Cormania: Gas-s-s-s! Or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (Roger Corman, 1970)

If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity], an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which, over fifty years later, is difficult not to see as one of its directors greatest failures. (I mean, say what you will about Creature From The Haunted Sea, but at least it had reasons for being crap.) (1)

This is extremely regrettable, given that the project represents an important milestone in Corman’s career on a number of levels. Not only does it mark the conclusion of his cycle of ‘counter-culture’ films (following on from ‘The Wild Angels’ in ’66 and ‘The Trip’ in ’67), but also his final collaboration with American international Pictures (following fifteen years of fruitful co-dependence), and in fact his final work as a director of independent commercial cinema in the United States. (2)

So, what’s ‘Gas’ all about then? Well… it’s difficult to say really, and that very uncertainty soon becomes a pretty big part of the problem.

A pastel crayon animated prologue introduces us to some high ranking military officials (including such personages as ‘General Strike’, and ‘Dr Murder’ - and if you find that magazine cartoon level of humour uproariously funny, there’s hope you might enjoy this movie yet), who, in the process of attending a ceremonial function at a chemical research base in Alaska, accidentally uncork a beaker containing a cloud of custom-made poison gas which now promises to spread across the earth, killing everyone aged over twenty-five.

Moving into live action post-credits, we meet a long-haired, wise-crackin’ campus troublemaker (Bob Corff) and his adorable, only marginally less wide-crackin’ girlfriend (Elaine Giftos), who depart Dallas in a salmon pink Cadillac and promptly get involved in a series of tiresome comical capers, eventually joining forces with a group of other sketchily-defined, more-or-less hippie-aligned young people (including amongst their number both a young Bud Cort, and one Tally Coppola, later to become Talia Shire). Together, this merry band traverse a marginally post-apocalyptic version of the American South-West, enduring a multitude of symbolic / quixotic encounters and threats as they vaguely pursue an Oz-like quest to consult an ‘oracle’, whose billboards (including a count-down in miles) they spot along the highway.

And… that’s about it, really. I mean, I wish I could tell you what the wearying procession of factions, marauders, aggressors, cultists, herd-like victims and all-purpsoe extraverted weirdos our protagonists run into along the way were actually meant to represent, but, as the film’s attempts at satirical humour alternate wildly between blunt, eye-rolling obviousness and head-scratching, lost-in-translation obscurity, it is honestly difficult to locate anything here which we squares might term a ‘point’.

Which might have been all well and good, if only Corman and his collaborators been able to wrangle some other value from these narratively unglued proceedings, but, sadly, the kind of pupil-dilating visual excess and subversive, taboo-breaking chaos which defined the era’s more successful underground/counter-cultural filmmaking is in very short supply in ‘Gas’.

Shot in a range of uninhabited / wreckage-strewn desert locations across Texas and New Mexico, the film’s footage soon becomes fairly monotonous, in spite of the natural beauty of the surroundings and some intermittently impressive photography from DP Ron Dexter. The tone of the action meanwhile remains cloyingly light-hearted, employing a gratingly twee take on hippie-era surrealism, whilst the characters remain vacant, distant and uninteresting.

Even the garish, mid-century Americana of the costumes and production design simply remain… standard issue, for the most part. Please bear in mind that I say all this as a viewer who usually maintains an extremely high tolerance for what Kim Newman has termed ‘Weird Hippie Shit’, but in a word, ‘Gas’ simply feels tired.

Just a few short years earlier, Corman could reasonably have claimed to have had his finger on the pulse of the intersection between popular culture and the underground (after all, ‘The Wild Angels’ not only launched a whole new era-defining genre, but provided direct aesthetic inspiration for generations of proto-punk rebels in the process).

The shadow-haunted autumn/winter of ’69 though found Corman and screenwriter George Armitage (future director of ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ and the fantastic Miami Blues) beginning work on ‘Gas’ at precisely the moment in which the optimism of the 1960s evaporated, leaving something darker and more fragmented behind it, ready to curdle as the decade turned… and ensuring that the film’s happy-go-lucky, flower-child hipster-isms must have felt painfully irrelevant by the time their film finally opened in September 1970. (3)

In this context, scenes which may have passed as wild, Godardian po-mo provocations back in the mid-‘60s (such as the film’s lampoon of a western shoot-out, in which characters point their fingers at each other whilst shouting the names of famous cowboy actors) simply play out as eye-rolling tedium - self-satisfied acting class wheezes dragged out for far longer than is really necessary.

Indeed, for a Corman production, ‘Gas’ feels uncharacteristically bloated and excessive. Shot across multiple locations in several states (and dogged by inevitable weather-related delays along the way), he seems to have become fixated here on mounting vast public spectacles of one kind of another.

The finished film is stuffed full of marching bands and parades, crowds of extras fleeing through the streets of Western town sets pursued by gangs of stuntmen on brightly painted bikes and sidecars, convoys of golf carts, JCBs and tooled up dune buggies (triggering entirely accidental flashes of Mansonoid paranoia), cheerleaders, football teams and hundreds of people crammed onto a remote mountaintop for the film’s conclusion… all, ultimately, to very little effect.

Amidst all this sound and fury, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the man who once shot a film as beautifully crafted as ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’ on a single set in two and a half days has lost his way very badly somewhere along the line.

Perhaps the sole quantifiable pleasure I took from ‘Gas’ in fact came from the music - and this is entirely due to the fact that I’m a big fan of the perennially underrated Country Joe & The Fish, and in particular of their gifted lead guitarist Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton, who was charged with composing ‘Gas’s songs and incidental cues (as heard in the rare moments when the brass marching bands, cheerleading chants and honking car horns shut up for a few minutes). (4)

It’s nice to hear the various bits and pieces Melton came up with (recordings never otherwise released, insofar as I’m aware), and we also get to enjoy some choice footage of the band in full flow at some kind of outdoor festival held at a drive-in theatre, backed up by a bitchin’ psychedelic light show, inter-cut with footage of two of the young hippie characters making out during an acid trip, and accompanied by subliminal flashes of underground movie-style abstract imagery.

Arguably the film’s strongest sequence, the overall effect here is only partially spoiled by the presence of Country Joe McDonald (who I’m fairly sure would not have made the twenty-five year old cut-off point required for this movie’s plot, incidentally) doing some kind of terminally unamusing skit about how he’s an omnipotent, god-like figure named ‘A.M. Radio’, or somesuch. (My god, this obnoxiously performative, satire-lite fucking hippie ‘humour’, I swear… it’s enough to make me want to shave my head and enlist in the nearest para-military organisation post-haste.)

Aside perhaps from hardcore C.J. Fish fans though, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone at the time of ‘Gas’s original release was actually digging what Corman was laying down here. Whilst ‘straight’ audiences must have simply been confused and alienated by all this mystifying hullaballoo, the campus radicals and garage band suburban punks the movie was presumably supposed to appeal to would surely by this point have felt patronised and turned off by its parade of quirky, central casting hippies mouthing half-baked flower power witticisms, long past their sell-by date in the hyper-accelerated climate of mid-century pop culture.

Even within the sphere of disastrous, released-too-late hippie movies, ‘Gas’ ranks low, lacking the lo-fi earnestness of the Firesign Theatre’s “electric western” ‘Zachariah’, the wild artistic vision of Dennis Hopper’s ‘The Last Movie’ or the magisterial visual gimmickry of Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’.

But the saddest thing of all is that, despite all this, ‘Gas’ seems to have been a project which mattered to Corman a great deal.

He spends over five pages of his 1990 memoir ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’ discussing the film, acknowledging the gruelling nature of the production, and regretting his decision to begin filming without a finished script. But, he also speaks enthusiastically of his success in creating “an apocalyptic, Strangelovian satire,” - one which, sadly, sounds a lot more exciting in Corman’s recollection than any of the footage which actually ended up on the screen;

“My films and my politics were getting more radical, more “liberated,” as the 1960s were coming to a close. I was truly beginning to believe I could do anything, which is why the picture ran a little out of control. Any idea that came to us, we would put in.” 

[…] 

“We ended up with some pretty wild and surreal images. We had a group of Hell’s Angels riding in their colors in golf carts instead of their choppers. The Texas A&M football team became a band of marauders on dune buggies, terrorizing the Southwest. We had Edgar Allan Poe speeding through the frame on a Hell’s Angels chopper with a raven on his shoulder, making comments from time to time. […] We re-created the Kennedy assassination while it was sleeting. Then we finally got to the Acoma mesa, which is virtually cut off from civilization, accessible only by a steep and winding dirt road.”

Although everything Corman describes can kind of be seen in the movie if you squint hard enough, I think the failure of any of it to actually make much of an impression on the viewer simply goes to prove that, much as I love him, Roger Corman was no Alejandro Jodorowsky. Logic, working within fixed limits and careful advance planning were the engines which powered his best cinema, and the mellow ideals of middle class So Cal suburbia remained his aesthetic base-camp, even as the wily tendrils of psychedelia and European decadence repeatedly threatened to drag him further afield. At the end of the day, maximalist cosmic wig-flipping was simply not his bag, man.

Nonetheless, Corman remained extremely unhappy about a number of cuts he claimed were made to ‘Gas’ in post-production, and which he blamed primarily on AIP’s James H. Nicholson, whom he felt had become increasingly conservative and intolerant of risk-taking in the films his company released, citing these arbitrary cuts as reasons for the film’s incoherence and commercial failure.

Strong words perhaps from a man who in later years would become famous for insisting his protégés’ films came in at under 88 minutes in order to save on film canisters, but above all, AIPs decision to cut the film’s intended final shot remained a source of great bitterness to Corman, ending one of the longest and most productive relationships in the history of independent cinema on an extremely sour note;

“The unkindest cut of all was the last scene. I ended the film with a spectacular shot from on top of the mesa, with a view sixty, seventy miles to the horizon. We had the entire tribe there and everyone else who had been in the film. It was a celebration. The leading man kisses the woman and I zoom back. It was a cliché I had never used to end a film. I did it precisely because it was a cliché. I had the entire marching band of the local high school. I had a whole group of Hell’s Angels. I had a bunch of guys on dune buggies. I had a football team. I had our whole cast in this wild celebration as the camera zoomed back and over the shot. God, who was a running character throughout the film, made his final comments on what went on. 

There must have been three hundred people on top of that mesa. It was one of the greatest shots I ever achieved *in my life*. And AIP cut the entire shot. They ended the picture on the couple’s clichéd kiss - because they didn’t like what God was saying. The Picture ended and made no sense.”

For a more revealing take on Corman’s state of mind during the production of ‘Gas’ though, I think the last word must go to production manager Paul Rapp, quoted in the same book;

“The ‘Gas-s-s-s!’ shoot was the toughest one I ever saw Roger go through. I had never seen Roger in a nasty, bad mood like that. He seemed very down, snarling and weary. The Dallas sequences were around Thanksgiving and they had all-time record cold and blizzard conditions. It was miserable. Roger was shivering the whole time, wearing the same parka he had for ‘Ski Troop Attack’. 

[…] 

The day we set up the last sequence at the mesa Roger seemed really adrift. The Indians were terrible to work with. He seemed isolated, almost directing like a robot. The last scene was a big action shot with the entire cast, dune buggies, motorcycles, and the whole Indian tribe coming together. The first take was a complete mess. Roger just sat there. I got everybody back in their positions for a second take and looked over at Roger. He just nodded. I called action for him, and surprisingly, this time it went perfectly. Roger got up from his chair slowly, thanked everybody, and said very quietly, “Let’s go home.” (5)

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(1)According to IMDB trivia, ‘Gas’s lengthy sub-title was inspired by an unnamed Major in the U.S. Army, who is alleged to have justified the total destruction of a Vietnamese town and its inhabitants on the basis that, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” - a reference which would have stood as the darkest and most effective piece of satire in the entire picture, if only an effort had been made to draw the audience’s attention to it.

(2) The WWI aerial combat epic ‘Von Richtofen and Brown’, which Corman shot in Ireland for United Artists, saw release in 1971, and subsequent to that he did not return to the director’s chair until 1990’s ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ - a film which I would argue stands more as a one-off vanity project produced by his own studio (albeit, a very worthwhile and interesting one) than as a strictly commercial proposition.

(3) Ironically in view of how badly the film falls victim to it, it’s interesting to note that Armitage’s script for ‘Gas’ is both aware of the hyper-accelerated fashion cycle of the ‘60s, and indeed pokes fun at it via the character played by Cindy Williams, a devotee of ‘old timey’ pop music who hangs around the jukebox listening to “golden oldies” by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead; a familiar motif found in near-future fiction written at the time by slightly bamboozled older geezers, and in Thomas Pynchon novels all the way up to 2009.

(4) It seems that Corman had originally planned to make ‘Gas’ with The Grateful Dead appearing on-screen and providing the soundtrack, only to end up - in characteristic Corman fashion - telling them to get lost when they turned up demanding more money than had been agreed upon, and immediately getting Country Joe on the line instead.

(5) All quotes in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 162-167.

Cormania: Viking Women & The Sea Serpent (Roger Corman, 1957)

...or, as the storybook style title card has it, ‘The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent’.

A big name for what is, by anyone’s estimation, a fairly minor movie, but not by any means an unenjoyable one.

If nothing else, the film certainly delivers on its title in short order (a lesson Corman had clearly learned from the failure of The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes a few years earlier), as we are immediately introduced to our Viking Women, and quite a fetching bunch they are too, led by Abby Dalton (Corman’s main squeeze at the time) as the fair-haired Desir, alongside another memorable turn from the Corman regular Susan Cabot (The Wasp Woman herself!) as treacherous / witchy brunette Enger.

(Amusing anecdote from this production # 1: apparently, another actress had originally been cast as the lead Viking Woman, but on the first day of shooting, she turned up to meet the bus to the location accompanied by her agent, who refused to let his client sign a contract until she was awarded a higher fee. Assistant director Jack Bohrer got Corman on the phone, and recalled being immediately instructed to, “make Abby the lead and move all the other girls up one spot in the cast. Have the girls learn their lines on the bus ride to the beach. Tell the agent to get lost.”) (1)

When we join them, the Viking Women are hanging around in a wooded grove, having seemingly been abandoned by their long absent sea-faring menfolk.

They do still have one man with them for some reason - Ottar, played by Jonathan Haze of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ fame. If there was a line of dialogue to explain why he’s not off with the other Viking Men, I must have missed it, but… anyway, he’s here too, and the Viking Women are holding a vote on what to do about their lonesome situation, through the long accepted Viking movie means of throwing spears at a pair of tree trunks. (So much more dramatic that just raising hands, don't you think?)

Naturally, the faction who want to set out to sea in search of the menfolk emerge triumphant, and so that’s exactly what they all do, casting off from the balmy shores of Southern Cali - sorry, I mean, uh, the Nordic Lands - in a rather fetching little longboat.

(Amusing speculation about this production # 1: in a cliff-top long shot of the longboat casting off, we clearly see the rudder fall off. Cut to the studio-bound / back projected medium shot on-board ship, and there is some dialogue along the lines of, “oh no, what are we going to do”, “we can’t steer this thing with just an oar”, etc. Given though that this plot point never really plays into anything else in the script, would it be cynical of me to to suggest that maybe the rudder falling off in the long shot was a total accident, but, given that there was no time to re-take the shot, they just had to make the best of it and improvise by working it into the dialogue..?)

Anyway, once they’re out on the open sea, the initial scenes scenes on board the longboat are actually quite nicely done, complete with satisfactory back projection and some elegant, moody lighting. It seems as if the Viking Women have only been drifting rudderless on the ocean for a few hours though, when - in a development which feels like a vague, subconscious comingling of Homer’s Odyssey, medieval cartography and Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ - they find themselves drawn into the currents of “the vortex” - the film’s obligatory vast, ship-wrecking whirlpool - and encounter its guardian, the terrifying Sea Serpent!

So yes - bingo! About twelve minutes into the run time, and we’ve met the Viking Women, we’ve had the Sea Serpent - and thus the filmmakers can be confident that no one’s going to be storming to the box office demanding their money back after this one, irrespective of whatever happens next.

(Amusing anecdote from this production # 2: according to Corman, his chief takeaway from ‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ was a decision never again to “fall for a sophisticated sales job about elaborate special effects”. Effects artists Iriving Block and Jack Rabin had apparently won the gig on the film by firing up both Corman and AIP’s Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff with a swanky presentation of painted mock ups demonstrating their skills - only for it to become abundantly clear upon completion of the promised footage that, “..they had simply promised us something they could not deliver”.

Quoth the director/producer himself: “First, I saw that they had shot the plates from the wrong angle and I couldn’t possibly match them. Second, the serpent was too small. I thought: My God, I’m not going to fit this into a ten day shoot. It was supposed to be thirty feet tall. I had rarely shot process myself because it is a specialized art, but I did the best I could […] with the boat rocking and the girls moving to obscure as much of the process print as possible. I shot the scene very low-key and fairly dark so you didn’t see too much.” ) (1)

In view of these circumstances though, I actually think the sea monster shots - brief and murky though they may be - come off pretty well. You get a good ol’ scary, scaly monster head arising from the murky water, emitting a suitably horrendous, unearthly yowl, so I mean, what more could you ask for? Seems like an entirely passable low budget Godzilla knock off kind of affair to me.

As Corman correctly notes though, what really sinks the effects here (no pun intended) is the disparity in scale and angles between the back projected ‘monster footage’ and the ‘live in studio’ foreground action. Presumably arising more from a combination of miscommunication, poor planning and the general inexperience than from any incompetence on the part of the effects guys, these problems are very much the kind of thing which could have been easily fixed up on a better resourced production, but on an AIP-financed double feature filler, with a few hours on the sound stage already booked and paid for no doubt, there was no obviously no option but to make do and plough ahead.

So, understandably, that’s more or less the last we see of the dreaded Monster of The Vortex, with the remaining two thirds of the movie instead concentrating on the primarily land-based exploits of the ship-wrecked Viking Women, who now find themselves washed up in the land of a barbaric tribe known as the Grimolts, who seem to specialise in enslaving / plundering the survivors of ships which have fallen victim to The Vortex.

“They can be handled, they’re only men,” Desir defiantly announces when the women’s captors start getting rough with them, thus earning the film a minimal scintilla of proto-feminist cred which it somewhat makes good on in subsequent scenes, as our heroines undertake a good deal of rough-riding, spear-hurling and brawling, rejecting the boorish advances of various Grimolt warriors, and generally proving themselves the equal of their male agressors (at least until their musclebound, aryan menfolk eventually make the scene, at which point they compliantly assume a secondary role in proceedings).

Stark, the king of the Grimolts, is played with no great amount of charisma by hard-working character actor and TV stalwart Richard Devon, looking here rather like a school headmaster who has had an unfortunate run-in with a shag pile carpet whilst on his way to a fancy dress party as Genghis Khan.

Making a rather more of positive impression however is Jay Sayer as Stark’s son Senya, delivering as good a rendition of the age old “snivelling, cowardly / effeminate son of domineering, tyrannical patriarch” archetype as I can recall seeing in recent years. (Like so many Corman actors, Sayer has a bit of barely supressed beatnik vibe about him, which I rather enjoyed.)

In fact, it's probably fair to say that the scene in which Viking girl-boss Desir rescues Senya by slaying the wild boar which is menacing him, only for the blubbering boy to insist that he must take credit for killing the beast himself in order to avoid facing the shame of admitting to his father that he was saved by a woman, probably represents the peak of this movie’s emotional intensity.

Elsewhere during the Grimolt sections of the film, we get to appreciate the fact that the production actually managed to obtain the use of some fairly decent looking ‘banqueting hall’ and ‘castle exterior’ sets, as well as rustling up an actual, honest-to-god boar for the hunting scenes. Look out also for Wilda Taylor, credited as ‘Grimolt dancing girl’, delivering an admirably wild and energetic routine during the obligatory banquet hall scene.

For the most part though, as soon as the Viking Women realise that - inevitably - it is Stark and the Grimolts who are keeping their long lost menfolk prisoner, the remaining run-time settles down into an entirely routine succession of escapes and re-captures, complete with lots of lots of interminable running around out in the scrubland surrounding Iverson’s Movie Ranch and (inevitably) the ever-ready Bronson Canyon caves.

In his memoir (see footnote), Corman claimed it was whilst feverishly shooting all of this running around type stuff that he broke his own record for ‘most set ups in a single day’, but for all the impact it has on screen, he might as well have chilled out and let everybody clock off and drive back into town for an early martini instead. It’s precisely the kind of undistinguished, work-a-day ‘action’ padding which, with a few changes of costumes and props, could have been slotted straight into any two-dollar western, war movie or sci-fi flick, making it tough not to zone out and let your mind wander, as the sundry Viking Women, freed Viking Men and Grimolts charge hinder and yon across the sand dunes.

Indeed, whilst all this was going on, I primarily found myself thinking about the strange lineage of Viking movies which runs through global popular cinema - a little mini-genre in its own right which has rarely attracted much recognition or critical attention.

I had previously assumed that the cycle must have been birthed from the success of Kirk Douglas epic ‘The Vikings’ (1958), or Jack Cardiff’s ‘The Long Ships’ (1964) - but, as checking those production years has made clear, ‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ actually beat both of those films into cinemas. In fact, I’m not aware of any Viking movies made prior to 1957, so maybe we can chalk up a bit more originality for Corman and screenwriter Lawrence L. Goldman here than I had otherwise assumed.

Subsequent to ‘The Vikings’, Mario Bava made a couple of corkers in Italy during the ‘60s (‘Erik The Conqueror’ (’61) and ‘Knives of the Avenger’ (‘66)), whilst Hammer produced ‘The Viking Queen’ in ’67, and, a few years after that, the Tarkan films out of Turkey picked up the baton, delivering all the berserk psychotronic craziness one could possibly ask for.

Not, you’d have to say, something that could really be claimed of Roger Corman’s modest contribution to the sub-genre. As I think has probably been made abundantly clear by now, we’re not exactly looking at an all-time classic here, but regardless; for a breezy, 66 minute time waster, ‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ proves perfectly enjoyable.

Most of the primary cast deliver engaging performances, and the whole thing swings by with an easy-going, upbeat vibe which makes it seem as if everyone was having a lot of fun with this material, however much of a nightmare the anecdotes related above suggest it must actually must have been to make. 

Rich in the kind of random eccentricities, sly humour and abundant charm which helps so many of these early Corman / AIP movies worth a watch in spite of their shortcomings, it’s difficult not to hit the closing titles with a smile on your face - especially if, like those lucky 1957 drive-in patrons, you’ve just seen it on a double bill with ‘The Astounding She Monster’ (which I’ve not seen, but it boasts an Ed Wood writing credit, and one of the greatest Sci-Fi posters of the ’50s). What a time to have been alive!

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(1) Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and production stories in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 45-47

Horror Express: The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (David Kramarsky / Roger Corman, 1955)

Over the past few years, I’ve got into the habit of tuning in to ‘50s American sci-fi/monster movies for a dose of comforting, mid-week escapism. Perhaps it’s just me, but somehow, that distinctive combination of remote desert town settings, flat, TV-style staging, woozy theremin music, reassuring techno-babble, clean-cut squaresville vibes and that distant patina of eerie, cold war paranoia… all of this just goes down perfectly with a whisky & soda after a hard day in the office (and the short run-times help, too).

Imagine my consternation then when 1955 ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ brutally overturned my expectations. Despite boasting Roger Corman as an executive producer (and uncredited director), the opening half hour of this extremely low budget, Palm Springs-shot outing feels a world away from the cheery hi-jinks of Not of This Earth or It Conquered the World. Instead, it presents us with a vignette of bleak, psychologically harrowing b-movie existentialism which Corman’s later collaborator Richard Matheson would have been proud of.

Our setting is an isolated, family-run ranch which has been steadily losing money for three years, or so husband/father Allan (Paul Birch) tells us in voiceover. He feels like a failure, having lost his family’s affections as a result of this financial turmoil, but is unable to find a way to reverse their sorry fate.

Allan’s shrewish wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) is meanwhile introduced to us as a seething vortex of negativity. Trapped in a kitchen she clearly hates with every ounce of her being, she spends her days labouring away at the Sisyphean task of trying to bake cakes, repeatedly burning them, and flying into a rage as a result.

So bitter is Carol that she won’t even allow the couple’s teenage daughter Sandy (Dona Cole) to leave to go to college. “Why should she get the chances I never got?”, she demands to know. Sandy in turn bitterly resents her mother for condemning her to a life of drudgery on the isolated ranch, all culminating in an atmosphere which at times feels as suffocating and inescapable as the pit in which the characters toil in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existentialist classic ‘Woman of the Dunes’ (1964).

As if all this wasn’t bad enough meanwhile, the family’s problems are silently observed by a lumbering, mute simpleton (Leonard Tarver) who - for reasons that are not really made sufficiently clear until the film’s conclusion - lives in a shack adjoining their house.

Charmingly, this fellow is known to the family simply as “Him” (“he can’t tell us his name, assuming he ever had one,” Sandy sneers), and he seems to spend much of his time shivering on an unkempt mattress next to wall covered in girly pictures - when he’s not spying on the family members or lurking about with a wood axe, that is. Allan insists that “He” is harmless, but the women aren’t so sure, treating him with a mixture of fear and outright contempt.

At the heart of this tsunami of bad vibes, Allan himself remains an inert, helpless figure. Staring out into the desert, he meditates on the threat posed by the dry, lifeless expanse which stretches beyond the limits of his unhappy homestead. “Maybe the hate started out THERE…,” he muses, gazing at gleaming animal bones in the sand.

Already living in vision of the American Dream transfigured into a hermetically-sealed, loveless hellscape, it’s safe to say the last thing any of these folks need is the arrival of a Beast with a Million Eyes. Thoughtfully though, when the film’s allotted visitor from another world does eventually make an appearance, it does so in a manner which initially feels more annoying than actively apocalyptic.

The Beast’s ship (or meteorite, or whatever it is - the nature of the vessel is never really made clear) overshoots the ranch house, breaking all the windows, and shattering Carol’s beloved glassware. Her sense of futile, outraged frustration in the face of this inexplicable domestic calamity feels horribly palpable; as she gazes forlornly at the shards of a water jug, it honestly feels for a moment or two that she might be about to slash her wrists.

Long before it deigns to make any kind of physical appearance however, it becomes clear that The Beast’s modus operandi involves taking psychic control whatever ‘inferior’ intelligences happen to be hanging about in its general vicinity of its landing zone, dispatching them on malign and destructive missions on its behalf. (Herein lies the rationale for the creature’s purported “million eyes”, or so I’m assuming, as it sees through the optics of all the local insects and animals, etc etc.).

So, first a flock of suicidal birds attacks Allan’s station wagon, before the film reaches what is surely it’s nadir (in both emotional and cinematic terms) during a sequence in which the family’s beloved sheepdog Duke allegedly ‘turns bad’ under the influence of the alien entity and attempts to attack Carol whilst she is alone in the house.

I should clarify that, up to this point, ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ has been reasonably well made on its own low budget terms, but the problem here is that the production obviously had no means of creating the illusion that poor old Duke had gone crazy / become rabid. True, they manage to rustle up a few close-up insert shots of him growling and bearing his teeth, but in the long shots which comprise the majority of the scene, he just looks like a normal, happy doggie, making Carol’s decision to run screaming in fear and subsequently blast him with a shotgun seem entirely inexplicable in visual terms - as well as making us hate her even more in the process - even as we grudgingly acknowledge the idea the script is trying to convey.

Strangely, the catharsis caused by Duke’s death (along with the impact of the other low level disasters the family have suffered) somehow succeeds in bringing them back together, allowing them to escape the depressive fug in which they were previously trapped and reminding them of the familial bond they all share -- and it is here that the essential point of Tom Filer’s screenplay finally becomes clear.

It is soon noted, y’see, that the alien’s hypnotic powers only have an effect on people when they are alone. When we’re together, when we have LOVE, we’re safe! (Like all malign invaders/super-computers/killer robots etc, the Beast is flummoxed by by the concept of love, although its clumsy voiceover here at least acknowledges a distant, historical memory of such a thing once existing on its long-dead home planet.)

Corny as it may seem in retrospect, this grand theme is actually quite effectively unpacked by Filer’s script, aided by a set of characterisations which are more multi-faceted and psychologically realistic than those generally encountered in ‘50s monster movies. Crucially, the core idea that, beneath all the dysfunctions and resentments inherent in family life, we still share an unbreakable bond with our relatives and life partners, is allowed to develop naturally here, rather than just being preached in our general direction, as was more standard in this genre/era.

Unfortunately however, nobody thought to include poor old “Him” in the group hugs, so… you can probably guess how that whole plotline plays out, although there is at least quite an interesting, socio-political twist thrown in vis-à-vis the revelation of who the hell “He” actually is, which I won’t spoil for you here.

Thematically speaking, I found this story’s emphasis on the virtues of togetherness - and its implied rejection of individual agency - quite interesting, in view of the anti-communist / pro-‘freedom’ ideology which (in allegorical terms at least) was pretty much obligatory in American SF films of this era.

But then, if you look at it another way, I suppose the alien entity’s attempt to create a kind of invasive hive mind provides just as good a stand-in for the Reds as anything else, so ok - fair enough. Nothing to see here folks, just a bit of unusually thoughtful ambiguity on the part of the scriptwriter - let’s move on.

Of course, the philosophical resonance and character drama in ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ could have soared to Shakespearean heights of achievement, and it still wouldn’t have saved the film from living in reviled infamy in the minds of the millions of ‘50s monster kids who presumably sat bored out their minds in matinee screenings, demanding to know: where in the fucking hell is the Beast with a Million Eyes?!

Legend has it that this was also the reaction of producer James H. Nicholson, whose American Releasing Corporation financed and distributed the film shortly before morphing into the legendary American International Pictures. True to form, they already had the movie pre-booked with title and poster artwork ready to go, so…. WTF are you trying to do to us here, Roger?

Having committed the cardinal sin of turning in a monster movie without a monster, ‘executive producer’ Corman was thus allegedly dispatched to make right on his mistake with a mere $200 in hand, hooking up with master monster sculptor Paul Blaisdell to produce… well, for the most part, they seem to have resorted to just using a kettle with some flashing lights on the top, to be honest.

Seen in insert shots earlier in the film, this object seems very small (like some kind of sensor or radio receiver or something?), so when we see the surviving characters approach it during the film’s final minutes and discovering that it is actually supposed to be big - like, a spaceship, with a monster in it - the effect is disorientating.

When the door on the side of thing finally opens, we belatedly get a 30 second glimpse of some kind of scary, brain-headed monster thing (with TWO eyes, for the record), somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the same year’s ‘This Island Earth’. In an attempt to boost the impact of this revelation, these shots are super-imposed with the image of a big, throbbing eyeball, lending them a rather wild, proto-psychedelic quality which could, at a stretch, perhaps be seen as a very early indicator of the direction Corman’s directorial work would take during the 1960s.

All this is actually quite cool, and psychotronic as heck, but it’s likely audiences at the time merely saw it as a load of cheapjack crap - a pathetic, last minute attempt to try to justify the movie’s title and poster artwork, delivering far too little, far too late -forever condemning ‘Beast..’ to the lowest rungs of the monster movies canon.

Viewed with nearly 70 years-worth(!) of hindsight however, ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ feels like a more-than-respectable addition to the Corman/AIP catalogue. Sure, it suffers more than usual from budgetary constraints, and the lack of a tight directorial hand on the reins allows some extremely clumsy elements (eg, the dog scene and the monster’s ridiculous voiceover) to make it into the final cut, but at the same time, the film’s strong writing and well-rounded characters nonetheless keep us engaged throughout.

As such, it to some extent helped establish a formula which Corman would re-visit again and again over the next few years, with increasing confidence and success each time around. In marking the start of this cycle, it deserves to be viewed sympathetically as a minor landmark in American genre cinema, as well as for its own not insignificant points of interest.

Horror Express 2020: More Short Takes.

Three more shorter-than-usual takes on recently watched Horror films to glide us into the big day itself tomorrow. Including some actual positive comments this time around.

#14 

It Conquered the World 

(Roger Corman, 1956)

When AIP released The She-Creature (reviewed earlier this month) in 1956, it formed one half of a double-bill with this rather more widely remembered little number from Roger Corman. Quite a night out, by my estimation. For the sake of random cyclical completeness therefore, I thought I’d dig out ‘It Conquered The World’ and give it a quick going over, having not seen it for many a long year.

During the first half, I was surprised to note such a high incidence of clunky dialogue, painfully bad line-readings and general meandering tedium, which has no doubt done a lot to aid the film’s retrospective status as a more-or-less definitive cheap n’ cheesy b-movie. In view of the fact that the film's principal creatives were all smart and competent people however, I tend to suspect there was a certain amount of sniggering self-awareness creeping in here, which makes me sad.

As cynical as the production circumstances behind Roger Corman's movies may have been, when it comes to his directorial efforts, I've always appreciated his earnest dedication to making a straight-facedly decent movie out of whatever meagre resources were available to him. So, it’s disappointing to imagine him knowingly signing off on a load of sub-par crap at some points on this one, underestimating the intelligence of his audience in precisely the manner he usually so strenuously avoided. Perhaps Lou Rusoff’s script - just as shamelessly barmy as the one he provided for ‘The She-Creature’ - might to some extent be to blame?

Anyway, regardless, there is nonetheless a lot to enjoy here right from the outset. Surely no genre movie fan can fail to be moved by the sight of a (relatively) young Lee Van Cleef firing up his inter-planetary radio-set (hidden behind a curtain in the corner of the living room) to speak to his friend from Venus? 

Appearing just a few years after he played sneering, homosexual hitman Fante in Joseph H. Lewis’s classic ‘The Big Combo’, Van Cleef’s plummy, pointed-finger-aloft delivery of his dialogue here (“listen Paul - listen to the VOICE!”) must have become an acute embarrassment for him as he began settling into his more familiar taciturn cowboy persona over the next decade or so.

Meanwhile of course, the thunderously obvious nature of the obligatory anti-commie sub-text, expressed through Van Cleef’s interplanetary collaboration with a malign being who promises heaven on earth to mankind in exchange for their emotions and individuality, is so clearly comical that I’d like to believe that Corman - not to my knowledge a rabid McCarthyite - very much did have his tongue in his cheek in this regard.

And, once things get going in the second half, ol’ Jolly Roger really gives us our money’s worth. In fact, as soon as the Best Movie Monster Ever (accept no substitutes) shows up, conquering the fuck out of Bronson Canyon (if not quite the world) with his killer grin and adorable, residual-arm-waggling “just frontin’” moves, it’s all gravy for a surprisingly action-packed final act.

First we get the great Beverly Garland blasting away at the bugger with a shotgun (and, how often do we get see the heroine of a ‘50s sci-fi movie sneaking out from under her husband’s nose to give the monster hell, incidentally?), then the Dick Miller Commandos show up with their bazooka, and finally, an enraged Van Cleef getting up close and delivering the foam-melting coup de grace with an f-ing blowtorch, of all things! His final words: “I bid you welcome to this earth... you made it a CHARNEL HOUSE!”

For all the missteps and faffing about in the first half in fact, this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever - god bless you, Mr. Corman. 

 

#15 

Daughter of Darkness 

(Stuart Gordon, 1990)

Nothing to do with Harry Kumel or Delphine Seyrig, this is a made-for-TV vampire movie shot in Romania, directed by the late Stuart Gordon. In view of the info in the preceding sentence, I'd always assumed it must naturally be a Full Moon/Charles Band joint (some kind of spin off from their Eastern European ‘Sub-Species’ films perhaps?), but when I finally sat down to watch it this week, it immediately became clear that we’re dealing with a different kettle of fish entirely.

None of the usual suspects or company logos turned up on the straight-laced opening credits, and once things get underway, the tone is very different from yr usual Empire/Full Moon house style. It’s slicker for one thing, with somewhat higher production values, but also blander and more conventional, as if attempting to appeal to a mainstream TV audience, rather than rabid horror fans.

The plot sees a young American woman (Mia Sara) arriving in Bucharest in search of her long lost father, who turns out to be none other than Anthony Perkins. Along the way, she collides with variety of sinister and/or seductive characters, gets into a few scrapes involving the sinister dragon pendant she inherited from her Dad, has ominous bad dreams in which she traverses areas of the city she has never previously visited, and so on and so forth.

Thanks to Gordon’s brisk pacing and inventive direction, this is all fairly diverting, but unfortunately, once it gets down to brass tacks, vampire stuff in Andrew Laskos’ script is pretty hackneyed, much of the dialogue is fist-in-mouth terrible (the alleged “flirtatious banter” between Sara and U.S. embassy attaché Jack Coleman is especially painful) and the performances (with the exception of Perkins and a couple of the Romanian actors) are extremely poor. This latter point is especially disappointing, given that Gordon's theatrical background and good eye for casting usually helped his films to punch well above their weight in terms of acting and character stuff.

Meanwhile, the obvious requirement to stick to PG-level content also proves a stone drag. Although there are a few potentially memorable horror scenarios, and vampires’ manner of feeding proves a bit of an eye-opener, you can almost feel the director straining at the leash, wishing he could unleash some of the nastiness of his better-known work, but clearly under orders to keep things as mild as possible.

On the other hand though, the film is, as mentioned, very well directed, and the photography (by Romanian DP Iván Márk) is extremely good, making excellent use of the evocative and unusual urban locations. In fact, whereas many American horror films over the years have tried to hide the fact that they were made in Eastern Europe for budgetary reasons, this one makes a real virtue out of being shot under the nose of the Ceaușescu regime, which by my calculations must have been struggling through its final tempestuous final months at around the time ‘Daughter of Darkness’ was filmed.

As such, the film’s evocative and seemingly authentic Bucharest street footage carries an electric and fearful atmosphere, effectively conveying the idea of a city living under a cloud of intrigue and paranoia, and even incorporating a sub-plot about Sara being pursued by the dictator’s secret police.

With a stuttering electricity supply, gun-toting soldiers on every corner, and brief glimpses of breadlines and dishevelled streetwalkers visible as Sara roars through the streets in a broken down taxi, the film suggests an interesting contrast between these symptoms of late 20th century misery, and the older, more dust-shrouded European world represented by the shabby five star hotels, over-priced restaurants and subterranean craft workshops which both she and the vampires are obliged to frequent.

At times, I was even reminded of Zulawski’s use of East Berlin in ‘Possession’ (a comparison further suggested by the fact that this film’s main bad guy, British actor Robert Reynolds, is a dead ringer for a young Sam Neill), but... there the similarities end, unfortunately.

Overall, I’m not sure I’d recommend going to the trouble to track down ‘Daughter of Darkness’ unless you’re a Stuart Gordon completist (or an Anthony Perkins completist?), or unless you have a special interest in films shot in Romania, possibly. But, it is at least a sufficiently respectable effort for me to continue truthfully claiming that I’ve never seen a Gordon film I didn't enjoy. 

 

#16 

Gemini 

(Shinya Tsukamoto, 1999)

To be honest, I've never been much of a fan of director Shinya Tsukamoto, but I am a fan of films based on the writings of Edogawa Rampo, wild gel lighting and buying stuff from Mondo Macabro, so I thought I'd give this one a go.

Results proved…. mixed, shall we say. The basic Rampo-derived story, about a former battlefield surgeon (Masahiro Motoki) being terrorised by his doppelganger, remains very compelling, using an ostensibly simple horror conceit to explore a wide range of uncomfortable thematic territory, touching on the dehumanising effects of war, the collapse of family hierarchies and, most pointedly, the pernicious violence inflicted upon society by the rigid enforcement of socio-economic inequality.

Rest assured however, this is all treated by Tsukamoto more as a visceral, ero-guro tone poem than some high-minded political allegory, as he adapts his jarring, dissociative audio-visual style (often likened to the cinematic equivalent of a tape cut-up or extreme noise record) to the needs of a slightly more refined period setting, delivering some truly shocking and bizarre moments for us to, uh, ‘enjoy’, in the process.

Former pop idol Motoki does fine work too in what is a challenging pair of roles to put it mildly, with his portrayal of the ‘evil twin’ character in particular standing as easily the most unsettling display of skin-crawling evil I’ve encountered during this October season.

In many other respects though, I’m afraid I just didn’t dig the approach Tsukamoto takes to this material. Although there is some beautiful photography in places, the ‘extreme’ colour schemes used through much of the film are achieved through ugly-looking post-production filtering rather than actual, on-set lighting and production design, with the unfortunate effect of making a lot of the footage feel as if it’s been brutalised by the pre-sets on an arty teenager’s iPhone, whilst the director’s fixation with lo-o-ong sequences of people silently maintaining creepy/natural postures or just generally freaking out in front of the camera for minutes on end likewise got on my nerves.

Ultimately, these questionable aesthetic decisions served to distract me from the central narrative (which I was enjoying) to a sometimes catastrophic degree, ultimately making the whole venture feel a bit pretentious and uninvolving.

I’m also not really sure why the occupants of the film’s early 20th century “slums” all needed to be crazy, Noh-dancing neo-primitive cyberpunks, but hey, you hire the guy who made ‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’, that's what you get I suppose.

Horror Express 2020 #5: The She-Creature (Edward L. Cahn, 1956)

Though it was likely little more than another day, another dollar for ‘50s b-movie workhorse Edward L. Cahn (whom we last encountered on the way back from Mars with It! The Terror From Beyond Space earlier this year), this curious yarn is notable for running with a set of mismatched plot ideas so sketchy and ill-thought-out that they actually go full circle, resulting in a tale whose steadfast refusal to make any damn sense whatsoever leaves it feeling dream-like, inscrutable and obscurely haunting, emerging as one of the more bizarre monster movies mid-century America had to offer.

Seemingly in some kind of southern Californian beach community (although this is never explicitly made clear), ‘The She-Creature’ is able to exploit a range of settings which will to doubt remind modern viewers of such later, brine-soaked classics as Herk Harvey’s ‘Carnival of Souls’ (1962), Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz’ ‘Messiah of Evil’ (1973) and most of all, Curtis Harrington’s ‘Night Tide’ (1960).

First of all, there are the lonely, rocky beaches, where we initially find the mysterious Dr Carlo Lombardi (didn’t he build E.T.?) stalking through the sea-mist, making esoteric pronouncements to himself (“now, on this very night, I have called her from the unknown depths of time itself, she is here”) as he observes a set of sinister, triangular footprints leading up from the surf.

(Chester Morris, who plays Lombardi, had been Hollywood royalty in the era of the early talkies, but was clearly pretty down on his luck by this point - ‘The She Creature’ marks his last feature film appearance until 1970, the year of his death.)

Then, there are the isolated, wood-panelled beach houses in which most of the characters live, which seem to extend in a horizontal line along the beach-front, although we never see more than one of them at a time.

And, of course, there’s the carnival, wherein Lombardi conducts his strange shows, attempting to win converts to his quack transcendental doctrines whilst thrilling punters with live-on-stage past life regression sessions, featuring his psychically indentured hypnotic subject Andrea (Cahn regular Marla English), who seems to spend her non-performing hours reclining in a diaphanous gown upon the stage-set’s altar-like backdrop.

Whereas the films I referenced above though were all shot on real locations, carrying an authentic sense of place as a result, the imagined geography of ‘The She-Creature’s world by contrast feels entirely disconnected from any kind of reality. We see no cars or roads, no streets or infrastructure. The people live in the beach houses. The shore is a realm of mist and monsters. The crashing of the waves never ceases. If the people want to go anywhere, they go to the carnival.

When necessary, cops and detectives appear from somewhere to frown and crack wise, haul off the bodies and (eventually) take ineffectual pot-shots at the monster. But though the wider world is frequently referred to in dialogue, we never see it. To all intents and purposes, the film’s budgetary constraints trap us within a closed, goldfish bowl-like realm - a Malibu gothic ‘Truman Show’, or a Pacific analogue to ‘The Prisoner’s village.

Our hero within this disembodied realm - Ted, played by Lance Fuller - is that rarest of things, a serious, scientifically-minded parapsychologist who frowns upon quacks like Lombardi for bringing his profession into disrepute. I won’t trouble you with the ins and outs of Ted’s relationship with the beach-house dwelling Chappell family, but essentially he’s courting eligible daughter Dorothy (Cathy Downs).

Dorothy’s proto-new age, society wife mother Mrs Chappell (Frieda Inescort) has meanwhile become a devotee of Lombardi’s hypnotic revelations, whilst comically single-minded, amoral capitalist Mr Chappell (Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders, who was playing horror movie cads as far back as ‘Cat People’ and ‘I Walked with a Zombie’) reckons he can make big bucks exploiting Lombardi’s uncanny gift for predicting local murders. So, like it or not, the pencil-moustached man of mystery is a pretty inescapable topic of conversation at the family’s nightly soirees.

Like Roger Corman’s even weirder The Undead from the following year, ‘The She-Creature’ seems to tap into the mania for past life regression therapy which seemed to be sweeping the U.S.A. in the late 1950s (if the plots of b-movies are to be believed, at any rate). In attempting to graft this concept onto the bones of a common-or-garden monster movie, scriptwriter Lou Rusoff apparently gave little thought to even the most elementary notions of scientific understanding, resulting in leaps of theoretical logic which are truly dizzying.

Even leaving aside the notion of a hypnotic subject’s past selves being able to manifest as invisible spirts who can roam around the waking world causing mischief at the hypnotist’s command, by seeking a way to crow-bar a monster into proceedings, Rusoff’s script implicitly invites us to contemplate an entirely new theory of evolution (“..based on the authentic FACTS you've been reading about,” claimed the poster).

Rather than accepting the conventional assumption that primitive, amphibious life-forms moved from the sea to the land at a fairly early stage in their development, gradually developing over the millennia into reptiles, birds and mammals as we know them today, ‘The She-Creature’ instead casually confronts us with the possibility that humanity’s distant ancestors stayed in the water far longer, apparently evolving directly from some monstrous and heretofore unknown species of carnivorous, anthropoid lobster.

The ontological implications of this Nigel Kneale-like revelation are staggering, but naturally no one in ‘The She Creature’ seems to bat an eyelid as Lombardi babbles on to all and sundry about how he’s been able to summon a living, breathing example of this primordial monstrosity from deep within Andrea’s ancient, pre-human subconscious.

Perhaps understandably, most of our characters are more concerned with the more immediate matter of the people Lombardi’s creature keeps bumping off each time it hauls its atavistic, weed-encrusted carcass from the depths of the Pacific. After all, this is a goddamn Edward L. Cahn movie, not some navel-gazing, pinko beatnik speculative science seminar! This thing is eight feet tall, immune to conventional weaponry and can crush a man’s head like a walnut, forgoddsake! What are gonna do again it?!

Built (and indeed occupied) by Paul Blaisdell, the creature suit here may not quite be up to the standard of the one he built for ‘It!’, but ridiculous though it is, it sure makes an impression - those big, choppy claws are convincingly huge, and the insect-like compound eyes and segmented antenna are a nicely horrible touch, ready to give kiddie matinee audiences are serious case of the heebie-jeebies, even as the gnomic vagaries of the film’s script potentially played havoc with hard work their teachers had gone to providing them with a solid grounding in the whys-and-wherefores of life on earth.

Released by AIP, double-billed with Corman’s ‘It Conquered the World’ (also scripted by Rusoff), ‘The She-Creature’ subsequently drifted off into the late-night UHF ether from which one supposes it periodically emerged to pollute the impressionable minds of subsequent generations American youth, accidentally propagating the veneration of weird, primordial lobster gods which we see practiced so frequently on our cities’ streets today.

So, heed the word of Lombardi, and check out ‘The She-Creature’ today - it’s a mist-shrouded subliminal mind-bender for the ages, its wave-crashing, theremin-blasting echoes ringing out through time and space long after its director picked up his lunchbox and headed off to make ‘Runaway Daughters’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Rock’ back-to-back.

 

Horror Express 2020 #1: Sugar Hill (Paul Maslansky, 1974)

Well, who on god’s earth could resist a poster like that if it popped up outside their local cinema?

Say what you like about American International Pictures, they sure knew their marketing, and the decision to mix up a blaxploitation female revenge story in the ‘Coffy’/ ‘Foxy Brown’ mould with a voodoo / zombie movie was not just a great idea, but an inevitable one, in view of the company’s place in the market circa 1974.

Not only were AIP the originators of the aforementioned Jack Hill/Pam Grier classics, but the success of the Count Yorga pictures had also put them in the forefront of the brief trend for contemporary, U.S. set reinventions of classic gothic horror tropes. Indeed, their blaxsploitation/horror crossover line was already thriving in its own modest fashion thanks to ‘Blacula’ (1972) and ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ (1973).

As it transpires, ‘Sugar Hill’ arrived right at the tail end of these trends’ parallel box office ascendency, just before Arkoff and Nicholson started trying to realign the AIP’s output from 1975 onwards. As such, it should really have been the crowning glory of the company’s achievements in this fertile era; the icing on an already fiendishly overstuffed grindhouse cake.

Trying to assign blame for the fact that it isn’t makes for a less than edifying assignment, but…. let’s just say that, whilst watching ‘Sugar Hill’, the only thing running through my mind from start to finish was: I wish Jack Hill had made this with Pam Grier.

I mean, clearly those guys would have knocked it outta the park. Can you even imagine? Pam in full effect as the voodoo queen, commanding her zombies, as Jack got the chance to mix up the visceral pulp mayhem of his black action films with the gleeful monster kid craziness of ‘Spider Baby’. Wonderful. The late Sid Haig would no doubt have been ragin’ around as some spike-toothed mob enforcer, and no doubt they’d find someone totally far-out - like Exuma, maybe? - to play the Baron Samedi / Vodou Loa character. Allen Toussaint and Dr John might be thrown into a studio together to cook up the soundtrack, and… oh man. It would have been incredible.

Unfortunately though, that’s not the film we got. I believe Hill was still finishing up ‘Foxy Brown’ around the time this was shot, and he subsequently cut his ties with AIP following disagreements with management on the set. Grier meanwhile stayed with the company, but after ‘Foxy Brown’ she (or perhaps, her management) seemed intent on trying to make a dent in the mainstream via watered down, PG-rated re-hashes of her earlier hits like ‘Sheba Baby’ and ‘Friday Foster’ (both 1975).

In lieu of the A-team, Arkoff instead placed a call with his buddy Paul Maslansky, erstwhile producer of such AIP-distributed European horror titles as ‘Castle of the Living Dead’ (1964), Michael Reeves’ ‘She Beast’ (1965) and Gary Sherman’s classic ‘Deathline’/’Raw Meat’ (1972). Having recently returned to America after fifteen years abroad, Maslansky apparently had a yen to direct. So, Sam gave him a brief run-down on what black exploitation films were all about, suggested that combining one with voodoo would be a dead cert, then he basically just handed him the keys and told him not to dent the bumper.

In order to keep costs down and avoid hassle with the unions, production took place in the less than atmospheric environs of Houston, Texas, subbing imperfectly for New Orleans, on a punishing tight three week schedule. A script was cobbled together from somewhere or other, and actress Marki Bey - top-billed for the first and last time after playing supporting roles in a couple of pictures for AIP director/producer Arthur Marks - was recruited to play the title character. She’s not bad, but… she’s no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. (1)

Likewise, ‘Sugar Hill’ is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination, but… it’s certainly not an exceptional one either. The very definition of ‘adequate’, it’s one of those movies that’s just kind of…. there, for the most part. It delivers exactly what you’d expect of a 1974 AIP-produced blaxploitation voodoo movie, nothing more, nothing less. Glimpses of innovation or inspiration are few and far between.

Predictably, the story begins with Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill propping up the bar in her upstanding boyfriend’s kitsch, voodoo-themed nightclub, where we get to see a bit of the floorshow, and hear Motown group The Originals’ laboured and rather heavy-handed theme song, ‘Supernatural Voodoo Woman’. (‘Theme from Shaft’ it ain’t.)

The club is proving a runaway success, so naturally the local, multi-ethnic mob (led by Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry) want in on the action. Upstanding BF of course is having none of it, so before you can reach for the fast forward button, he comes a cropper in the car park, and Sugar is out for sweet revenge.

Naturally, her first stop is Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), who lives a ghostly existence in a decaying colonial mansion amid a swampy estate swathed in prop department Spanish moss and gallons of dry ice. After the requisite sacrifices and incantations, Baron Samedi (a wild-eyed, permanently grinning Don Pedro Colley) arrives resplendent, as his ping-pong ball-eyed zombie slaves rise from the mulch of the forest floor to take care of business.

Before you can find any more synonyms for ‘predictably’/’naturally’/’of course’ etc, Quarry and his assorted despicable cohorts begin to meet their supernatural doom in a neatly episodic fashion, and….. that’s about as far as a plot synopsis needs to go, really.

On the plus side here then; even if the swampy, Louisiana atmos isn’t quite what it should be, the blind, silver-eyed zombies are an effective, distinctively creepy creation, and must have made quite an impression on audiences back in the pre-Fulci/Raimi era, when such soil-covered, filth-encrusted revenants were a rare sight indeed on the big screen.

Colley is full of fun too as Baron Samedi, going waa-ay off the deep end performance-wise, even if his top-hatted Loa character never really manages to move beyond the more obvious clichés of his part, and the ‘gags’ he dishes out as he drops in on his assorted victims are uniformly woeful.

Also providing excellent value for money is Quarry, who, despite reportedly being cast in this film simply because AIP were legally obligated to provide him with one more job before nixing his contract, nonetheless does sterling work. Giving every indication of having thoroughly enjoyed himself, he transforms his underwritten mob boss character into a hip, razor sharp figure who actually becomes strangely likeable, especially when sparring with his dim-witted, racist blonde girlfriend Celeste (Betty Ann Rees).

Those minor highlights aside however, there’s not really a lot to shout about here. Though there’s some nice lighting and camerawork here and there, in stark contrast to Hill, Maslansky’s direction is depressingly inert. It’s bad sign that he fails to invest even the calamitous early death of the boyfriend character with much dramatic weight, and for the most part proceedings remain equally flat thereafter.

Although he went on to enjoy a highly successful production career through the 70s and 80s (masterminding the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, of all things), it is notable I think that ‘Sugar Hill’ represents Maslansky’s only directorial credit. The drably utilitarian, “will this do?” vibe of most of the footage he captured here answers the question of why he never gave it another shot pretty concisely.

I probably can’t entirely blame Maslansky (who seems like a perfectly nice guy in interviews incidentally) for my next complaint – it sits more with a combo of him, Arkoff and Nicholson, writer Tim Kelly, the whole outfit really I suppose, but…. well, how can I best put this?

Whilst employing white writers and directors to make majority black cast films in the U.S.A. was never going to be an ideal scenario, my belief is that, when AIP hired hip white filmmakers like Hill, Larry Cohen and Jonathan Kaplan to make black action films for them in the early 1970s, those directors at least gave the impression that they were trying to engage with black audiences.

They positioned themselves on the same level as their hypothetical viewers and took an honest stab at reflecting their concerns back to them, sometimes pushing back against the more objectionable content demanded by the studio, and often allowing their actors to bend the material to their own creative/personal needs. To not put too fine a point on it, good movies resulted.

‘Sugar Hill’ by contrast merely feels like it’s patronising its target audience. Though the “revenge against whitey” plotline essentially isn’t much different to that of ‘Coffy’ or ‘Black Caesar’, there’s no real depth here, no impact or involvement. As each of the bad guys in turn prove themselves racist, corrupt or despicable before getting iced by Sugar Hill’s zombies as the guffawing Baron Samedi looks on, the payback is so predictable, so simplistic, that viewers – be they black, white, blue or green – simply feel as if they’re being played for fools, more than anything else.

It’s as if Arkoff told Maslansky, look, you’ve gotta knock off whitey (and some corrupt, black criminal types too, just for the sake of balance) – that’s what sells the tickets. Lesson learned, he’s just ticking the boxes for his boss here. Social relevance? Implicit understanding of the economic inequalities underpinning racial strife? Reflections on the blighted legacy of slavery lurking behind all that voodoo/colonial mansion shtick? Sadly there is precious little of any of that here.

And that’s before we even get to the “only in the 70s” ending, which sees the aforementioned Celeste (the real villain of the piece, to all intents and purposes) being ritually offered up to Baron Samedi as the ‘offering’ to repay him for his hard work icing all the bad guys, leading to us being implicitly invited to cheer in approval as Colley, grinning ear-to-ear, closes in for what he must assume to be a post-credits supernatural rape scene. HAPPY ENDING, everybody!

Boy oh boy. Let’s just skip over unpacking the questionable implications of that one, shall we? It might take a while.

In a sense, ‘Sugar Hill’ reminds me more than anything of the British horror directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in the late 1960s, ‘The Blood Beast Terror’ and ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (both 1968). It carries the same terrible stench of wasted potential, of the lightning-in-a-bottle potential of a unique confluence of time, talent and ideas being squandered, just because the guys in the back office were more concerned with delivering exploitable pictures as quickly and cheaply as possible than they were with actually making a movie anyone in their right mind would wish to see more than once.

When undertaking creative work, I’ve always tried to remember the old axiom that, if you aim for ‘good’, hopefully you’ll get something average - but if you aim for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably end up with shit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘Sugar Hill’ is shit – it’s a perfectly serviceable movie, and certainly worth a look for fans of this particular aesthetic terrain. But, if the film’s makers had borne the above wisdom in mind, it could easily have been worth two looks, or even eight or nine, if you get my drift. And the restless spirit of Mr. Arkoff may wish to note that we’d still be paying for it every time too.

Now if only they’d got Jack Hill to make this, and persuaded Pam Grier to star, and….

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(1)In fairness to Bey, this is a criticism which can just as easily be levelled at literally anyone else in the film industry. (Werner Herzog? I mean, he’s ok, but he’s no Pam Grier.)

Horror Express: The Haunted House of Horror (Michael Armstrong / Gerry Levy, 1969)

If you’ve read around the history of British horror a bit, chances are you’ll already be familiar with the convoluted background of this singularly ill-starred production, but nonetheless, it’s impossible to really put the contents of the film in their proper context without reference to behind-the-scenes shenanigans, so I’ll recount the tale for you in brief below.

So, basically – in 1967, ambitious young writer/director Michael Armstrong made a short film entitled ‘The Image’, starring an equally young and ambitious David Bowie. To follow up on the relative success of this venture, Armstrong put together a proposal for his debut feature – a violent psychological horror/thriller with a shocking-at-the-time homosexual twist, provisionally entitled ‘The Dark’, also starring Bowie. Tigon’s Tony Tenser was sold on the idea, and approached the British office of American International Pictures to sort out a co-production deal… which, by common consent, is where the trouble began.

To retrospective gasps from the world as it existed just a few short years later, AIP’s UK head honcho Louis M. ‘Deke’ Heywood nixed the casting of Bowie, insisting that fading ‘Beach Party’ heartthrob Frankie Avalon would prove a better box office draw, whilst also excising some of the more controversial elements from Armstrong’s script. The director, apparently grokking that compromise is the name of the game in commercial cinema, acquiesced, and set about shooting whatever was left of his masterpiece amid what seems to have been an atmosphere of persistent back office interference.

As Armstrong tells it, after principal photography was completed, he was told that Heyward didn’t think the footage was up to scratch, and had requested two weeks of re-shoots. Hastily throwing together ideas for a bunch of new and revised material he could use to beef things up, Armstrong anxiously prepared for the big production meeting – only to discover that it had taken place without him. He could collect his full fee, and would retain his director’s credit, but Heyward’s assigned director (Gerry Levy, who’d recently helmed the disastrous ‘The Body Stealers’ for Tigon/AIP) would handle the re-shoots, so, thanks for your hard work old chap, but best just go home and put your feet up, and we’ll sort everything out, alright?

Nine months later, something called ‘The Haunted House of Horror’ (we can blame Tenser for the title – not one of his best) made it to the screen, and is, to put it charitably, a complete dog’s breakfast.

It may be a cheap shot to observe that this back story is more interesting than anything that actually happens on-screen, but it’s unavoidable really. The fact is, most of the enjoyment which can be gleaned from this misbegotten cultural artefact comes from trying to keep track of whose footage we’re watching at any given moment, as fragments of Armstrong’s attempt to expose the venomous cynicism and psycho-sexual dysfunction of his swinging London contemporaries are interspersed – sometimes within the same scene, or exchange of dialogue – with redubbed material or new insert shots highlighting Heywood & Levy’s perverse determination to transform the project into some kind of outdated “teens in the haunted house” type drive-in caper.

As such, we’re never quite sure whether the mod-ish youngsters who initially assemble at a Central London house party are meant to be wolfish, psychedelic degenerates or gormless, Scooby-Doo-esque innocents. When they subsequently decamp to a derelict rural mansion for a phony séance (just for KICKS, y’know), the sudden lurches between teeth-grindingly witless dialogue of the “gosh, let’s get outta here before we see a ghost” variety and outbursts of shrieking, mean-spirited hysteria are jarring in the extreme… although the sad truth is that neither mode is really terribly engaging.

As presented here, the central conceit that, upon discovering that one of their friends has been brutally murdered, the party-goers decide to respond not by calling the police and/or leaving the dark old house to seek help, but instead by disposing of the body and instigating an extended private game of “one of us is the murderer, but who?”, just seems flat out ridiculous.

Perhaps if (as I suspect may originally have been the case), the script had established these guys as a bunch of sinister, ulterior motive-harbouring ne’erdowells with legitimate reasons to fear the fuzz, it might have worked. As is though, it feels as if Shaggy just got knifed, and Velma and Freddie are like, “shit man, we need to ditch the stiff”. We just can’t buy it, in order words – especially when it’s square-as-a-slide rule Frankie Avalon who’s trying to sell the others on this deeply questionable course of action.

Elsewhere, Heywood/Levy-mandated sub-plots involving veteran tough guy actor George Sewell as a spurned older lover of one of the girls, and a doddering Dennis Price as a police detective, prove almost unbelievably tedious, serving little purpose beyond padding out the run time – examples of the kind of cinematic ‘dead air’ which will sadly be all too familiar to devotees of Jess Franco and/or Harry Alan Towers. Even during the central ‘spooky house’ segments though, the pacing is often pretty slack and the action repetitious.

On the plus side, the pungent swinging ‘60s atmos of the film’s opening scenes will (as with just about anything filmed in this magic time and place) be worth the entry price alone to some viewers. The fuzzed up grooves which play during the house party scenes are pretty cool (it’s The Pretty Things, working once again under their ubiquitous ‘Electric Banana’ pseudonym, I believe), and the production design and set dressing - by future Norman J. Warren collaborator Hayden Pierce - is excellent too, during the Armstrong footage at least.

Some of the ‘tiptoeing around the dark house’ stuff is convincingly atmospheric, and, most memorably, the film’s two murder set pieces (both featuring male victims) are exceptionally gory for the period, edited together as sequences of ‘Psycho’-like shock cuts which I presume must remain largely true to the director’s original intent.

In places, we can also see that Armstrong had a pretty good knack for drawing strong performances from the film’s young cast (perhaps the fact he was around the same age himself helped in this regard), although the chopped and mangled nature of the footage prevents any of them from really establishing a consistent identity for themselves, whilst Avalon – whose be-cardiganed and be-quiffed character is ludicrously introduced as “..the epitome of Swinging London” – proves as wooden and out-of-place as you’d fear.

Likewise, we can just about see how the final reel revelation of the killer’s identity and motivation might potentially have provided a powerful and disturbing denouement, if the preceding seventy-five minutes had provided us with an appropriate frame of reference for it all, and if the pivotal scene had been performed by two actors who actually seem to have been in the same room with each other and understood the significance of the dialogue they were delivering – neither of which, sad to say, is the case here.

Whilst most of the blame for the sorry state in which ‘Haunted House of Horror’ reaches us must inevitably lie with Heywood & Levy though, it’s fair to say that there is likewise little left here to suggest that Armstrong’s original cut would have been a singular work of genius. Perhaps, as Heywood & co would no doubt have argued had posterity granted them the opportunity, he was simply too young and inexperienced to deliver a releasable, commercial feature? Perhaps, in tacking 30 or 40 minutes of hastily-shot filler onto the footage he delivered, they were simply trying to protect their investment and get the thing into cinemas?

Perhaps. But probably not. The cack-handedness of the producer’s insidious attempts to alter the tone and emphasis of the material, together with the remnants of a more coherent aesthetic vision which can be glimpsed in Armstrong’s footage, certainly lend credence to the director’s hard-luck story. Even if the film he delivered may have been a bit rough around the edges, Armstrong’s original cut would almost certainly have comprised a darker, more tonally consistent and more noteworthy contribution to the canon of British horror than the dispiriting hodge-podge of inconsequential guff AIP left us with.

It may not have established its director as a worthy successor to Polanski or Michael Reeves, but it would at least have given us a juicy chunk of sordid, late ‘60s gristle to chew on, prefiguring the grimy, proto-slasher tradition of Pete Walker’s ‘The Flesh & Blood Show’ and Richard Gordon’s ‘Tower of Evil’ by several years, or else mirroring the congealing counter-cultural ennui of Alan Gibson’s ‘Goodbye Gemini’ or Reeves’ ‘The Sorcerers’.

And, if we’d gotten his original wish and managed to cast Bowie, well… the sky’s the limit. Safe to say, we’d all have had umpteen releases of ‘The Dark’ sitting on our shelves by this point, and ‘Sight & Sound’ would have knocked out a cheery 50th anniversary piece a few months ago. Perhaps Armstrong might even have gone onto a longer and more rewarding directorial career, rather than packing the whole thing in after being shafted even more comprehensively by Adrian Hoven whilst trying to direct ‘Mark of the Devil’ in Germany a year or two later. Who knows. It’s a funny old game, this film industry lark.

We must, I suppose, at least admire Armstrong’s self-control in not attempting to recreate his film’s groin-stabbing finale in real life after seeing ‘Haunted House of Horror’ for the first time. He did get to enjoy at least some small quantity of revenge a few years later however, using ‘Deke’ Heywood as the basis for the pointedly named character of ‘Big Dick’ in what remains perhaps his most endearing contribution to British cinema, the semi-autobiographical sex film satire ‘Eskimo Nell’ (1975).

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One of many things which is arguably more rewarding than watching ‘Haunted House of Horror’ is looking at some of the wonderful artwork which distributors around the world came up with to try to sell it. In particular, note the Italian poster, which tries to pass it off as a Poe adaptation!