Deadlier Than the Male (1967)

I have a weakness for 1960s spy spoof movies. Deadlier Than the Male is an interesting British entry in the genre. Bulldog Drummond is a character about as far removed from the spirit of the Swinging 60s as you could possibly get so trying to update him as a 60s secret agent was a bold move. And it works fairly ell. OK, he may not have much connection with the original character but Richard Johnson makes a good very British secret agent. For some obscure reason he’s been given an American nephew who doesn’t serve much purpose. Presumably he’s there to give the movie a transatlantic feel. The plot is classic 60s stuff. It opens with a spectacular assassination of an oil magnate named Keller. And the assassin is Elke Sommer so I’m already disposed to like this movie. Elke is Irma Eckman, and she then turns up at a board meeting of a rival oil company. Keller had been blocking a major deal they wanted to pull off and Irma had made them a tempting offer. She guaranteed that he would withdrew his objections to the deal within a month, if they paid her a million pounds. The executives of this rival company aren’t entirely convinced they should pay up since Keller’s death was apparently an accident, but Irma points out that the contract merely stipulated that if Keller withdrew his objections the money would be paid, and Keller’s death had certainly had the effect of withdrawing his objections. They’re still not all that happy, but Irma soon finds a way to bring them round to her point of view. A couple of further nasty accidents and they’re only to anxious to write her a cheque. But who is this Irma Eckman? Is she working for some other individual, or some organisation? She soon turns up in other boardrooms, with similar attractive proposals for finding very final solutions to awkward business problems. Bulldog Drummond is on the case. This movie doesn’t have the kinds of spectacular stunts and gadgetry that you find in Bond movies. It does have a nice sense of style though, and it’s well-paced with the right mix of humour and action. The chess game is the sort of scene that makes these 60s spy thrillers so very appealing. Johnson is an engaging enough hero, much more of a conventional British gentleman than someone like Bond, although he does have an eye for the ladies. And Nigel Green, one of my favourite 1960s cult actors, is there as well and in fine form. And of course such a movie has to have beautiful girls. The glamour and sexiness in this one is provided by Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, and they’re very well qualified to provide those commodities. Elke has great fun being a villain and she’s terrific. And Sylva Koscina makes a great partner in murder and mayhem for her. Ralph Thomas was a very experienced director in a variety of genres, including the superb Hitchcockian thriller The Clouded Yellow and the delightful Dirk Bogarde spy spoof Hot Enough for June. And he does a fine job with this film. There’s some nice use of exotic locations in Lerici in northern Italy. Network DVD’s release (a two-movie pack that also includes the highly entertaining sequel Some Girls Do) features interviews with the leading actors recorded during the filming of the movie in 1967. Elke Sommer tells us about the importance of glamour, and who am I to argue with her? And the movie gets a splendid widescreen transfer. It’s a fun movie. I personally think Some Girls Do is even better, so this two-movie set is really a must for fans of 60s spy/adventure movies.

Satan's Baby Doll (1982)

Producer Gabriele Crisanti was so pleased by his 1979 sleazefest Malabimba, the Malicious Whore that he decided it was too good an idea to only film once. So three years later he made it again, under the title Satan's Baby Doll (La bimba di Satana).

This time he acted as screenwriter as well. Malabimba had contained just about every exploitation element you could think of, and some you hadn’t thought of. But it was complicated by having a plot, which was now stripped back to the absolute basics.

In fact the plot is so stripped down that even though it’s much simpler than in the first version it’s also much more difficult to follow. The wealthy and powerful Aguilar family is headed by Antonio. His wife Maria has just died. But his loyal family retainer (who appears to have some experience in the field of Satan-worshipping) has serious doubts that she will stay dead. And he is right. She takes over the body of their daughter Miria to return to life, or a semblance of life.

The family has a resident nun named Solo (in Malabimba she was part of the family buy I have no idea where she fitted in in this one). Solo and Maria had been conducting a clandestine lesbian affair behind Antonio’s back and now Maria intends to continue the affair. So this one character manages to introduce a whole swag of exploitation elements.

There’s also Antonio’s wheelchair-bound brother who provides opportunities for even more exploitation elements. The plot, having been set up rather sketchily, isn’t really developed in any great depth. There’s some mayhem, and copious quantities of assorted illicit sex.

Malabimba had been directed by Andrea Bianchi, not exactly one of the shining lights of Italian cinema perhaps but a guy who knew how to combine sleaze and horror in a fairly entertaining way. To direct Satan's Baby Doll Crisanti hired Mario Bianchi (apparently no relation to Andrea Bianchi). Unfortunately this left the film in much more dubious hands.

While Malabimba had managed to work reasonably well as both horror film and sleaze-fest the same cannot be said for Satan's Baby Doll. The horror elements are there but they just fall flat.

Mariangela Giordano plays the nun, as she had in Malabimba. She’s a capable actress and evidently one with few inhibitions. It’s with the rest of the cast that further problems arise. They’re at best adequate. One of Malabimba assets had been Katell Laennec as the possessed girl. In her one and only film role she brought a quality of rather scary twisted eroticism to her performance. In Satan's Baby Doll the equivalent role is taken by Jacqueline Dupré (also in her one and only film role) but sadly she just doesn’t have the same presence.

Of course criticism of such things is somewhat beside the point. This is not Citizen Kane. It’s not aiming at anything more than providing as much sleaze as possible with a token nod to the horror genre. And it delivers the sleaze.

I would hesitate to claim that Malabimba had been made with any higher aspirations but it’s more successful in providing actual chills and it’s also more successful at creating an atmosphere of claustrophobic unhealthy overheated decadent and generally kinky eroticism. So if the plot outline sounds like it’s right up your alley then you should definitely go for Malabimba in preference to this less than stellar remake.

The Shameless DVD release includes as much of the surviving footage of this movie as could be located, including some previously cut material. Whether this is in fact an uncut edition is uncertain but it’s probably as close as we’re likely to get. And the Shameless DVD appears to have the same running time as the R1 Severin release.

The lack of extras is mildly disappointing but it’s probably not the sort of movie that the people involved would be overly keen to talk about today! If you absolutely adored Malabimba and want more of the same then it’s perhaps worth buying; otherwise just buy Malabimba instead.

Blue Sunshine (1976)

Blue Sunshine was for me one of those movies that turns out to be something quite different from what I’d expected. And a lot better than I’d anticipated as well.

For some reason I was expecting a fairly amateurish offering packed with exploitation elements. In fact this is a rather well-crafted horror thriller with no sex and no gore but a good deal of suspense. And some real chills.

A party goes wrong when one of the guests goes completely mad, and in a decidedly murderous way. Three people are left dead and the murderer is himself killed on the highway by a truck. Jerry Zipkin finds himself accused of murdering his friend by throwing him in front of the truck. The most curious thing is that the guy who went crazy (whose name was Frannie Scott) had lost all his hair, and apparently quite suddenly. Rather unusual for a guy aged around 30.

Shortly thereafter Jerry hears of a case of a cop who has butchered his whole family. The cop was about the same age, and had also suffered from unexplained and dramatic hair loss. So far we have an odd coincidence, until one of the women who’d been at the party points out to Jerry that both Frannie and the cop had graduated from Stanford in the same year. When Jerry encounters a couple of other people who had also been at Stanford at the exact same time, and are also experiencing mysterious hair loss problems, he sees a disturbing pattern. A pattern that could potentially cost many more lives.

The stage is now set for a classic double chase movie, with Jerry racing against time to track down the cause of these murderous outbursts while trying to evade the pursuit of the cops. His investigations lead him to suspect that the words Blue Sunshine are crucial, and he’s right. Blue Sunshine was a variety of LSD which apparently had enjoyed a brief vogue at Stanford back in 1967. It seems that Blue Sunshine has some very nasty long-delayed side effects. His investigations also lead him to one-time drug dealer and now aspiring Congressman Ed Flemming.

Writer-director Jeff Lieberman has come up with a nifty little tale of the hangover that followed the Summer of Love, a tale that combines black comedy, suspense, horror and just a dash of political comment. There’s no actual political agenda being pushed here though, it’s more a case of taking a sardonic look at both the hippie culture that produced the Blue Sunshine nightmare and the slick political operators like Flemming that so many former hippies metamorphosed into.

The movie is also quite well acted. Zalman King is quietly intense and obsessive as Jerry Zipkin, his underplaying of the role making the character’s intensity more convincing. Mark Goddard is best-known for his role as Major Don West in the Lost in Space. As Ed Flemming he does the smooth political operator thing surprisingly well, and also wisely underplays his role. Flemming’s blandness is the creepiest thing about him. He’s very much a TV politician. It’s a great performance that makes me wonder why Goddard’s career never really went anywhere.

The acting in general is very strong for a low-budget film.

There are some classic horror moments. The scene here Flemming’s ex-wife, another victim of Blue Sunshine, slowly loses it as the children she’s minding start screaming more and more loudly is particularly effective. One of the effects that Blue Sunshine has is extreme noise sensitivity. Along with the shopping mall scene and the climactic department store scene it shows that Lieberman has a sound grasp of the essentials of suspense.

Technically the movie is quite impressive as well, more so than you expect from a low-budget movie such as this. There are some quite nifty camera moves.

The DVD release comes packed with extras including a director’s commentary track and an interview with Jeff Lieberman (who is a very amusing guy). The movie got rave reviews when it came out and created something of a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival but sadly distribution problems meant that it failed to get a proper theatrical release. Lieberman seems to have had similar problems with all his early horror films.

Definitely a DVD worth getting hold of.

Central Park Drifter (1987)

I have to preface my review of Central Park Drifter (AKA Graveyard Shift) by saying that I’m not a fan of the 80s in general, or of 80s horror movies in particular.

The movie concerns a taxi driver who happens to be a vampire, and a film producer of really bad 80s direct-to-video movies like, well like Central Park Drifter. She catches his cab she just knows she’s made a connection with this guy. That’s because she’s dying and he can sense death. But this time he’s found more than just another dying woman to vampirise. He’s found a Love Worth Dying For. Yes folks, we’re in Vampires As Sexy Romantic Heroes territory.

This territory was first staked out in the 1977 BBC TV adaptation of Dracula, and later extended in the 1979 Dracula feature film with Frank Langella as the Count.

Michelle (the film producer) has finally found love, but Stephen Tsepes (the vampiric cab driver) just wants to die. And I can relate to that, because by the end of this movie I wanted to die as well.

There’s really not much more to the plot than that. The vampire taxi driver has a kind of coven of vampire women, just like Dracula with his brides of Dracula. Michelle has a sleazy husband.

This movie has everything. It has bad 80 hairstyles, bad 80s fashions, a bad 80s aesthetic and bad 80s music. It has atrocious acting. It has a director who is trying so hard to be hip that it’s embarrassing. He’s watched MTV so he knows how to be hip.

Part of the problem with this movie could be that the Shriek Show DVD is a bad DVD transfer from a dubious VHS source. That could explain why this movie looks so awful. Of course it’s also possible that the movie looked awful to begin with. It seems to have that worrying 1980s direct-to-video feel to it.

You might be wondering why you’ve never head of writer-director Jerry Ciccoritti. Once you’ve watched this movie you’ll understand why you’ve never head of him, and why he’s spent the rest of his career in television.

Ciccoritti tries to spice up the movie with some sex and nudity, but it just doesn’t work. Nothing can breathe life into this corpse. The undead have never been so dreary, and they’ve never had such bad hair. The 89-minute running time feels like centuries. You will know the meaning of eternity, and you will pray to be staked.

This third-rate movie gets the third-rate DVD release it deserves. Avoid.

The Medusa Touch (1978)

The Medusa Touch is an odd and frequently overlooked 1978 British movie that could belong to any one of three or four genres. Whichever it belongs to it’s an interesting movie.

It was technically a British/French co-production and the cast reflects the growing internationalism of movies in the 70s. Lino Ventura, a prominent French actor who was actually Italian by birth, plays a French police inspector who for some mysterious reason is working for Scotland Yard. Lee Remick is an American psychiatrist practising in London, and Richard Burton is one of her patients. Ventura and Remick get more screen time but Burton dominates the film, not just through his acting presence but because his character is the one around whom everything revolves.

Burton is novelist John Morlar, a man with a self-described talent for disaster. Not for writing about disasters, but for creating them. Death has been his constant companion, striking down anyone who thwarts him or threatens him. It has taken him years to realise that he doesn’t just anticipate accidents and violent deaths, he actually causes them to happen.

His first victims were his parents. A few years later a bullying schoolmaster became a further victim. And so it has gone on. Morlar’s powers, which he has not the slightest understanding of, appear to be growing. They may be responding to his growing despair, his sense of alienation from the world and his ever-increasing hostility towards humanity.

Dr Zonfeld (Lee Remick) has spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince him that events such as the deaths of his wife and her lover are just coincidences, but gradually she comes to suspect that he may not be imagining things.

The movie opens with a vicious assault that leaves Morlar in a coma, and the backstory is filled in with a length and complex series of flashbacks that occupy much of the movie’s running time. It’s a technique that has its dangers but director Jack Gold and screenwriter John Briley carry if off very successfully. The plot never becomes confusing despite its complexity. Inspector Brunel (Ventura) is assigned to investigate the attack on Morlar but in order to uncover the identity of the assailant he must first learn to understand Morlar.

The quest takes on added urgency since Morlar has given indications that his next disasters will be in a much more spectacular scale. It has now become a race against time.

This is quite an ambitious picture. There are some impressive effects. This is of course pre-CGI so the effects are achieved mostly with models although the producers also borrowed an entire cathedral.

Burton is fabulous, making Morlar a figure of both pity and dread. Remick and Ventura are very solid. The supporting cast is a galaxy of 1970s British acting talent - Michael Hordern, Gordon Jackson, Harry Andrews, Jeremy Brett and Derek Jacobi are merely the better known faces. But it never feels like a star-laden movie with big names making pointless cameos just for the sake of it. These were the kinds of actors available to British film-makers in the 70s and they turn minor supporting parts into fully fleshed and fascinating characters.

The movie deliberately avoids committing itself to explanations, and the horror comes as much as anything from the fact that even Burton doesn’t know if he’s actually evil or not. Various explanations are suggested, ranging from the supernatural to the science fictional. The movie is structured as a police procedural but with the police facing crimes that are rationally inexplicable. It’s rather like the BBC’s 1979 TV series The Omega Factor, which was in turn very much like an early version of The X-Files.

It’s the kind of mix that could easily have become a mess but it all fits together rather beautifully. And it’s very entertaining.

Network DVD are rapidly becoming one of the best DVD companies out there. The DVD includes a very chatty but highly diverting commentary track with director Jack Gold and horror aficionados Kim Newman and Stephen Jones. This one is definitely worth a purchase.

Tommy (1975)

Mention Ken Russell to most people and chances are the movie they’ll think of is Tommy, based on the rock opera of the same name by Pete Townshend of The Who’s. It’s a movie I’ve avoided seeing for years, much as I revere Ken Russell. And it’s definitely a mixed bag.

Tommy is a boy born during the Second World War. His father is a British bomber pilot who is posted as missing in action. After the war his mother finds a new love, at a seaside holiday camp. The father returns and is killed by the mother and her lover. The shock of witnessing the killing renders Tommy deaf, dumb and blind. He suffers various indignities at the hands of an assortment of strange characters - his crazy cousin Kevin, his crazier Uncle Ernie, and is given psychedelic drugs and encounters the Acid Queen.

Tommy eventually discovers an unexpected skill - he becomes the greatest pinball player in the history of the world. He and his family become fabulously rich as a result but pinball is only the start. Tommy will go on to found a major religious cult, and will endure further sufferings.

It’s a story that gave Ken Russell the chance to indulge his visual imagination to the full without having to fret to much about narrative coherence. It’s essentially a string of musical numbers, rather like a linked series of lavish music videos, and the episodic structure offers the opportunity to present a succession of visual set-pieces. Each set-piece has its own visual style, its own mood.

So far so good. But there are some problems. The first problem is that the rock opera as a concept is one of the worst ideas in the history of western civilisation. Don’t get me wrong. I like rock’n’roll and I like opera. But the two should never, ever be mixed. Just as rock musicians should never have been permitted to consort with symphony orchestras.

The second problem is that the music is awful. This is of course a matter of personal taste. I like some of The Who’s early material but they rapidly degenerated into bombastic stadium rock of the worst sort.

The third problem is that Pete Townshend was getting into some serious hippie-dippie territory at the time he wrote Tommy. The combination of the pomposity of rock opera with hippie ideals is enough to make strong men shudder.

The fourth problem is Ann-Margret, who plays Tommy’s mother. Not that her performance is bad. Far from it. She’s just too good. She completely dominates the film and entirely overshadows the central character. She unbalances the movie.

With all these problems the movie still has one big thing in its favour. It has Ken Russell. With Ken Russell’s visual genius you can even ignore the terrible music. The images tell the story quite successfully without the music anyway. Russell was attracted to the theme of false religions and false prophets and has a good deal of fun with it. The Cult of Marilyn might have been an obvious idea, but only Ken Russell would have pushed it so far and made it work. There’s a good deal of Christ imagery as well. The combination of Russell’s Catholicism and Pete Townshend’s new age silliness works better than you might expect.

While Ann-Margret does dominate the movie this is really no bad thing. She’s magnificent. Roger Daltrey is adequate enough as Tommy. Oliver Reed is bizarre but entertaining as Tommy’s stepfather.

A good deal of credit must go Russell’s first wife Shirley. Her costume designs are a major part of the film’s outrageousness. The movie was apparently made on a relatively small budget, demonstrating once again that talent and imagination are so much more important than money and technology when it comes to making visually striking movies.

Everything in this movie is real. That really is Roger Daltrey doing the insanely dangerous stunts. That really is Ann-Margret writhing on the carpet covered from head to toe in baked beans. There are no doubles. And no dubbing of singing voices. When Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson sing, you’re hearing Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson sing.

Ken Russell’s commentary track is well worth the time taken to hear it. He has very fond memories of the film. His admiration for Ann-Margret knows no bounds.

Not a complete success, Tommy remains an extraordinary experience.

Sucker Money (1933)

Willis Kent Productions was one of those movie production companies that was even further down the food chain than the Poverty Row studios. They were involved in some Poverty Row productions but mostly they catered to the exploitation market, making sensationalistic potboilers such as Sucker Money.

Although it came out in 1933 I’m not sure that it actually qualifies as a pre-code movie. Willis Kent movies were the types of movies, in common with other exploitation movies of the period from the 30s to the 50s, that were generally distributed outside the established distribution networks dominated by the major studios. Even when the Production Code came in these tiny companies weren’t bound by its rules anyway.

Although Sucker Money was apparently filmed in the studios of Republic Pictures the studio doesn’t appear to have had any actual involvement. Presumably they just rented out studio space.

The plot is as sensationalistic as you could hope for. A newspaperman goes undercover to blow the lid off the operations of a phony psychic. This counterfeit spiritualist claims to be able to contact the spirits of the dead, for a price of course. He has quite an elaborate setup with a team of actors and various technical aids including a movie projector that appears to show his clients scenes of their dead relatives. The dearly departed offer helpful advice, but the advice is usually along the lines of recommending the purchase of shares in speculative mining companies that the phony psychic just happens to own.

The fake psychic’s current target is a wealthy but naïve businessman from a small town in the Midwest. The businessman has an attractive daughter and she provides the love interest for the crusading reporter. The scam starts to go wrong, but the reporter’s cover is also blown and he finds himself held captive while the scammers plan to kidnap the businessman’s daughter.

This is very low-budget film-making indeed, and to describe the plot as creaky would be an act of generosity. The acting is mostly dire, with a particularly wooden hero. The special effects are crude but considering it’s a zero-budget film they’re serviceable enough.

Surprisingly, for an exploitation film, there isn’t much in the way of sex and sin. In fact there isn’t any sex and sin at all, which leads me to believe the movie may have been intended as a very cheap B-feature for theatrical release rather than an exploitation film as such.

It’s a public domain movie and my copy is from Mill Creek’s Dark Crimes boxed set. It’s an awful DVD transfer but it’s the sort of movie that probably only exists in very battered theatrical prints. It’s also a film that’s not likely to be getting a fancy restoration job done on it any time soon.

With all its faults the inherent interest of the subject matter makes it at least moderately entertaining. Especially if love movies about fake spiritualists and con artists with a suggestion of the fascinating and seedy-glamorous worlds of travelling carnivals and sideshows.

Director Dorothy Davenport had been married to silents star Wallace Reid. After he died as a result of drug addiction she directed a number of exploitation movies which she used as a vehicle to warn the public against the evils of moral decay. The movies she directed including the highly entertaining 1934 The Road to Ruin, a delightful mix of sleaze, sin, nudity and moralising.

At just under an hour Sucker Money is a harmless enough time-killer, and it’s an amusing curiosity.