Zee and Co. (1972)

Aka X, Y and Zee. Quite frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a shit! Middle-aged London architect Robert Blakeley’s (Michael Caine) angry wife Zee (Elizabeth Taylor) finally gets even with him for his affair with young widowed boutique owner Stella (Susannah York) by first attempting suicide and then having a go at seducing the woman herself. And Stella’s past threatens to engulf them all … Come back here, you! I haven’t dismissed you yet! This is Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s first original screenplay and it was published in advance of the film’s release, with some evident alterations to the source material. Worth watching as an incredible time capsule of the ageing Swinging London set hiccoughing their way into the new decade and with gems of performances from the cast.  Taylor’s flamboyant bisexual complete with Cleopatra makeup flames into violence when provoked by her sly puss of a husband, recalling the best moments of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in this raunchy iteration of the woman scorned. She’s dressed horribly, matched only by fag hag Gladys (Margaret Leighton in an astonishing pink frightwig) who shows up in a gold see-through number. Caine excels as the man who finds himself cuckolded by his victim and goes off the rails pondering whether it’s possible men have nervous breakdowns, chastened by reminders of his wideboy background;  while York gets to have another tilt at the kind of  plaything part from The Killing of Sister George but with a taint of something else – as she says, I’m sick of serenity. It often tips into camp particularly in the with-it party scenes but there’s a truth about the relationships that shears through the trashy affect and all three rise to meet the perversity that haunts them. It’s nicely shot around London by Billy Williams and there’s a sharp score by Stanley Myers which acknowledges the slide back and forth from uxorious romance to self-parody. Look out for a young Michael Cashman as Gavin, York’s design assistant. Filled with sex and spite, this is highly entertaining. Directed by Brian G. Hutton, if you can believe it, in a total change of pace from Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes. But of course! I think I know what she is. She practically told me herself

The Carpetbaggers (1964)

Living up in the air like a rich seagull. When playboy Jonas Cord (George Peppard) inherits his father’s industrial empire based on an explosives factory, he expands it by acquiring an aircraft factory and Hollywood movie studio. His rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s is ruthless. He sets aviation records and starts a passenger airline. He marries and then quickly abandons sweet, bubbly Monica Winthrop (Elizabeth Ashley) the daughter of a business rival and provokes their divorce before she gives birth to their daughter; turns his young, gorgeous stepmother, Rina Marlowe (Carroll Baker), who was his girlfriend originally before his father Jonas Sr. (Leif Erickson) married her, into a self-destructive movie star; and manages to disappoint even his closest friend and surrogate father, cowboy movie star Nevada Smith (Alan Ladd) whose concealed background he uses for a movie script. Then he falls for a prostitute Jennie Denton (Martha Hyer) whom he wants to turn into the movie star of America’s dreams… If that woman ran an immoral house she’d have to pay me. Despite the lurid and sadistic content of Harold Robbins’ sensational 1961 bestseller, a roman à clef which mines the contours of a Howard Hughes-type protagonist, and censorship issues aside, this is a strangely muted adaptation by John Michael Hayes and Edward Dmytryk’s stilted direction doesn’t help. The real shocker is the fight scene between Peppard and an ageing Ladd which looks properly dangerous and finally explores Cord’s psychology but it’s truly disturbing because it feels real, unlike much of the drama. As a portrait of the Thirties movie-making scene it’s certainly got a nose for the Hollywood casting couch mentality and its general air of seedy decadence and corruption. In that light it’s an interesting take on the career of the Harlow rip off played by Baker (and she made the biopic the following year). Robert Cummings is properly horrifying as Dan Pierce, the smooth agent who is a pimp in all but name; and Martin Balsam scores as Bernard B. Norman, a dastardly studio head; but in many ways, including performance, with Peppard the main culprit, this is all trash, all surface. Ladd’s character is a mélange of Tom Mix, William Boyd and Ken Maynard:  the prequel, Nevada Smith, would be directed by Henry Hathaway from a John Michael Hayes script with Steve McQueen in the lead. Ladd died before this was released. Only you know how all the pieces fit

Dorian Gray (1970)

Aka The Secret of Dorian Gray/Il dio chiamato Dorian/Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray. One day when even you’ve become an old and hideous puppet this will still be young. London student Dorian Gray (Helmut Berger) is the subject of a portrait by society painter Basil Hallward (Richard Todd) whose clients hedonistic aristos Lord Henry Wotton (Herbert Lom) and his wife Gwendolyn (Margaret Lee) take a fancy to him. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with aspiring actress Sybil Vane (Marie Liljedahl) as she rehearses Romeo and Juliet. She makes him think about someone other than himself for a change. As Basil completes his portrait Dorian finds himself obsessed with his painted image and swears that he will trade his soul to remain young. His relationship with Sybil grows complicated and argumentative and she is killed when she is knocked down by a car. Dorian is heavily influenced by Henry who has him sleep with Gwendolyn and Dorian then becomes immersed in society as a kind of gigolo who makes other people famous, be they men or women. However as the portrait begins to reveal his age and escalating depravity he hides it away from sight where it changes appearance and becomes ugly and Dorian ends up killing Basil when he says he’s not responsible for the alterations.  Dorian is conscious of the peril of his situation, particularly when Henry introduces him to Sybil’s double, a woman married to a scientist embarking on research into rejuvenation … Everything is yours. Take it. Enjoy it. The most beautiful man of this or any time stars in a European co-production of the greatest work of literature by the greatest Irish author and it’s updated to the flashy, groovesome Seventies. What bliss is this?! With equal parts tragic romance and fetishistic kink it easily falls into the category of trash yet the moral at the centre – the idea that youth is beautiful in itself, not just for what it can obtain – gives it a lingering value. The god-like Berger is perfectly cast as the impossibly erotic creature who transitions from youthful selfishness to graceless decadence, and his sleazy polymorphous journey through the fashionable world of swinging London is both quaintly dated and oddly touching, principally because of the relationship with Liljedahl (best known for her soft-core films in her home country of Sweden) and Berger’s consistent performance, beset by narcissistic fascination, bewildered by loss. It is precisely because this plugs into the truly pornographic ideas behind the 1890s textual aesthetics that it seems oddly perfect as an adaptation despite the occasional surprise – a bit of S&M in a stables, plus it’s not every day you see Lom approach a beautiful young man to have his wicked way with him. The screenplay is credited to giallo director Massimo Dallamano, Renato Romano, Marcello Coscia and Günter Ebert, from  Oscar Wilde’s indelible novel. The contemporary score is composed by Peppino De Luca and Carlo Pes. Produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff and Harry Alan Towers for American International Pictures. You only have a few years to live really fully

Tormented (1960)

No one will ever have you! Jazz pianist Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) lives on the beach in Cape Cod and is preparing to marry Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders) when old flame Vi Mason (Juli Reding) turns up to stop him and falls to her death from the local lighthouse when he refuses to lend her a hand as the railing breaks.  Wet footprints turn up on his mat, a hand reaches out to him, Vi’s voice haunts him and he starts behaving strangely particularly in front of Meg’s little sister Sandy (Susan Gordon).  Blind landlady Mrs Ellis (Lillian Adams) explains to him that similarly supernatural stuff happened when someone else died in the area. Then the beatnik ferry captain Nick (Joe Turkel)  who took Vi to the island to see Tom appears and starts getting suspicious that she never returned particularly when wedding bells are in the air … I’m going to live my life again and stop running. With a pedigree crew – director Bert I. Gordon co-wrote with regular collaborator George Worthing Yates – who did the screenplays for some great pirate movies and sci fis including Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, which starred Hugh Marlowe, frequently mistaken for Richard Carlson – you’d be expecting a class act. And it’s a good story hampered by a minuscule budget which gives off a different kind of aroma. The effects are hilarious – particularly good is some woman’s hand entering frame when Tom is in young Sandy’s company and he hits it and runs off.  Sandy sees nothing, of course. My favourite moment is when Vi’s disembodied head appears and Tom reaches out and enjoys a tussle with a blonde wig which he then wraps in paper and throws down a step only to have it picked up by his blackmailer and opens it only to find dead flowers. Despite Carlson’s character mutating into a murderous beast and his ex spinning a Monroe-esque vibe, and the hilarious hey-daddy-o exchanges with the beatnik boatman (whom you’ll recognise as Lloyd the bartender in The Shining), by far the most complex performance comes from young Gordon (the director’s wonderfully talented daughter). The ending is satisfying indeed if you like really proper ghost stories. However if you think you’re going to hear some decent jazz, well, it’s hardly a priority in a camp outing such as this. This was Sanders’ last film in a strangely brief career.  She’s a perfume, she’s a footprint, she’s a hand, she’s a space in a picture

Mom and Dad (2017)

It’s not my fault you don’t have a life. A mass hysteria of unknown origins causes parents to turn violently on their own children. Carly (Anne Winters) is a selfish teen and her young brother Joshua (Zachary Arthur) is obsessed with superheroes. They are the children of permanently disappointed Brent (Nicolas Cage) and Kendall (Selma Blair) whose dreams of a good life are hanging on a thread of yoga and a pool table. At school a TV signal seems to rewire the teachers’ brains and the students are in danger. Meanwhile Kendall attends the birthing room at the local hospital where her sister is having a baby but she tries to kill it when the machines go down. Kendall races home where Brent is losing it and the children are taking refuge in the basement  … It’s like they’re waiting for a buffet. A funny take on parenting during a mass midlife crisis in the ‘burbs, this nods to Poltergeist in the TV white noise that seems to trigger violence in all the moms and dads.  There’s also a reference to Night of the Living Dead as Carly’s cool boyfriend Damon (Robert T. Cunningham) happens to be the African-American who rocks up on time to help when things get seriously violent. Curiously the action sequences are not particularly well tooled but things get more amusing when grandpa (Lance Henriksen) arrives to let his son know how much he cares for him. Blair is great as the cool mom who protects her sister’s newborn one moment and tries to gas her own kids the next. Cage (naturally) relishes the role of the man bemoaning his cottage cheese ass, reminiscing over a teenage car crash when his topless girlfriend gave him a lap dance. Doesn’t quite hit all the notes needed for cult classic status but the titles are fabulous in a Seventies-trash homage sorta fashion with Dusty Springfield’s Yesterday When I Was Young giving us absolutely no idea of what’s about to unfold:  an ode to power saws. Written and directed by Brian (Crank) Taylor. I used to think my parents’ divorce was the worst tragedy of my life but ironically that just doubled my chances of survival!

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011)

Highly entertaining documentary about the exploitation/trash maestro who had ambitions way beyond his pay grade.  We hear from a variety of his alumni and the man himself, his brother Gene (another producer), his wife (and fellow producer) Julie and former assistant Frances Doel, among many others, about how the engineer who got screwed over money on the movie The Gunfighter decided to put on a show himself and debuted with The Monster From the Ocean Floor. By the time he made The Wild Angels he was directing his 100th movie which is stunning. He meant the world to Jack Nicholson who made his debut with The Cry Baby Killer – and then didn’t work again for a year! Nicholson describes Corman as his ‘lifeblood’ and bursts into tears. Corman kept him in work and gave him writing and acting jobs for a decade before he made his breakthrough with Easy Rider – which wouldn’t have happened without The Trip, which Nicholson wrote and it starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper: AIP wouldn’t make Easy Rider with Hopper and it went on to make history – as well as pots of money (as it were…) There are great clips of all the era’s material but the best storytelling comes from William Shatner recalling the personal jeopardy the Cormans experienced during the making of The Intruder, that fierce discourse on integration. The seventies stuff –  crazy funny movies like Hollywood Boulevard and Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is interspersed with really good interviews with Allan Arkush and Joe Dante and we learn about Corman’s own personal viewing tastes, choosing to distribute great films by European auteurs through his own company. The big studios took his formula and made multi-million dollar versions of Fifties exploitation content that made his name so he moved more fully into straight to video. There is no mention of the studio he set up in Ireland in the Nineties – presumably on grounds of taste.  Nor of his big studio movie from 1993, Frankenstein Unbound, his last directorial outing. Personally I’d like to have seen Monte Hellman speak about their collaborations but instead we get Paul WS Anderson and Eli Roth. That’s showbiz! Directed by Alex Stapleton.

 

Happy 91st Birthday Roger Corman 5th April 2017!

Aside from being a great opportunity to look at 50 years of wonderful poster art and titles to die for, today is trash-horror-exploitation maestro Roger Corman’s 91st birthday. The legendary Pope of Pop Cinema started life as an engineer but lasted just 4 days in the job. After a spell studying literature and reading scripts for Hollywood studios he got into the whole filmmaking thang himself and created a company that eventually served as a film school for some of the most notable directors in American cinema, from Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese, Stephanie Rothman to Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich to Penelope Spheeris. The most acclaimed of his work is the Edgar Allan Poe series, adapted by top-class scenarists like Richard Matheson and Robert Towne. His own best work as director (The Intruder) was so controversial he steered clear of such subject matter (racism) again and passion projects like Von Richthofen and Brown aka The Red Baron eventually gave way to serial producing:  his last directorial effort was a quarter of a century ago (Frankenstein Unbound). He audited acting classes with blacklistee Jeff Corey to understand performance and meet talent – which is how Jack Nicholson got his break in Cry Baby Killer and Robert Towne started writing screenplays. What I love about his early work is the way the women come to the fore:  June Kenney, Fay Spain, Beverly Garland and Susan Cabot are some of my favourite ladies and some of his alumni like Paul Bartel, Ron Howard and Demme have called upon him to act in small character parts in their mainstream successes. I once presented him with a project on biker movies and it was returned to me with the dry comment ‘Very accurate.’  High praise indeed! A scattering of my own fave raves from this renaissance man would include Gunslinger, Sorority Girl, A Bucket of Blood, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Wild Angels and Cockfighter. So much choice! Happy Birthday Mr Corman!

The Blob (1958)

This independently made campy trash classic is mainly of interest these days because it stars one Steven McQueen – and it boasts a fairly horrific theme tune by one Burt Bacharach. Steve’s out necking in his crush-worthy automobile with Jane when a shooting star that crashes to earth turns out to be … a parasitical blob of cherry Jell-O that infests humans! Well, what would you do, Daddy-O? Truly a product of its time but it looks pretty good and it must have been sensational at the drive-in paired with I Married a Monster From Outer Space!

Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

What on this good earth could possibly be better than a biker film – unless it’s a biker horror film?! Adam (Stephen Oliver) and his crew The Devil’s Advocates (nominative determinism or tempting fate?!) are tooling around as bikers do until he falls under the influence of One (Servern Darden) and his cult… Donna Anders, appearing here as DJ Anderson (confusingly, her real name!), plays his girlfriend Helen, who doesn’t like the hand of Tarot cards she’s dealt at the story’s outset. When they come across One and his gang in the deconsecrated desert church their food is drugged, she turns into a werewolf and soon infects Adam. (Is this a feminist act?!) They flee but get picked off one by one and when Adam and Helen transform in front of the others, the gang kill them. A few of them return to the church to kill the satanists but they recognise themselves in the procession …Notable for its footage of real-life bikers doing what they usually do, this was co-written by director Michel Devesque with David M. Kaufman. Oliver was best known for playing Lee Webber in TV’s Peyton Place between 1966 and 1968 and appeared in a number of other biker outings:  Motorpsycho (1965), Angels from Hell (1968), and Cycle Psycho (1973). You’ll recognise other cast members from The Last Movie. Cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky earned his stripes shooting for Encyclopaedia Brittanica but after this he made Scream Blacula Scream and in the following years got credits on films as diverse as The Muppet Movie, Somewhere in Time (sigh!), The Jazz Singer, Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer:  a versatile talent.  Likewise Levesque, who followed this with Sweet Sugar, another exploitation outing, but who also had an impressive career as an art director on such fare as Supervixens, Beneath the Valley of the Super-Vixens, Carquake and Foxes. There’s a notable psychedelic soundtrack provided by Don Gere. This is pretty good as biker werewolf movies go, which is to say, what more could you want from such a fabulously preposterous genre mashup?! If you’re hairy you belong on a motorbike! You read it here. PS cat lovers beware.

Frightmare (1974)

Aka Cover Up. And on this eve of lost souls it is only right to return to the world of Pete Walker, that sleazy trash maestro of Britcult, encompassing cannibalism, lunacy and serial killing. As you were.  Jackie Yates (Deborah Fairfax) has been dreading the release from a mental asylum of her father Edmund (Rupert Davies) and stepmother Dorothy (Sheila Keith) who apparently ate 6 of their victims in a 1957 killing spree. Now they’re back. And a lot of young people are disappearing in the neighbourhood. Time for Jackie to turn Nancy Drew with her boyfriend Graham (Paul Greenwood). The complicating issue in her quest to stop the driller killers is her stepsister Debbie (Kim Butcher!) who wanders  off at night with a biker gang and appears to have a genetic predisposition to human flesh …  Written by Walker and David McGillivray with sounds by Stanley Myers (any relation to Michael?!) in an outing which boasts the usual Walker flourishes and desposits what Rosemary Woodhouse might call a sort of chalky undertaste. Notable for an appearance by the lovely Leo Genn in his second last screen appearance ever, as psychiatrist Dr Lytell. Care in the community? Psycho on the streets! Happy Halloween!