13 Great Films for Week X of a Pandemic (on Prime)

There's a pandemic going on outside and a bad year for spring pollen makes us indoor kids all sneezy and paranoid, thus robbing us of the schadenfreude we'd normally feel at being told we must stay inside in front of the TV all day. But that doesn't mean we don't make excellent guides through the jungle of weird and justly forgotten films from the 60s-80s with which Prime is overrun. So let me hack you a path through 13 wildly post-whatever films, starting from the first failure of CDC style checkpoints in Cassandra Crossing (1978) onwards to Italian cannibal zombies all the way back around to the past-post-apocalyptic Rats: Night of Terror--not to mention all the groovy psychedelic stops along the way. This carefully programmed series of 13 films that examine the drastic things humanity is simply too 'human' to do to save itself, until it's too late.


So, if you can still drink, o pen up another packet of powdered whiskey and sneak some peeks through the black rainbow looking glass end of reality films.

The dad of the director of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy is clearly highly qualified to tell a tale of what happens when a wounded, contaminated terrorist winds up hiding on a speeding international incident of a train, requiring colonel Burt Lancaster to make some tough decisions, like having the military in hazmat gear welding bars over all the train doors and windows so no one can escape, rerouting it onto a disused line so it can crash into a ravine (thus saving the world and the secret germ warfare program) and machine gunning anyone who stands up to them. Ingrid Thulin is the voice of compassion and reason butting his head. Passengers include Martin Sheen and Ava Gardner are an odd pair of con artists; OJ Simpson and Richard Harris are officials aboard trying diplomacy and then machine gun violence; Lionel Stander is a conductor; Lee Strasberg a stereotypical old European Jew for whom all the systemic abuse of civil liberties is just a little too familiar. Alida Vialli, Lou Costell, Sophia Lauren, John Phillip Law, and Ann Turkel all run around in the back, hoping to help or hinder. In other words it's pure 70s cinema: a bloated cast of international stars on a runaway moving vehicle and one of those unresolvable "many must die so more can live" kind of tough choices that let us sympathize with both the military and the innocents battling against the sudden cessation of freedom.

This horror film of George's offers a clear indicator why it's so important to let people shelter in their homes rather than herd them into gymnasiums. The drastically under-equipped Major Ryder and the cool whiskey flask-packed Colonel Peckham (Lloyd Hollar) figure the best way to contain an outbreak of 'Trixie' --an experimental depopulating agent designed to infiltrate the water supply like a fatal dose of really bad acid--is to round everyone in the affected sleepy PA town at 2 AM and herd them into the high school gym. Trouble for the military: this is rural PA in the early 70s, full of bitter and and armed Vietnam vets in no mood to have the military push them around yet again. Ryder could have quarantined easier just by letting everyone sleep. But almost from the get-go we've got infectious military drums as the doomed army unit scrambles into gear during the chaotic, very well-edited rattatatat scenes of the military trying to set up a field office in the local doctor's cramped offices, treating everyone in town like they're criminals, not telling them what's going on ("We've been promised bullhorns and loudspeakers," notes Ryder. "No telling when they're going to arrive!")

It's long been one ugly looking film but recently it's gotten a loving restoration; Prime's print glows with warm colors, at least in the beginning where the blue eyes of a blonde girl seem otherworldly and rampant fire burns heavenly orange and the naked skin of nurse Lane Carroll is a heavenly in its rosiness. Romero edits in the same multiple camera whiplash style that made Dawn of the Dead so unique in its structure.

As with our own codename: Corona, Trixie travels faster than the ability of the governmental operatives to contain it, and by the time the right response arrives we have to widen the perimeter of the outbreak and start all over again. ("If Trixie jumps perimeter, this could could travel across the entire continent.") When instructed to send in one of the scientists who worked on the virus, they grab Richard "Dummies! Dummies!" France (Romero's equivalent to Cronenberg's Joe Silver) "Jesus Christ this is so RANDOM!" he shouts. He's masterful, and centers the film with that great bullhorn voice.

Lastly, you have to love any film as clued in the bliss of the morning hours, it's a film that starts at one in the morning and sees the sun come up on a whole new world about halfway through. It's not unlike the morning after one of those old SU block parties in the late 80s, with zonked people staggering around and the sense the town has been altered by chemicals and nothing will ever be the same again. If you were there, you know what I mean. And there's Lynn Lowry as a sheltered young hippie-ish girl who winds up losing her virginity to her father during one of the more disturbing sequences. They're all going insane so we can't really judge him by the same criteria as the sane, but there you go.

The remake is also on Prime, and pretty good as far as these things go, but now that it's been restored to glowy perfection, the original is the way to go (PS -There are numerous uploads of this film on Prime, at least where I am, so if the image isn't sublime, try another link.)

Right up there with Nightmare City and Contamination as far as recently-discovered Italian psychotronica I can return to again and again when the never-ending film marathon of my life runs dry of viable programming options. I've already seen Raiders at least four times since discovering it in 2017. There are so many reasons it rocks: Christopher Connelly and Tony King as a pair of mercs who own a boat together, with Hawksian attention paid to cigarettes, alcohol, and manly camaraderie (they also have a helicopter pilot buddy played by Ivan Rassimov). Giola Scol is an archaeologist flown from her Machu Picchu dig to a remote oil derrick where George Hilton and company are raising a Russian sub, due to an Atlantean plaque found down on the ocean floor. Then... shortly after the sub is raised, so too comes.... Atlantis! This triggers a strange reaction in a certain percentage of the nearby population, turning them all into marauding savages, driving around in their pimped out bikes and ride slaughtering everyone who's not infected with their strange madness. The leader calls his gang 'The Interceptors' and announces the return of the Atlanteans and that all others "but one" must die. Time to get the molotov cocktails lined up, and--luckily--find a warehouse full of guns and ammo.
Naturally we wonder if John Carpenter ever saw this movie as it bears striking resemblance to his last great film: 2001's Ghosts of Mars. In both films the ghosts of a violent, ancient genocidal race are accidentally awakened from their timeless sleep, possessing normal humans to dress up like metal mutants, wiping out all non-infected human life in preparation for the original inhabitant's return (2).

Naturally with the word Raiders in the alternate title, one expects a certain amount of loot grabbing (a lot of films in the 1982-3 era had to have ancient treasures laying on altars deep within booby-trap filled tombs and pyramids), but that's towards the end, during the big super-weird climax. Mostly there's a lot of molotov cocktails being thrown and guns and rides and great real time stunts, like people jumping out of a helicopter onto a speeding bus, or vice versa. The whole thing leaps around giddily from one scrape to the next, but we can always figure out what's going on but never what's going to happen next, making it 90 minutes of action packed awesomeness. It's not on DVD so Prime is the only place to see it.

Sandahl Bergman is the goddess of her little slice of the post-'cancellation' wasteland but decides to wander to the north with a handsome idiot (since it's pre-ordained by her oracle) and in the process runs into scrapes with everyone from New Yoahk-accented mutants to crazed warriors in a post-war ruined city and even acolytes of a 'one god' mutant boy who can control matter with his green flashing eyes. There's also a powdered-wig naturalist and his tutu-wearing henchman; and decadent werewolf aesthetes listening to a gramophone (led by David Brandon).  Sandahl and her right hand woman endure the rack, flogging, the old trash compacting wall cliffhanger, and display a lot of cool feminist force. Israeli auteur Ari Nesher wanted to make sure women weren't objectified, but man do we become thankfully acquainted with Bergman's incredibly lithe dancer legs. Symbols of great strength as well as lithe dancer grace and beguilement.

Bits like Sandahl's being startled into sword out readiness after stepping on a stray rubber duck by the werewolf elite's swimming pool all come tumbling and it's very well paced, relentlessly entertaining and packed with crazy songs, rock anthems galore. The Prime print is great clearly taken from the latest must-have Blu-ray edition. (full review)