Dir - Stan Brakhage
Overall: MEH
The most known of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage's works, Dog Star Man is a series of silent shorts that were made over the course of four years and are collectively linked despite having no decipherable narrative. For those that are either inexperience with or have an adverse reaction to deliberately unconventional cinema, this will be a confounding endeavor since the entirety of the project is nothing more than heavily manipulated images which are exposed on top of each other with no sound design whatsoever. Most of these visuals are illegible and meant for reactionary interpretation, creating a subjective viewing experience that is more akin to a moving and kinetic form abstract art that can only be seen as having a "story" if one's own imagination is engaged along with what is presented on screen. As far as the shots themselves, they range from Brakhage and a dog climbing a mounting, to a baby being born, naked bodies, outdoor scenery, and various scratches, deliberate film imperfections, and morphed images that can be grotesque, haunting, beautiful, and always stupefying. Certainly not for everyone and sitting through the entire seventy-eight minute collection will offer no further insight than simply witnessing one of the five sections on their own, but it is as good of a place to start as any when venturing into the world of experimental movie-making.
Dir - William Grefé
Overall: MEH
A typically sluggish crud rock from regional exploitation filmmaker William Grefé, Death Curse of Tartu, (Curse of Death), pits a teenage archeologist team against a dead voodoo priest that can turn into animals and unleash stock footage on people when his grave is disturbed. Shot in the Everglades, the jungle setting is at least authentic, actor Frank Weed provided the animals that actually interact with the characters on screen, and there is some accidental mood-setting when the library-cued music shuts up and we get a couple of shots of Doug Hobart in zombie makeup. The story is so rudimentary and unimaginative that it is almost impossible to pay attention to, something that is not helped by Grefé's wretched sense of pacing and the poor no-name actors who have to embarrass themselves with such tripe. As a gripping bit of "boring white people vs supernatural jungle forces" action, the movie is an unmitigated failure, but as an accidental documentary about how dangerous the Florida wilderness is, it achieves some semblance of success.
(1967)
Dir - Jean Yarbrough
Overall: WOOF
With a title like Hillbillys in a Haunted House, one's expectations should be set before a single frame is viewed. In this regard, it "delivers" on being a dopey genre mash-up, but whether or not anyone with half a brain cell would find it entertaining, that is another matter. Sadly, this was the final screen performance of Basil Rathbone that was released in his lifetime and it also features other former genre heavyweights Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, both of whom were well into the "anything for a paycheck" phase of their careers. Seeing these three gentleman try and save face in such a lame-brained horror comedy is a painful experience, not because the movie beats you over the head with how stupid it is, but more by how lazy it is. Both Ferlin Husky and Don Bowman, (who reprise their roles from the previous year's The Las Vegas Hillbillys, which this is a sequel to), have insufficient charisma to be the two leads and the plot seems like it was concocted within five minutes. It revolves around cookie-cutter country singers who stay the night in a house where spies are doing something about a rocked fuel formula and also have a caged guy in a gorilla suite because apparently a goal of this movie was for Rathbone, Carradine, and Chaney Jr. to join Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi in sharing screen time with a primate. Besides Merle Haggard showing up twice, the rest of the many country music interludes, (including the entire last fifteen minutes), just slow down an already lifeless B-movie that should probably be the last one in anyone's filmography here that you should get to.
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