High School Caesar (1960)

I love juvenile delinquent movies, and High School Caesar ticks all the relevant boxes. It has drag racing, it has the good girl pitted against the bad girl, it has half-baked psychoanalysis to explain the characters’ motivations, it has high school dramas treated as the stuff of epic tragedy.

Most of all it has that peculiarly American concept, high school as a metaphor for life.

Matt Stevens is the Al Capone of his high school. He runs a protection racket, plus a very lucrative racket in stolen exam papers and a crooked dance racket. To ensure the growth of his criminal empire he needs to be elected as student body president and it goes without saying that the election is accompanied by widespread corruption and intimidation.

Matt has a rival. His rival’s name is Kelly. Kelly is just as good-looking and popular as Matt, and he has his own band of devoted followers and supporters. The difference is that Kelly is a responsible and decent young man. He organises drag races, but he is careful to make sure they take place on deserted stretches of road so that no-one will get hurt.

Matt’s loyal lieutenant is a kid known as Cricket. Cricket is in awe of Matt, because Matt controls everything that matters. Matt’s corrupt organisation produces a healthy financial profit in which Crocket shares, plus Matt controls access to the girls. When Cricket says he wants to date the new girl at school, the beautiful blonde Wanda, Matt assures him that he’ll organise it.

This is where Matt’s smooth organisation encounters its first problems. He instructs his girlfriend Lita to inform Wanda that she will now be dating Cricket, but Wanda prefers hunky blonde nice boy Bob to creepy and geeky Cricket. And Lita starts to show signs of rebelling since she suspects that Matt has eyes for Wanda.

Of course a showdown between the two rival leaders is inevitable, and being a juvenile delinquent movie the showdown must take the form of a drag race. And now Matt’s supremacy is really endangered, since his dad’s Cadillac convertible proves to be no match for Kelly’s car. Matt is humiliated, and vows he will have his revenge. Meanwhile Cricket has been humiliated as well. Wanda just refuses to understand that she’s supposed to date the boys Matt tells her to date. And when Matt can’t deliver on his promise to provide his second-in-command with the girl he promised to him Matt’s prestige really starts to totter. The tragedy is moving to its inevitable conclusion.

No movie of this sort would be complete without a psychiatric explanation of the failings of the juvenile delinquent. We learn that Matt is fabulously rich, but he’s all alone. His parents send him monthly cheques, very substantial cheques, but they’re too busy jet-setting around Europe to bother with their son. He has lots of money, and he has servants, but it doesn’t compensate for the lack of parental love. He’s a poor little rich boy.

He has a lucky gold coin that his father gave him, a coin that will play a vital part in the plot, but it’s also a symbol. It’s all his father has given him, but Matt didn’t want a gold coin, he wanted a real father.

John Ashley plays the role of Matt and surprisingly enough he can in fact act. I’m not saying he’s a great actor or even a very good one, but he’s competent. The other actors are up to basic B-movie standards, but they’re all quite entertaining.

Daria Massey makes a rather effective bad girl. We know she’s the bad girl because she has black hair, as distinct from the good girl Wanda who has blonde hair because she’s, you know, the good girl.

High School Caesar is in the public domain and can be obtained from the usual sources for such movies. My copy came in the St Clair Vision boxed set Classic Teenage Rebels - all PD juvenile delinquent movies, the transfers are what you expect but it’s cheap and the movies are terrific.

High School Caesar is everything you could ask for in a juvenile delinquent movie and if you enjoy the genre then it’s highly recommended.

Sins of Sister Lucia (1978)

The existence of a sub-genre of Japanese anti-Catholic nunsploitation movies, such as Sins of Sister Lucia (Sudojo Lucia: kegasu), might at first glance seem surprising but once you become familiar with the world of 1970s Japanese exploitation movies it starts to make sense. Such movies appealed to the strongly anti-western, anti-authoritarian, anti-traditionalist, Marxist ideology that is so characteristic of 1970s Japanese cinema.

The better Japanese directors of that era infused their movies with enough style and enough weirdness to make them enormous fun in spite of the heavy-handed political messages. But in the hands of lesser directors it could get a bit tedious.

A particular problem with nunsploitation movies is that there are really only a couple of basic nunsploitation plots and most movies in this sub-genre adhere fairly closely to a rigid formula. Again it’s not a problem if you have someone as talented as Norifumi Suzuki in the director’s chair, as is the case with his gloriously outrageous School of the Holy Beast.

Sins of Sister Lucia, from Nikkatsu Studios, shows dramatically what could go wrong in the hands of an unimaginative director such as Koyu Ohara.

This film suffers from yet another problem. Any nunsploitation movies is going to be sleazy. That’s part of the fun. But there was a tendency in some Japanese exploitation movies for the sleaze to become merely vicious and unpleasant rather than fun. That’s definitely the case here.

The plot is pretty standard. Rumiko is the daughter of a corrupt politician. She not only steals the bribe money he had stashed away, she also stabs one of his cronies. She must be punished, but without a scandal, so she is sent to a nunnery. She is now Sister Lucia. It’s the sort of nunnery you find in nunsploitation movies - the nuns are all ex-crazed and most are lesbians. It’s all symbolic of the hypocrisy and corruption of all authority, at least in the eyes of radical film-makers in the 70s.

The arrival in the nunnery of two violent criminals on the run leads to more violence and more sex, until mercifully the police arrive and the movie ends.

There is one extremely good scene, in which the other nuns entrap Lucia in a huge spider’s web of woolen yarn. It’s the one moment of true visual inspiration in the movie. Apart from that it’s all rather pedestrian.

You’d expect copious quantities of sleaze and you certainly get it, but mixed with just a little too much nastiness for my tastes.

Mondo Macabro’s DVD presentation, as always with this company, looks superb and includes some nice extras.

If you want to explore the world of Japanese nunsploitaton you’re much better off seeking out a copy of the movie to go for is School of the Holy Beast (which is also available on DVD).

Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)

I usually have a pretty high tolerance for plot incoherence when it comes to Italian giallos and horror flicks but Francesco Barilli’s 1974 Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero) really challenged that tolerance.

Mimsy Farmer is Silvia Hacherman, a pretty blonde scientist who appears to be going slowly mad. She is haunted by memories of her childhood, rather confused and disjointed memories, but memories that obviously relate to something sexual. She is also involved with people who seem to be dabbling in voodoo.

Her hold on reality is gradually becoming more tenuous. As her childhood memories become clearer, her madness grows. Sometimes it’s better to leave the past in the past.

For the first 90 minutes or so it seems to have the potential to be a reasonably entertaining giallo, but then comes the final ten minutes. And that’s when you realise you’ve just wasted 100 minutes of your time as the movie spectacularly self-destructs. Sometimes this can be can a morbidly fascinating experience, but sadly not in this case.

There have been occasions when I’ve watched a movie and I’ve been underwhelmed by it, but then when I listen to the commentary track or see an interview with the film-maker I find myself inclined to judge the move less harshly. In this case the accompanying interview with writer-director Francesco Barilli actually made me dislike the movie even more, although it did at least explain a great deal about why this movie turned out to be such a trainwreck.

Bariili had been working on two separate projects, one involving madness and one involving voodoo (and other related elements but I’m trying not to reveal spoilers). Bariili got the bright idea to combine the two projects. Unfortunately they aren’t actually combined, they just exist side-by-side without really meshing. And then the producer insisted on the addition of another pointless sub-plot, which just makes things worse.

None of this would matter because this is after all Italian horror which is all about style rather than substance, except that what we have here is an incompatibility of mood which is far more serious than a plot that doesn’t make a lick of sense. The final ten minutes seem like it belongs to a different film, and it just doesn’t fit stylistically or atmospherically.

It might still have been salvageable had it been made by someone with real visual flair but Barilli’s directorial style is just a bit too pedestrian.

On the plus side Mimsy Farmer is quite good.

Raro Video deserve credit for releasing such an obscure movie although they’re a little overenthusiastic in describing two pages of text and two very small illustrations as “a fully illustrated booklet containing critical analysis.” The desperate attempts to compare it to Argento’s movies and to Rosemary’s Baby also ring rather hollow.

Ultimately Perfume of the Lady in Black is just not worth the effort and I can’t recommend this one at all.

Never Too Late To Mend (1937)

Never Too Late To Mend is a Tod Slaughter melodrama, and if you’re familiar with his movies you’ll know that there is going to be much fun to be had.

Like all his classic movies this one emanates from George King Productions and captures perfectly the spirit of Victorian melodrama.

This time Slaughter plays the wicked Squire Meadows. Squire Meadows wants to marry Susan, the beautiful daughter of Farmer Merton. Farmer Merton is not against the match, but Susan is in love with impecunious farmer George Fielding. Farmer Merton tells George that he will never gain his daughter’s hand until he can produce a thousand pounds.

George’s only chance of obtaining such a vast sum (and in mid-19th century England this was a very vast sum indeed) is by going to the colonies to seek his fortune. He intends to take ship for New South Wales.

This will leave the field open for Squire Meadows, but given that he is twice the age of George Fielding and that George Fielding is a handsome young man Squire Meadows decides it would be wise to take no chances. He concocts a scheme to have George arrested for poaching. The plan miscarries when George’s friend Tom bravely confesses to the crime to save his friend from prison.

While George is in his way to Australia the unfortunate Tom finds himself in the local prison, the administration of which is largely in the hands of the visiting Justices of the Peace, one of whom is none other than Squire Meadows. The brutal treatment of the prisoners is encouraged by the squire. He claims that he regards the prisoners as his children, but in reality they’re simply a convenient means for satisfying his sadistic impulses and his greed.

The only person at the prison who stands up to him is the prison chaplain, who was formerly the local parish priest.

Squire Meadows’ plotting is about to come undone however. He has finally, largely as a result of financial pressure exerted on her father persuaded Susan to marry him but on the eve of the wedding George Fielding suddenly reappears. And he has on his person not just one thousand pounds, but no less than seven thousand pounds. He has struck gold, literally, in New South Wales.

Of course Squire Meadows is not going to give up so easily and the stage is set for a classic melodramatic finish.

As with most of his movies there’s a bit of social comment, and a generous helping of sentimentality. It all works extremely well.

Tod Slaughter was always tremendous fun in these roles and in this one he’s at his wicked best, even indulging in actual moustache-twirling.

The support cast is perfectly competent but no-one is going to notice the support cast in a Tod Slaughter movie.

Tod Slaughter’s 1930s British movies are probably the purest cinematic expression you’ll ever find of Victorian melodrama. He played these roles on stage as well and having been born in 1885 and having made his stage debut in 1905 he must have had some first-hand experience of seeing the genuine article. He was almost 50 before he made his first movie so his whole acting style is very stagey. For this kind of material that’s a major asset.

If you’ve never seen a Tod Slaughter movie then you’ve missed out on a exceptionally enjoyable experience. Never Too Late To Mend is a good place to start, although Sweeney Todd is perhaps better.

Alpha Video’s DVD release (from their Tod Slaughter boxed set) is reasonable enough quality by Alpha Video standards - a bit faded and grainy but perfectly watchable.

Dr Renault’s Secret (1942)

The 30 and 40s saw a tremendous vogue for horror movies dealing with ape-men and other assorted animal-human hybrids. Dr Renault’s Secret, released by Fox in 1942, is one of the classier examples of this sub-genre.

The source material was Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel Balaoo. Leroux is best known today for Phantom of the Opera but he was a prolific and highly successful writer in both the mystery and horror genres.

Dr Larry Forbes is a young up-and-coming neurosurgeon, engaged to Madelon Renault, daughter of the famous brain surgeon Dr Renault (George Zucco). Dr Forbes arrives at the chateau in France where Dr Renault both lives and conducts his research, and is met by Dr Renault’s rather strange-looking servant Noel (J. Carrol Naish). Noel has a vaguely simian appearance and this being a horror movie we immediately wonder if he might not be quite fully human, especially as he seems to have some rather animal-like instincts.

Dr Forbes is not a terribly inquisitive chap though and doesn’t give the matter too much thought. A murder that occurs soon afterwards does raise further suspicions. Noel is not the only unsettling character at the chateau - there’s also the ex-convict Rogell (Mike Mazurki). He’s definitely up to no good.

The horrifying truth about Dr Renault’s experiments eventually comes to light, but not before Madelon’s life has been placed in great danger.

If you were going to make a mad scientist movie in the 1940s then George Zucco was going to be one of your first choices to play the role. And he does a splendid job, combining a very real rather avuncular charm with real menace. J. Carrol Naish does the sympathetic monster thing to perfection as Noel. The other players are quite adequate but they’re inevitably overshadowed.

While this was definitely a B-picture, it was a B-picture made by a major studio so the production values are quite high. It looks classy. It’s also exceptionally well made. Director Harry Lachman never really moved beyond B-movies but in Dr Renault’s Secret he shows himself to have been a highly proficient craftsman.

The make-up effects are subtle but very effective.

All in all this is a slick and highly entertaining little horror flick.

It’s one of three movies included in the Fox Horror Classics volume 2 boxed set. Picture quality on the DVD is superb. There’s a brief but informative featurette.

Things To Come (1936)

Things To Come, made in 1936, was one of the most ambitious productions of the British film industry of the 1930s, and the most spectacular science fiction movie made in Britain until Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey 30 years later.

With a screenplay by H. G. Wells, based on his novel The Shape of Things To Come, this is science fiction about ideas. Not always sensible ideas, but ideas nonetheless.

The movie deals with a century of future history. It begins with a war that breaks out in the late 1930s. The war drags on for decades. By the 1960s the world has broken up into countless petty states run by local warlords. Science and technology have come to a standstill, and existing technology is slowly decaying. The warlord of Everytown (known simply as the Boss and played by Ralph Richardson) thinks he’s pretty formidable because he has an air force. In fact he has a couple of dozen 30-year-old biplanes, none of them airworthy. And there’s no fuel to make them fly anyway. But his prestige still rests on the fact that he has an air force.

The world has been ravaged by plague as well as by war. The plague has ended but civilisation remains in ruins. Then in 1970 something extraordinary is spotted in the skies over Everytown. An aircraft. An aircraft actually flying. A sleek modern aircraft, obviously not a relic from the past. The pilot, John Cabal (Raymond Massey) informs the warlord that he represents Wings Over the World, an organisation of scientists which now runs the world. There is a new world order, and all petty states are being brought under the control of this new world government. Resistance is futile.

Of course the Boss does try to resist, but he is powerless against the Gas of Peace that puts everyone to sleep while the scientist rulers move in and take over.

We now cut to the year 2036. The scientists still control the world, and are about to undertake the conquest of space. They have built a gigantic space gun that will launch a manned projectile to the Moon. This is the brainchild of Oswald Cabal, grandson of John Cabal. But there is opposition. There is an anti-progress movement that believes that technology has advanced far enough and that a halt must be called. The mob is incited to storm the launching facility to destroy the space gun but they may be too late. The space gun is already primed to launch its two astronauts to the Moon.

The technocratic socialist world government is the sort of thing that appealed to idealists like Wells in the 30s although today many viewers may well see it as sinister and unworkable rather than utopian. The scientist-run state may be portrayed as basically benign but it’s hard to see it as anything other than a totalitarian state.

More interesting is the clash between the prophets of progress and the anti-progress forces, a conflict that shows that Wells could be remarkably prescient at times.

The movie steers clear of some of the more controversial elements in Wells’ thought that were reflected in his novel, such as his belief that human progress required the total abolition of religion. In common with so many social visionaries Wells tended to regard human nature as a minor detail that could be simply ignored. The movie does make it clear that all the peoples of the world joyously embraced the rule of the wise scientists, which certainly indicates a staggering lack of understanding of what makes humanity tick.

Whatever the movie’s weaknesses in the realm of ideas, visually it is extraordinarily impressive and was immensely influential. Director William Cameron Menzies was also a noted production designer and art director and although he’s not credited as such on this one he would certainly have had a major influence on the look of the film. The sets and costumes are superb and the miniatures work is magnificent. The blending of futuristic styling with costumes based on the ancient world was still being copied decades later in TV series like Doctor Who and Star Trek.

This movie’s influence can be seen in some other rather more unlikely places. The atmosphere of the warlord’s petty kingdom in Things To Come is remarkably similar to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of George Miller’s Mad Max II: the Road Warrior. Given the number of times that Things To Come has been screened in Australian television over the years I’m inclined to think that’s no accident. Even the warlord’s glamorous girlfriend with her barbarian queen look would not have been out of place in most 1980s post-apocalyptic sci-fi thrillers.

There’s not a lot of characterisation so there’s not much of a challenge for the actors, although that doesn’t stop Ralph Richardson who is in full flight as the seedy, cowardly, bullying warlord.

This is a movie that occupies a central position in the history of cinematic science fiction and is really one that must be seen.

Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules (1983)

Luigi Cozzi’s 1983 Hercules is certainly not your average sword & sorcery movie. In fact it’s one of the most truly bizarre experiences that cinema has to offer.

How many Hercules movies can boast bears hurled into orbit? How many have Hercules battling gigantic mechanical children’s toys? Which just shows how pitifully inadequate previous Hercules movies were.

The madness is there right from the start in this movie. It begins with a prologue, giving the viewer an overview of Greek mythology. Except that there’s very little an ancient Greek would recognise - this is Luigi Cozzi’s own private mythological cosmogony, where the Olympian Gods live on the Moon.

Then we move on to the actual plot. Hercules, after witnessing he deaths of both of his adoptive parents, travels to Thebes where he attention of the evil King Minos and his equally evil daughter Ariadne (Sybil Danning). They were responsible for the deaths of his biological parents, the rightful king and queen.

Hercules falls in love with the beautiful Cassioppea (Ingrid Anderson), and of course he has to be set impossible tasks, in this case to cleanse the fabled stables of 1,000 horses, stables that have not been cleaned for years. He does this in the simplest possible way, by changing the course of a river. This impresses Cassioppea considerably. Useful dating tip for guys: if you really want to impress a girl on your first date then changing the course of a river should do the trick. Well it worked for Hercules anyway.

By falling in love with Hercules Cassioppea provokes the anger of both King Minos and sundry goddesses. She is imprisoned by King Minos, who intends to sacrifice her to the firebird he has trapped in a volcano on the island of Thera. To rescue her Hercules finds an unlikely ally - the witch Circe (Mirella D'Angelo). She looks like an old lady but when Hercules retrieves her lost talisman for her he makes a surprising discovery. She is not an old lady at all. In fact she’s a total babe. His heart belongs to Cassioppea but in the meantime he’s happy enough to hang around with the bodacious and scantily clad sorceress.

Meanwhile King Minos has unleashed his secret weapon to destroy Hercules. He has employed the services of Dedalos. In Greek mythology Dedalos was a man and an inventor of genius. This is pretty boring, so Luigi Cozzi makes Dedalos a woman and a total babe, and also completely evil. She’s a kind of evil disco princess/mad scientist. Her specialty is mechanical toys. Mechanical toys that can be made gigantic and that are armed with things like death rays.

This is not the end of the craziness of this movie. There’s also the chariot. Circe and Hercules find a magic chariot but not the magic horses that go with it. No problem. Hercules simply get Circe to use her magic to tie a rock to the chariot, then he hurls the rock into space. The chariot, with its two passengers, then becomes a flying space chariot.

As you might have gathered the plot is not the main attraction here. You watch this movie for Cozzi’s insane imagination and for the assorted visual treats on offer.

Apparently Olympian goddesses usually dressed as if they were just about to go to the disco. They were also heavily into 80s big hair. The costumes are as mad as everything else. The special effects are often bad but they’re always entertaining and weirdly effective. There’s no nudity although some of Cassiopea’s costumes are very scanty indeed.

The acting is B-movie standard but fun. The absurdly muscle-bound Lou Ferrigno works well enough as Hercules. Sybil Danning as Ariadne and Eva Robins as Dedalos have fun as B-movie beautiful but evil villainesses.

Luigi Cozzi was the man behind Starcrash, the 1978 movie that stands as one of the must outrageously enjoyable space operas ever made. Hercules is much much stranger but just as enjoyable. We’re talking Alfonso Brescia levels of cinematic insanity here, but I certainly don’t have a problem with that. This is the sort of delightful weirdness you only get in Italian science fiction.

MGM have released this piece of movie mayhem as a double-sided DVD with the sequel, Adventures of Hercules, on the flip side. As usual with MGM releases there’s a lack of extras but it’s a lovely print. Highly recommended as long as you have a taste for high camp extravaganzas.