(1972)
Dir - John Farris
Overall: WOOF
Try as no budget junk movies often did, hardly any of them could escape the insurmountable hurdle of having little to offer besides people delivering piles of dialog to each other. Dear Dead Delilah is the only film to be directed by screenwriter John Farris and it adheres to such an ever-present trope, making for an unwatchably dull experience that even bottom-barrel B-movie hounds will find insufferable. A rich southern family squabble over a buried fortune while an unrelated woman shows up having just been released from a mental institution for murdering her mother with an axe. Agnes Moorehead makes one of her last screen appearances in the lead, but she was too ill to do anything outside of a bed or a wheelchair. Leisurely sprinkled into proper southern-accented tomfoolery are some Herschell Gordon Lewis-worthy shots of dismembered limbs, people being axed, blood-covered bodies, and a hilarious beheading via horseback. Regrettably though, these shots are too infrequent to make this anything worth participating in, unless someone wants an immediate cure for insomnia.
(1973)
Dir - Fredric Hobbs
Overall: MEH
A tonally wild exploitation movie from small-scale writer/director Fredric Hobbs, Alabama's Ghost is dated, goofy, loud, and cheap, but it is loaded with so many conflicting details that it is able to maintain one's interest for significant portions of its running time. An ambitious stage manager comes across a box belonging to a long-dead and famed magician, leading said stage manner on a trek through superstardom as he strikes up a bargain with the magician's elder sister, (who is a guy in drag), and another manager who kicks his career into the stratosphere. There is also a meglomaniacal vampire-controlling Dr. Caligari with a robot-making machine, wailing ghosts, hippie musical numbers, ole timey ragtime jazz musical numbers, slapstick gags, a Mad Max-styled car that looks like it is made out of dinosaur fossils and a bulldozer, stock footage, nightmare drug trips, voodoo rituals, an elephant, and a showdown in the desert which suggests that the filmmaker's lost their goddamn minds while shooting this. Every performance is cranked up to eleven and whatever semblance of a "plot" is hiding in there gets steamrolled off of a cliff. Whether this is the best or worst movie about a magician's rise to power is debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is easily the weirdest.
(1979)
Dir - Robert S. Fiveson
Overall: MEH
The 1970s produced a handful of dystopian-styled sci-fi thrillers and Parts: The Clonus Horror, (The Clonus Horror, Clonus), is an independently-made one that takes itself seriously yet is predictable and less than memorable. This was the directorial debut from producer Robert S. Fiveson, co-writing Bob Sullivan's story along with two other credited screenwriters; a story that takes its obvious cues from Michael Anderson's Logan's Run, Michael Crichton's Coma, and George Orwell's seminal 1984 novel. The film has a unique enough angle, focusing on a clone farm where wealthy people harvest their doubles for body parts, all in the name of immortality. It raises the question of whether or not artificial humans should be treated as "real" humans, which is a weak excuse for those in power to utilize and those in power are the ones who are persistently portrayed as villainous. Presentation wise, it has clumsy acting and dialog which should produce some unintended chuckles from the audience, but its sense of paranoia is matched by a fun and dated aesthetic that fits the times well enough.
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