Category Archives: 70’s Movies

The Orphan (1979)

Posted on October 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

orphan

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Oppressive aunt dominates kid.

David (Dan Owens) is a child of around 10 growing-up in the 1920’s who witnesses his mother (Joanna Miles) die a violent death and then later has to deal with his father’s untimely death as well.  His Aunt Martha (Peggy Fleury), who was the sister of David’s mother and who also had a secret affair with his father (Donn Whyte) years before, moves into the home and takes over as his adoptive parent. Since she had no children of her own she doesn’t know how to communicate with kids and instead lays down a lot of rules that David doesn’t like and pushes him into a make-believe world. He spends most of his time in an old backyard chicken coop where he talks to a stuffed monkey that he believes holds power and can make changes in his life for the better particularly when it comes to his aunt.

This film’s biggest claim-to-fame was its original title which was Friday the 13th: The Orphan and the producers of the Friday the 13th movie, which was filming around the same time that this one was released, feared it would get confused with theirs and thus went into negotiations to get the title changed. It was anticipated at that time that this one would do better as it took more of an old-fashioned approach to horror by working-off of atmosphere, imagery, and mood while the other one was an all-out slasher, which was still considered to be a fringe genre that would only attract small, select audience. Instead that one became a huge hit while this one fell into virtual obscurity.

For the most part I though it was an interesting and while not completely successful does have its moments. The pacing is indeed off especially during the first act where nothing much happens and there’s few if any frights, which made me start to wonder if it was even a horror movie at all, but it gets handled well on the technical end and I remained intrigued enough to keep watching. Things did improve by the second act and there’s a few creepy nightmare segments including David’s vision, captured with a fish-eye camera lens, of entering an orphanage, which is visually unnerving and I wondered if possibly writer/director John Ballard was going back to his own childhood experiences and the dark memories that he harbored as these scenes start to seem quite personal.

The acting by the kid is phenomenal. Usually child actors, even if they’re good, aren’t quite up to carrying a movie, but Owens does and I was surprised to find that he’s never appeared in any others as I felt he was talented enough to have a memorable career. He has, with his overbite, a creepy look about him and very much resembles, Ike Eisenmann, another famous child actor from the 70’s. However, I wasn’t sure if finding a kid that gave-off a scary vibe right away was necessarily the right move as the horror might’ve been more effective had he seemed cute and precocious initially, and someone the viewer could like, only to have, as a surprise twist, the dark elements come out later versus telegraphing it from the beginning.

Spoiler Alert!

There are a couple of good murders, but you’re going to have to wait until literally almost the very end to see them. The plot is also heavy-handed as it’s obvious that there’s going to be an ultimate clash between the kid and the aunt and endlessly dragging-it-out to where the viewer knows  where it’s headed, but takes its sweet time to get there, gets a bit frustrating. I also didn’t understand why the story had to take place in the 1920’s as I didn’t think it added anything and could’ve easily been set in the modern day and the attempts to make it seem like a period piece, especially on a low budget, doesn’t completely work.

Also, the plot synopsis in IMDb for this movie is inaccurate. It describes the kid as having ‘horrific headaches’, which he believes ‘make him commit murders’, but in the print I saw, which as supposedly the uncut, extended version there was no talk about headaches, or even observing him having one.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: November 10, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 32 Minutes (Extended Cut)

Rated R

Director: John Ballard

Studio: Cinema Investments Company

Available: DVD-R (j4hi.com, dvdlady.com)

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Moody/Stylish, Movies Based on Short Stories, Obscure Movies

Tagged , , , ,

Scalpel (1977)

Posted on October 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

scalpel1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Surgeon alters patient’s face.

Dr. Phillip Reynolds (Robert Lansing) is an esteemed plastic surgeon who secretly harbors a dark side. When he sees his daughter Heather (Judith Chapman) making-love to her boyfriend he flies into a rage and kills the boy and then stages it to look like an accident. Heather runs away in terror and is not heard of for quite awhile. In the meantime Phillip’s father-in-law dies and bequeaths his entire fortune of $5 million to Heather, but since she’s nowhere to be found the money remains in escrow until she can come forward to claim it. Later, as Phillip is driving along a city street with his brother-in-law (Arlen Dean Snyder), they come upon a nightclub stripper (also played by Chapman) who has had her face crushed when a bouncer rammed it into a brick wall. Phillip decides to reconstruct the woman’s face to resemble his daughter’s, so she can claim the fortune and the two can split it. Things work smoothly as Philip trains her on all of her daughter’s traits and able to identify member’s of the extended family. Everyone comes to believe she’s the real daughter and the two are able to get their hands on the money only to have the real Heather suddenly reappear.

This movie, amongst IMDb reviewers, gets high marks with most rating it between 7 to even a 10 out of 10. I rate it lower, which I’ll go into, but they’re are things about that I did like. The performance by Lansing is excellent and perfectly conveys a character that seems nice and respectable on the outside, but could turn sinister, sometimes in unexpected ways, all of a sudden. The surgery scenes are realistic and even a bit graphic and the film has a few slick touches including the cinematography by Edward Lachman that nicely captures Georgia’s topography.

The plot has an intriguing premise and there’s no shortage of twists, but the way the stripper character gets handled I had a big problem with. There’s absolutely no backstory as to who this woman is, or why she got into the situation that she did. It doesn’t even seem like a real person, but a transparent entity that conveniently pops-in out-of-nowhere with essentially no past to her. I think the filmmakers were working-off of an old-fashioned belief that a sex workers had ‘no life’ and therefore would be more than happy to walk away from their former existence and take-on a new one without any regret, but this just isn’t true. Sex workers have friends and family and a past just like anyone else and wouldn’t necessarily want to just completely turn their backs on their old connections. The script also doesn’t bother to explain why a bouncer would shove a women’s face into a brick wall as he throws her out of the bar, or what might’ve happened to lead up to that, which to me was a plot hole.

Some may argue that maybe she lost her memory when her head hit the wall. Even if this was possibly the case (it never gets confirmed and in one instance Heather asks the woman about her past and she looks down like she does recall it, but is ashamed of it) it would most likely be temporary amnesia which can happen at times during a traumatic event or accident, but the old memories will usually come trickling back eventually. Either way it would’ve added an intriguing wrinkle to the story, if someone from her past tracked her down and became a part of the plot.

In addition I didn’t feel that Chapman’s acting was so great as she seems to be playing the same person instead of two different individuals. More contrasts needed to be made into the dual character’s personalities other than one can play the piano while the other couldn’t. I didn’t like that both spoke in an extremely distinctive twangy southern accent either. The impostor could’ve put on the affected accent when needed, but in private should’ve spoken in a way that was much different.

Spoiler Alert!

The ending in which the fake Heather takes the inheritance money after signing-off on it and then flying away on a private jet, is a letdown. Her signature would be different than the real Heather’s and during her ‘training’ on how to be like Heather that would’ve most likely been a point they’d overlook. A really cool twist would’ve had her thinking she had gotten away with it only for the jet to land and the police waiting for her as they recognized that the signatures didn’t match, or in her haste she had forgotten and wrote in her real name instead.

There’s another segment, just before the ending, where a hitman, disguised as a policeman, chases the fake Heather through a forest in an attempt to kill her, and he manages to catch-up with her and points a gun in her face, but then the film cuts away. The fake Heather then reappears in the mansion wearing the hitman’s police uniform, but no explanation for how she got away, which should’ve been played-out.

Alternate Title: False Face

Released: January 15, 1977

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated R (Reissued as PG with erotic nude scenes removed).

Director: John Grissmer

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: Blu-ray, Fandor, Tubi

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies that take place in the South

Tagged , , , , ,

Jennifer (1978)

Posted on October 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

jennifer

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: She can control snakes.

Jennifer (Lisa Pelikan) is a shy student from West Virginia attending to a preppy boarding school in California. She lives with her father (Jeff Corey) who suffers from mental issues and is a religious zealot. She cares for him while also helping him run their pet store. At school Jennifer gets on the bad side of Sandy (Amy Johnston) the spoiled daughter of a rich senator (John Gavin). Sandy and her snotty clique of friends try to make life miserable for her, but Jennifer knows something that they don’t. She has a special ability, since childhood, to communicate and control snakes and when the harassment gets to be too much she unleashes the snakes onto her enemies.

While Hollywood is well known for ripping-off hit movies, in this case Carrie, this one is quite possibly the most shameless and brazen as very little effort is made to differentiate it from the original and it seems almost intent to copy it in every possible way. Star Pelikan looks and speak almost identically to Sissy Spacek from the original, even has the same clear blue eyes and Amy Johnston is virtually the spitting image to Nancy Allen who was the mean girl from that one. Director Brice Mack even replicates Brian DePalma’s soft focus camera lens and lighting schemes though I will give this one some props for mentioning John Travolta.

Jennifer’s powers gets awkwardly handled too as it’s over a half-hour in before they even get mentioned and we as viewers should’ve gotten foreshadowing about them a lot earlier. The preacher’s kid getting killed by one of Jennifer’s snakes when she was 7, which is what forced them to leave the small town, should’ve been played-out and not just discussed and the flashback scene of her as a child getting in front of a group of churchgoers at a religious revival in order to demonstrate her powers over snakes should’ve been shown right at the beginning instead of 35-minutes in.

I did though appreciate that Jennifer isn’t quite as pathetic as her Carrie counterpart and is able to hold her own in social situations instead of pathetically slinking away. The fact that she does have a few friends and people sticking-up for her is nice too as watching all the kids, like in Carrie, being cruel to another for the simple sake of meanness can get a little hard to take. The writing team of Steve Krantz and Kay Cousins Johnson also do a good job of creating a likable main character and a really nasty villainous making you fully hate her and looking forward to the climatic showdown. It’s just unfortunate that Amy Johnston was a weak actress and unable to make her character, as spoiled and nefarious as she is, more interesting.

Pelikan on the other-hand is excellent and I found it ironic that she was, in real-life, married to Bruce Davison, who starred in a famous horror movie of his own, Willard, about a young man that could control and communicate with rats. Nina Foch is great as the corrupt school administrator and I really dug her big glasses. John Gavin is fun too in his last movie role before he left show business to get into politics and looking like he hadn’t aged a day since the 50’s when he was, at that time, considered an up-and-coming star. Bert Convy though, while a great game show host, proves to be yet again weak as an actor. He’s so bad that even the scene where he tells-off Foch, which should’ve been rousing, becomes boring and I was hoping that at some point his character, which was a bit too good-to-be-true, would’ve made a provocative pass to Jennifer when they were alone together simply to give the story a little bit of a darker subtext.

Spoiler Alert!

Caveats and all I found the ending to be super cool and I really wished it would’ve gone on longer. Real snakes were used and the shots of them growing to giant size is genuinely creepy and makes sitting through the rest well worth it. The only quibble is that it’s never explained how Jennifer is able to make snakes appear out of nowhere. I was okay with the concept that she had an ability to make them do as she wanted and attack those that she didn’t like, but getting them to pop-in was a bit much. To have helped avoid this issue the final sequence should’ve been done at the her pet store, where the snakes could’ve come out of their glass cages to defend her, instead of in a parking garage where there were no snakes until she somehow ‘zapped’ them in.

I was also surprised, just as a side note, with the level of nudity that you see in what is otherwise a PG-rated movie. Not that I’m complaining, and I realize 70’s standards in the rating system are different than today’s, but still it ends up being more than you might think.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: March 31, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Brice Mack

Studio: American International Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Horror, Movies with Nudity

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Ghosts That Still Walk (1977)

Posted on October 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

ghosts

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Teen possessed by ghost.

Mark (Matthew Boston) is the 15-year-old son of Ruth (Caroline Howe) who is a researcher that specializes in astral projection. She goes out one day to an abandoned cave and brings home the decayed corpse of an ancient Indian Medicine Man and attempts to speak to the ghostly spirit that she feels is still inside it. Mark catches her talking to it when he comes home early from school and this sight spooks him enough that he runs away. When he eventually does return he begins to behave erratically and his concerned grandmother (Ann Nelson) sends him to a psychiatrist (Rita Crafts) who tries to get to the bottom of the matter.

This film, while not very good, is unique in several ways in that it’s one of the few horror movies that could be watched by the entire family. The mild frights are in the supernatural vein that may spook a child, who I believe was the intended audience, slightly, but won’t traumatize. This is also a rare horror film that features no blood, no gore, no nudity or swearing, and no psychos, or monsters. It also has virtually all of the scenes taking place outside in the bright sunlight versus doing them in the dark of night like with most scary movies. This marks as well the film debut of Ann Nelson, an elderly actress who went on to play a lot of old lady roles in TV-shows and movies during the 80’s and here as a hyper-anxious, deeply religious grandma is entertaining and helps give the film a few more points.

Reviewers on IMDb all seem to remember one specific scene that stands-out that stood out to them, which is the moment where boulders roll across the flat desert terrain by a invisible force, which is indeed a cool visual. However, I didn’t like the way they would conveniently bounce-up and avoid the camper that the old couple are driving in versus having one of the boulders come directly towards the camera and crash into the windshield, which would’ve been effectively dramatic.

Other scare segments don’t work as well. The scene where the camper begins driving itself goes on too long and isn’t as intense as it could’ve been as it’s done on a deserted highway and would’ve been more exciting had we seen the vehicle going into oncoming traffic. Cutting back-and-forth to the grandma getting bounced around on the interior walls as it drives crazily elicits unintended laughs instead of tension.

It’s also confusing as to who the main character is supposed to be. It starts out with the kid, who’s likable enough, but then he goes away for a long period and we get stuck exclusively with the elderly couple in a flashback bit and then it segues to the mother and in-between there’s extended scenes, with voice-over, of the psychiatrist as she researches the case. The kid, who I liked best, finally comes back near the end, but it’s not enough to save it and the way it gets structured here makes it seem like 4 different stories that get awkwardly merged instead of having one protagonist throughout.

The ending peters-out with a fizzle giving the viewer no climactic pay-off at all. The title is also goofy as I didn’t think ghosts walked, but instead floated.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: September 25, 1977

Runtime: 1 Hour 32 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: James T. Flocker

Studio: James Flocker Enterprises

Available: VHS, DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Ghost Story, Horror, Movies for the Whole Family, Obscure Movies

Tagged , , ,

The Meateater (1979)

Posted on October 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

meateater1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: A haunted movie theater.

Mitford (Peter Spitzer) is a middle-aged father of two who decides he’s had enough of being a shoe salesman. Much to the reluctance of his wife Jan (Dianne Davis) he buys an old movie theater and decides to reopen it. The theater had remained closed since the previous owner showed the movie Carnal Knowledge, which was considered too racy for the conservative citizens of the town, but Mitford promises to schedule only G-rated fare. While opening night is a sell-out it proves fatal when the projectionist (Richard Nathan) gets electrocuted and dies. Then from behind the screen it’s revealed that someone from years ago had hanged himself. No one knows for sure who it is, particularly the vulgar police detective (Joe Marmo), but the new owners begin to suspect that the weird, stuttering man (Arch Joboulian) who lives nearby and always appears in the theater at odd times may know more about what’s going on than he’s letting-on.

Regional filmmaker David Burton Morris, who has shot the majority of his films in the Twin Cities area where he’s from, has had some acclaim with his dramas, but his foray into horror is a disaster. The only redeeming quality are the quirky characters. Raymond, as a hyper nervous, geeky projectionist is funny and I hated seeing him go. The crass investigator is good for a few chuckles too and in some ways probably not all that different from a gruff policemen of that era.

The film’s downfall is the fact that there aren’t any scares. It starts out creepy enough, but that vibe soon gets lost and the soundtrack plays like something better suited for a comedy. The extraneous conversations really bog it down. Discussions about Jimmy Dean sausages and having the family singing the Oscar Meyer wiener song as they drive home has no place in this story, or any other for that matter. It also suffers from poor framing where the husband and wife are sitting on a porch to one side and the detective on the opposite end, but despite all three being involved in a conversation only the couple are seen while all we see from the detective are his legs.

Spoiler Alert!

The third act is where it really goes south as the brother of the crazy stuttering man (both played by Joboulian) kidnaps the couple’s teen daughter (Emily Spindler) because she reminds him of Jean Harlow his favorite movie star. However, the teen girl wasn’t in much of the movie up until then, so the viewer has no emotional connection with her and therefore no care whether she gets away, or not. Since the mother had taken up most of the screentime it really should’ve been her as the kidnap victim. Either way it’s not very tense and Jobulian, who comes-off as a cross between Angus Scrimm in Phantasm and Richard O’Brien from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is not a good enough actor to make the villain role even remotely interesting. The attempt to borrow from the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ theme where this deformed being falls for a young beauty is both stale and contrived.

The story also has no connection with the title. We do see a man biting down on a rat at the beginning and the theater does show some documentaries of animals attacking other animals, of which we see a few snippets of, but the title leads one to believe this will be about cannibalism and there’s none. The film’s promotional poster seen above is misleading as well and far scarier than anything you’ll witness in the movie.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: November 16, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: David Burton Morris

Studio: Hollyco

Available: DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Horror, Low Budget, Obscure Movies

Tagged , , , ,

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Posted on October 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

messiah1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Town of dead people.

Arletty (Marianna Hill) travels to the seaside town of Point Dume, California to visit her father (Royal Dano) who is a popular artist there. When she arrives she finds his home abandoned and reads over his journals that he left in which he describes frightening things that have occurred to him in the days leading up. She then meets Thom (Michael Greer) and his two lady lovers, Toni (Joy Bang) and Laura (Anitra Ford). He too is searching for her father while also interviewing residents of the town about the strange events that have been happening and documenting them on tape. The four begin having weird encounters themselves as at night the residents of the town take-on a zombie-like existence where they stare at the moon and show an unusual craving for blood and meat.

The film was shot in 1971 under the title of ‘The Second Coming’, but the investors pulled their money out of the project and it was never completed. In 1973 another producer bought the footage and edited it before releasing it to theaters under its current title. It was not an instant success and fell into obscurity until another distributor bought the print 5 years later and decided to re-release it under the title of ‘Return of the Living Dead’ in order to capitalize off of the George Romero franchise, which quickly got it sued.

Today the film has gained a strong legion of fans and seen as being a unique and moody masterpiece and while it does fall short on the story end more than makes up for it with its atmosphere. It was written and directed on a shoestring by the writing and directing team of Willard Huyck and his wife Gloria Katz. Their names are most connected with the notorious bomb Howard the Duck, and while their careers were certainly stigmatized because of that, which some feel was unfair, they’re now considered neglected talents after many of those same critics saw this one.

The film certainly has some very cool and memorable moments with the best one being Anitra Ford’s trip to Ralph’s supermarket, shot on-location, and her confrontation with the zombies and subsequent chase through the store. Another great moment is when Joy Bang goes to a movie theater, where co-director Gloria Katz has a cameo as the lady in the ticket window, and while the theater is near empty when she arrives it slowly fills-up with the zombies as she’s watching the movie.

The two female leads are terrific and help give the film a personality with each scene that they’re in. Ford is better known for being a longtime show model on ‘Price is Right’  while Bang had some brief, but memorable moments in a few other films during the early 70’s before retiring from show business in order to move to Minnesota to become a nurse.

Hill though isn’t as good. She also starred in Schizoid, which was reviewed here a few days ago and like in that movie she gets upstaged by her co-stars. I did find it interesting though that in one scene here she kills someone with a scissors since that was the major weapon of choice in the other movie. I did find it odd that in the credits here her first name is listed with only one ‘n’ while in the other movie it was listed with two, so I guess, since that movie was shot 9 years after this one, that as she aged she must of grown another ‘n’.

The veteran cast of male actors are excellent too. The aging Elisha Cook Jr. has an entertaining bit as a wide-eyed homeless man telling crazy stories. Charles Dierkop is fun as a terrorized gas station attendant and Royal Dano is diverting as the father who smears his face with blue paint. The only male actor that isn’t effective is Michael Greer, who was quite flashy when playing flaming gay characters like in The Gay Deceivers and Fortune and Men’s Eyes, but when he’s stuck doing a straight guy he’s deadly dull.

Unlike the rest of the movie the ending isn’t as effective and I didn’t think the sudden voice-over narration was necessary. We had gone the whole way without it, so entering it in at the last minute becomes jarring and disconcerting. There’s also no interesting final twist and the zombie theme is too similar to the George Romero films, ultimately making this one, despite the eerie touches, seem like a poor cousin to those.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: April 22, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz

Studio: International Cine Film Corporation

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Zombie Movies

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Mirrors (1978)

Posted on October 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

mirrors

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Woman haunted by voodoo.

Marianne (Kitty Winn) and Gary ( William Paul Burns) are a newlywed couple who travel to the French Quarter of New Orleans for their honeymoon. Little do they know that a secret group of people, including the owner of the hotel that they’re staying at, have decided to possess Marianne with the spirit of a dead black woman. Soon after arriving Marianne begins having frightening dreams and the reflections of someone else when she looks in the mirror. Strange occurrences happen around her including the deaths of dogs and even her husband. Eventually she gets taken to a psychiatric hospital where Dr. Godard (Peter Donat) listens to her case and agrees to try and help her.

This was the third feature film of director Noel Black. He attained the attention of film critics with his 1965 movie short Skaterdater, which lead to funding for his second project Pretty Poison, which starred Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld and garnered a cult following. Soon after he became highly in-demand, but he made the mistake of deciding it was more important to stay busy in the business than holding out for a good script. He took on directing the notorious Cover Me Babe, which features what may be the most unlikable protagonist in film history, and a movie Black later admitted “should never have been made”. He followed this up with Jennifer on My Mind, which met with equal disdain by both the critics and at the box office. By 1974, when this film was shot, Black was just trying to remain relevant as the studios that initially adored him were now no longer calling. This film was meant to showcase his visual talent, but he and the producers could never get on the same page as to what direction to take the story culminating in a muddled script that goes nowhere.

That’s not to say there aren’t things about this movie that I liked. The music score by Stephen Lawrence is haunting and the on-location shooting of the French Quarter offers a nice ambiance. I liked the point-of-view shots done when Marianne first gets wheeled into the hospital and the scenes inside an abandoned train station are spooky.

The story though lacks focus. The film opens right away with us seeing the notorious voodoo group in action, but it would’ve been more interesting had we not been given this information right away and instead made it more of a mystery for the viewer as to whether she was going insane, like the other characters in the movie think she is, or not. Winn’s performance is good. She’s better known for her part in a much more famous horror movie The Exorcist, where she appeared more youthful while here her hair is cut short and with make-up given a middle-aged demeanor. Her character though is poorly fleshed-out and shows no unique qualities and in that respect she’s quite boring, but as she becomes repeatedly terrorized by the group the viewer softens to her, mostly due to her good acting, and ultimately cares about her fate.

Spoiler Alert!

The story has similar themes with the cult hit Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and had it been better realized could’ve been a minor success, but the ending is too ambiguous. Winn turns to the camera in the final shot and shows a weird expression making us believe, I guess, that she’s been possessed by a spirit, but why was she chosen? There’s many people that come to New Orleans, so why does this group pick her to go through all this and not someone else? What’s the purpose, or end game of the group and what do they hope to achieve? None of this gets answered making the viewer feel afterwards that it was a big pointless waste of time. Black admitted that it didn’t work out right, but blames the fact that it was taken out of his hands and revised in a way that he didn’t approve of. All of this may be true, but in either case it’s best not to come into it with high expectations as you’ll leave gravely disappointed afterwards.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: February 8, 1978 (Filmed in May of 1974)

Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Noel Black

Studio: First American Films

Available: DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with a Hospital setting, Movies with a Hotel setting, Obscure Movies

Tagged , , , , , ,

Mansion of the Doomed (1976)

Posted on October 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

mansion

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Gouging eyes for daughter.

Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart) is a man tormented with guilt. He was the one driving the car the day he got into an accident that caused his daughter Nancy (Trish Stewart), who was a passenger in the vehicle, to lose her sight. Since he already had a background in eye research he begins working on finding ways to restore her vision. He finally comes upon the idea of transferring the eyes from a person with sight to hers. He chooses her boyfriend Dan (Lance Henrikson), who is also a doctor, as his guinea pig. At first the surgery is a success, but then later Nancy again goes blind. Chaney becomes even more determined to find a cure and begins kidnapping more people for his eye harvesting. Once the victims have their eyes removed he does not kill them, but instead keeps them prisoner in a cage in the basement of his mansion where his nurse and cohort, Katherine (Gloria Grahame), feeds them while also sending them electrical shocks through the metal bars of the cage just in case they try to get out-of-line.

The was the first feature length film to be produced by Charles Band, who has become known has a B-horror movie maestro. He had just gotten done producing the short Last Foxtrot in Burbank, which was virtually a shot-for-shot spoof of the Last Tango in Paris, which won him enough attention and accolades that it allowed him to get funding for this project. The star of that film Michael Pataki was commissioned to direct this one and Frank Ray Perilli, another B-actor who helped write the script for the first one, was assigned writing the screenplay here. Although the story is quite ghoulish the special effects are decent and the microscopic close-ups of eyes being poked at while in surgery will effectively make many quite squeamish.

Unlike other low budgets horrors the acting is excellent. Basehart, who was a one time considered an up-and-coming leading man but was clearly in a career decline by this point is still able to drive the story. I liked the way his character is conflicted and feels through his guilt that he’s doing the ‘right thing’ even when he isn’t, which made him a far more interesting villain than just the one-dimensional evil one. Gloria Grahame, another actor who had success, and even an Academy Award, decades earlier before plummeting into B-movie hell, isn’t as strong and her paralyzed upper lip, the unfortunate effect of too much cosmetic surgery, I found a bit annoying when she spoke, but fortunately she isn’t seen doing that too often. Henriksen is great as a caged prisoner who refuses to go down without a fight, but Vic Tayback, who had appeared with Grahame just a few years earlier in another horror flick, Blood and Lace, gets stuck with an extremely small role, as a police sergeant, which has very little screen time.

The script is a bit one-note and the second act has a redundant quality as we see one eye surgery after another. The victims become a bit too easy to subdue as well. One scene has two angry men, played by JoJo D’Amore and Al Ferrara, who chase Chaney into his home after he crashes into their car. All the Dr. does to ‘make it right’ is hand them a check for $1,000, but the men accept this offer too quickly. How would they know the check wouldn’t bounce, or that Chaney would stop payment on it before they tried to cash it? Other segments have him kidnapping a hitchhiker (Katherine Stewart) and a real-estate agent (Donna Andressen), but it’s never shown how exactly he’s able to overpower them. This was a short guy who was aging (already in his 60’s) and not too big, so he wouldn’t have necessarily had the upper-hand on these other women who were much younger and more agile, so playing-out the struggles he has with them should’ve been shown.

The blinded victims locked in a dungeon is what helps this film stand apart. Granted there are logistical issues that never get explained like how do all these people crammed into a small space pee and poop? Do they just all do it in the small cage and if so how and who scoops it out? Other than that though the make-up effects where their faces are shown with empty eye sockets is genuinely horrifying and realistic. Their efforts at trying to escape are both gripping and exciting.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: October 1, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael Pataki

Studio: Charles Band Productions

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Horror

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Digby: The Biggest Dog in the World (1973)

Posted on September 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

digby2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Dog grows really big.

Billy (Richard Beaumont) is a young boy who buys an Old English Sheepdog from a local dog home manager ( Victor Maddern). However, when he brings the dog home his grandfather (Edward Underdown) doesn’t want it in the house, so his mother (Angela Douglas) tells him to give the pet to someone else. He then leaves him at the home of Jeff (Jim Dale), a researcher who works at a defense lab that is experimenting in growth formulas. Jeff is smitten with Billy’s mother, but too shy to ask her out. He ultimately agrees to take the dog as an excuse to be around the mother more. Things though turn chaotic when Jeff decides to borrow some of the growth formula at his lab, in order to feed it to his tomato plants, but instead it gets accidentally given to the dog, who then grows to gigantic proportions.

This is the type of movie that’s clearly meant for kids, but kids today, with the advanced computerized special effects seen in modern films, will quickly be turned-off by the cheesy effects here. The attempt to make the dog seem bigger by placing him in a miniaturized kitchen doesn’t exactly work. Other segments where he’s seen outdoors and at a circus don’t work either because it’s obvious that the animal was simply put in front of a green screen. The segment that has Jeff sneaking the dog outside while having him wear an outfit meant for a horse is stupid too because a horse’s head is shaped differently than a dog’s, so there would be no way it would fit over the dog like it does.

The only inspired effect is when Billy crawls into the dog’s giant mouth in order to feed it a formula that will supposedly get the animal to shrink back to normal size. The recreation of the dog’s mouth to a large size is impressive though a dog’s tongue is thinner and longer than a person’s and yet the tongue in this mouth is styled much more like a human’s. Having the kid command the dog not to swallow, as if he did it would’ve sucked the boy down the throat, is dumb because swallowing is a natural reflex when liquid is poured in, so I’m not sure it could’ve been prevented, or that the dog would’ve understood what the command ‘don’t swallow’ would’ve even meant.

The story is based on the novel by Ted Key, who besides creating the comic strip ‘Hazel’ also wrote the screenplays for Gus, about a mule who kicks field goals, The Million Dollar Duck, about a duck who lays golden eggs, and The Cat from Outer Space. Those movies fared a bit better as they were more imaginative and had better character development. Outside of a circus scene, which features an elderly and near-sighted knife thrower played by Bob Todd, there is nothing that is funny, or even slightly amusing.

A good story should have a protagonist that the audience can root for and and a clear antagonist that the audience hates, or at least fears. This film though doesn’t have that.  Jim Dale is a likable enough, but a scientist nerd who’s awkward around women is a tired stereotype that isn’t interesting. The kid had more appeal and could’ve easily been the hero without the Jeff character even being present. The supporting cast is essentially the same person; deluded, wacky folks who are lost in their own little worlds and clueless about what is really going-on. It’s okay to have one dumb character, but when everybody is goofy it gets tiring fast. There’s no bad guy either just a bunch of buffoons running around saying buffonish things and getting into cartoonish predicaments. If that’s your idea of entertainment then have-at-it, but most will find this to be a dated and silly though those that remember watching as a kid may for nostalgic purposes like it a bit more.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: December 6, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 25 Minutes

Rated G

Director: Joseph McGrath

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD (Region 2)

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, British Movies, Farce, Foreign Films, Movies Based on Novels, Movies for the Whole Family, Obscure Movies

Tagged , , , ,

Not a Pretty Picture (1976)

Posted on September 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

not

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Reenacting a rape incident.

While Martha Coolidge is known today for having directed such 80’s classics as Valley Girl and Joy of Sex she started her career in the 70’s doing documentaries mainly about high school students. After having done three of those she decided to do one that was more personal and dealt with a real-life incident that occurred to her when she was 16 when she got raped on a date with a college student who was 20. While she went about casting the actress to play her as a teen she was shocked to learn that the actress, Michele Manenti, had a similar experience. The film then weaves between reenactments of the date rape and the situations that lead up to it as well as the aftermath. There’s also interviews with the cast members who talk about the emotions they go through while playing the characters including Jim Carrington, who plays the rapist named Curly, who confesses that he thought women secretly wanted to be raped due to his belief that they fantasize about it.

What I got out of the film and enjoyed the most was looking at the acting process and how the performers used elements of their own experiences to help shape the characters that they play. I was genuinely surprised that only one of the cast members, Amy Wright who has a small role as Cindy, ever went on to do another movie. The two stars, who I felt were both outstanding, never acted in anything at least film or TV wise even though I felt they should’ve had long careers. I realize that the acting profession is a very competitive business and what may seem like the cream-of-the-crop in college may not be able to rise to the top in the real-world, but it still seemed sad that they weren’t able to do more, or at least more in front of the camera. It’s also surprising how non-dated this is. The conversations they have both about dating and acting is something that could’ve easily been shot today and just as topical. If it weren’t for them openly smoking indoors in a public setting, which is a major no-no now, you would never have known this was done in the 70’s.

While the conversations that Coolidge has with the cast proves to be insightful the reenactments aren’t as compelling. The scene involving the conversations that the four friends have inside a car has some interesting points, but it goes on too long and gets static. The aftermath where Martha is ridiculed by the other girls at her school and called a ‘whore’ because of the rumors that Curly spreads stating that she was a ‘willing participant’ and the stressful moments she has when she doesn’t get her period and fears she may be pregnant are quite dramatic, but the most important scene, the rape itself, gets botched. All the other recreated scenes where done as if in real-time and with sets that replicated the era, which was 1962, but with the rape it’s staged as a rehearsal with Martha and the other stagehands clearly in view as it occurs and Coolidge constantly stops the action to have them redo the scene several times in order to get it right, but this takes the viewer out of the moment and mutes the emotional impact. In hindsight I think they should’ve done the entire recreation, both the rape and what lead up to it as well as the aftermath, first and then went to the behind-the-scenes footage afterwards instead of inter-cutting it, which may have been novel for the time, but eventually gets off-putting.

The film’s focus was apparently intended to be on Martha and her reactions at seeing her own rape get played-out as the camera keeps panning back to her face as she watches the actors perform it and then at the end she describes her feelings in a emotional way. While I’m sure this was a tough thing for her to do I still felt it would’ve been more encompassing to have it about all the other women, including the actress in this film, that this has happened to and how men in that time period were able to get away with it and never had to be accountable. That to me was more disturbing and the film ends up missing that point, or not hitting-it-home hard enough, and thus isn’t as strong, or ground-breaking as it could’ve been.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: March 31, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 23 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Martha Coolidge

Studio: Coolidge Productions

Available: Vimeo

Leave a comment

Posted in 70's Movies, College Life, Documentaries, Drama, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Obscure Movies

Tagged , , ,