Common Law Wife (1961)

Common Law Wife actually started out as a movie called Swamp Rose, directed by Larry Buchanan and shot in colour. It was then turned into a black-and-white movie called Common Law Wife with a huge amount of additional footage shot by a different director, Eric Sayers.

It all becomes quite confusing. It appears that Buchanan’s original film no longer exists. If indeed he ever completed it.

To make things really confusing the central character, Baby Doll, is played by two different actresses!

Both versions originated in Texas, with the swamp footage being shot near the Louisiana border.

Surprisingly, in its own way, it all works as a lurid thoroughly enjoyable hicksploitation potboiler. It’s not a sexploitation movie. There’s no nudity. It does however qualify as swampsploitation with a bit of southern gothic thrown in. The plot is complicated but delightfully lurid.

Shugfoot Rainey (George Edgley) is the richest man in town. His money comes from oil. He lives with his wife Linda (Annabelle Weenick) except that they’re not actually married. Or so Shug Rainey assumed.

Shug is tired of Linda. Her looks are fading and she’s rather needy. Shug has wired for his niece Jonelle (played by Lacey Kelly in Buchanan’s footage and an unknown actress in Sayers’ footage) to come to see him. He intends Jonelle to be Linda’s replacement. Jonelle is a stripper in New Orleans. Everyone calls her Baby Doll. She’s a whole lot younger and cuter than Linda. Jonelle is very pretty, albeit in a cheap sort of way. Shug doesn’t mind if she looks cheap. He likes his women that way.

The problem is that Linda has seen a lawyer who has told her that as far as the law in this state is concerned she is Shug Rainey’s common law wife. He can’t just boot her out the door. He could try to buy her off but Linda isn’t having any of that. Linda likes living in Shug’s mansion. She is emotionally dependent and she also has her pride. She’s not going to be replaced by a brazen hussy like Baby Doll.

The local sheriff, Sheriff Jody, gets mixed up in the drama. He’s Shug Rainey’s nephew. He’s married to Jonelle’s very respectable very prim sister but he’s lusted after Jonelle for years. They had an affair in their teenage years. The two sisters most definitely do not get along. Pretty soon the erotic embers are blazing back into life for Jonelle and Jody.

And then there’s Bull the moonshiner. He’s after Jonelle as well.

There are therefore lots of emotional betrayals and sexual triangles going on. And there’s money at stake as well. Shug has money. Bull has money. You figure this could easily end in murder. What’s cool is that there is no way to be sure which of these sleazy people is likely to be the victim, and which is likely to be the killer.

And of course it does end in murder.

The plot is wild and crazy but surprisingly, given the film’s bizarre production history, it does hang together in its own overcooked way. And Baby Doll is a memorable bad girl.

This is not a sexploitation movie. There is no nudity. It is an exploitation movie but of a slightly earlier more tame variety. It relies on overheated passions rather than bare skin.

The DVD transfer isn’t great but it’s acceptable. I believe there’s now been a Blu-Ray release. The Something Weird DVD also includes two other hicksploitation films, Jennie: Wife/Child and Moonshine Love (which is great fun).

I enjoyed Common Law Wife quite a bit. Highly recommended.

Common Law Wife is fairly close in feel to another swampsploitation potboiler, the rather entertaining Louisiana Hussy (1959). It also has a bit in common with Russ Meyer’s southern gothic hicksploitation classics Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1964) although it has to be said that Meyer’s two films are way way better.

Innocent Blood (1992)

1992 was, unexpectedly, an interesting year for vampire movies. There was Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and John Landis’s Innocent Blood. Two very very different movies but both stylish and daring and breathing new life into an old genre. Coppola’s Dracula is insanely romantic. Innocent Blood is an erotic horror black comedy. It’s also a hardboiled gangster movie. There’s a lot going on!

Horror comedies were nothing new but they had invariably been goofy and innocuous and had relied on broad comedy and even slapstick. They had been very kiddie-friendly. Innocent Blood isn’t the least bit kiddie-friendly. This is not family entertainment. This is blood-drenched full-on horror but combined with sophisticated witty black comedy and vampire sex.

Marie (Anne Parillaud) is a cute French lady vampire finding life in the big city in the U.S. to be a bit of a challenge. She hasn’t fed for quite a while and she’s very hungry. She’s also sex-starved.

Marie has solved the ethical problems posed by vampirism in a rather neat way. She does not drink innocent blood. Her victims are very bad people and by killing them she’s doing society a service as well as feeding herself. It’s a win-win!

At the moment she has turned her attention to a syndicate of mobsters. Specifically, the mob led by Sal Macelli (Robert Loggia). These are very hard very violent men but they’re no match for a vampire.

Joe Gennaro (Anthony LaPaglia) is an undercover cop who has infiltrated Sal Macelli’s organisation but now everything is out of control and his cover is blown. And Macelli is dead anyway.

Macelli is dead but he’s now a vampire. He’s even nastier as a vampire than he was as a gangster and he has plans to lead a vampire mob that will control the city.

In the midst of all this chaos Gennaro finds an unlikely ally. She’s an odd but cute French girl named Marie. He thinks she’s a murderess. It takes him a while to get used to the idea that she’s a vampire. And it takes him even longer to realise that they are going to have to be allies. Gennaro is no match for a bunch of vampiric hoodlums but Marie is not just a vampire, she’s an old vampire. She’s more powerful than Macelli and she knows how the whole vampire thing works. She knows the weaknesses of vampires.

Gennaro and Marie are not sure that they can trust each other but the sex is really really great and after a good old steamy bedroom romp they decide they can be friends.

Much mayhem follows.

Surprisingly all the disparate elements in this movie come together effectively. This is full-blown horror with plenty of violence and gore. It’s a tough violent gangland tale. There’s some inspired black comedy but Landis is careful never to cross the line into goofiness. And this movie is never camp. There’s plenty of erotic heat. There’s an offbeat love story. But these elements are kept in perfect balance. Landis knows what he’s doing and he’s in complete control.

The acting is generally very good. It’s fun to see Don Rickles as a crooked lawyer - he’s amusing but it’s not an out-and-out comic performance. Robert Loggia goes way over the top as Macelli but that’s the right way to play it and he’s truly scary.

Obviously this movie was always going to stand or fall on Anne Parillaud’s performance and she turns out to be an inspired casting choice. Her French accent makes her seem exotic and an outsider. You don’t want a vampire with a Brooklyn accent - that would lead to goofiness. Anne Parillaud makes her lady vampire suitably enigmatic. Parillaud is beautiful but not conventionally pretty - she doesn’t have a Barbie doll look. She looks like a sexy dangerous lady vampire. This movie came out the same year as her star-making turn in the superb La Femme Nikita (1990).

One thing I like is that although Marie has her ethical inhibition about not taking innocent blood she doesn’t indulge in a whole lot of angsting about it. She’s sincere, but she doesn’t revel in moral grandstanding. And while that aspect could have made it into a species of vigilante killer movie that aspect is not pushed too far. Marie is a vampire, not a cop or a social worker.

The practical effects are done well. There’s enough gore to satisfy those who like that sort of thing. Landis keeps things moving along (I don’t agree with those who think this movie is too slow). There’s some sex and quite a bit of nudity.

A lot of people disliked this movie. I suspect that those who were unaware that the vampire movie had moved on and had been comprehensively reinvented during the 70s and that the traditional elements of vampire lore had long since been consigned to the dustbin disliked the movie because those traditional elements are lacking here. No crucifixes. No wooden stakes through the heart. No vampires sleeping in coffins. What’s great is that Innocent Blood is not only a non-traditional vampire movie, it doesn’t try to ape the revolutionary vampire movies of the 70s like Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, Jose Larraz’s Vampyres or Jean Rollin’s Lips of Blood. It’s its own thing.

Innocent Blood is hugely entertaining and original. A great vampire film. Very highly recommended.

Landis was going for a visually dark shadowy look and thankfully the Warner Archive Blu-Ray retains this.

Cyborg (1989)

Cyborg is a 1989 science fiction action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and directed by Albert Pyun. While there is a cyborg in the film the character played by Van Damme is totally human.

The setting is your basic post-apocalyptic wasteland world. There’s been social, political and economic collapse and then a devastating plague.

The last remaining scientists are holed up in Atlanta and they’re working on a cure for the plague. They need some crucial data. That data is contained in a female cyborg, Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon). She has to make it to Atlanta.

The chief bad guy is an incredibly vicious pirate named Fender (Vincent Klyn). He wants that data. Not to save lives, but because he would give him unlimited wealth and power.

Gibson Rickenbacker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is a Slinger - a kind of mercenary/hired gun/adventurer/freebooter. Slingers might not be solid law-abiding citizens but they’re not pirates and they’re not murderers. He doesn’t care about the data or the cyborg but he has a really big grudge against Fender (explained in a series of brief flashbacks). He’ll try to save the cyborg but what he wants is revenge.

He hooks up with Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter). She’s some kind of thief and she tries to kill our hero but he feels sorry for her and he doesn’t like hurting women and when she insists on tagging along he puts up with her. She has come over all idealistic and wants to save the cyborg.

She makes a likeable cute side-kick and gives Rickenbacker the chance to show that he has a gentle side. He’s not interested in getting her into bed but he does end up caring about her.

The plot is very sketchy but that doesn’t matter because it’s just an excuse for a series of extremely violent incredibly brutal action scenes but that’s OK because those action scenes are superbly staged.

This movie is a non-stop adrenalin rush.

Jean-Claude Van Damme was cast for his very considerable martial arts skills. As an actor he’s competent.

Fender is an evil villain with the emphasis on the evilness and he’s effectively scary and very very nasty.

This is a Cannon Group production and while the budget was limited and the concept of the post-apocalyptic world is routine it looks very impressive. Imagination and energy are more important than a big budget.

The presence of a cyborg suggests a cyberpunk influence but really she’s just there to add an extra coolness factor. Both the plague and the cyborg are just plot devices to make Rickenbacker’s quest about something more noble and important than mere revenge. There is however one major emotional twist towards the end.

The movie is totally focused on the action and Pyun wisely allows nothing to distract us from that. He’s not going to waste time on exposition. We don’t care where the plague came from. We don’t need a detailed history of the process of social collapse. We don’t even need to know exactly what a Slinger is. We just need to know that they’re basically good guys while the pirates are seriously evil. This is totally a good vs evil story. The villain has no redeeming features whatsoever.

Cyborg is pure action entertainment and it delivers the goods very impressively. There’s not a wasted minute in the movie. The plot probably has lots of holes in it but there’s no time to notice such details. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a badass action hero and his martial arts skills are pretty awesome. He doesn’t say much, but he doesn’t need to.

Cyborg is highly recommended.

I have the French Blu-Ray release and it looks terrific.

I’ve also reviewed another much less successful Albert Pyun-directed Cannon Group release, Alien from L.A., released a year earlier.

Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974)

Lady Snowblood is one of the best-known of the Japanese pinky violence movies and a movie very much admired by Quentin Tarantino. It was a success in 1973 and a sequel followed in 1974, Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance.

Both movies were directed by Toshiya Fujita and had the same writing team.

The setting is Japan in 1906, just after the the Russo-Japanese War.

Now it really seems like luck has finally run out for the notorious killer Yuki Kashima, known as Lady Snowblood (Meiko Kaji). She has fallen into the hands of the police. It only took about forty cops to capture her and she was only able to kill a dozen or so of them first.

Now she is about to be hanged. Or maybe not. She is rescued although rescued may not be quite the right word. The secret police have decided that they need the services of one of the most skilled assassins in the country.

So now Lady Snowblood is a secret agent and a government assassin. She’s not thrilled about this but she doesn’t have much choice.

Her job is to infiltrate the house of notorious anarchist Ransui Tokunaga (Jûzô Itami) by posing as a maid.

Ransui has in his possession a document that could bring down the wicked corrupt government. He is captured and tortured by the secret police. He asks Yuki to deliver the document to his brother. For reasons that are never explained she agrees to do so. None of Yuki’s actions make any sense. She has no reason to get involved in childish revolutionary plots and there is no indication that there is the slightest emotional attraction between Yuki and either of the loathsome brothers.

Much misery and violence follows. There are a few action scenes but they’re uninspired and rely entirely on gushing fountains of blood.

Strident political subtexts could be a problem in Japanese movies of this era. This movie is nothing more than an adolescent wallowing in revolutionary chic. Everybody connected in any way with the government is portrayed as a grotesque cartoon villain.

Yuki plays no real role in the movie. She only seems to have been included so they could promote the movie as a sequel to Lady Snowblood. The focus is entirely on the two brothers and the glorious revolutionary struggle. Meiko Kaji gives her worst ever performance but it’s not her fault. The script gives her nothing even remotely interesting to do and offers not the slightest hint of her motivations.

The violence and torture are both nauseating and boring.

This is not a pinky violence movie. It’s a political violence movie. Not only is there no sex or nudity there’s no indication that any of the characters has any emotional life. The heroes are too busy with the glorious revolutionary struggle, and the villains are too busy being wicked and dastardly.

This is a movie absolutely dripping with venomous loathing for Japan, for Japanese society and Japanese culture.

It’s also an extraordinarily boring movie about worthless people being worthless people.

I have seen worse movies than this, but not many.

I’m generally a very big fan of pinky violence movies but Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance is bitterly disappointing. It has no style, no excitement, no suspense.

This movie just seriously rubbed me up the wrong way. If you enjoy incredibly brutal torture scenes you might enjoy it. My recommendation is to give it a miss.

It looks OK on the Criterion Blu-Ray but it’s no a particularly visually impressive movie to start with.

Alien from L.A. (1988)

Alien from L.A. is, in a vague sort of way, a riff on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It’s a 1988 Cannon Group release directed and co-written by Albert Pyun.

Wanda Saknussemm (Kathy Ireland) is a California gal who has just been dumped by her hot surfer dude boyfriend. He dumped her because even though she’s cute she’s such a wet blanket and a dorkette and her whiney voice gets on his nerves.

Now she’s off to Africa to look for her missing explorer/archaeologist father. All she knows is that apparently he fell down a bottomless pit and hasn’t been seen since.

Inevitably Wanda falls down the same pit.

She finds herself in a huge hitherto unknown underground city known as Atlantis. In fact it’s a vast underground world. 

She gets rescued by a gruff hardbitten miner, Gus Edway (William R. Moses).

Atlantis is a dystopian totalitarian hellworld. And now she’s being hunted down as an alien. Anyone from the surface world is an alien. Amusingly the authorities tell the citizens to be on the lookout for an alien girl from the surface world while at the same time assuming them that aliens do not exist and that the surface world does not exist.

There’s a difference of opinion about what to do with her when she’s caught but security chief General Rykov (Janie du Plessis) favours extreme measures.

Wanda gets into countless scrapes and has countless narrow escapes. And eventually finds out something extraordinary about the city.

I was expecting this to be a very low budget affair but clearly the budget was reasonably generous. It has the grungy post-apocalyptic wasteland look that one finds in so many movies of this era. This is the film’s first fault - it doesn’t have quite enough of a distinctive flavour.

Albert Pyun has said that he was trying to make a fairy tale movie aimed at a family audience. There’s nothing wrong with that except that as a result the villains are not sufficiently evil and scary to be really memorable and we don’t have enough of a sense that Wanda is in real danger.

The third problem is that Gus Edway is a very bland hero.

A fourth and bigger problem is that there’s no real romance subplot. There is obviously zero attraction between Wanda and Gus. An action/adventure movie works better when the hero and the heroine care enough about each other to take risks for each other, and when we, the viewers, are desperately hoping that they’ll end up together. Another character is introduced very late who might have potential as a love interest for Wanda but this subplot doesn’t go anywhere.

The final problem is that the extraordinary revelation about the city isn’t exploited. We expect it to lead to something but it doesn’t.

The power struggle within Atlantis could also have been developed a bit more.

For some people Kathy Ireland as Wanda is an issue, especially her high-pitched little girl voice. I don’t have a problem with her. Wanda is supposed to be whiney and to irritate people. That’s why her boyfriend dumped her and that’s how the whole adventure began. I think however that she comes across as fairly likeable and sympathetic.

Alien from L.A. has some major flaws but it’s not as bad as it reputation would suggest. If you don’t set you expectations too high it’s a reasonably enjoyable sci-fi adventure flick. Tentatively recommended.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals (1969)

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals is a very low-budget 1969 horror flick made by an outfit called Vega International. This company had a brief and very chaotic history and it appears that some of the half dozen or so movies they planned to make were never completed, or simply ended up being lost. The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals seems not to have had much, if anything, of a proper release and was pretty much unknown until it turned up on VHS in the 80s.

Egyptologist Dave Barrie (Anthony Eisley) steals two Ninth Dynasty Egyptian mummies after the plane carrying them to a museum crashes near Las Vegas. One is the mummy of the Princess Akana. The other is the mummy of some high priest dude who had been her lover.

Akana is perfectly preserved. Dave is immediately fascinated by her. He had already come up with a theory that she could be revived after being dead (or apparently dead) for several thousand years.

It turns out he was right and she does indeed revive. He naturally falls in love with her but the bad news is that he is now the victim of a curse. He has become a jackal-man, a werejackal.

He runs amok, kills a couple of cops, then returns to his extraordinarily dilapidated house and goes to sleep. He wakes up with no knowledge of his nocturnal rampage.

Meanwhile the other mummy has revived as well and he is determined to destroy Dave, seeing him as a rival to Akana’s love. Their ongoing battle provides most of the movie’s action.

Dave takes Akana out on the town, along with his friends Bob and Donna. Akana likes 1960s Vegas.

Dave has more werejackal episodes and that other mummy is causing mayhem as well. Fortunately people in Vegas are sophisticated enough not to be overly disturbed by rampaging mummies and werejackals roaming the streets.

A movie like this wouldn’t be complete without John Carradine who plays a professor who is a bit worried about what Dave is up to.

The plot obviously borrows heavily from other mummy movies but I can’t recall another movie with a werejackal.

In low-budget movies that rely on iffy makeup effects it’s usually a good idea not to let the audience see too much of the monsters until it’s unavoidable. But in this movie we see lots of both monsters. The werejackal prosthetic head is actually not that bad.

The acting is mostly dull. Anthony Eisley isn’t going to convince anyone that he’s an Egyptologist. Marliza Pons as Princess Akana is a problem. Apart from not being able to act she does does not have the necessary glamour or allure.

On the plus side the pacing isn’t too bad (pacing is where very low budget movie so often fall down).

The fact that the story is crazy is no great problem. A great gothic horror movie doesn’t need a dazzling plot. What it needs is a suitably spooky or creepy atmosphere and a sense of dread - a sense that something is happening that just isn’t possible. These are the things that this movie fails to pull off.

A gothic horror movie set in Vegas is however a cool idea.

It’s all very silly and to be honest it’s a very bad movie but if you’re in the right mood you’ll get some fun out of it.

Severin have released The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals on Blu-Ray. The transfer is acceptable given that this movie probably never looked stunning to begin with. The disc comes with a stack of extras plus a bonus film, another Vega International production - Angelica, the Young Vixen.

Angelica: The Young Vixen (1970)

Angelica: The Young Vixen is a low-budget sexploitation movie made by an outfit called Vega International. This company had a brief and confusing history and of the half dozen or so movies they planned to make some were completed and some weren’t. One of the partners in the company was Oliver Drake, a prolific director of B-westerns who helmed several of Vega’s films including The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals. He’s credited as director of Angelica: The Young Vixen but it was in fact directed by another guy who had taken the name OIiver Drake.

Vega were active from around 1968 to maybe 1971 and Angelica: The Young Vixen seems to have had its original release in 1970. It was considered a lost film until very recently when Severin got hold of a very battered but complete release print. They have included it as an extra on their Blu-Ray release of The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals.

Angelica: The Young Vixen falls vaguely within the hicksploitation sub-genre (a sub-genre I dearly love).

Ned Hurley (William Johnson) is the overseer on the farm belonging to Judge Blaine (Lou d’Jena). Cute blonde nymphet Angelica (Dixie Donovan) is one the field hands. She’s shacked up with a gypsy named Nick (Vincent Ricco) but she’s been playing around with Ned as well and that’s already led to the two men trading punches.

We then get a sex scene, a threesome, which was a later insert and has no connection whatsoever with the rest of the movie but presumably a distributor thought the movie needed to be spiced up. It adds a bizarre touch because we have no idea at all who these people are.

Then, in a slightly surreal scene, Nick drags the two illicit lovers, sleeping bag and all, to a tree where he tries to string them up. The final result is that Ned is charged with murder. It was really an accident and the dropping of the charges is just a formality but the judge has to figure out what to do with Angelica. She’s a material witness. And she’s 17.

The judge’s daughter Marlou (Josie Kirk) suggests that Angelica can come stay with them.

Marlou has an ulterior motive. She likes girls. She likes girls in That Way. Especially cute blonde sexpots. Angelica isn’t into girls in That Way but she figures it would be wise to play along.

Angelica is still sleeping with Ned. And she’s started sleeping with Judge Blaine. And with a lawyer attached to the judge’s court. Angelica is a very friendly girl. Very affectionate.

There’s a perfect setup here for some overheated melodrama and that’s what we get and it’s done reasonably well and it’s quite entertaining. The script is perfectly adequate.

The acting on the whole is pretty basic but Dixie Donovan (who made a stack of sexploitation movies in her very brief film career) is a lot of fun as Angelica. Maybe not a conventionally good actress but she knows how to do the seductive dangerous sex kitten thing to a tee and she clearly had no inhibitions about taking her clothes off. And she’s very easy on the eyes.

There is nudity, including frontal nudity, in copious quantities and numerous sex scenes but there is still plenty of time for the outrageously overcooked plot to keep simmering along.

The print has some very major print damage which was obviously why Severin decided to throw it in as a freebie. It was a good decision. This is a thoroughly enjoyable slice of classic American sexploitation. I liked Angelica: The Young Vixen but then I do like this sort of thing quite a bit.

And they’ve included an audio commentary for it! Which makes this a fine double-header Blu-Ray release.