70's American Horror Part Ninety-Seven

MYSTERY IN DRACULA'S CASTLE
(1973)
Dir - Robert Totten
Overall: MEH

 

This installment of The Wonderful World of Disney anthology series of TV movies merely teases at being in the horror camp.  Instead, Mystery in Dracula's Castle concerns a gang of kids who are making their own vampire movie, only to run into some jewel thieves that are hanging out at their lighthouse shooting location.  Not only is there no Dracula, there is also no mystery and no castle.  Cutesy and non-threatening, the lack of monsters or any supernatural elements will likely displease anyone coming into the proceedings based on either the title or the fact that as kid-friendly as Disney has always been, they did produce a number of notable horror cartoons as frequently featured in their Disney's Halloween Treat specials throughout the years.  A couple of friendly faces show up, (including Clu Gulager and John Fiedler), a dog that survives gets a lot of screen time, and the monster movie kids are not too annoying, all things considered.  Still, the stakes are too low for anyone to give a shit about anything going on here and the wacky high-jinks are worth more of a yawn than a chuckle.

 

SATAN'S CHILDREN
(1975)
Dir - Joe Wiezycki
Overall: WOOF
 
Christ, whoever thought that Satanism could be so fucking boring?  If Florida was "good" at anything during the 1970s, it was churning out unwatchably lame exploitation junk heaps and Satan's Children is as unwatchable as junk heaps get.  Directed by Joe Wiezycki with the type of enthusiasm that comatose human vegetables would find lifeless, it plays almost entirely with no musical score, flat wide shots, and actors who look like they are either on antidepressants or just miserable being in front of the camera.  The story itself is as downtrodden as the viewing experience is not entertaining.  It concerns an unlikeable asshole who runs away from his even more unlikable father and sister, only to get raped by a bunch of men and then dumped where a commune of hippy Satanists do things like act fatigued, argue, sway around while praising Lucifer, punish each other for having homosexual thoughts, and listen to what some also lazy looking asshole named Simon says.  The good news is that Wiezycki never made another movie again so at least we were sparred further abominations of his particular brand of no-effort garbage-peddling.

 

THE ASTRAL FACTOR
(1978)
Dir - John Florea/Gene Fowler Jr./Arthur C. Pierce
Overall: MEH

The last movie from veteran B-filmmakers Gene Fowler Jr. and Arthur C. Pierce, (at least in an uncredited capacity since John Florea got the official director title), The Astral Factor, (The Astral Fiend, Invisible Strangler), has a slew of familiar faces on board and a hilariously terrible poster, but the sensational premise is undermined by an idling presentation.  It was re-edited and re-released straight to video in the mid-80s in a version that mercifully cut ten minutes out; ten minutes that were not missed.  Frank Ashmore miraculously learns how to astral project, turn himself invisible, and electroshock people with his eyes or something by means that are never properly explained, and he goes on a killing spree after escaping from prison, targeting various ladies who tattled on him.  Robert Foxworth is the detective who is tasked with taking Ashmore down and he does this by having snooze-worthy conversations with every other actor on screen, resulting in an aimlessly lifeless watch.  Because Ashmore's bad guy has the power to not be seen, well, we hardly see him anywhere except in a couple of flashbacks and melodramatic mugging shots where he confronts his mommy issues.  The whole thing ends with Foxworth firing a machine gun wildly inside of a house, followed by some abysmal special effects that send Ashmore off into some ether dimension, but most viewers will probably have given up long before this.

70's American Horror Part Ninety-Six

SUPERBEAST
(1972)
Dir - George Schenck
Overall: WOOF

The only directorial effort from producer George Schenck, Superbeast was shot in the Philippines because who wants to spend more money than they need to when making disposable exploitation crap?  Of course we have Vic Díaz, of course we have cheap monster make-up, and of course the movie sucks.  Reading a plot synopsis would be a hundred times more exciting than anything in the actual finished product, which is saying something because the plot synopsis is a hundred times more dull than it sounds.  Antoinette Bower is a scientist or something who travels to the Philippines for some reason and halfway through the movie she finally meets a guy who is hunting deformed people who are experimented on by another scientist.  Bower looks as if she is appearing in the movie out of spite, but her costars are just as challenged when it comes to emoting, not that they have anything at all to work with.  To say that nothing happens in this movie would be a grand understatement and it seems to have been designed for no one to be able to find a single redeemable quality therein.  Mission accomplished then.

 

LOGAN'S RUN

(1976)
Dir - Michael Anderson
Overall: GOOD

A fun and dated sci-fi spectacle from a decade that produced its fair share of them, Logan's Run fuses dystopian and utopian ideas together with popcorn-munching glee.  It was in development hell for a number of years before MGM finally got it off the ground with English director Michael Anderson, producer Saul David, and screenwriter David Zelag Goodman at the helm, adapting the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson.  Equipped with a hefty budget for its era, it presents a 23rd century that looks exactly like the mid 1970s, with one-piece uniforms for the guys, colorful and silky garments for the ladies, shots of toy monorails buzzing around the miniature city, a sparkling robot in an ice cave, loud furniture, a shopping mall converted into the youth-populated setting, lush architecture, holograms, electronic blips and boops on the soundtrack, and the famous carousel ceremony where citizens willingly levitate towards their doom.  The plot is adherent to silly and inconsistent character behavior and rushed plausibility jumps, but its more dark themes about hedonistic indulgence and submissiveness to machines never get too heavy, with an upbeat ending that sends mankind off into a possibly enlightened era where everyone can rebuild, grow old, and still enjoy their indulgences.

HUMAN EXPERIMENTS

(1979)

Dir - Gregory Goodell
Overall: MEH

Before switching to television for the rest of his career, filmmaker Gregory Goodell scored Geoffrey Lewis to be a scuzzy mad scientist of sorts in the women-in-prison exploitation romp Human Experiments, (Beyond the Gate).  Garnishing a spot on the U.K's video nasty list, it is a typically miserable watch since our protagonist is a wrongly convicted felon with no friends or family who was taken advantage of by scumbag men her whole life before being in the wrong place at the wrong time and sentenced to a correctional facility for a homicide that she did not commit.  Once incarcerated, Linda Haynes gets gaslit, brutalized, and has her mental fortitude diminished to the breaking point, making this the antithesis of a "feel good movie".  This is purposeful though since Goodell is going for downtrodden ickiness and he peppers the film with wretched characters, loathsome subject matter, and uncomfortable scenes, some of which are Italian-flavored in their lack of logic, (like a prison escape where Haynes is inexplicably overwhelmed by every manner of insects and copious amounts of them at that).  Lewis misses an opportunity to villainously ham it up, but Haynes pulls out all of the stops as the anguished victim, plus it at least kind of works out in the end.

70's American Horror Part Ninety-Five

MY BROTHER HAS BAD DREAMS

(1972)

Dir - Robert J. Emery
Overall: WOOF

 

Some regional exploitation out of Florida, My Brother Has Bad Dreams, (Scream Bloody Murder), suffers from a lack of urgency as well as a predictable story involving a dweebish recluse who suffers from an acute form of "only in bad screenplays" mental illness.  Nick Kleinholz III, (whose only film credits are this and writer/director Robert J. Emery's previous movie Sign of Aquarius), plays such a recluse, held up in his family's mansion with his older sister who refuses to get him psychiatric help even though he sleeps with mannequins and pretends that his mother is still alive after witnessing their father murder her as a child.  Kleinholtz also masturbates when spying on his sister naked but in her defense, that may be the one weird thing that he does which alludes her.  When a Vietnam vet drifter shows up and goes skinny dipping with KIeinholtz because when in Rome, things eventually get out of hand once we hit about an hour in.  We only get four speaking characters in this and all of their conversation revolves around how not stable Kleinholtz is, so we get the point long before everyone starts to get murdered.  Besides a few nightmare sequences and half-assed sleazy bits, it is a wearisome watch that inexplicably ends with a shark attack.  So at least there is that.

 

SONG OF THE SUCCUBUS

(1975)
Dir - Glenn Jordan
Overall: MEH

Originally airing on ABC's The Wild World of Mystery, Song of the Succubus was produced by Don Kirshner from The Monkees fame, has Brooke Adams, George Gaynes, and a rock band called Moon taking up many minutes of screen time playing their schmaltzy songs, plus oh yeah, there is a Victorian ghost who haunts the frontman.  Adams plays both the ghost and an up-and-coming singer/actor, plus the plot revolves around the band having squabbles with their management, getting a gig on a TV program, and supernatural possession shenanigans. Narratively threadbare, the production is of the typical shot-on-tape variety that many a television movie from the era was stuck with, making this non-existent on effective spooky atmosphere.  It is dated, goofy, boring, and irritating, especially involving the never-funny antics of the band who oddly role play with each other and live together. Yet despite the aforementioned The Monkees TV program which was also ridiculous yet gifted with the charismatic Davey Jones, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Michael Nesmith, these guys and one gal here have no such infectious charm, let alone acting or comedic chops.  Not that the movie which they are stuck in gives them anything to work with.

 

DEATH AT THE LOVE HOUSE
(1976)
Dir - E.W. Swackhamer
Overall: MEH

A formulaic ABC Movie of the Week with a tale that has had countless variants over the decades, Death at the Love House could be worse, but it also probably never had a chance to be any better.  Robert Wagner and the ever-busy-on-the-small-screen Kate Jackson play a married author couple who rent out the house of a long dead Hollywood starlet that was once sleeping with Wagner's father.  They plan to write a book on said starlet, (played by Marianna Hill), and uncover some lurid details, like how hardly anyone that they talk to was a fan of her and most freely admitting that she was a man-stealing and career-ruining, vindictive diva.  Designed as a ghost story with all of the trimmings, Wagner falls victim to Hill's spell via a painting of her, Jackson gets both annoyed and gaslit, there is a creepy caretaker that knows more than she lets on, and it all plays out as you would expect, with everything even catching on fire in the end.  The soft focus photography is nice and dated, the slightly menacing music never stops, Jackson gives the material a noble effort, and the spacious old house looks intimidating, but the by-numbers story is too easy to check out on.

70's American Horror Part Ninety-Four

GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TO COUNT DRACULA?
(1971)
Dir - Laurence Merrick
Overall: WOOF

Many Z-grade exploitation movies have been described as "comedies" possibly in an attempt to excuse their nonsensical ineptitude and the baffling, counter-culture nonsense that is Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? falls into such a lot.  The only thing hilarious about it is that it was allegedly a gay porno called Does Dracula Really Suck?, (Dracula and the Boys), in its original form, though accounts vary as to the authenticity of such a claim.  In any event, writer/director Laurence Merrick only made three films before his death in 1977 and this was the second of them.  A movie that has all of the snooze-inducing boredom found in unprofessional filmmaking, it concerns an undead asshole doing a bad Béla Lugosi impression who owns a nightclub, has a pet tiger, a gorilla, some kind of deformed servant, and various vampire ladies at his disposal before he sets his sights on a particular gal who he spends about seventy minutes of this seventy-seven minute crud rock making mindless small talk with.  The color schemes are tacky and there are strange moments scattered about, but this is an embarrassing mess that dips its toes into Manos: The Hands of Fate terrain without being nearly as riotous.

SO EVIL, MY SISTER
(1974)
Dir - Reginald Le Borg
Overall: MEH

The final film from director Reginald Le Borg, So Evil, My Sister, (Psycho Sisters, The Sibling), is a sloppily plotted psychological thriller of sorts, spearheaded by Golden Era scream queen Faith Domergue and later era scream queen Susan Strasberg.  These leading ladies play a pair of siblings who each prove to be pulling a con on the other involving Strasberg's money and dead husband.  There is also an overly-chipper douchebag who cannot read the room, a dim-witted handyman who scares everyone, somebody in a stupid rubber mask who is also scaring everyone, and cops that are surveying the goings-on at the sister's beach house for reasons that eventually reveal themselves.  Most of the characters act like dumb-dumb doo-doo heads and the plot twist is a combination of "Huh?", laughably stupid, and lame.  Allegedly, Le Borg's initial cut was even more drab than the finished product, with producers adding in an opening car chase and a vehicular explosion.  These moments as well as some random nightmare sequences jive awkwardly with the humdrum story, but at least such desperate attempts to give the movie some pizazz are appreciated.  Otherwise, this is mundane stuff.

 

THE LAST DINOSAUR
(1977)
Dir - Alexander Grasshoff/Tsugunobu Kotani
Overall: MEH

Japanese studio Tsuburaya Productions and America's Rankin/Bass Productions collaborated on three  tokusatsu films and the first of them was The Last Dinosaur, (Kyokutei Tankensen Pōrābōra).  It has the ridiculous premise of a billionaire big game hunter traveling to the polar caps in order to kill a twenty-to-forty foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex with a riffle; a Tyrannosaurus rex which somehow lives there within a tropical climate.  This is not even the most implausible aspect of the film though since it also finds a way to let the bulbous and screaming curmudgeon Richard Boone make-out with blonde bombshell Joan Van Ark.  Sticking with good ole fashioned suitmation and model work, the special effects seem laughably out of touch considering that this was released the same year as Star Wars.  Boone is hilariously annoying and gruff, but one could hardly blame him for what dribble he has to work with.  The film is a snooze-fest long before all of the characters get marooned for several months and make merry by killing animals and fending off the primitive natives.  People yelling, random horn blares on the soundtrack, and embarrassing shots of stuntmen in rubber dinosaur suits make for some unintended giggles, but that still leaves over ninety-minutes of sluggish crud to sit through.

70's American Horror Part Ninety-Three

GARGOYLES
(1972)
Dir - Bill L. Norton
Overall: MEH

Notable as the first film that Stan Winston worked on, Gargoyles was the November 21st, 1972 entry of The New CBS Tuesday Night Movies program and the first of a career's worth of works in television for director Bill L. Norton.  Shot on New Mexico desert highways as well as Carlsbad Caverns Natural Park, the titular monsters look about as good as the best Star Trek aliens and Norton chose to present them in slow motion for most of their scenes, which does nothing to enhance their otherworldliness.  In fact it becomes more difficult to take the creatures seriously as things go on, especially when they are shown in a non-threatening light while reading books, hatching from eggs while cooing, speaking English with artificially wobbled voices, and riding horses even though they have wings and can fly.  While the concept is unsettling of slumbering demons awakening to reap havoc amongst the human race in an age-old war to defy their creator, (in other words, these gargoyles are meant to be Satan's army), only the first act provides any mysterious menace.  Still, the novelty of watching none other than Bernie Casey as the head gargoyle is a hoot in and of itself.

 

TRACK OF THE MOON BEAST
(1976)
Dir - Richard Ashe
Overall: WOOF
 
Some New Mexico regional junk, Track of the Moon Beast was rightfully lambasted on a later episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is exactly where such a dull piece of celluloid belongs.  It is also telling that the film was shot in 1972 yet failed to find a distributor for four years, ultimately debuting on television by a station that must have been desperate for content.  This marks the only time that Richard Ashe's was behind the lens and it was inexplicably co-authored by Bill Finger, who created none other than Batman with Bob Kane nearly forty-years prior.  In any event, the movie is caca.  A lazy riff on pick-any-wolf-man story, it is laughably more ridiculous since Chase Cordell's hapless mineralogist gets hit in the head with a rock and then somehow turns into a lizard beast when the moon is out.  He also has a Native American buddy that lists all of the ingredients in his stew, as well as spouting some expository nonsense about an ancient legend that foretells the title creature's coming.  The performances are abysmally wooden and Ashe's direction mostly consists of long shots that do not cut away until everyone is done with the scene, creating one of the most insultingly boring and D-rent dung heaps that the 1970s ever produced.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY
(1978)
Dir - Radley Metzger
Overall: MEH

Nearly four decades had passed since Hollywood attempted a version of John Willard's 1922 stage play The Cat and the Canary and filmmaker Radley Metzger, (who had a significant career making soft and hardcore porn movies), hardly seems like the logical choice to bring such an antiquated tale to life in the late 70s.  A British and American co-production whose wide release was held up for three years by a lawsuit with the distributors, it is as formulaic in its plotting as any other whodunit.  Metzger resists the urge to load the film with nudity or eroticism, but there is a lesbian couple present and he does add more ghastly ingredients like blood and shots of torture equipment.  Alex Thomson's cinematography creates some menace here or there, (either with claustrophobic closeups or wide shots which show off the vastness of the sparsely-decorated mansion ), but the updated presentation hardly improves upon the more spooky black and white atmospherics of previous versions.  It also replaces all the humor with mean-spirited cynicism, making it a downer of a watch that answers the question of what the Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard classic would be like if it had a miserable tone.

70's American Horror Part Ninety-Two

THREE ON A MEATHOOK
(1972)
Dir - William Girdler
Overall: WOOF

Filmed in his native Kentucky at Lake Cumberland specifically, Three on a Meathook was the debut from regional movie-maker William Girdler who went on to do a steady handful of such films until his untimely death in 1978.  This continues a trend of horror movies that claimed to be inspired by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein yet have about as much to do with Gein's exploits as an episode of Groovie Goolies does.  Here, James Pickett murders a bunch of attractive women that he offers to stay in his house when their automobile breaks down, (despite the stern warnings from his father who knows what his son is capable of), then Pickett forgets that he did this, feels guilty about it, and wanders around so that we can be bored to tears with wretched musical numbers, some nudity, plenty more walking around, and bland conversation.  Pickett eventually falls for a nice girl in town and every human watching can correctly surmise how that relationship is going to end up, (i.e. not goodly), and sadly such an inevitable conclusion is a slog to sit through, even with its twist ending in tow.

THE HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES
(1973)
Dir - Paul Harrison
Overall: MEH

The last film to be directed by Paul Harrison who mostly worked in television, The House of Seven Corpses has a cornball premise that is anything but inventive, yet there are moments that have a spooky-by-way-of-embarrassing charm to them.  Opening with that age old movie-within-a-movie gag where the audience is not aware that it is a movie-within-a-movie gag, things follow a foreseeable path as a low budget Gothic horror film is being shot on location in a house with a mysteriously tragic past.  John Carradine is here as said abode's owner who ruins takes by complaining about their inaccuracy and giving everyone an expository dialog tour so that we learn just how all of the former tenants died there.  Things only kick into supernatural gear within the last twenty-odd minutes, which gives us too much time to spend with the rest of our stock characters, including a cranky director, his slacker crew, a prima-donna leading lady who is past her prime, a blonde starlet who is not that bright, and a cynical veteran thespian.  We only get one walking corpse instead of the seven that are alluded to in the title, but it looks nice and decrepit once it finally show up and the Utah Govenor's Mansion provides an ideal setting.  Still, the set pieces are all clumsily done and the macabre schlock does not go far enough to warrant sitting through the entire thing.

THE CAR
(1977)
Dir - Elliot Silverstein
Overall: MEH

In the annals of haunted automobile movies, Elliot Silverstein's The Car is considered one of the poorest, namely because it is too goofy to take seriously, despite the fact that everyone involved chooses to take it seriously.  A hybrid of two superior Steven Spielberg movies, (namely Duel and Jaws), it concerns a supernaturally possessed, 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III that inexplicably starts running over pedestrians while apparently only being immune to a cemetery and moments where the script needs it to stay in park.  There are some recognizable mugs on board who give it their all, (John Marley, Ronny Cox, R.G. Armstrong, and James Brolin in the lead), but they all come off as silly when faced against a cartoonish premise that should be played for laughs yet never is.  To be fair though, Silverstein stages the numerous attack sequences in a suspenseful manner and the car stunts are well-executed.  Long moments of silence are jarringly broken up by the Continental's roaring engine and blaring horn, plus the car's tweaked features such as the flat-black paint job, low roof, massive bumper, and lack of door handles makes it just otherworldly enough to be threatening on paper.  The pacing slags with some useless domestic side arcs, but it delivers enough unintentionally funny charm for your average bad movie enthusiast.

70's American Horror Part Ninety-One

DEAFULA

(1975)
Dir - Peter Wechsberg
Overall: WOOF

A novelty film as the title would suggest, Deafula has the distinction of being a rare genre movie done in American Sign Language.  Writer/director/lead actor Peter Wechsberg, (Peter Wolf), was a member of the Connecticut-based National Theater of the Deaf before making this his cinematic debut, filming it in Portland, Oregon where it debuted in its initial and completely soundless form.  Infrequent musical passages and narration where added later for wide release, but the movie remains primarily silent and unfortunately primarily tedious. Wechsberg's intentions are admirable, but he is clearly working within meager means and with insufficient talent at his disposal.  His fake papier-mâché nose and vampire getup is ridiculous, the story is moronic, and the staging is persistently awkward due to lousy cinematography and drab pacing which makes long, long scenes of no audio come off as both ugly and insufferably boring.  If properly atmospheric or visually experimental, the film could have endured as something more than just an historical footnote but alas, this is dull and amateurish movie-making first and foremost.

 

ORCA
(1977)
Dir - Michael Anderson
Overall: MEH

 

Shot in Canada, Southern Europe, and the US with a British director at the helm and Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis setting the whole thing in motion, Orca, (Orca: The Killer Whale), was one of the many, (many), inevitable Jaws knock-offs that is nowhere near as good as Steven Spielberg's blockbuster.  It deserves its own level of infamy for doing the whole "killer sea beast is out for vengeance against humans" thing a full ten years before Jaws 4: The Revenge was unleashed.  Every character on screen taking the insultingly stupid story seriously aside, the film is also notable for featuring a real life unhinged Richard Harris in the lead, who was shithouse drunk, suffered a mental breakdown on set, and insisted on endangering himself by doing his own stunts.  While we get an unpleasant whale miscarriage and murder early on which sets off the daddy orca on its quest for blood, things quickly stall from there, with sparse whale attacks and characters having the same conversions over and over again, trying to convince each other that yes, they are in fact being targeted by a deep sea apex predator.  It is a slick and well-shot production, but also a ridiculous and boring one that pretends that it is neither.

NIGHTMARE IN BLOOD
(1978)
Dir - John Stanley
Overall: MEH

A meta horror movie spoof before such things became more abundant, Nightmare in Blood has an appropriate person behind the lens, being San Fransisco's Creature Features host John Stanley.  This was Stanley's only crack at making his own bit of celluloid and while his tongue-in-cheek heart is in the right place, the results are far from clever.  Jerry Walter plays a ham-fisted actor who also happens to be a real vampire, appearing in character at all times when he agrees to be the guest of honor at a horror convention held in a spacious movie theater, bringing the real Burke and Hare along with him as cronies.  There is also a Van Helsing-like vampire hunter and a pretentious guy who speaks with unwavering calmness and whose religion is comic books, so we get plenty of nerdy eye candy, references, and Easter eggs scattered about.  Stanley's directorial chops lack agency though, plus he and co-writer/producer Ken Davis' script forgets to put anything funny into the mix, so the film plays off as awkward and dry for such intentionally goofy material.  It can only be seen as a failure in what it attempts, but it is a celebration of the genre that has some quirkiness to it for those who are forgiving.