Fast Company (1979)

Fast Company is a lighthearted romantic action thriller drag-racing drive-in movie directed by David Cronenberg. This is definitely not the sort of thing one associates with Cronenberg.

This is a Canadian movie shot entirely in Canada.

Cronenberg was just finding his feet as a director at this time. This is a movie he did for a pay cheque but he is in fact a drag-racing fan.

Lonnie Johnson (William Smith) is a well-known popular drag racer. He drives the fastest dragsters, the “fuelers” which run on nitromethane and alcohol. Or he did, until his car exploded. Now he has to drive a “funny car” (front-engined dragsters with fibreglass body shells). Which means that his protégé Billy Booker (known as Billy the Kid) misses out. Lonnie feels bad about this. He likes Billy. But Lonnie had no choice. He races for the FastCo team and his boss Phil Adamson (John Saxon) insists.

We know Adamson is going to be the bad guy because he’s played by John Saxon. And Saxon is in full-on nasty slimy super-villain mode.

Lonnie’s chief rival is Gary "The Blacksmith" Black (Cedric Smith). Gary resents Lonnie’s success but while he’s hyper-competitive we should not jump to the conclusion that he’s going to be a bad guy.

Lonnie’ girlfriend is Sammy (Claudia Jennings). She’d like him to give up racing and she knows he won’t but she loves him anyway.

Billy the Kid is sleeping with Candy (Judy Foster), who is a kind of drag racing equivalent of a Formula 1 grid girl. Adamson is trying to force her to sleep with clients.

Adamson has plans to get rid of Lonnie because Lonnie won’t grovel to him but he has to have a plausible justification for firing him.

It all comes to a head with a big race for the Funny Car championship.

There’s some satire here about the corrupting effects of commercialism in sport but FastCo is not a giant corporation. Adamson has a private plane but it’s not a LearJet. It’s a little single-engined Cessna. FastCo and Adamson are just not big enough or important enough to be truly sinister, which makes the satire lighthearted and amusing. Despite his ruthlessness and unscrupulousness Adamson is ridiculous rather than truly scary.

There’s plenty of cool drag racing action. There are crashes and there are exploding dragsters. Lonnie is nicknamed Lucky Man because of his extraordinary knack for walking away unscathed from spectacular crashes. There’s some suspense. There’s an over-the-top villain. There’s a bit of humour. There’s a lighthearted feelgood vibe. There’s some romance. There are bare boobs. This is a total drive-in movie.

One thing I like about it is that it takes these people seriously. Drag racing is their life. The movie isn’t mocking them. Lonnie isn’t a ridiculous figure. Sammy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving him. Candy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving Billy. These people have a passion and they follow it. They are doing what they love. Sammy respects Lonnie for that.

With motor racing there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the attraction for the spectators is the possibility of witnessing a fiery crash. It’s a kind of primitive ritual - men courting violent death. It’s a dance of death. It’s interesting that although on the surface Fast Company doesn’t seem at all Cronenbergian 17 years later Cronenberg would deal with similar themes in a very Cronenbergian way in Crash. And while Fast Company doesn’t deal with the erotic aspect of this attraction overtly we do see some very hot babes who are obviously at least to some extent keen to have sex with men who may be marked for death.

John Saxon is delightfully fiendish. William Smith makes a good sympathetic hero. He’s not perfect but basically he’s a good guy. Claudia Jennings, a fine actress, is very good but isn’t given enough to do.

Fast Company is a fine above-average drive-in movie.

This movie looks great on Blu-Ray.

Moonshine Love (1969)

The Sod Sisters is a very obscure American hicksploitation movie also released as Head for the Hills and later reissued as Moonshine Love. It was directed by Lester Williams.

It’s included as an extra on one of the old Something Weird DVD releases.

I really can tell you very little about this movie. I can’t even tell you where it was shot.

It begins with three of the most incompetent criminals who ever drew breath bungling a daring daylight robbery. It should have been easy - an old guy carrying a bag filled with banknotes. One of the trio, Tom (Tim E. Lane), decides to double-cross the others. He makes his getaway by jumping onto the back of a pickup truck but he manages to lose the loot. The loot is found by somebody, which will become important later.

He ends up lying unconscious by the side of a remote country road after falling from the pickup truck.

He’s found by Zeb (Hank Harrigan) and his two girls, Jeannie (Genie Palmer) and Lily (Breege McCoy).

We find out that they’re a close family.

Zeb is a moonshiner. He’s a cheerful likeable rogue.

Tom has amnesia after his fall from the truck. He’s wandering through the woods when he sees Jeannie and Lily frolicking naked in the river. It turns out that they’re nice girls and they take Tom home with them. Jeb doesn’t mind. Tom could be useful to have around. Jeb is easy-going but he’s a bit on the lazy side. If Tom is willing to work for his keep he’s welcome to stay.

Living in a cabin in the woods with only her daddy and her sister a girl can get a mite lonesome. And a healthy young girl like Jeannie has certain urges. Normal female urges. It’s at times like this that a girl is thankful for her carrot. A carrot can be a great comfort for a girl. I don’t know what it was like for the carrot but Jeannie is now feeling much more content and much more satisfied.

Pretty soon Tom and Jeannie are getting along really well and Jeannie doesn’t need her carrot any more. A man can do that job much more enjoyably.

Of course Tom’s erstwhile partners-in-crime will show up eventually and then things will get interesting.

This is the only credit for director Lester Williams and screenwriter Stan Potosky. In fact it’s the only screen credit for just about everybody involved. This is one of those regional exploitation movies made by people who were not much more than amateurs who had managed to get together a few thousand dollars (or sometimes, a few hundred dollars) and decided to make a movie. It’s very rough around the edges and the acting is terrible.

On the other hand the plot is actually quite decent. The pacing is good. There are a couple of amusing moments (such as the scene with the nosy revenue man) and they’re clearly intentionally amusing and reasonably clever. And there’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek feel which also appears to be intentional. The script is quite a bit better than the amateur hour effort that the movie’s micro-budget might lead one to expect.

There’s a bit of low-level violence. There’s a lot of nudity, including frontal nudity. There’s quite a bit of fairly graphic simulated sex. And that female masturbation scene with the carrot is surprisingly explicit. It helps that the two girls really are pretty and really do look nice without their clothes on.

I like the ending. It just seems right.

The print was clearly in less than pristine condition which is why Something Weird threw it it in as an extra bonus on their Common Law Wife/Jennie, Wife-Child double header DVD. The transfer really is perfectly acceptable.

If you can get past the very stilted acting Moonshine Love is a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be. I certainly wasn’t bored. This is good sexploitation/hicksploitation fun. I’m a sucker for hicksploitation and I like movies about moonshiners and this movie does have quite a bit of charm. I’m going to go out on a limb and give it a highly recommended rating.

Alienator (1990)

Alienator is a very low-budget 1990 science fiction action movie directed by Fred Olen Ray. So you assume you’re going to have fun.

The title suggests that it’s going to be a rip-off of both Aliens and The Terminator. It doesn’t actually have much to do with either of those movies. But it does have an ultimate warrior android. It also owes a bit to The Astounding She-Monster (1957).

Jan-Michael Vincent is the Commander of a prison planet. This planet is in a distant part of the galaxy and although this is a humanoid civilisation it has no connection with Earth. No-one on Earth even knows that this distant interstellar civilisation exists.

A particularly dangerous prisoner, Kol (Ross Hagen), is about to be executed. The commander has no moral qualms about this. Any prisoner who has ended up on his prison planet has committed truly horrific crimes. The Commander has other things on his mind, like his assistant Tara (P.J. Soles). Or rather he has his mind on her cleavage. You can’t blame him.

Kol pulls off a daring escape, steals a spacecraft and ends up on Earth.

He encounters a bunch of college kids in an RV deep in the woods. Kol has been injured. The kids pick him up and take him to the cabin of forest ranger Ward Armstrong (John Phillip Law).

It soon becomes obvious that Kol is a pretty strange guy. He spins this story about being from another planet. And he claims that a deadly killer robot has been sent to hunt him down.

It soon becomes apparent that Kol really is from another planet and the killer robot from outer space is real as well. Ward and the college kids are not entirely sure about Kol but they seem to have no choice other than to try to help escape from the killer robot. They figure the robot is trying to kill all of them.

The robot, the Alienator, is a lady killer robot (played by female bodybuilder Teagan Clive). The Alienator seems to be unstoppable. Bullets definitely do not stop her.

Ward turns to the Colonel (Leo Gordon). The Colonel was in Nam. He’s a war hero and a super-tough hombre. The Colonel doesn’t buy all this outer space stuff but he’s a man who never runs away from a fight. The Vietcong didn’t scare him and killer robot girls don’t scare him either.

Of course Ward and the college kids and the Colonel have have all been operating on the assumption that the Alienator is the villain, or rather villainess. That might be true but the action on Earth is intercut with action on that prison planet and the situation might be a good deal more complicated.

This is a very low-budget movie which usually didn’t bother Fred Olen Ray who always figured (mostly correctly) that energy and enthusiasm could compensate for lack of money.

The problem here isn’t the crude spaceship models. The problem is the Alienator. She doesn’t look very scary in a conventional way. She looks like she’s hoping for a gig as bass player in a really bad 70s metal band. Her whole look is so terrible that it achieves a bizarre kind of greatness. And Teagen Clive does have a certain presence. She’s certainly memorable, and that’s what counts. Like P.J. Soles’ cleavage in the early scenes she gets your attention.

The overall tone is pleasingly odd, with everyone playing things as straight as they can no matter how goofy things are getting.

There’s no graphic violence and no nudity. It’s silly lighthearted fun.

Fred Olen Ray had a knack for getting away with movies like this. You get the feeling that he was having a great time. You’ll need a lot of beers and a big tub of popcorn but if you have those things you’ll have a good time as well. The Alienator is recommended.

My copy is a Spanish DVD release (in English with removable Spanish subtitles) and it offers a pretty decent transfer. I believe there’s a Blu-Ray release, from Shout! Factory.

The Sentinel (1977)

The Sentinel is a 1977 supernatural horror/occult thriller movie written and directed by Michael Winner. Or at least it might be supernatural horror, or it might not be.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table right at the start. I don’t care what anyone says I like Michael Winner as a director.

We start with a bunch of Catholic priests in Italy and they seem to be very concerned not just about evil in general but about some specific manifestation of evil.

Then the scene shifts to New York. Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a successful model. Her lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon) wants to marry her. They’ve been living together for two years. Alison says she needs space. She wants her own apartment.

She is troubled by a bizarre childhood memory. It involves her father, and possibly satanic influences.

She finds a nice apartment. Maybe she should have been suspicious when she found out that such a nice apartment was available for such a low rental but the real estate agent, Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), seems very reassuring.

Some of her new neighbours are a bit odd. Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) is a crazy old guy who lives with his cat and his parakeet but he’s very sweet and very friendly.

The two lesbians are more worrying. And the twins. Even fact all of the neighbours are worrying in various ways.

The noises from upstairs are disturbing.

Alison really starts to worry after she asks Miss Logan about the neighbours.

We might wonder a bit about that disturbing childhood memory. Is it a real memory? Could it be a false memory? Or just a dream? Or even a demonically inspired dream? Or is she remembering things that she misinterpreted at the time?

This is a “supernatural evil in the modern world” movie. But this is one of those movies that may or may not be actually about supernatural horror. Everything we see could have non-supernatural explanations. Somebody could be gaslighting Alison. Or Alison may in fact be crazy. That’s a possibility that will occur to us, and it occurs to Alison as well.

Alison goes to investigate those noises upstairs and she thinks she kills an old man. It might be her father. But her father died several weeks earlier. And the only blood the police find is Alison’s blood.

Detective Gatz (Eli Wallach) is worried by several things, principally by a case a few years earlier. A case that could have a link to these recent events.

Winner cleverly keeps things mysterious. He offers us nothing substantial that would back any of the theories we might have come up with to explain what is going on. He slowly builds an atmosphere of menace and paranoia but keeps it vague, which of course makes it all the more unsettling.

Alison is a really nice girl. She might be a really nice sane girl, or a really mad girl. Other characters are ambiguous as well.

And there’s still that niggling suspicion that supernatural evil might be at work.

I’m being deliberately very vague because I think this is a movie you’ll appreciate a lot more if you go into it not knowing what kind of movie it’s going to turn out to be.

Burgess Meredith gives the most memorable performance but all the cast members are fine. John Carradine is quite something as well. Cristina Raines and Chris Sarandon are effectively ambiguous. Look out for Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in small roles.

The unease mounts remorselessly. The ending really is worth the wait. This is a movie that delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

The Universal Blu-Ray is barebones but looks good.

Darkman (1990)

Darkman, released in 1990, was one of a number of comic book or comic book-inspired action movies made in the early to mid 90s. Other notable examples being Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow and The Phantom. All were expected to launch franchises but for various reasons this didn’t happen (although there were a couple of direct-to-video Darkman movies). Darkman was in fact commercially very successful.

Sam Raimi directed and co-wrote the script.

Genius scientist Dr Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is working on a new type of synthetic skin. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) is a lawyer but despite this she’s one of the good guys. She has tumbled upon a corruption scandal involving property developer Louis Strack (Colin Friels). She has an incriminating memo. A bunch of goons led by the sinister Robert Durant (Larry Drake) break into Peyton’s laboratory and then blow it up. Peyton is assumed to have perished but he survived, horribly disfigured. His new synthetic skin invention won’t help because it’s unstable. It disintegrates after a short period of time.

The skin however can be useful as a temporary measure and Peyton uses it it to get his revenge.

An enormous amount of mayhem ensues.

This movie was not based on an actual comic book. It was an original story by Sam Raimi. Comic books were a very obvious influence, along with 1930s pulp novels such as The Shadow, 1930/40s movie serials and the Universal gothic horror movies of the 30s. Darkman certainly achieves an extraordinary comic-book vibe. And since it’s an original story there were no pesky rights issues to worry about.

It was also clearly an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman mega-hit. Darkman has some traces of the urban gothic feel of Batman but it has a flavour of its own. It has an aesthetic perfectly suited to a comic-book movie.

Liam Neeson is an actor I’ve never thought about one way or the other. He’s fine here and does the brooding tragic thing well.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Frances McDormand’s performance but it’s too bland for a movie such as this which demands larger-than-life performances.

This movie is dominated by its villains. Colin Friels is deliciously oily and slimy. Larry Drake as Durant is properly menacing and sadistic.

What distinguishes Darkman from the other comic book style movies of the 90s is that Raimi was coming from a horror background so it has more overt horror moments, and the Darkman makeup effects are genuinely gruesome.

What makes it fun is that the horror is combined with so much goofiness and so many hyperactive action scenes.

You’re not meant to take his movie even a tiny bit seriously. There’s a lot of black comedy. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.

Some of the action scenes are amazingly silly and totally unbelievable but it doesn’t matter. This is the world of comic books. The crazier the action scenes the better, as long as they’re done with energy. And this movie has immense amounts of energy. The suspended-from-a-helicopter scenes are ludicrously over-the-top and implausible but comic book heroes can do those sorts of things.

Raimi had a modest budget to work with. Some of the special effects are a bit iffy but Raimi figured that if they were done at sufficiently breakneck pace it wouldn’t matter, and he was right.

The production design, given the limited budget, is impressive. This is a cool dark fantasy world.

Don’t bother giving any thought to the plot. It’s a standard revenge plot and it’s full of holes but if you have plenty of beer and popcorn on hand you won’t care. There is an attempt to add a tragic aspect to the story and that works quite well.

Darkman is just pure hyperkinetic crazy fun. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Highly recommended.

Darkman looks pretty good on Blu-Ray.

Human Desires (Indecent Behaviour 4, 1997)

Human Desires, released in 1997, also goes by the title Indecent Behaviour 4 although I’m told it has little connection to the earlier films in that series. This is a direct-to-video erotic thriller starring Shannon Tweed so of course most people have already decided it’s junk before even watching it. There are actually a couple of slightly odd things about this movie that make it interesting.

It’s a private eye thriller with lots of sex and nudity. Again, to a lot of people that means it must be junk. So most people go straight into Snark Mode. Almost every online review you read will tell you that this is just a softcore movie with zero plot. That’s nonsense. It has a perfectly serviceable plot.

It begins with a pyjama party thrown by Alicia Royale (Shannon Tweed). She and her husband Miles (Ashby Adams) run a top-flight fashion modelling agency. They’re looking for a model to headline a major campaign for their biggest client. There’s a lot of money in it for the agency. There’s a lot of money in it for the girl. It will catapult her straight into the ranks of the supermodels.

There are three contenders - Julia (Peggy Trentini), Zoe (Dawn Ann Billings) and Melinda (Lisa Nohea).

Then Julia is found floating face down in the swimming pool. It appears to be suicide.

Dean Thomas (Christian Noble) was out of place at the party. He’s a down-at-heel private eye. As luck would have it Dean and Zoe are the ones who discover Julia’s body.

Zoe wants to hire Dean to investigate. She suspects murder. Dean isn’t interested. He’s an ex-cop but he likes being a PI because missing persons cases, background checks and exposing straying wives who are having affairs is easy work and it’s safe work. He’s not Mike Hammer. He doesn’t want to be Mike Hammer. He has no interest in murder cases.

Dean eventually takes the case because of Maria. Five years earlier he was a cop. Maria was an informant. He got involved with her. He fell in love with her, and that led him to make a mistake that got her killed.

His motivation for taking this case is not quite guilt. He just doesn’t like seeing women get murdered and he doesn’t like it when their killers get away with it. Maria’s killer got away with it.

And there is a chance it was murder. The cops think it was suicide but they don’t rule out murder. They don’t however think there’s any chance of proving it and they have other cases to deal with. They haven’t closed this case but they’re not actively pursuing it.

What I like about his movie is that Dean is not a standard movie PI. He doesn’t do the tough guy routine. That’s not what real PIs do. If you’re a PI and you’re spending a great deal of time beating guys up or getting beaten up you’re in the wrong job. PIs gather evidence. They try to keep out of trouble. That’s what Dean does. He doesn’t get into a single fistfight in the whole movie.

On the other hand he is a trained investigator. He does know how to gather evidence and he knows how to connect different pieces of evidence. He’s competent when it comes to routine investigations.

I like the fact that Human Desires ignores a lot of standard PI thriller clichés. Miles wants to pressure Dean into dropping his investigation. We know what will happen next. Dean will get roughed up by hoods. That’s what happens in PI movies. But it doesn’t happen here. Miles is not a nice guy but he’s not a gangster. He runs a modelling agency. In the world of high fashion you don’t send guys to break other guy’s legs. Miles doesn’t even get his head of security, tough ex-cop Roddy Daniels (Duke Stroud), to threaten Dean. Roddy just begs Dean to back off.

So, surprisingly perhaps, these people behave like real people not crime thriller stereotypes.

There are half a dozen suspects. All have movies, but not one has a motive sufficiently overwhelming to enable us to be sure of their guilt.

The acting is generally quite adequate.

The biggest problem is director Ellen Earnshaw. She’s good on pacing but she doesn’t know how to direct sex scenes. All the sex scenes here are the same. She makes no attempt to add visual interest by shooting different sex scenes in slightly different ways, with different setting, different lighting, different camera angles. It’s one of the oddities of softcore cinema that male directors make sex scenes much more genuinely erotic because they put more imagination into them. The sex scenes here are steamy enough but they just blend into one another.

Human Desires has lots of sex and T&A but it has a decent enough thriller story. If that sounds like your thing it’s recommended. I have to confess that I rather enjoyed it.

Human Desires is available on DVD paired with another interesting (although flawed) Shanon Tweed movie, Illicit Dreams.

The Monk (1972)

The Monk is a movie I’ve been searching for for quite a while. I was delighted to find it on DVD. Not the greatest transfer perhaps but it is in the correct aspect ratio at least. This is a movie that definitely needs a full restoration and a Blu-Ray release. It was a Franco-Italian-German co-production shot in English.

It’s based on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s 1796 gothic novel of the same name. This is one of the most notorious most outrageous novels of all time. If you’re telling yourself that a novel written in 1796 couldn’t possibly still be shocking today then think again. The Monk still packs a punch.

It’s necessary to keep in mind that anti-Catholic bigotry was a major strain in English culture (both high culture and pop culture) from the 16th century right through to the 20th century. Anti-Catholicism was a common theme in the first wave of gothic fiction which lasted from 1764 up to around 1820. It found its most spectacular flowering in Lewis’s The Monk.

The gothic fiction of that early period invariably has hints of the supernatural but it almost always turns out that nothing was actually involved. The Monk is unusual in that it has overt and explicit supernatural elements.

This movie certainly has some horror an exploitation elements but it has some definite art-house credentials as well. The script was co-written by Luis Buñuel no less (with Jean-Claude Carrière).

In fact Buñuel had been hoping to film the novel since the 1950s.

For various reasons Buñuel lost interest in directing and the assignment was given to Greek director Ado Kyrou. The script by Buñuel and Carrière was retained.

The setting is presumably Spain, probably in the 17th century. Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is a monk renowned for his piety and wisdom, and especially for his passionate belief in the vital importance of chastity. Ambrosio is admired by all.

He is becoming a little worried about Brother John. Brother John is in fact a gorgeous young woman, Mathilde (Nathalie Delon), masquerading as a man. We will later discover that her motives are less than innocent. Even wearing a cowl nobody could possibly mistake Mathilde for a man. This might of course be a deliberate touch, perhaps an attempt to capture the somewhat outlandish feel of the early gothic novels with unlikely coincidences and implausible disguises.

Mathilde has no trouble seducing Ambrosio. He is wracked by guilt but he can’t give her up.

Mathilde has clearly awakened Ambrosio’s interest in women. He becomes obsessed with a young girl, Antonia. Antoni’s mother is very ill. Ambrosio offers her spiritual comfort but he’d like to offer Antonia comfort of a more carnal nature. By this time Ambrosio has surrendered to the pleasures of the flesh but with the added spice of lots and lots of guilt.

Mathilde tells the wretched monk that there is a way he can have Antonia. Mathilde has commerce with demons. She can summon a demon who will deliver Antonia into his hands. Ambrosio is horrified but his lusts have now taken control of him.

The wealthy and debauched and incredibly wicked Duke of Talamur (Nicol Williamson) also has an interest in Antonia. The Duke is a noted philanthropist. He is always looking for ways to help the unfortunate, especially if the unfortunate happen to be very young girls.

Needless to say these wicked goings-on attract the attention of the Inquisition. It seems that nothing can save Ambrosio.

The cast is fine. Franco Nero did this sort of thing well. On the subject of the blending of art and exploitation in this movie it’s worth noting that is star, Franco Nero, was an actor who shuttled happily back and forth between art movies and exploitation movies and popular commercial movies. Nathalie Delon as Mathilde is suitably wicked. Nicol Williamson oozes corruption and evil and uber-creepiness from every pore.

This movie really needed Buñuel at the helm. Ado Kyrou clearly has no feel for the material. The sleaze and trashiness is there in the source material and the movie doesn’t back away from admitting that shocking things are going on but the style is dull and too arty. With Buñuel unavailable it might perhaps have been better to pick a director with more of an exploitation movie sensibility. It would have been interesting to see Jess Franco let loose on this material. Alice Arno as Mathilde could have been awesome.

This movie came out the same year as Ken Russell’s The Devils. That’s the kind of approach The Monk needed. The Monk definitely needed some visual flamboyance and outrageousness.

The ending is cringe. The Monk just doesn’t make it. The 70s was the time when a great adaptation of the novel could have been made but this film represents a misfire and a lost opportunity.