Thriller: A Cruel Picture (They Call Her One Eye, 1974)

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (released in the US in a savagely cut version as They Call Her One Eye, 1974) is one of only three films made by Swedish writer-director Bo Arne Vibenius, all of which encountered serious distribution and censorship problems.

A young girl was raped as a child and the trauma has left her a mute. She now lives an idyllic existence on a country farm, or at least she did until she encountered Tony. He kidnaps her and forces her into a life of drug addiction and prostitution. But Tony makes one fatal error. He gives the girl (now named Madeleine) one day off per week. She uses her days off to train herself to be the perfect killing machine. She studies martial arts. She becomes a crack shot with a rifle or handgun, although her favoured weapon is a good old-fashioned double-barreled shotgun. She also learns advanced driving techniques from a rally driver.

She certainly intends to have her vengeance, but she has infinite patience. She has accumulated quite a hoard of money, by offering extra services to her clients. She will wait for the right moment. Although her revenge is a long time coming the movie is never dull. In fact it’s perfectly paced, with the long process by which Madeleine hones her killing skills inexorably building up the tension.

The plot is a fairly standard revenge plot, and although in 1974 female revenge movies were comparatively rare they were soon to become quite a considerable sub-genre. The plot doesn’t really matter in this type of movie, which is just as well because this one really stretches credibility to the limit, with the girl becoming a hopeless junkie within about week, and apparently unable to escape because if you go 36 hours without a hit it means instant death. What does count in this kind of film is the execution, and this one is done with considerable style.

The element that really makes this one something special though is Christina Lindberg as Madeleine. Lindberg has a rather minimalist acting style (which seems to be a common characteristic among Swedish actresses, including the truly great ones), but it works extremely well. In scenes where many actresses would be tempted to go over-the-top with emotional outbursts Lindberg takes an exceptionally subtle approach. But you can see Madeleine internalising her pain. She embraces it, because it’s her pain that makes her strong. While Lindberg is best known for her many softcore porn movies during the late 60s and early 70s she was an interesting and effective actress in the right role.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture ran into major censorship trouble almost everywhere at the time of its original release. The Synapse DVD release seems (judging by the running time) to be completely uncut, and it’s difficult to understand why it upset the censors so much. But then trying to make sense of something as absurd as censorship is the sort of thing that can send you mad. There’s a lot of nudity and some sex scenes and some sexual violence, but considering the subject matter that’s unavoidable and the sex is handled with remarkable restraint. There’s also plenty of violence, but again it’s done with restraint. By 1970s standards there’s very little gore. I can only assume it was the drug-taking scenes that aroused the wrath of the moral guardians, and considering that the movie takes such an extreme anti-drugs stance that’s just one more instance of the stupidity of censors. The movie is certainly much less harrowing than some of the other female revenge movies of the time, such as I Spit On Your Grave.

The Synapse DVD is disappointingly short on extras but it’s a nice transfer and most importantly the film is uncut. This is a classic of exploitation cinema, and a must for cult movie fans.

Wild Guitar (1962)

Arch Hall Sr. was an intriguing character as well as a B-movie legend. As a test pilot during the Second World War he gained such a reputation for wildness that he eventually had a movie made about him (The Last Time I Saw Archie) in which he was played by no less an actor than Robert Mitchum. He’s been a B-movie actor since the 1930s and had been writing screenplays for years before finally setting up his own production company called Fairway International Pictures. The company’s first venture was Eegah, a movie with a formidable reputation for insane awfulness.

Like all Fairway’s pictures, it starred Arch Hall Jr. Young Arch’s main asset as an actor, in fact his only asset as an actor, was that he was the son of the producer and owner of the production company. Arch Jr. also contributed original rock’n’roll songs for the soundtracks of all six movies in which he starred. His songwriting and singing skills were every bit as impressive as his acting. When Fairway made Wild Guitar in 1962 Arch Hall Sr had handed over the task of directing to Ray Dennis Steckler, who would later create his own legend by directing The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?.

Wild Guitar is basically a rock’n’roll teen romance movie about a naïve kid named Bud Eagle (Arch Hall Jr) from Spearfish South Dakota who arrives in Hollywood with a motorcycle, a guitar and 15 cents in his pocket. He is befriended by Vicki, a would-be dancer, and thanks to some amazing luck he gets his first break on a TV talent quest. He is then signed by a dishonest and conniving manager named Mike McCauley (played Arch Hall Sr). He becomes a star, but he never gets to see any of the money he’s made. The plots gets sillier and sillier, involving a phoney kidnapping by the world’s most incompetent crooks, before true love triumphs.

Ray Dennis Steckler also acts in the movie, as Mike’s very unmenacing henchman Steak. His acting is very similar to his directing - weird and incompetent but strangely compelling. You don’t believe what you’re seeing, but you have to keep watching. Nancy Czar as Vicki is not only incompetent, she’s also vaguely disturbing, as if she has no idea at all what’s going on. Arch Hall Jr has absolutely zero acting talent.

It all sounds like terrible film, and it is. But it’s a terrible movie very much in the Ed Wood style. As bad as it is, it’s immensely entertaining. And the worst things about the movie are what makes it most entertaining. The movie also seems torn between trying to be a hard-hitting exposé of corruption in the music business and a sentimental feel-good teen romance movie, and the resulting very confused feel gives it an extra touch of weirdness that adds to the charm. Arch Jr’s songs are awful, but they’re also awful in a fun way.

And it has go-go dancing! Vicki’s dancing is like everything else in the movie. Bad, weird but oddly fascinating. And then there’s the scene where Daisy the stripper tries to seduce poor innocent young Bud. Totally un-erotic, and she doesn’t actually take any of her clothes off, but her dancing is bizarre even by the standards of the rest of the movie. There’s just so much bad movie goodness in this picture. Thoroughly enjoyable, and highly recommended. If you’d always regretted that Ed Wood hadn’t made a rock’n’roll teen romance movie then Wild Guitar is a must-see.

Night of the Assassins (1976)

Jess Franco’s 1976 The Night of the Assassins (La Noche de los asesinos, also released as Night of the Skull) is a movie that becomes a lot more enjoyable once the penny drops and you figure out what he’s trying to do. Superficially it looks like Uncle Jess attempting a giallo but done in an odd period style. In fact it’s an Edgar Wallace krimi. Franco is quite fond of such movies and had already done a couple, most notably The Devil Came from Akasava.

And if you accept that as being his intention then The Night of the Assassins is rather enjoyable. It has most of the characteristics that made the German Wallace krimis so much fun. It has the outlandish and absurdly over-complicated plot, it has the settings that are so unconvincing and so completely wrong that they become fascinatingly surreal, it has very theatrical murders, and it has the same mix of mystery and comedy. Franco adds a little more horror to the mix, but horror was an element in some of the more memorable krimis anyway.

An English lord living in Louisiana is murdered. The reading of the will offers the opportunity to bring together (rather in the style of a 1930s Hollywood old dark house movie) a collection of relatives and hangers-on, all of whom distrust one another and all of whom seem quite capable of murder. More murders follow, and the murders conform to a pattern corresponding to a quotation from the Book of Apocalypse that the deceased lord was fond of. So there is murder by earth, by wind, by water and by fire. And (another indication that we’re dealing with a krimi here) the case is being investigated by a famous detective from Scotland Yard, with Scotland Yard’s jurisdiction apparently extending as far as Louisiana.

I think the idea of this movie as a tribute to the krimis also explains the surprising lack of gore for a eurohorror movie of this period. In fact there’s no gore at all. This lack of gore isn’t a problem - Franco still manages to come up with a couple of the most chilling scenes he ever filmed. The murder by earth is superbly done.

The actors (including Franco himself) all seem to be having a great time. There’s virtually no nudity at all. Even Lina Romay remains fully dressed for almost the entire film. I almost didn’t recognise her with her clothes on! It’s worth pointing out that the Tartan DVD gives us the Spanish release of the movie, so (being a Franco film) it’s quite possible that versions released elsewhere in Europe were somewhat spicier. Maribel Hidalgo is marvellous as the crazed and vicious widow of the deceased Lord Archibald.

The best of Jess Franco’s movies in my opinion are the ones where he gives both the trippiness and the sleaze full rein. The Night of the Assassins is Franco Lite, but it’s still entertaining and it has a rather engaging oddness about it.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

One-Eyed Jacks is one of those films with a production history so interesting and troubled that it almost overshadows the film itself. It was originally going to be directed by Stanley Kubrick, and both Rod Serling and Sam Peckinpah were also involved at some stage in the writing process. After finding that he just couldn’t get along with star Marlon Brando, Kubrick quit. This was probably a good thing for Kubrick, because this is really not his sort of film at all and the end result would probably have been disappointing as Spartacus. Kubrick needed to get out of Hollywood and make his own films.

With Kubrick gone, Brando took over as director and the scene was set for a classic Hollywood disaster. The movie ran months over schedule, and millions over budget. Paramount hated the result, slashed the running time by about half, and took little interest in promoting the movie. It lost money, and Brando never got to direct another movie. Given all that, you’d expect One-Eyed Jacks to be an absolute turkey. In fact it’s an exceptionally interesting movie, and arguably the first modern western, the grand-daddy of the spaghetti westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and Django, and the revisionist Hollywood westerns such as Little Big Man, High Plains Drifter and McCabe and Mrs Miller. It’s also, perhaps even more surprisingly, extremely entertaining once you get used to its rather leisurely pacing.

The bare bones of the plot is nothing more than a standard western revenge plot. Kid Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are bank robbers. Dad double-crosses the Kid, who spends five years in a Mexican gaol, while Dad ends up as sheriff of Monterey, California. The Kid escapes, and comes looking for revenge. But Brando wasn’t interested in the plot or any of the conventions of westerns for that matter. He was interested in the psychology of Kid Rio and of Dad Longworth (and yes, the Freudian angle suggested by the names is certainly present) and the relationship between them, and in the relationship between Rio and Dad’s step-daughter Louisa (yes, some more Freudianism there too).

And as a psychological study the movie does, mostly, succeed. Both Rio and Dad have good and bad in them. Dad did double-cross Rio, but it was a momentary giving in to temptation, and it’s been eating away at him ever since. His savage outburst of violence against Rio is clearly motivated by guilt. Rio is a very unheroic hero, but he’s not quite an anti-hero. He’s brave, he’s burning up with anger and the desire for vengeance, but being Brando he also broods a lot. And while he’s brooding he’s not taking action, he’s doing a bit of a Hamlet, he’s hesitating and he’s thinking. Going after revenge is tempting, but is likely to see him ending up dead, and he’s not overly keen on that.

And then there’s Louisa, and that’s turned out to be complicated. He was supposed to seduce her the way he’d seduced so many other women, with his ready capacity for telling lies, and this would be another way of revenging himself on Dad. But she’s really in love with him, and he finds that shaming her doesn’t make him feel good, it makes him feel bad, and he doesn’t really hate women at all, and if all that isn’t enough to brood about there’s also the fact that he has to admit he does love her. Is that love more important than revenge? That requires more brooding. And while Brando’s acting style in this movie can best be described as minimalist, consisting mostly of brooding of varying degrees of intensity, it somehow works. We do get the sense of a man torn between conflicting emotions, and we do care about Rio. In his brooding way, he’s a man you can’t help liking, and for once it’s possible to understand what the heroine sees in the hero and why she loves him.

One-Eyed Jacks is also visually interesting. Westerns don’t normally make much use of ocean backdrops, but this one does, and to good effect. There are some nice set-pieces, especially the early scene on the ridge as the Mexican troopers close in on Rio.

Karl Malden gives a finely judged performance as Dad. There are some fun supporting turns, especially from Slim Pickens as an oily deputy. Pina Pellicer is extremely good as Louisa. But this is Brando’s film, and his understated but complex performance makes this an intriguingly odd but highly watchable western (and I don’t even like westerns as a general rule). In 1961 it was probably much too odd for mainstream audiences, but it’s definitely worth seeing.

The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968)

The surprising thing about The Mini-Skirt Mob isn’t that it’s a bad movie. You kind of expect that a movie with a title like that is going to be a bad movie. But it’s such a bizarre bad movie. It’s as if someone decided to make a bad western, then changed their minds and decided to make a bad biker movie, then thought no what I’ll do is make a bad juvenile delinquent movie, or perhaps a bad movie about rodeo riders, and then just before they started shooting they finally settled on making a bad thriller. So it’s all those things combined. Combined very badly.

Jeff Logan is a rodeo star. He used to hang around with other losers who were rodeo riders, and he also used to hang around with a gang of girl bikers called The Mini-Skirts. As far as I can make out The Mini-Skirts are rodeo groupies. I had no idea that rodeo riders attracted miniskirt-wearing motorcycle-riding girl groupies with bleached blonde hair but apparently they do. Which I guess explains why guys would take up rodeo riding. Jeff has decided to put all that behind him though, and he has married a nice middle-class girl called Connie. Why she would be interested in such a loser is never explained, but that’s just one of the many many things that are never adequately explained.

Jeff’s old girlfriend Shayne, the leader of The Mini-Skirts, has no intention of accepting this situation. She is determined to get Jeff back. So she does the obvious thing that anyone would do that in that situation - she instigates a campaign of violent intimidation against Jeff and his new bride. Jeff’s old buddies from the rodeo and the rest of The Mini-Skirts join this campaign of terror. His best friend Lon goes along with this because he is pathetically desperate to take Jeff’s place in Shayne’s bed, and figures the best way to do this is to help Shayne to win Jeff back. Spook and L. G. go along with it because they’re dumb rednecks and don’t know any better. The other Mini-Skirts tag along because they’re Bad Girls Who Live For Kicks.

Why this situation should escalate into murder, gunfights and the hurling of Molotov cocktails at Jeff and Connie’s trailer is a question that only the scriptwriters of this movie could answer.

If the insane plot isn’t enough for you, there’s the acting. Diane McBain’s performance as Shayne has to be seen to be believed, and even after you’ve seen it you still don’t believe it. Cult movie legend Patty McCormack (Rhoda from The Bad Seed) plays her sister, a bad girl who isn’t all bad. The rest of the actors are simply atrocious, including Harry Dean Stanton as Spook.

This is a movie that has everything wrong with it, but everything is wrong in just the right way and the results are outrageously entertaining. Shayne is one of the all-time great bad girls. If you love movies about evil miniskirt-wearing motorcycle-riding girl rodeo groupies (and frankly I can’t imagine how any right-thinking person could not love such movies) then you simply must see The Mini-Skirt Mob.

Watcher in the Attic (1976)

By the end of the 1960s the major Japanese studios were in financial trouble. To combat the menace of television they decided to chase a younger audience by the time-honoured method of adding more sex and violence. Toei Studios produced their pinky violence films, and Nikkatsu produced their “roman porno” movies, “roman porno” being short for romanic pornography. Noboru Tanaka’s The Watcher in the Attic is one of the more notable examples, and it’s now on DVD.

In fact there’s nothing remotely pornographic about it. It deals with adult subject matter and there’s plenty of sex, but it’s more art film than anything else. It’s based on several short stories by Edogawa Rampo. Rampo was one of Japan’s foremost writers of mystery novels, but his mysteries contained considerable elements of horror, weirdness and sexual perversity. He was a great writer and I highly recommend his stories. The Watcher in the Attic captures the flavour of his tales superbly.

A man hides in an attic, spying on the guests in a boarding house. He witnesses a murder, and becomes obsessed with a high-class prostitute. They become enmeshed in a mutual web of voyeurism, murder and sexual obsession. This story is interwoven with another, about a man whose sexual obsession is to become the chair in which his beloved sits. So he designs a chair that he can sit inside, so that his lover can literally use him as a chair, and pleasure herself at the same time.

It sounds sleazy, but somehow it isn’t (although it’s most certainly perverse). The production values are surprisingly high. This might be an exploitation movie, but it’s not by any means cheap and nasty. The period settings look wonderful. It’s set in 1923, a time when an era of comparative liberalism was about to be succeeded by the militarism and repression of the Showa Era. All Japanese exploitation movies have a political edge to them, and this one is no exception. The acting is exceptional. This is a classy production.

If you like unconventional erotic horror you really can’t go past this one. An excellent movie, and highly recommended. And since it’s from Mondo Mcabro, the transfer is exquisite, there’s a fascinating documentary on Nikkatsu’s 1970s erotic horror movies, an interview with the author of a book on the subject, and loads of trailers. No cult movie fan can afford to be without this one.

Fellowship of the Frog (1959)

Fellowship of the Frog (Der Frosch mit der Maske) appeared in 1959 and was the first of the long-running series of “krimis” made by Rialto Studios, based on the works of Edgar Wallace. Wallace already had a huge following in Germany which these movies were intended to exploit. Other German studios started turning out Wallace krimis as well, and by the early 70s even the Italians were getting in on the act. These films are in some ways the precursors of the Italian giallos, with outlandishly complicated and unlikely plots and a slightly surreal edge. For their time they were also surprisingly violent and sexy, and Fellowship of the Frog features a rather brutal machine-gunning which still seems quite graphic even today.

The other wonderful thing about these movies was that they were made in Germany but set in England, and the English settings are outrageously and delightfully wrong in just about every respect. The sleazy night clubs that feature in almost every one of these movies seem like they belong in Hamburg or Berlin, the British police are depicted as being armed to the teeth and continually involved in bloody Chicago-style shootouts with mobsters, and the stock footage of London landmarks interspersed with scenes that don’t look remotely English makes the settings even more unreal. The English settings are so inaccurate that on is tempted to believe it was a deliberate stylistic choice. Even if it was merely serendipity, it works. This is an alternate universe London, a world that exists only in these movies, but it’s an amazingly rich and entertaining world.

Fellowship of the Frog got the series off to a flying start, and includes all the best-loved ingredients of the krimi. There’s a comic-book style diabolical criminal mastermind wearing a frog mask. He’s the leader of a gigantic Dr Mabuse-style criminal organisation, the members of which are all marked with a frog tattoo. There’s Eddi Arendt providing comic relief as a crime-fighting butler in the service of wealthy American amateur detective Richard Gordon, played by the debonair Joachim Fuchsberger. Both Arendt and Fuchsberger would appear in many more of these films. There’s a sexy night-club singer. There’s jazz and there’s a seedy night-spot. There’s a beautiful young woman caught up in a bizarre criminal plot. There’s romance, violence and comedy. There’s a plot so convoluted that it defies analysis. And there’s non-stop action and non-stop entertainment.

Connoisseurs of this genre consider the movies directed by Alfred Vohrer for Rialto to be the cream of the crop, but Harald Reinl does a fine job in this one. The acting is never dull. The film has very much a film noir look which contrasts nicely with the outrageous pulp storyline.

The Edgar Wallace Collection, vol 1, from Retromedia include this film and a second Wallace krimi, The Mad Executioners. The transfer of Fellowship of the Frog is fullscreen and has a few blemishes but overall it’s quite satisfactory. And the set is great value.