(1962)
Dir - Gene Nelson
Overall: MEH
Actor-turned-director Gene Nelson had a hefty career behind the lens in television, but his first theatrically released gig was handling the routine, low-budget Hand of Death, (Five Fingers of Death). The makeup effects by Bob Mark are a combination of Easter Island statue, sea creature and Ben Grimm, but the charcoal complexion and thick lips also unfortunately and unintentionally give it an aura of exaggerated blackface which is likely to raise some contemporary viewer's eyebrows. Writer/producer Eugene Ling's script is bare-bones stuff, dedicating the first half to pleasantries between character and some lab coat banter, with the rest of it simply revolving around John Agar in a hat and trench coat stumbling around town and occasionally murdering someone by accident in his now mutated despair. Keen eyes may recognize The Three Stooges' Joe Besser and a toddler-sized Butch Patrick in cameos, but besides the aforementioned garish monster makeup, the film ultimately ends up being too bland to have enough B-movie goofy charm. At least is is only an hour long though.
(1964)
Dir - Del Tenney
Overall: GOOD
Filmed in Stamford, Connecticut and marking the film debut of both Roy Scheider and writer/director/producer Del Tenney, The Curse of the Living Corpse is a textbook, old dark house/whodunit that has some admirably macabre details. Opening of course with a reading of the will, the recently maybe-deceased father suffers from a fear of being buried alive, so he takes the logical precautions in case of his misdiagnosed demise, only for said precautions to be systematically ignored by the greedy inheritors of his fortune. Tenney's script cherry picks numerous cliches and the equally stock premise plays out with virtually zero surprises, but the angle to announce every character's specific phobia in order to predictably set up how each will meet their end is still a fun detail to play around with. The kill scenes are brutal enough for the tame time period, plus Scheider's posh accent is a hoot and the future A-lister gets to chew the scenery as is appropriate. The movie is not as atmospherically spooky or tightly plotted as would be preferred, but it has its tongue in the right cheek and Carnival of Soul's Candace Hilligoss appearing in her second and last leading role is something for genre fans to get a kick out of.
(1969)
Dir - Henri Pachard
Overall: WOOF
The third kind of movie from Henri Pachard, (who would go on to have a decades' long career behind the lens in porn), The Erotic Circus, (Orgy in the Psycho House), is a puzzling exploitation relic that nearly gets by on its incompetently embarrassing strangeness. The "story" begins and ends with "pervert drug dealer goes to visit his pervert sister who sleeps with her pervert son", and it is told over the course of an hour with either incessant sitar or surfer music on the soundtrack. More of an aggressively incoherent montage than anything else, it seems as if it escaped from someone's dingy basement and was made with zero dollars. More than half of the seven, highly unphotogenic people on screen would never appear in anything again, nearly all of the dialog is done away with inside of the first twenty-odd minutes, and the entire thing is filmed in bright, garish lighting with the cinematography skills of a chimp with no arms. It is a stretch to say that Pachard was simply churning out his own no-rent, regional version of a nudie movie since the merger of Psycho, Herschell Gordon Lewis crap, and Easy Rider wields far stranger, borderline concerning results than it even sounds like it would on paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment