THE BODY SHOP (1973)
aka Doctor Gore
Article 2500 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-7-2008
Posting Date: 6-16-2008
Directed by J.G. Patterson Jr.
Featuring J.G. Patterson Jr., Jenny Driggers, Roy Mehaffey
Country: USA

A mad scientist kills beautiful women and removes their body parts in order to construct the perfect woman.

If ever a movie looked like a tribute to the gore movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis, this is it. Director/star J.G. Patterson Jr. (aka Don Brandon) had even worked with Lewis before, in a variety of different capacities on several Lewis films, including MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN, HOW TO MAKE A DOLL and THE GRUESOME TWOSOME. It’s aggressively amateurish, extremely bloody, technically incompetent, but it does manage to have a sense of humor (at least some of the laughs seem to be intentional), and it even manages to improve on Lewis by having decent sound quality. I hope you really like the “Sugar and Spice” song that opens the movie; you will hear the melody endlessly throughout this. The movie also has no plot, as will be apparent when you reach the end of the movie. In short, the movie is awful. Patterson died in 1974, but it looks like another directorial effort of his called THE ELECTRIC CHAIR wasn’t released until 1977.

BEWARE THE BRETHREN (1972)
Article 2499 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-6-2008
Posting Date: 6-15-22
Directed by Robert Hartford-Davis
Featuring Ann Todd, Patrick Magee, Tony Beckley
Country: UK

A sexually repressed young man has become a serial killer while his equally repressed mother becomes a member of a cult religion.

This one starts out promisingly enough with a sequence which juxtaposes scenes of the religious cult holding a mass while the murderer stalks a woman. I also liked the skill with which the identity of the murderer is revealed to us, and the movie occasionally makes creative use of sound. However, even during these bits, I was a little put off by the lack of subtlety, the rather ham-handed use of symbolic imagery, and a sense that the movie was more than a little overbearing. Unfortunately, the good things about the movie soon evaporate and the problems take over. The first half of the movie mostly belabors the discoveries we make about the characters in the first few minutes of the movie, and the second half of the movie makes a weird left turn away from the serial killing and focuses on the cult religion, and it ends with a bizarre sequence which is alternately bizarre and obvious, but ultimately unsatisfying. I also think the “gospel music” poorly chosen; it sounds more like seventies soul-pop than gospel music, and it’s just weird watching someone play the organ while no organ is heard in the music. All the major characters start coming off as twitchy basket cases before it’s all over, and the movie’s constant dwelling on the fetishism of the serial killer gets tiresome as well. Director Robert Hartford-Davis also gave us CORRUPTION and INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED; this is nowhere near as good as the former, and only slightly better than the latter.

BANG BANG KID (1967)
Article 2498 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-5-2008
Posting Date: 6-14-2008
Directed by Giorgio Gentili and Luciano Lelli
Featuring Tom Bosley, Guy Madison, Riccardo Garrone
Country: Spain / Italy

A western town is under the thumb of the evil Bear Bullock and his gunslinger assistant, Killer Kossock. Help comes in the form of a man who has invented a gun-fighting robot.

My first impulse is to take the movie to task for the non-stop narration that makes up the first ten-to-fifteen minutes of this spaghetti western science fiction comedy. However, that’s probably the funniest part of the movie. That’s not to say that the opening is really funny; it’s pretty lame, but the rest of the movie is even lamer. The central idea is cute enough, and it has some possibilities, but the movie fails to take advantage of any of them, and it falls flat on its face on every conceivable level. The movie also has its weird moments; it occasionally puts forth a visual metaphor in which Bear Bullock is a tyrannical king, the villagers are oppressed peasants, and the inventor is a knight in shining armor, but this aspect of the movie just makes it more bizarre without adding to the humor. In short, this is a listless and rather dull misfire.