1970s American Horror Part Seventy-Seven

THX 1138

(1971)

Dir - George Lucas

Overall: GOOD

 

Compared to the block buster of all block busters Star Wars which would meld throwback pulp sensibilities with state of the art practical effects, George Lucas' debut THX 1138 is an unrecognizable science fiction counterpart whose shoestring budget brings a cold, dystopian future to contemplative life.  An expansion of his 1967 student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, this was the second feature produced by Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope company which was distributed by Warner Bros. and garnished the star power of a shaved-headed Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence.  Done in a cold arthouse manner that is miles away from the popcorn-friendly spectacle of Lucas' later works, the then twenty-five year old filmmaker utilizes various San Fransisco locations to depict an exclusively indoors, Orwellian landscape where sexuality and reproduction are prohibited and only the most non-threatening of emotions are tolerated.  Though the plot is rudimentary and predictable, plus the presentation challenging and deliberately paced, the attention to detail is impressive.  Flowing camera work, montage-like editing, intimate close-ups, incessantly somber music, an all white jail cell, and contemporary factories, tunnels, hallways, and garages combine into the proper aesthetic of a robotic world of servitude that is stripped of humanity.

MASSAGE PARLOR MURDERS!

(1973)

Dir - Chester Fox/Alex Stevens

Overall: WOOF

More of an excuse to throw naked bodies and random cutaways at the screen than anything resembling an actual "movie, Massage Parlor Murders! is as embarrassing as Z-grade grindhouse cinema gets.  The only directorial effort from Chester Fox and Alex Stevens, its dialog is as repetitive as the nudity, exemplified in the very first of an endless stream of pointless scenes where a schlub goes in for a massage from a pretty lady who both go back and forth with each other only for the guy to apologize, get dressed, and leave.  This is shown in a continues shot that does nothing to advance the bare bones story that kicks off afterwards where a religious zealot starts murdering women who take their clothes off because the seven deadly sins or whatever.  We also have the filmmaker's attempting a French Connection-style car chase, a random sequence where naked people are hanging out in an indoor swimming pool, montages of people walking around town, and two detectives occasionally remembering that there is a killer on the loose who they have to catch.  Shot on location in Manhattan for clearly zero dollars, it is a seedy, no talent, insultingly useless bit of celluloid that even the most mentally ill of trash fans should find difficulty to defend.

CRUISE INTO TERROR

(1978)

Dir - Bruce Kessler

Overall: MEH

Bruce Kessler directed three made-for-television movies in 1978 alone, two of which marked the last time that he worked in the horror genre.  The first of these, Cruise Into Terror aired in February on ABC, has a crop of familiar television actors, (plus Ray Milland), and boasts a quirky premise about an ancient Egyptian evil hiding away in...the Gulf of Mexico?  Sadly the small-screen presentation does not allow for much in the way of pizazz unless you count most of the women showing off their cleavage while playfully flirting with all of the manly crew and passengers on a cruise ship.  Michael Braverman's script allows for plenty of time for such mild banter as it takes forever for anything alarming to happen to our cast of eventually stranded white people, (plus two minorities), and this unfortunately dulls up the proceedings.  The superstition vs science arguing between Reverend John Forsythe and Milland's headstrong archeologist bleeds over into the other characters and once it hits the hour mark, the story even manages to throw Satan and a pulsating baby sarcophagus that gets Lee Meriwether all hot and bothered into the mix.  The eerie and chanty score by Gerald Fried is a highlight, but otherwise this is too melodramatic and long-winded to recommend.

1970s American Horror Part Seventy-Six

THE HEADLESS EYES
(1971)
Dir - Kent Bateman
Overall: MEH

The directorial debut from Kent Bateman The Headless Eyes is a typically shoddy exploitation movie and one of many that was shot on location in Manhattan when the city was the epitome of seedy decadence.  It also has embarrassing attributes left and right. Horrendous cinematography that takes place almost exclusively in fully-lit and ugly rooms, repetitive music, actors with pretentious accents, recycled sound cues; the non-existent production values are relentless.  Swedish thespian Bo Brundin chews the scenery as a schlubby and irksome scumbag that gets his eye gouged out by a woman that he is trying to rob, only to spend the rest of the movie looking so red and flustered as if he is doing an Oliver Reed impression.  Brundin's character becomes fixated with de-eying his victims, these moments are shot in a fittingly grisly style, (meaning unconvincingly with bright red blood), and Bateman tries to convey a sense of surreal lunacy throughout.  The film frequently detours into nonsensical fever dream sequences and these give it an edge over ONLY being poorly acted and poorly made trash.  It is too stupid and amateurish to offend, but that is precisely what makes it of interest to fans of bottom-barrel cinema.

 

SCREAM, PRETTY PEGGY

(1973)

Dir - Gordon Hessler

Overall: MEH

 

This ABC Movie of the Week from November of 1973 is one of many ghoulish genre offerings that Bette Davis stared in during the post-Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? stage of her career.  Director Gordon Hessler pumped this one out the same year that he did the outstanding The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, (who is credited here along with Arthur Hoffe), had just hung up his hat at Hammer Studios where he penned most of their more well-known horror works.  Unfortunately, such personnel hit below the mark here, delivering a predictable, watered-down, and unintentionally silly Psycho retread.  Sian Barbara Allen is so annoying and pushy as a bright-smiled antagonist that it makes one wonder if she was meant to be a red herring, but this seems unlikely as the eventual mystery clearly points in its inevitable direction that her hapless character was just too inquisitive for her own good.  Davis though does a solid job with a supporting role that does not require too much of her, coming off as something that the Hollywood veteran could knock out quickly for some extra retirement money.

 

BOG
(1979)
Dir - Don Keeslar
Overall: WOOF

As Wisconsiny as any Wisconsin movie ever was, Bog is the only theatrical release by regional kind-of filmmaker Don Keeslar.  As opposed to most yokel local crud rocks, Keeslar somehow was able to get a couple of professional actors on board, including Gloria DeHaven as both a scientist and a rambling gypsy woman with cave echo on her voice.  Keeslaer only remembers that he is making a monster movie at irregular intervals and he also seems clueless to the fact that he is making one in 1979.  With an elderly cast, no gore, no nudity, and no exploitative elements, the film is rooted in the type of minimal effort B-movie schlock from two decades prior as opposed to being something that a post grindhouse audience would gravitate towards.  Also making this feel like a 1950s drive-in cheapie, Carl Kitt's script is a recklessly talky snore, keeping the rubber suit monster off screen until fifty-one minutes in where we finally get some quick, blink-and-you'll-miss-them cuts of a blurry fish mask thing.  This is an unforgivable faux pas when you have less set pieces than you can count on one hand, instead filling your movie with endless banter and lingering establishing shots.  You can also make a drinking game out of how many times characters say some variation of "What do you think you'll find out there?" followed by "Who knows?".  The worst kind of bad movies are boring bad movies and this belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of such things.

1970s American Horror Part Seventy-Five - (Bert I. Gordon Edition)

NEC'RO•MAN'CY
(1972)
Dir - Bert I. Gordon
Overall: MEH
 
Bert I. Gordon, (one of the primary kings of giant monster B-movies), shifted gears with the trippy and psychological horror film Nec'ro•man'cy, (re-released and re-cut as The Witching in 1983).  Staring an "I'm only doing this for the money" Orson Welles slipping into a British accent, as well as actual British horror mainstay Pamela Franklin doing an American accent, it has moments of unintended silliness and an overall goofy presentation.  Most odd is the snappy editing which eliminates most establishing shots and cuts right to the beginning of every conversation.  While this attempt to trim the fat is refreshing for an era where sluggish pacing was the norm, it also gives the movie a jolting feel, made doubly problematic by the fact that much of it ends up dragging anyway.  There are creepy ideas adherent in Gordon and Gail March's script about a cult leader trying to do occult leader things to bring his dead son back to life, but it is too disjointed and awkward to deliver the proper chills.

 

THE FOOD OF THE GODS

(1976)

Overall: WOOF

The second adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth from writer/director Bert I. Gordon, (the first being 1965's Village of the Giants), The Food of the Gods, (H.G. Wells' The Food of the Gods), is an abysmal giant animal movie that makes over-sized rats, chickens, wasps, and worms come off as ridiculous as you can imagine.  Gordon had stepped away from such movies for eleven years at this point and the dated special effects are but one problem, utilizing the age old tricks of normal-sized animals interacting with miniatures and spliced together with the actors pretending to fend off against them.  Throw in some children in rat suits and unconvincing closeups and it becomes a consistently laughable film and one that seems downright embarrassing from a special effects perspective, especially considering that Star Wars was in production at the time of its release.  Gordon's screenplay is worse than the visuals though; not insultingly bad, but just lazy and hare-brained in its environmental angle and poorly thought-out characters.  The following year's Empire of the Ants would utilize the same tactics and suffer from similar ailments, but it would fare better in comparison for anyone in the mood for a bad over-sized monster double feature.

 

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

(1977)

Overall: MEH

Filmed in part in the Florida Everglades, Empire of the Ants was the final "giant creature" movie of director Ber I. Gordon's career and is also a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1905 short story of the same name.  While some of the shots all too clearly broadcast the budget's shortcomings, the film still works well as a special effects showcase.  Fusing some of the tricks that Gordon used on 1957 film Beginning of the End, (mixing over-sized closeups of the ants with actors and miniatures, plus spastically wiggling fake insect limbs around), all manage to do the trick.  Unfortunately, Gordon and co-screenwriter Jack Turley's script leaves everything to be desired, loading it up with one forgettable character after the other and taking a full thirty minutes until any oversized bug mayhem goes down.  Even with A-lister Joan Collins on board and a third act revelation that makes good on the opening narrations promise that ants use mind-altering pheromones to get what they want, the story endlessly drags.  A Jaws/Invasion of the Body Snatchers hybrid sounds intriguing on paper, but the whole thing only comes alive in all too infrequent fits and starts.

1970s American Horror Part Seventy-Four

MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD

(1973)

Dir - Christopher Speeth

Overall: WOOF

On the long list of bizarre regional horror films made by clueless unprofessionals, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood ranks high up there as far as reckless incoherence and sleazy ghoulishness goes.  The lone directorial effort from director Christopher Speeth and screenwriter/co-producer Werner Liepolt, it was filmed on location in William Grove, Pennsylvania and takes a cue from the state's most famous horror proprietor George A. Romero by loading the movie with one unphotogenic non-actor after the other.  Hervé Villechaize even shows up for a couple of seconds, but his inclusion is only one of all of the head-scratching components here.  Even giving a plot synopsis is problematic since there hardly is one; instead it is just a series of nonsensical set pieces that come one after the other, centering around the carnival of the title that is overrun by either ghouls or just ugly people.  Jerome Dempsey kind of leads the lot of them with his embarrassingly melodramatic line-readings and he is on some kind of quest to hire people to work for him and then have them run around all of the rides at night until he gets bored with this and has them murdered in order to drink their blood or whatever.  The performances are pathetic and the budget is non-existent, but it goes hard with the head-scratching atmosphere and comes off like a Messiah of Evil/Carnival of Souls knock-off except done with no talent.

SEX DEMON

(1975)

Dir - J.C. Crickett

Overall: MEH

Two things were bound to collide in the mid 1970s and this would be gay underground pornography and The Exorcist.  Enter Sex Demon, a long-thought lost debut from non-filmmaker/manager of The Gaiety Theatre in Times Square J.C. Crickett who shot his own knock-off of William Friedkin's frequently knocked-off masterpiece with no money, yet with a whole lot of hardcore man-on-man action instead.  Be warned, even those who champion porn's Golden Era may not be prepared to see hardcore fisting, men's mouth getting filled up with urine, and screwdrivers being shoved into butt-holes.  At least the camera cuts away during the latter moment's penetration and we only see the bloody post-insertion.  It is all filmed with abysmal cinematography, gnarly-looking actors who are clearly not actors, and a slap-dash story that is barely present on account of the many unflattering sex scenes.  Like some of the seedier adult films from the era that were not there to glamorize the decade's free sex and X-rated censorship freedoms, Crickett's work here is deliberately ugly and it fits right in with a story about a young man who gets taken over by evil forces and acts out his most rapey and animalistic impulses accordingly.  It is a rough yet fascinating watch, representing a unique detour for two genre's that seldom meet and even if they do, never with such bizarre and unflinching determination.

SISTERS OF DEATH
(1977)
Dir - Joseph Mazzuca
Overall: MEH

Filmed in 1972 though not released until five years later, Sisters of Death was the last movie to be directed by Joseph Mazzuca, who predominantly worked as a production manager before and afterwards.  Not that his work here shows much future promise, but given the circumstances, who could blame him?  The story kicks off ominously with a sorority in blue robes looking all alms to Satan like who instead do a game of Russian roulette as an initiation, which goes about as not good as you would imagine.  Fast forward several years, the surviving sisters of the title are mysteriously invited to a reunion in a swanky mansion with a pool, and then the actual story kicks into gear which is both preposterous and lame.  By "kicks into gear" we mean "grinds to a halt" of course, with everyone trapped via an electric fence and just kind of crying, arguing, and ultimately accepting their mini-vacation while their crazy host immediately makes his presence known and bides his time in picking them off, for no other reason than to get the movie close enough to ninety-minutes.  It all has a made-for-TV vibe that is void of nudity and bloodshed, making this a failure even on the exploitation front.

1970s American Horror Part Seventy-Three

DYING ROOM ONLY

(1973)
Dir - Philip Leacock
Overall: MEH

An effective if frustrating made-for-television thriller from screenwriter Richard Matheson, Dying Room Only is at least better than its groany pun of a title would imply.  Matheson adapts his own 1953 short story of the same name which has an excellent premise of someone disappearing within a minute in a remote diner that only has three other people there.   For almost the entire duration, the audience is meant to feel Cloris Leachman's increasing aggravation and terror as she is belittled and toyed with by the local yokels.  The performances are strong, with a perfectly cast Ned Beatty in particular making an intimidating presence that matches Leachman's hapless woman without a safety net who is at the mercy of those who wish to do her harm in the middle of nowhere.  Once the sheriff shows up, things become more difficult to buy into as the viewer is fully aware who the culprits are and it then becomes an elongated waiting game for the details of their scheme to get delivered.  The plot points are more predictable than not, but director Philip Leacock throws in a good amount of tense set pieces until it all mercifully wraps itself up.

 

THE AMUSEMENT PARK
(1975)
Dir - George A. Romero
Overall: GOOD

The long-lost The Amusement Park was a director-for-hire job form George A. Romero which was shot in 1973 over the course of three days in between Season of the Witch and The Crazies.  Given a theatrical premier at the 1975 American Film Festival in New York, it was commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania on a budget of thirty-seven thousand dollars as an education film about elderly abuse, though the results are far from traditional. Romero takes such an opportunity to construct a series of bizarre vignettes set in the West View Park where old people are persistently ridiculed, neglected, and terrorized.  Besides Lincoln Maazel in the lead whom Romero would work with again in 1978's Martin, the cast are all non-actors and Romero himself plays an asshole that yells at a sixty-eight year old woman for hitting his bumper car, which is easily his least sympathetic cameo in one of his own works.  As far as social commentary goes, this is as on-the-nose as anything from the filmmaker and it pulls no punches with its surreal examination of senior citizen mistreatment.  It is a rare art film that showcases a previously unseen side of Romero's ambitions while still adhering to a disturbing and sinister tone.

 

THE ORPHAN
(1979)
Dir - John Ballard
Overall: WOOF

Director/co-writer John Ballard's only film credit of any kind, The Orphan, (Friday the 13th: The Orphan), is a baffling mess of a psychological horror movie, (or something).  A rich kid's parents die, his uppity religious Aunt comes to live with him, she is a bitch, and a whole lot of stuff happens that may not be happening.  It is difficult to decipher what Ballard was going for here since his approach suffers from a steady combination of aggressive incoherence and clumsy ineptitude.  The editing and sound design are both nauseating in their intensity, with scenes being cut to smithereens and overlapping ADRed dialog, sound effects, and music creating a cacophony of cinematic noise.  This is doubly odd since the plot is straightforward, (kid misses his mom and dad and then goes crazy), but so many head-scratching choices are made along the way.  Damn wiener kid Mark Owens, (who never appeared on screen before or since), delivers a performance that is often times grating, but it is hardly his fault since even the most accomplished of child thespians would embarrass themselves with such dribble.  Maybe this was simply an attempt to represent the troubled mind of a troubled youth, but it is poorly realized to the point of being unwatchable.

1970s American Horror Part Seventy-Two

VOICES OF DESIRE

(1972)

Dir - Chuck Vincent

Overall: MEH

 

The full-length debut from Chuck Vincent, (who goes by the name Mark Ubell here and would spend a large majority of the next two decades working as a pornographic director), Voices of Desire is a singular, erotic version of Carnival of Souls where a woman is troubled by eerie hallucinations, dead silence, smiling ghouls, and a whispering voice in her head.  Also, she gets naked a lot.  Serving as another staring vehicle for Sandra Peabody who also appeared in Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left the same year, she plays the troubled protagonist who falls victim to a sex cult that uses mysterious and possibly otherworldly means to get her in their clutches for group horizontal tango purposes.  The dialog is almost non-existent, the music is mostly classical and sounds as if somebody just turned a record on at full blast, hardcore footage from what looks like other productions is spliced in, and most of the running time is made up of slow, unsexy, and naked bodies fondling each other.  Largely comatose-inducing, but its surreal amateurism casts a creepy and hazy spell that makes it stand out from other skin flicks from the era.

 

KILLDOZER!
(1974)
Dir - Jerry London
Overall: WOOF

A year after Stephen King published his short story/eventual Maximum Overdrive source material "Trucks", ABC broadcast the television movie Killdozer! with a comparatively ridiculous premise of a piece of machinery on wheels that becomes sentient and goes on a murdering spree.  The first full-length from veteran TV director Jerry London, the most detrimental and head-scratching aspect of the production is in how straight such doofy material is played.  A modest crop of character and small screen actors who look like other actors, (Carl Betz is close enough to Richard Crenna and Clint Walker is the American version of English thespian Nigel Green), do battle with the hulking piece of construction equipment of the title, but they only do so in between long and slack dialog exchanges that only slow down an already bare-bones presentation.  Scenes of the Caterpillar D9 bulldozer gradually attacking people because of a mysterious meteorite that crash landed in the crew's excavation site have no agency too them and worse yet, it comes across like the machine's victims could have easily gotten out of the way or avoided its attacks altogether.  Too silly to take seriously and to serious to be silly, it is a misguided dud.

 

PSYCHIC KILLER

(1975)

Dir - Ray Danton

Overall: GOOD

Wrapping up his theatrical career from behind the lens before switching exclusively to television, actor-turned-director Ray Danton's Psychic Killer, (The Kirlian Force), is an oddity amongst 70s B-movies.  Doubling as the last work on the big screen for the top-billed Jim Hutton and Paul Burke, it also has Julie Adams holding her own as a no-nonsense psychiatrist, but the film is less about its "star" power than it is about its odd premise and some grisly murder sequences that find Hutton's wrongly-convicted ex-felon being granted astral projection abilities which he uses to reap his revenge.  The first act in a correctional facility only hints at the events to come, but there are still some startling moments there to keep the viewer from checking out too soon.  Before too long though, it settles into a fun smorgasbord of people being picked off, from a possessed/boiling hot shower faucet, to a car that will only accelerate, to a butcher shop coming alive, to a guy singing opera for absolutely no reason who falls victim to the equivalent of a Looney Tunes gag.  Danton keeps the mood serious even if some of the moments have got to be intentionally comedic, plus we have an unnecessary romance detour to give both Burke and Adams something more to do, but the film has enough unsettling inventiveness to give it an edge in the exploitation field.

1970s American Horror Part Seventy-One

TERROR CIRCUS
(1973)
Dir - Alan Rudolph/Gerald Cormier
Overall: MEH

A desert "women in captivity" bit of unabashed exploitation, Terror Circus, (Nightmare Circus, The Barn of the Naked Dead), is equal parts sluggish, ugly, and implausible.  A debate as far as who was in the director's chair has raged since the movie's release, with the general conceit being that Alan Rudolph took over from screenwriter Gerald Cormier, though pseudonyms may have been utilized as well.  In any event, the movie itself is nothing to write home about, having Andrew Prine playing an underwritten psychopath who way too easily kidnaps, psychologically tortures, physically abuses, and murders a barn full of women in a deranged charade of putting a circus together because his mother died or his dad was mean or whatever.  This mild mix of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ruralness, Last House on the Left sadism, and Psycho mama's boy villain inception is half-baked at best, merely throwing early various sleaze elements from more lauded films into something that makes no attempts at exploring any of them.  The movie fails to commit to its garish ideas, with only a few nasty and violent scenes, as well as a complete lack of nudity that could easily frustrate those that were hooked in on one of its three marketed titles.

 

TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO

(1977)
Dir - Stuart Hagmann
Overall: WOOF

The last movie from television director Stuart Hagmann, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo also continues screenwriter Guerdon Trueblood's career with bug-infested, made-for-TV genre films.  Even more horrendously listless than usual for dopey genre movies that were churned out on the cheap for small screen consumption, Trueblood seems to be swinging for the fences in trying to come up with anything compelling to add to the tired formula.  The entire first act is dedicated to Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman smuggling coffee, (and inadvertently, spiders), out of South America, only to crash land in a field to allow for the real lack of a captivating plot to get underway.  Emergency response officials, civilians, and more pilots then try to figure out what brought the plane down, what kind of arachnids they are dealing with, (turns out they are banana spiders and not tarantulas at all), how they can be stopped, and some stuff about oranges and alcohol which is so insultingly boring as to cause a stroke for the viewer.  It all concludes with what can fairly be described as the most anti-climactic and unexciting finale in the history of motion pictures, where the spiders are hypnotized by wasp noises and then slowly, (again, slowly), removed from a factory before the power malfunctions and a couple of people who are not at all in danger can slowly, (again, slowly), be led to safety.

 

TIME AFTER TIME
(1979)
Dir - Nicholas Meyer
Overall: GOOD

 

Screenwriter-turned director Nicholas Meyers's adaptation of Karl Alexander's novel Time After Time, (which was still in its preparation phase during the film's production), is a clever companion piece to the well-respected 1960 film The Time Machine, pitting H.G. Wells against Jack the Ripper which is to say Malcom McDowell against David Warner.  The two English thespians make a wonderful pair of dueling time travelers, each venturing from 1893 London to contemporary San Francisco, with Wells discovering the identity of the famous and never-caught serial killer of his day, tracking him several decades in the future and all with the aforementioned machine that the author conceived of.  It is an effective angle to have Wells' optimistic hopes for mankind be dashed away by a late 70s American where violence seems to be more readily accepted and nurturing for the Ripper to thrive, but most of the fun comes out of the reliable performances, fish-out-of-water high-jinks, and an adorable romance between McDowell and Mary Steenburgen.  Meyer handles the material with brisk ease, keeping enough humor, suspense, and creativity coming without much cinematic flair, all of which forgives some unconvincing special effects early on.