doing in crocodile country is addressed but is never answered, Martino would rather thrill than explain.
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In the Salmon fishing town in the Northwest somewhere, Vic Morrow and hick friends resent the local Native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena) trying to prevent the installation of a fish cannery, which is tied into an escaped testing hatchery of hyper-evolutionary salmon, turning humanoid, attacking and killing the men and forcing themselves on the women. Yeah, you heard me. Got a problem with that? Doug McLure and his liberal son break up the fight at the dance. The son goes off with Johnny to hear 'what he has to say' while Vic and friends paddle up with molotov cocktails and the monsters keep a-striking (Denise Galick, Cindy Weintraub and Lynn Theel are some of the other girls) and a cannery-sponsored genetic scientist (Ann Turkel) shows up to investigate. James Horner's subtle but familiar score of eerie strings and harp glissando stabs touches a lot of familiar bases but never gets showy, Mickey Mousy or obvious. So hey - I'll take it.
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Maybe because it's so subconsciously resonant as far as deep id impulse, especially at the beach where feminine curves are so prominently displayed against the surging tides (and where my own hormones were first formed) these monster ravagings don't bother me as much as they would if humans were doing it. Besides, one would be hard-pressed to find a more stealth feminist exploitation king drive-in genre than Corman --bathing suit tops may fly off but the girls never lose their dignity or resourcefulness -- even the Miss Salmon (Linda Shayne) stops screaming long enough to bash her attacker's brains out with a rock. To me, the most objectionable thing in the film is that a smirky toe-headed ventriloquist (David Strassman) almost gets it on with a naked fan in a tent, his puppet poking suggestively through the zipper of his bag. Yikes! Objection!
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Whatever, a fast hour in, and boom all hell breaks loose in one of the best monster attacks on a local waterfront salmon festival in cinematic history. All is well. The monsters themselves are good enough to not be bad, but not bad enough to be genuinely scary- with their long arm extensions and habit of swaying back and forth like bad Igor impressionists, covered in sea weed, their incessant sexual aggression is almost refreshing in its innocence. They don't make 'em like this anymore - they make 'em like HBO does- traumatic and demeaning - instead of good-natured ad unhinged).
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Now we're in the tail end of the triple feature - the real murk. Yew rer rawrned
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Terrible pacing, acting, framing, reaction shots, and classical music library cue segue choices all combine to make a truly spectacular--nay, Wagnerian!--chronicle of a weekend trip taken by four students and their professor Dr. Karl (Tawm Ellis) to hunt for the infamous upstate NY Yeti at his friend's upstate NY island. It got away from him the last trip, and he's Ahab-level consumed. While the sole survivor of the last expedition raves and rants at a nearby party, a towheaded idiot student is taken by the Karl to eat at an "exclusive" restaurant, where he drops some creepy hints. Is he Count Zaroff or just gay back in the era when coming out of the closet was not safe? I won't tell you! It's best you go into it as I did, clueless aside from a memory of reading Michael Weldon's slam of it in Psychotronic.
Director Mike Findlay is either a genius or an idiot because it's very hard to nail that level of paranoia, the way in dreams you can never be sure if the inconsistencies going on around you are your misperceptions or just a result of an 'incomplete' mise en scene. You didn't get that extra element in, say, Rosemary's Baby where it's just an am I paranoid because of hormones and society or are they all in a demon cult out to steal my child? kind of thing, not an am I paranoid or are they out to get me for real or is it just this flimsy diegetic reality is so full of holes I'm waking up in reverse, into a kind of meta-Brechtian schism? kind of thing. In the words of Rosemary Woodhouse, "this is no dream this is really happening!" But she does know she's in a movie? No, that's what makes this one so complicated. You'd have to really be an idiot to think you were in 'reality' if you're a character a movie that's just half a step up from a home movie you'd shoot with your friends and watch on a small projector where dust bunnies obscure the corners of the image like spidery silhouettes and everything kind of slowly softens into an autumnal blur - you know, like life?
Still, your home movies never had a character like the Tim Carey-esque Ivan Agar as the mute body building "Indian," Laughing Crow chopping wood in the yard in a frisson bit that seems like the inspiration for similar moments in Jordan Peele's Get Out. There's lots of drinking and strangeness that again, seen through the eyes of Karen as the sort of would-be final girl / Marilyn Burns / Rosemary / only sane one in the room, is both bad movie hilarious, nightmare scary and just plain weird.
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It works because when the acting is really bad it brings out a whole extra nightmare level if you're dealing with a duplicitous character. Though it looks like a homeless guy in a sheepdog costume, the sight of the yeti bounding around the woods is pretty endearing. And when you're expecting a Scooby Doo- denouement it goes way darker, and then brings in a HAM radio! Findlay's wife Roberta did the cinematography (under the nickname 'Wings' in the credits). The only actor I liked was Jennifer Stock as Karen - hence her picture all over this post. The combination of her super long straight auburn hair, Greta Gerwig body, black cape, and terrible acting skills leaves quite an effect on me. She's the only 'human' in the cast, the only one with any sense of what's happening - the one having the nightmare. And she's in all the best scenes.
Apparently this is the restored version so there's previously edited out random bits like a dying wife crawling along with a toaster across the bathroom floor to hurl it into her husband's bath are now fully restored as is the head-scratching decapitation prologue that will leave you wondering whether the the cocoanut head with a mask on falling into the swimming pool was meant to be ceremonial (like some effigy) or a human sacrifice that's just really really badly done? Then it hits you - that's what this kind of shit's all about - film is itself ceremonial. That cocoanut scene looks so familiar I feel like I shot it myself for a super 8mm Conan-inspired film Alan and I did in 1981. That's 'uncanny' all right.
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The Findlays were no fools and use their nonexistent budget to their benefit, for we can never be sure if the movie is intentionally bad, as in things aren't matching up for a reason that will be revealed later, etc. When key things seem to be missing in something we can't tell if we're supposed to notice it or it's red herring, danger signals, or directorial incompetence - is this not the root of childhood nightmares? That mix of psychic, physical and social anxiety that comes from jumbled social cues? In this case we're squarely with poor Karen who has one of the stupidest most passive and gullible boyfriends in the history of stupid gullible boyfriend who thinks cutting up her friend to use as bait in yeti traps is natural- she's hysterical for even complaining--, but hey - as a nightmare it can't be beat and the final act with all the round robin dingus dialogue and a hilariously chilling bit of 'forking' is straight up from the pages of my own childhood nightmares.
The Amazon Image taken from the usually spotty Sprockets releasing label has some nicely restored colors and deep blacks that make it, for all its crudity, far more watchable than it probably was in every other home video version. As with many on this list, the music is library cues, this time classical- lots of, I believe, Wagner and Berlioz)
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There's nothing quite as matter-of-taste as Andy Milligan, the off-off Broadway theater geek's Ed Wood, a master of getting Victorian era value out of dusty mansions and historically preserved NYC and London gardens and storefronts. For this oddly-named gem, the acting is surprisingly good, or at the very least, spirited, with something of the flavor of Rocky Horror Picture Show or John Waters characters tried to do a straight Dark Shadows soap opera version of House of Usher. A woman wearing a punishing amount of eyelash mascara brings her urbane British husband (a deadbeat 'painter') home to meet the family, all suffering from lycanthrope and busy working on treatments: there's the brother who's kept chained in his room and fed live chickens ala a carny geek; the bedridden old patriarch; the conniving older sister, the sassy maid and--my new favorite-- Hope Stansbury as the mad sister, a sexy morass of Jill Banner as Virginia Merrye (emotionally stunted, possibly supposed to be playing a child) and Mary Woronov (tall, assertive, and unafraid to project badass oomph in a camp tradition). A woman eager to own a horde of man-eating rats so she can shout "Tear 'em up!" as was the big catch phrase from the year before, in case you forgot. If the rats element seems--as truth in advertising--like it's coming, rather than here, you're right - it's truth in advertising. Supposedly the producer wanted some rats added in re-shoots to capitalize on Ben, the Willard sequel released the same year, I think Monica was supposed to unleash them on someone, and maybe she did (it's hard to tell), generally the violence is just done by whirling the camera around with flames underneath the lens.
No one thought about rats after 1973, when the Exorcist came out, and then the cut and re-added possession scenes to already filmed movies (like Lisa and the Devil becoming House of Exorcism). That's show biz!
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Getting back to Stansbury. With her pale skin, long straight black hair, willowy physique and habit of darting around all amped up and giddy with hammy homicidal rage, teasing deranged brother, chopping up her neighbor friend or lunging out at her sister from the wardrobe closet like a shot --she's a perfect embodiment of the Victorian era devil girl. Does Melora Cregar or Dame Darcy know about this movie? They must. If not, they must be told! Where's my old rotary phone?
There's some genuinely good British actors floating around aside from her, and alas her scenes are strictly supporting compared to the 'good' sister and (I keep waiting for those lashes to just lock shut) and her hunky mellow husband - both of whom do a surprisingly fine job with the material, and --- as the bedridden father. Most scenes are single shot set ups between two hammy actors trying to make a short theater piece out of every exchange, no matter how slight to the story or meandering and repetitive the lines (or improv cues). No one can ever just buy silver bullets or a flock of man-eating rats, they have to endure pages of Victorian shopkeep small talk as if Milligan thinks he is going to stumble on becoming Dickens through sheer disconcerted effort.
When enough of such scenes accrue, there's a rushed, gory, poorly edited (censored, with gore restored?) climax of gore and blood that happens so fast after all the endless two-person talking shots, your head spins. Frankly, it's awesome. Milligan's habit of shooting on 16mm and 35mm as his film stock 'ends' arrive, all of varying quality, the Kuchar-style ability to mask lack of budget with colored plastic light covers, the way his whites assume a death green pallor from blowing up 16mm to 35mm, I don't know - it just works. Unlike all the other crap in the crap bins, it's never boring, and you either want to keep hunting more down, or never want to read his name again, or both. Show one alongside a typical Derek Jarman from the same period and art critics would have to be awake to tell them apart - surely that counts for something - since they won't be.
If your wondering why so many actors have paper collars and sleeves, the nearest I can figure is, when Milligan was doing their make-up, he forgot to take them off (make-up people use them sometimes to not smear up the costumes - did he just forget and no one told him or noticed or are they supposed to be that way?) Don't even bother wondering, just dig the underground vibe, the way the camera spins and falls over when gore scenes come, as if the only time Milligan's camera can face gore is in passing by as he's running past it in the opposite direction. Sorry, there's not time enough to care, who's that Mooney girl chopping up now? Was I supposed to even know? Let's just dig the way his dry cool British actors work with such hothouse grand guignol and the overheated nature of termites chewing every facet of a production until it's all just glorious splinters soaked in lysergic acid. I keep wondering, why is this not a musical by now? The book writes itself, and having written, runs to America. Milligan is dead of AIDS, a fact that once again makes us all grateful to John Waters for his relative monogamy. He is still with us, Female Trouble is coming out on Criterion, and we are blessed. If it was reversed, how damned we'd be then.
It's on Amazon Prime, along with a host of other Milligan gems, including # 9 (see item #12 on the 'Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime" list, THE BODY BENEATH)
2. See Halloween, Darkness and Tick-Tockality; Phantasm
One last thing too - where possible I've also kept to the spirit of the decade, breaking this list into three parts, the afternoon kid-friendly matinee, the evening teenager make-out drive-in, concluding with the late night grindhouse third-on-the-bill weirdness.
1. PLANET OF THE DINOSAURS
(1977) Dir. James K. Shea
**1/2 / Amazon Image - C-
It may not be good, but it's everything great about the 70s as my generation remember it (spaceships, sexy young adults, dinosaurs, lasers), and none off the bad (kids, parents, buzzkill morality). Marooned on a planet just like earth millions of years ago, a groovily-dressed co-ed crew from a crashed space craft eke out a living against a whole food chain of stop motion dinosaurs that stand as a reminder that before Jurassic Park there were no such things as 'velociraptors'. (Seriously, I would have remembered them as I was huge into dinosaurs all through the 70s, and they'd be here, too. Frankly, I think Spielberg invented them for the movie.)Whether you go for it will depend on your age and taste: the stop motion animation is fairly good for the budget, somewhere between Ray Harryhausen's and the ones in Land of the Lost; the foxy costumes evoke some 70s daredevil stunt gymnastics team --the men have open shirts and the women include: lovely Nylah (Pamela Bottaro), in a yellow midriff, white hiphuggers, long straight black hair; Mary Appelspeth, eaten much too soon; and Derna Wylde, who's seduction strategies expand well past the entire crew, sweeping up all hapless young male viewers. As for the men, there's a real macho boldness vs. cowardly caution thing at play, reminding us of how, in the 70s, the emerging women's lib movement found more affinity with the Burt Reynolds macho men than the wussy liberals. Planet helps us remember why - he made us--children and women--feel safer. He'd guard you by fighting - not by running or pacifying. As a kid in the 70s, living 24/7 in immanent danger, it was this theme that made TV series like Danger Island episodes on Banana Splits, and The Land of the Lost (all the hiding in caves, etc), so compelling. Every game of tag had a 'base' but not these.
2. LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK
(1972) Dir Charles B. Pierce
*** / Amazon Image - D
From its opening montage of woodsy twilight shots set to a mournful folk ballad, there's a compelling low-key inexorability to this influential mix of local witness interviews and re-enactments of what happened in Fouke, Arkansas, in the 1950s-60s when a certain Sasquatch-style monster has been smelled, seen, heard, shot at, run from, and most of all talked about around campfires and country stoves at night and in the mornings while looking at damage done to screen doors and big footprints left in the swampy loam. Acted often by the the actual witnesses themselves in their own homes in the same areas it happened, there's a real immediacy to it all as if the film itself is some mimetic charm to keep the beast away. Told with a vivid urgency balanced out with a low key modesty natural to the region, the result is an effective mix of the best elements of both re-enactment and interviews that manages to be double scary rather than half. The film was a huge word-of-mouth hit whose influence is still observable today on half the shows on cable.
To that end, the old analog fullscreen TV VHS dupe quality of the Amazon image, may actually make it more effective--adding to the authentic rusticity of it all, evoking old nature shows like they'd have on back in the 70s during the grassroots boom (see thus great collage of Ranger Rick, Waltons, Little House and Wilderness Family covers / posters). The focus is always on the natural world enabling--rare in a semi-documentary-- an eerie sense of ever-mounting twilight and onrushing darkness (2). The crappy quality enables a Blair Witch sense of helplessness, depicting a time and place with so little light pollution that a monster could be five feet from your door at night and you wouldn't see them, where to get help from a neighbor during entails hightailing it a mile through the swamp in the middle of the night, with the men off on jobs the women all home nervously sewing while the hound dog whines and mysterious howls echo outside and the cabins are as cramped as the outdoors vague and hostile.
3. CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE
(1976) Dir. Joy N Houck (written by Jim McCullough)
** / Amazon Image - B-
The success of Boggy was such that four years later, they were still coming out with these semi-true "expedition / flashback" bigfoot-themed movies, and of all those that followed, this is probably the best. Chicago University anthropology majors Rives (John David Empire of the Ants Carson) and his 'Nam vet buddy Pahoo (backwoods character actoor mainstay Dennis Fimple) head down to the Bayou as a sasquatch research project and get intertwined with locals and a creature. The scenery is all actual bayou, the locals and the town have a perfect mix of friendly and suspicious. \
It would be better if it was color corrected (you can tell future John Carpenter's regular future DP Dean Cundey's picaresque magic hour establishing shots would clean up real nice) but what the hell Amazon gives us a nice HD transfer from the Code Red source, but the source material is terribly preserved (blacks washed to a fine greenish fog) con mucho celluloid scratches, pocks, etc. - but hey, in the words of Bleeding Skull's Joseph Ziemba, "imperfection only adds to the backwoods whiff. The Black Lake setting wouldn’t feel the same without it. " And speaking of whiffs, the stole is showlened by ole Jack Elam's local 'edge of town' drunk (he loses his buddy to the creature in the prologue). Everyone who's 'been there' will feel sympathy for Elam's trying to convey the threat of a giant hairy monster to a cop while you're so trashed you can barely turn off the ignition and stagger into the holding cell.
Still the climax with the boys running headlong into the monster, their scattershot response and the weirdly open ending is very unique as is the strangely intimate bond between these two lads-they're not quite at the level of improv drunken bonding that Fonda and Oates had in Race with the Devil, but their heads are in the right low-key place (Carson makes great low-key use of lines like "What's with you and hamburgers, man?"). A refreshing change too is the way the build up involves the meeting and interviewing of so many character actors, and the film stopping for little bits of business (like a back porch country song between bigfoot witness Peckinpah regular Dub Taylor on harmonica and the writer of the film Jim McCulloch Jr. on guitar) and weird moments of futzing (there's a bit with a "Keep off the Grass" sign outside the jail).This slow pace might seem like a way to pad the time, but it was typical of the more relaxed pace of 70s nature-set movies and makes the sudden violent action more resonant. Other films in this post-Boggy subgenre (like 1976's super-boring Sasquatch, also on Prime) err too much on the side of rusticity, presuming a drawled field journal note-based voiceover and languid shots of bearded guys unpacking sound equipment off their mules will make up for the lack of actual thrills. Black Lake gets the mixture just right, and I like that the monster is never humanized or earning of sympathy, nor fully seen. It's simply an unknowable crafty thing that protects its territory in the most direct and brutal ways. So all in all, eerie noises, slow-building suspense and a good 'in-the-moment' actorly rapport that gives every moment a chance to land, a score mostly consisting of library cues, banjo licks and Stavinsky stabs, what's to strongly dislike?
4. THE CRATER LAKE MONSTER
(1977) Dir. William R. Stromberg
** / Amazon Image: A+
The gorgeous HD luster of the Crater Lake print on Amazon makes you wonder - would all these look that good if there was a decent negative and color graded transfer? Is there a good Boggy Creek or Planet of the Dinosaurs I should know about? Look at that shimmery lime green sparkle on the water surface in the top image. It doesn't even matter if the film is bad when you've got that crisp transfer and you know the monster is stop motion, even though it looks like the clay it's made out of is ever in the process of drying up, and when it's in the water we see what looks like a plastic dragon head floating in a swimming pool. There's other things to recommend about this homegrown monster film, but not too many. There's the the lame hick antics of boat rental and "tacle" salesmen who get wasted, notice the monster, and try to convince the sheriff, etc. are bemusing in a kind Mr. Wind and Mr. Kipp kind of way, but not nearly as much as Stromberg seems to think. The sheriff gets the most lines but is maybe the worst actor in the bunch. The score of library cues range from lame to uninspired, and to pad the time, a guy shoots the owner of a liquor store to get a free pint of booze (which makes sense to me, but a real alcoholic would take a bigger bottle!), there's the usual meetings of the bewildered, incredulous sheriff, the intrigued local doctor and called-in expert, having drink, looking at maps, sketches of dinosaurs, and wondering why their small town of all places has their very own plesiosaur - did the meteor heat up a dormant egg in the silt? And it all ends with a big duel between man, bulldozer, and dinosaur.
The stop motion on the beast is good and the pacing --even with all the tired bits of local color and a throwaway side story of a stranded magician and his cute assistant (who decide to pretend their daytime fishing trip is occurring at night, on the off chance the post-production people will tint in some day-for-night filtering. No chance). As with the last film, the soundtrack seems lifted straight from the library, but in the end... who cares? It's saved by the gorgeous mountain lake setting and the lustrous new HD transfer that gets the mist rising off the morning lake so completely you can see the rainbow in the shimmer. 
(1977) Dir. William Girdler
**1/2 / AI - B
(from: "Leslie of the Heretics") Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors and real animals--especially vultures, hawks, a cougar, a crazy dog pack, and a tarantula--the scene where the hawks and vultures maul the bitchy girl is terrifying because those birds are real, and they're right there in the shot, and her unease is palpable.
The key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals. Girdler doesn't do such things, I presume, and that's where the comfortable cult pleasure is for we sensitive types. Quick edits between what is clearly just well staged play wrestling with tame animals, close-ups of baring teeth, pink foamy blood, actors and stunt men yelling and running, an animal's teeth resting on someone's arm, and then the hawk looking down signals an end to the scrimmage with his cry like a gym coach's whistle. You put it together in your mind, Sergei! Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for sick freaks in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions and snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise.
It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. There may be nothing else at all to recommend it, scenery and Georges aside, but I love Day of the Animals, because even very young kids can tell when animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, no matter how many bared fangs, snarls and screams may come. Somehow, that's very reassuring, we can still be scared and intrigued but when we go to bed we don't feel sick to our stomach, we feel alive... (Full)
The Amazon Print is good except the color grading it a little intense - the result being that everyone looks magenta/red. but so what? Maybe that's the Ozone up there! (see also on Prime- Grizzly)
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INTERMISSION
This is the point in the list where the children go to bed. Are they gone? Are you sure? Did you check under the couch? Are they hiding deep within? Get them up to bed, thermodynamically speaking!
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| The images above are from Island Claws |
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Luckily these next two films look and are divino.
6. THE GREAT ALLIGATOR
(1979) Dir Sergio Martino
*** / Amazon Image: B+
Up to now we've been hanging out in the USA, in local areas like Bouke Arkansas or Crater Lake, but we mustn't forget all the imports from Italy that rounded out our drive-in and grindhouse triple bills. This endurable gem from ace genre-blender Sergio Martino, The Great Alligator is a great choice for that, for it blends Italy's then in-vogue primitive cannibal genre with Jaws via a giant alligator god who wakes up and starts eating tourists at a newly opened resort deep in an unnamed jungle (It was filmed in Sri Lanka, though the natives are notably diverse). The resort's capitalist owner Mel Ferrer tries to keep it all quiet and avoid a panic, but visiting photographer Claudio Cassinelli sees the writing on the wall and wants to alert the tourists. Resident anthropologist Barbara Bach, rocking the same wet 70s bathing suit white shirt combination Jacqueline Bissett indelibly sported in The Deep two years earlier--agrees. Too late! That night, well, hell breaks loose on land and by sea, with Bach tied to a sacrificial raft, Claudio desperately trying to untie the wet knots, as all hell breaks loose downriver between angry natives and hungry gator.
With several great if obvious miniatures, a sprawling, well-directed cast (including go-to ginger moppet Silvia Collatina, Lory del Santo, Anny Pappa) and plenty of stunts, miniatures, and termite details in abundance, especially in the ornate gator-themed wicker headgear and breast plates of the natives and in the rich sound design which weaves Stevio Cipriani swirling cocktail score gamely into a tapestry of thumping diegetic jungle drums, funky electric guitar, chanting, birdcalls, screaming and then ---suddenly -- inside the melange of noise -- a tiny splash along the water surface that quiets humans, birds, drums, on a dime- and sends the audience and natives alike jerking in its direction. What's a giant gator doing in crocodile country is addressed but is never answered, Martino would rather thrill than explain.
7. HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP
(1980) Dir. Barbara Peeters
*** (Amazon Image - A-)
In the Salmon fishing town in the Northwest somewhere, Vic Morrow and hick friends resent the local Native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena) trying to prevent the installation of a fish cannery, which is tied into an escaped testing hatchery of hyper-evolutionary salmon, turning humanoid, attacking and killing the men and forcing themselves on the women. Yeah, you heard me. Got a problem with that? Doug McLure and his liberal son break up the fight at the dance. The son goes off with Johnny to hear 'what he has to say' while Vic and friends paddle up with molotov cocktails and the monsters keep a-striking (Denise Galick, Cindy Weintraub and Lynn Theel are some of the other girls) and a cannery-sponsored genetic scientist (Ann Turkel) shows up to investigate. James Horner's subtle but familiar score of eerie strings and harp glissando stabs touches a lot of familiar bases but never gets showy, Mickey Mousy or obvious. So hey - I'll take it.
Whatever, a fast hour in, and boom all hell breaks loose in one of the best monster attacks on a local waterfront salmon festival in cinematic history. All is well. The monsters themselves are good enough to not be bad, but not bad enough to be genuinely scary- with their long arm extensions and habit of swaying back and forth like bad Igor impressionists, covered in sea weed, their incessant sexual aggression is almost refreshing in its innocence. They don't make 'em like this anymore - they make 'em like HBO does- traumatic and demeaning - instead of good-natured ad unhinged).
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8. THE TWILIGHT PEOPLE
(1972) Dir. Eddie Romero
**1/2 - Amazon Image - A
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A Philippines-filmed combination Planet Terror, The Most Dangerous Game and Island of Dr. Moreau this is one of the better horror films starring John Ashley that were cranked out in the early 70s in the land where filmmaking was fast, cheap and out of control. Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay) abducts gentleman adventurer Matt (Ashley) to use parts of brain in the wild animal people he keeps locked up in an underground cave below his heavily-guarded mansion. His daughter/assistant Neva (Pat Woodell) examines him in several sexy scenes and soon he's coming and going as he pleases, looking askance at the poor caged animal creatures, including most famously, Pam Grier as the leggy panther woman. The Bat Man is aweome, especially once he gets his wings back; other monsters are less successful, especially the still-wet 'Antelope Man'. Soon Neva and our hero are leading an escape through the caves, animal people armed with M-1 rifles, while Matt takes Dr. Gordon hostage at gunpoint the other way around to throw the grinning towheaded homosexual security guard Steinman (Jan Merlin in a great, slithery, teeth-clenched performance) off the scent.
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The image, which is surely from the recent Blu-ray, is delectable - the color correction cranked to eleven so everything glows in a green / red patina that suits the interior lighting of the first half and the jungle at dawn cross-island chase in the second. The score is rife with pizzicato strings, bongos, rolling high-hats and jazz bass. There's a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but who cares? The sight of Woodell leading her animal coterie through the jungle evokes Yeux sans Visage, and with her gorgeous long legs and game for whatever attitude, the sight of Grier leaping from the throat of one pursuing guard to the next is most galvanizing and reassuring, as is the effect of the bat man flying through the trees and around the mansion, picking off the last of the guards. In the past I've found these Filipino movies claustrophobic and oppressive-- you can feel the humidity and bugs watching-- but here the colors are all popping and the air is fresh and clean. Climb aboard and don't think twice!
(1972) Dir. Eddie Romero
**1/2 - Amazon Image - A
A Philippines-filmed combination Planet Terror, The Most Dangerous Game and Island of Dr. Moreau this is one of the better horror films starring John Ashley that were cranked out in the early 70s in the land where filmmaking was fast, cheap and out of control. Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay) abducts gentleman adventurer Matt (Ashley) to use parts of brain in the wild animal people he keeps locked up in an underground cave below his heavily-guarded mansion. His daughter/assistant Neva (Pat Woodell) examines him in several sexy scenes and soon he's coming and going as he pleases, looking askance at the poor caged animal creatures, including most famously, Pam Grier as the leggy panther woman. The Bat Man is aweome, especially once he gets his wings back; other monsters are less successful, especially the still-wet 'Antelope Man'. Soon Neva and our hero are leading an escape through the caves, animal people armed with M-1 rifles, while Matt takes Dr. Gordon hostage at gunpoint the other way around to throw the grinning towheaded homosexual security guard Steinman (Jan Merlin in a great, slithery, teeth-clenched performance) off the scent. 
The image, which is surely from the recent Blu-ray, is delectable - the color correction cranked to eleven so everything glows in a green / red patina that suits the interior lighting of the first half and the jungle at dawn cross-island chase in the second. The score is rife with pizzicato strings, bongos, rolling high-hats and jazz bass. There's a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but who cares? The sight of Woodell leading her animal coterie through the jungle evokes Yeux sans Visage, and with her gorgeous long legs and game for whatever attitude, the sight of Grier leaping from the throat of one pursuing guard to the next is most galvanizing and reassuring, as is the effect of the bat man flying through the trees and around the mansion, picking off the last of the guards. In the past I've found these Filipino movies claustrophobic and oppressive-- you can feel the humidity and bugs watching-- but here the colors are all popping and the air is fresh and clean. Climb aboard and don't think twice! 
Now we're in the tail end of the triple feature - the real murk. Yew rer rawrned
9. SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED
(1974) Dir. Michael Findlay
**1/2 / Amazon Image - B
Director Mike Findlay is either a genius or an idiot because it's very hard to nail that level of paranoia, the way in dreams you can never be sure if the inconsistencies going on around you are your misperceptions or just a result of an 'incomplete' mise en scene. You didn't get that extra element in, say, Rosemary's Baby where it's just an am I paranoid because of hormones and society or are they all in a demon cult out to steal my child? kind of thing, not an am I paranoid or are they out to get me for real or is it just this flimsy diegetic reality is so full of holes I'm waking up in reverse, into a kind of meta-Brechtian schism? kind of thing. In the words of Rosemary Woodhouse, "this is no dream this is really happening!" But she does know she's in a movie? No, that's what makes this one so complicated. You'd have to really be an idiot to think you were in 'reality' if you're a character a movie that's just half a step up from a home movie you'd shoot with your friends and watch on a small projector where dust bunnies obscure the corners of the image like spidery silhouettes and everything kind of slowly softens into an autumnal blur - you know, like life?
Still, your home movies never had a character like the Tim Carey-esque Ivan Agar as the mute body building "Indian," Laughing Crow chopping wood in the yard in a frisson bit that seems like the inspiration for similar moments in Jordan Peele's Get Out. There's lots of drinking and strangeness that again, seen through the eyes of Karen as the sort of would-be final girl / Marilyn Burns / Rosemary / only sane one in the room, is both bad movie hilarious, nightmare scary and just plain weird.
Apparently this is the restored version so there's previously edited out random bits like a dying wife crawling along with a toaster across the bathroom floor to hurl it into her husband's bath are now fully restored as is the head-scratching decapitation prologue that will leave you wondering whether the the cocoanut head with a mask on falling into the swimming pool was meant to be ceremonial (like some effigy) or a human sacrifice that's just really really badly done? Then it hits you - that's what this kind of shit's all about - film is itself ceremonial. That cocoanut scene looks so familiar I feel like I shot it myself for a super 8mm Conan-inspired film Alan and I did in 1981. That's 'uncanny' all right.
The Findlays were no fools and use their nonexistent budget to their benefit, for we can never be sure if the movie is intentionally bad, as in things aren't matching up for a reason that will be revealed later, etc. When key things seem to be missing in something we can't tell if we're supposed to notice it or it's red herring, danger signals, or directorial incompetence - is this not the root of childhood nightmares? That mix of psychic, physical and social anxiety that comes from jumbled social cues? In this case we're squarely with poor Karen who has one of the stupidest most passive and gullible boyfriends in the history of stupid gullible boyfriend who thinks cutting up her friend to use as bait in yeti traps is natural- she's hysterical for even complaining--, but hey - as a nightmare it can't be beat and the final act with all the round robin dingus dialogue and a hilariously chilling bit of 'forking' is straight up from the pages of my own childhood nightmares.
The Amazon Image taken from the usually spotty Sprockets releasing label has some nicely restored colors and deep blacks that make it, for all its crudity, far more watchable than it probably was in every other home video version. As with many on this list, the music is library cues, this time classical- lots of, I believe, Wagner and Berlioz)
10. THE RATS ARE COMING,
THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE!
(1972) Dir. Andy Milligan
* / Amazon Image - A
No one thought about rats after 1973, when the Exorcist came out, and then the cut and re-added possession scenes to already filmed movies (like Lisa and the Devil becoming House of Exorcism). That's show biz!
Getting back to Stansbury. With her pale skin, long straight black hair, willowy physique and habit of darting around all amped up and giddy with hammy homicidal rage, teasing deranged brother, chopping up her neighbor friend or lunging out at her sister from the wardrobe closet like a shot --she's a perfect embodiment of the Victorian era devil girl. Does Melora Cregar or Dame Darcy know about this movie? They must. If not, they must be told! Where's my old rotary phone?
There's some genuinely good British actors floating around aside from her, and alas her scenes are strictly supporting compared to the 'good' sister and (I keep waiting for those lashes to just lock shut) and her hunky mellow husband - both of whom do a surprisingly fine job with the material, and --- as the bedridden father. Most scenes are single shot set ups between two hammy actors trying to make a short theater piece out of every exchange, no matter how slight to the story or meandering and repetitive the lines (or improv cues). No one can ever just buy silver bullets or a flock of man-eating rats, they have to endure pages of Victorian shopkeep small talk as if Milligan thinks he is going to stumble on becoming Dickens through sheer disconcerted effort.
When enough of such scenes accrue, there's a rushed, gory, poorly edited (censored, with gore restored?) climax of gore and blood that happens so fast after all the endless two-person talking shots, your head spins. Frankly, it's awesome. Milligan's habit of shooting on 16mm and 35mm as his film stock 'ends' arrive, all of varying quality, the Kuchar-style ability to mask lack of budget with colored plastic light covers, the way his whites assume a death green pallor from blowing up 16mm to 35mm, I don't know - it just works. Unlike all the other crap in the crap bins, it's never boring, and you either want to keep hunting more down, or never want to read his name again, or both. Show one alongside a typical Derek Jarman from the same period and art critics would have to be awake to tell them apart - surely that counts for something - since they won't be.
If your wondering why so many actors have paper collars and sleeves, the nearest I can figure is, when Milligan was doing their make-up, he forgot to take them off (make-up people use them sometimes to not smear up the costumes - did he just forget and no one told him or noticed or are they supposed to be that way?) Don't even bother wondering, just dig the underground vibe, the way the camera spins and falls over when gore scenes come, as if the only time Milligan's camera can face gore is in passing by as he's running past it in the opposite direction. Sorry, there's not time enough to care, who's that Mooney girl chopping up now? Was I supposed to even know? Let's just dig the way his dry cool British actors work with such hothouse grand guignol and the overheated nature of termites chewing every facet of a production until it's all just glorious splinters soaked in lysergic acid. I keep wondering, why is this not a musical by now? The book writes itself, and having written, runs to America. Milligan is dead of AIDS, a fact that once again makes us all grateful to John Waters for his relative monogamy. He is still with us, Female Trouble is coming out on Criterion, and we are blessed. If it was reversed, how damned we'd be then.
It's on Amazon Prime, along with a host of other Milligan gems, including # 9 (see item #12 on the 'Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime" list, THE BODY BENEATH)
2. See Halloween, Darkness and Tick-Tockality; Phantasm