Thursday, September 14, 2023

70's American Horror Part Forty-Nine

CARNIVAL OF BLOOD
(1970)
Dir - Leonard Kirtman
Overall: WOOF

Before he ended up in real movies, poor Burt Young found himself collecting a paycheck in Leonard Kirtman's unwatchable debut Carnival of Blood, which technically belongs on any honest list of the worst movies ever made.  Shot guerilla style on location at Coney Island with actors who do not know what acting is, it has some of the most unforgivingly grating performances that have ever been captured by cameras.  Every character aggressively talks over each other like a, (very), poor man's attempt at John Cassaveetes' cinéma vérité grittiness.  The results are certainly gritty, but more like a dumpster full of diapers and open ketchup packets than anything artistically meritable.  It is as if Kirtman got a hold of a camera and assumed that he could simply improvise a slasher film by asking random people at an amusement park to be in it, except that the only direction he gave them was to fight and talk louder than whoever else was talking.  Throw in some nonsensical sound effects, rock music to fill random spaces, and then editing all of the embarrassingly unprofessional footage together while blindfolded and you get some semblance of just how much of a travesty on the medium of cinema this piece of shit is.
 
THE SAVAGE BEES
(1976)
Dir - Bruce Geller
Overall: MEH

One of three directorial efforts from Mission Impossible creator Bruce Geller, the NBC Monday Night at the Movies installment The Savage Bees is a typical Jaws-adjacent bit of nature horror where people try desperately to get city officials to take an external animal threat seriously before it is too late.  Scripted by Guerdon Trueblood, (who had a particular penchant for stories about killer somethings by also authoring Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, Ants!, this film's sequel Terror Out of the Sky, and Jaws 3-D), the TV presentation means that the bulk of the running time is delegated to people talking about insect mayhem as opposed to actually showing any.  When swarms of aggressive African bees actually do descend upon their prey, it is depicted merely through sound effects, sinister music, and busy camerawork, that is until the last twenty minutes when we finally see them in people-and-car-covering action.  Though Ben Johnson is a no-brainer choice to play the concerned sheriff and Michael Parks and Gretchen Corbett have a blossoming romance with each other for what it is worth, the human characters are hardly important here, which is a shame in that nearly the entirety of the movie focuses on them.  Still, it is agreeably paced and the finale is equal parts silly and suspenseful.

THE DARK
(1979)
Dir - John Cardos
Overall: MEH

After an eleven year break having worked exclusively in television as was his norm, Dick Clark briefly returned to producing theatrical features with The Dark, an occasionally atmospheric though steadily dull affair.  Stuntman-turned director John Cardos stepped in for Tobe Hopper, the latter of whom was let go early on for allegedly falling behind schedule.  Stanford Whitmore's script was then tweaked at the eleventh hour, changing the movie's monster to an alien that can shoot lasers from its eyes instead of a mutated giant that was to be living in its parent's attic.  Cardos brings with him the same merely competent chops from behind the lens that he had on his previous Kingdom of the Spiders, with an identical problem of far too little action making way for meandering dialog between characters who are just doing their mundane jobs.  All encounters with the extraterrestrial beast are kept off screen until the last ten minutes, with Cardos merely, (yet effectively), teasing the earlier murder sequences by way of Roger Kellaway's sinister, Friday the 13th-esque musical score which utilizes creepy chanting.  Such moments are frequent and create an eerie tone, but everything else going on is a horrendous bore and though the Neanderthal-esque baddie looks cool when he finally does appear, the messy finale fails to justify the laborious trek to get to him.

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