Month: May 2020

2069: A Sex Odyssey (1974)

2069: A SEX ODYSSEY (1974)
aka Ach jodel mir noch einen – Stosstrupp Venus blast zum Angriff
Article 4530 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-10-2014
Directed by Georg Tressler
Featuring Nina Frederik, Catharina Conti, Heidrun Hankammer
Country: West Germany / Austria
What it is: Sex comedy (as if you couldn’t guess)

Five women from Venus land on Earth with a mission to gather as much spermatozoa as they can. They land near a small German village where they are mistaken for a French ski team. Many encounters ensue.

Once again, I find myself pointing out that it is my desire to be comprehensive in my coverage of the fantasy/horror/science fiction genres, and this does lead me to certain films I wouldn’t bother with otherwise, and this takes me once again into the realm of sexploitation. On that level, this one is rather mild; it only garners an R rating. That’s one of the two surprises in the movie; the other is that it is a hair funnier than I expected it would be, but then, I didn’t expect it to be funny at all (though I certainly expected it to try). Beyond that, this movie is pretty much at the level you’d expect. This one is checked off; let’s move on.

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Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977)

TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING (1977)
Article 4529 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-9-2014
Directed by Robert Aldrich
Featuring Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Roscoe Lee Browne
Country: USA / West Germany
What it is: Political thriller

A former Air Force general, jailed under trumped-up charges, escapes from prison with a couple of men and manages to infiltrate a missile base. He then threatens to launch nine nuclear missiles to start World War III if his demands aren’t met, one of which is that a secret document describing the ulterior motives for Vietnam war is released to the public.

This had the potential to be a truly nail-biting thriller; unfortunately, the movie never realizes that potential. There are various reasons for this, and at least one of them is that several usually dependable actors disappoint in their performances, including Burt Lancaster (who I usually really like) and Charles Durning; for some reason, Lancaster’s character never becomes compellingly real, and Durning fails to convince as a president. There are also a number of scenes that strike very false notes, not least of which is the scene where the secrets of the document are finally revealed. The movie has also one of the worst cases of what I believed Roger Ebert referred to as the phenomenon of “Mamet Dammit”; there is a lot of cussing in the script, but it all sounds forced and fake. These problems, combined with an overuse of unnecessary split screen and a length of two and a half hours, conspire to make this movie almost interminable. Ultimately, the movie failed to convince, and despite a handful of good performances (including those of Melvyn Douglas and Joseph Cotten), it never takes off. I was very disappointed.

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They Might Be Giants (1974)

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS (1971)
Article 4528 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-8-2014
Directed by Anthony Harvey
Featuring George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward, Jack Gilford
Country: USA
What it is: Odd comic romance

A female psychiatrist by the name of Watson takes on the task of treating a man who is under the delusion that he is Sherlock Holmes, and, towards that end, she follows him in an adventure where he seeks the whereabouts of his enemy, Moriarty.

James Goldman originally wrote this as a stage play, but after its initial production, he withdrew the play, feeling that he never quite got it right. The fact that he wrote the screenplay for this movie version does seem to indicate that he didn’t quite give up on it. Still, I can see what he means; there’s something about this meditation on Sherlock Holmes as filtered through the sensibility of “Don Quixote” that doesn’t quite come together. Whatever its flaws, however, the acting is not at fault; both George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward are wonderful in their respective roles, and there are some wonderful moments here. Two of my favorite moments include a scene where Scott’s character manages to make a non-speaking mental patient finally open up and talk, and the wonderful, if ambiguous, ending where he finds what he’s looking for. The theme of the madmen being saner than the supposedly normal people of the world isn’t particularly novel, especially in the anti-establishment countercultural world of the early seventies, but I find myself wondering if that was the theme of the original play from ten years earlier; nevertheless, Scott’s acting abilities give it a fascination and a depth that make the theme resonate. The fantastic content is a little tougher to pin down; we do have the theme of madness here, and the ending may lend itself to a fantastic interpretation. At any rate, I’ve developed a definite love for this movie, and I’d like to read the play version, if I ever get a chance.

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Echoes (1982)

ECHOES (1982)
Article 4527 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-7-2014
Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman
Featuring Richard Alfieri, Gale Sondergaard, Ruth Roman
Country: USA
What it is: Ghost story of sorts

An artist is plagued by vivid dreams from a past life. It turns out that he has an enemy from the past who is trying to manifest himself into the artist’s current life.

In some ways, this comes across as one of the most professionally made of the movies I’ve seen lately. It’s well acted, has a decent visual sense, has a few familiar names in the cast (Sondergaard, Roman and Merecedes McCambridge), and has a potentially interesting premise in that the ghost that continues to haunt the artist down through the ages attempts to manifest himself as a twin of the artist, but who was miscarried in the womb. But the way all this supernatural material manifests itself in terms of the action of the movie is that the artist becomes increasingly rude and unpleasant, especially towards his dancer girlfriend. As a result, despite the fantastic elements, the movie mostly plays out like a really bad romantic drama, and the more the artist acts like a jerk, the less I find myself caring about him or his plight. After a while, I found myself hoping for a really downbeat ending, and I don’t think that’s what the filmmakers intended. In short, this one doesn’t work.

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Delusion (1981)

DELUSION (1981)
aka The House Where Death Lives
Article 4526 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-6-2014
Directed by Alan Beattie
Featuring Patricia Pearcy, David Hayward, John Dukakis
Country: USA
What it is: Psychokiller movie

A nurse takes on a job of caring for crippled old man in his house. At about the same time, the old man’s grandson, both of whose parents have died recently, also comes to stay with him. Then the murders start happening…

This may be one of the most laid-back psycho-killer style horror movies I’ve seen. I think I see what it’s trying to do; it’s going for quiet, eerie horror rather than loud, overbearing horror, and though that’s a tough trick to pull off, the movie almost does it. The key word there is “almost”; the problem is that the movie gets so laid-back on occasion that it becomes more sleep-inducing than suspenseful. The plot does try to give us a couple of neat twists, but that doesn’t quite work either; for one thing, it’s built on one of the more common horror setups in which one character carries all the weight of the suspicion, and since you never see the murderer, you know it’s a red herring, and another is that the big surprise at the end isn’t really that big a surprise, as I had begun to anticipate it. Still, it is nice to see Joseph Cotten in a fairly decent role here as the crippled old man, and he gives his character some nice dimension. Ultimately, the movie is a nice try, but it misses the mark.

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Deathmoon (1978)

DEATHMOON (1978)
aka Death Moon
TV-Movie
Article 4525 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-5-2014
Directed by Bruce Kessler
Featuring Robert Foxworth, Joe Penny, Barbara Trentham
Country: USA / UK
What it is: Horror in Hawaii

An overworked businessman suffering from bad dreams he can’t remember is ordered to take a vacation. He goes to Hawaii, where an ancestor of his was a missionary who offended the natives by interfering with a tribal ceremony. Has he inherited the curse they laid on his ancestor?

When my primary complaint about a movie is that you can’t see anything in the night scenes, I find myself wondering whether or not they were shot that darkly for some reason, or whether my print of the movie is simply not very good. I do know that I can see the daylight scenes just fine. Now I’m not talking about scenes where the action is somewhat obscured by the darkness; I’m talking about scenes where you’ll see a couple of pinpricks of lights that may be eyes, or scenes where you strain your eyes trying to see if there’s anything at all on the screen. I will say this much; when the scenes are this dark, they’re no fun at all, and that’s especially true for horror movies where much of the key action occurs at nights. In a movie like this, I will find myself suspecting that the reason it’s so dark is to cover up the fact that the werewolf makeup is really lame; I know you never get a good look at him here. Granted, the rest of the movie is no great shakes, either; character-wise, there’s something dull about a man who’s a werewolf who hasn’t the slightest suspicion that he is, the investigation isn’t particularly engaging, and most of the movie seems more interested in the man’s romance with a fellow vacationer and location footage of Kaua’i, where this was filmed. You know, sometimes I get the feeling that certain movies exist primarily for the travelogue footage. Lovers of Hawaiian footage will probably like this one more than horror fans.

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Dark of the Night (1986)

DARK OF THE NIGHT (1986)
aka Mr. Wrong
Article 4524 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-4-2014
Directed by Gaylene Preston
Featuring Heather Bolton, David Letch, Perry Piercy
Country: New Zealand
What it is: Haunted car thriller

A woman buys a used Jaguar to take on a trip. When she picks up a man and woman who were hitchhiking, the woman disappears from the back seat and the man claims not to have seen her. She discovers that the woman was a previous owner of the car, and that she was murdered in it. She comes to believe that the car is haunted.

I like the basic story the movie tells, and I like the decidedly non-Hollywood feel of this one; it’s one of those movies where the actors in the cast all look like ordinary people rather than Hollywood stars. However, one of the problems with the feature film form is that in order for them to be really salable, they need to be of at least a certain length, and there are certain stories that would work best with a much shorter running time. I’m afraid that’s the case here; despite the efforts made to keep this one interesting, a certain degree of dullness seeps in, especially during the middle section of the movie. The movie is sometimes compared to CHRISTINE, but the resemblance is pretty much on the surface; this one is playing a somewhat different game. The ending is, however, quite satisfying.

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Burned at the Stake (1981)

BURNED AT THE STAKE (1981)
aka The Coming
Article 4523 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-3-2014
Directed by Bert I. Gordon
Featuring Susan Swift, Albert Salmi, Guy Stockwell
Country: USA
What it is: Weird witch possession movie

A man whose daughter is on trial for being a witch travels through time to the present day, where he encounters a girl who may be the reincarnation of the one who is accusing is daughter of witchcraft – Ann Putnam.

For the first ten minutes of the movie, I thought this was going to be another of those dramas about the Salem witch trials; it’s quite bad during this sequence (at least partially because of the very clumsy period dialogue being used), and I was glad when the movie took a left turn into the present. Still, that left turn is pretty bizarre, and the story (which is kind of a cross between THE EXORCIST and a reverse-angle version of one of those “witches returning from the dead” stories) really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. For some reason, the possession of the girl gives her witch-like powers (despite the fact that Ann Putnam was not a witch but merely accused others of witchcraft), and in order to save her the powers of a real witch are needed. The more I try to sort it out, the less sense the movie makes. Still, for a movie that is often quite bad, it has its moments; my favorite is a scene in which a real witch threatens the captain of the police department. Susan Swift (as both Ann Putnam and the girl she possesses) gives a good performance, but I did get very annoyed with her constant yelling and crying, a problem I’m more likely to attribute to bad direction than to her talent. It’s a strange entry into the oeuvre of Bert I. Gordon, and though it has some interesting ideas, it never comes together.

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Won’t Write Home, Mom – I’m Dead (1975)

WON’T WRITE HOME, MOM- I’M DEAD (1975)
Episode of “Thriller” aka Terror from Within
Article 4522 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-2-2014
Directed by James Ormerod
Featuring Pamela Franklin, Ian Bannen, Suzanne Neve
Country: UK
What it is: Mild “Thriller”

A woman visits a cousin who she hasn’t seen since she was a child; she’s visiting because her fiance (with whom she has a psychic link) was supposed to have been there. Little does she know that her fiance has been murdered. Will her dreams reveal the secret her fiance left behind?

The British TV series “Thriller” was very uneven; some of them did indeed live up to the title, while others tend to disappoint. This one is a little closer to the latter; though it has an interesting initial setup and passable climax, it’s one of those stories where you just know that most of the running time is going to consist of the heroine not finding the clue that she needs to unravel the mystery, and sure enough, that’s what we get here. It tries to add to the tension by having a subplot about a mysterious Rolls Royce, but the mystery of this plot element feels pretty forced. The psychic link is the fantastic content here, which is more than a lot of the other episodes have to make it qualify. Still, the psychic link manifests itself rather clumsily. At heart, this is an interesting idea marred by a weak script.

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Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980)
Article 4521 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-1-2014
Directed by Ruggero Deodato
Featuring Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen
Country: Italy
What it is: Italian cannibal movie

An anthropologist undertakes a mission to the jungles of South American to find out what happened to four filmmakers who disappeared while on a mission to make a documentary about the primitive cannibal tribes of the region. He manages to acquire the footage they shot.

If I learned anything from watching this movie, it’s that I’ve developed a high tolerance for gory and repugnant footage; I managed to get through the whole thing without flinching. This is, of course, the most legendary and notorious of the Italian Cannibal genre. It has been banned in several countries, and the director himself was charged with murder; he was only freed when he was able to gather up the cast members (who had signed a contract to disappear for a year after the movie was released so as to seem as if they had really died) and have them show up in court. The most offensive thing in the movie is easily the slaughter of the animals; the human violence was faked, but the animals were really and explicitly killed. The main question that needs to be asked is this – was their a point or a purpose to the parade of atrocities on display here? Deodato does seem to be trying to make a point; some of the atrocities are not committed by the native tribes, but by the documentary filmmakers themselves, and it’s obvious that he’s trying to get the audience to ask themselves who the real monster are. Unfortunately, two things blunt the effectiveness. One is that he makes the filmmakers so vile that they stop feeling like human beings and more like symbols. Secondly, despite efforts to the contrary, the “documentary footage” doesn’t always feel convincing; there are moments where it looks overly-edited and where it feels like there are more cameramen around than is supposed to be on the journey, and the addition of a musical score makes it seem even less real. This, combined with the fact that much of the atrocity footage seems very gratuitous, undercuts the movie somewhat. As a result, despite the fact that the violence is quite extreme, I have a feeling that the movie hasn’t really risen above its exploitation roots enough to truly disturb me. Or perhaps it would be better to say that I’m more disturbed by what was done to make the film than by what it was trying to say.

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