Wednesday, November 13, 2024

70's American Horror Part One-Hunred and Four

BRAIN OF BLOOD
(1971)
Dir - Al Adamson
Overall: WOOF
 
Several of the most awful movies on planet earth, (or presumably any other planet), came from the helm of Al Adamson, and Brain of Blood, (The Creature's Revenge, The Oozing Skull, The Undying Brain), exemplifies his routinely pour output as well as any of them.  It has production values that are one notch bellow a Herschell Gordon Lewis film, actors who perform as if they are doing so under court-ordered community service, stock music that disappears for noticeably long portions so that scenes can play out in real time, head-scratching editing, multiple plot lines converging with the grace of hyperactive rodents with diarrhea, and of course most of all, the type of pacing that could make a person overdosing on Adderall fall into a decade-long coma.  We have a cancer-ridden ruler of a fictional country deciding to have his brain transplanted into a fresh body by a mad scientist who keeps random women chained up in a dungeon so that Angelo Rossitto can torment them, plus some other people are trying to stop said ruler's resurrection, plus there is a woman with shoe-leather skin, massive cleavage, and a foot-tall mountain of bleach blonde hair because why wouldn't there be?  Every once in a while something happens that is stupid and awkward enough to laugh at, but the movie feels nine-hundred hours longer than it actually is.

WARLOCK MOON
(1973)
Dir - William Herbert
Overall: MEH

Though its poster alludes to this being some kind of vampire romp, Warlock Moon eventually reveals itself to be a Satanic supernatural thriller, minus the thrills of course.  The only movie of any kind from writer/director/producer William Herber, it was filmed at an abandoned sanatorium which stands in for an abandoned spa, and the script causes one to wonder if the only reason that the film exists is because the people who made it simply came across the setting and cobbled together some hogwash to shoot there.  Done on a noticeable shoestring, it has some curious elements like a ridiculous boyfriend character who dresses up in disguises and does silly voices for his girlfriend, an old lady who loves putting drugs in people's tea, random hillbilly hallucinations, and the credits wrapping up before the movie actually does.  As one could guess, the pacing is dreadful and the performances are nothing to write home about, but writer/director/producer Herbert at least exhibits some Herk Harvey-level ambition.  His attempts at macabre atmosphere are amateurish at best and the flimsy attempts at gaslighting everything that Laurie Walters witnesses are hilariously pathetic, but its poorly-realized exploitative value goes for and achieves some intentional strangeness.
 
THE BEAST AND THE VIXENS
(1974)
Dir - Ray Nadeau
Overall: WOOF
 
Only the 1970s would think of combining softcore smut with a Sasquatch terrorizing Big Bear, California.  The only film directed by actor Ray Nadeau, The Beast and the Vixens, (Beauties and the Beast), opens with a smiling narrator giving us the bare-bones rundown on what Bigfoot is, but the gears switch to naked people doing naked stuff quickly after that.  Two couples go camping, have sex before and after such a trip, and a few of shots of somebody in easily the most embarrassing yeti costume of all time are thrown in before we meet some rapist criminals in the woods so that more naked bodies can be on display, except crying this time.  Oh and worry not, there is also some wretched hippie folk music thrown in because again, the 1970s.  Nadeau and his crew of people who presumably were never paid have nothing to work with here, merely pointing the camera at actors that no one has ever heard of who are playing characters that are underwritten, and all in a plot that seems as if it was conceived of three seconds before shooting started.  An unwatchably boring mess, the dialog is all ADRed, the soundtrack is all library-cued, every shot looks terrible, and it just signifies how shoddy and embarrassing of a production this is.  Even for 70s Bigfoot movie fanatics, (Is there such a thing?), this should be avoided at all costs.

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