They Might Be Giants (1971)

They Might Be Giants is one of those movies that you watch not expecting all that much but that ends up being a very pleasant surprise indeed. This is an utterly charming movie. Made in 1971 and directed by Anthony Harvey, it tells the story of a retired judge (George C. Scott) who believes he is Sherlock Holmes, and his psychiatrist, Dr Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward). The movie raises questions about where we draw the line between madness and genius and fantasy and reality, and suggests that perhaps life needs a little madness. The chemistry between Scott and Woodward is extraordinary – they are an absolute delight. Scott gives one of the finest performances of his career – he is funny, he is touching, and he is magnetic. They Might Be Giants offers a mixture of humour, romance, intelligence and pathos. A wonderful little film that deserves to be much better known.

The Day the World Ended (1955)

I’m a great admirer of Roger Corman, and his ability to do a lot with a little fills me with awe. It has to be admitted though that his 1955 sci-fi flick The Day the World Ended is unbelievably bad. Corman could do a lot with a little but he couldn’t perform miracles with nothing at all, and the budget on this one was obviously virtually zero. It’s interesting to compare it with another very early Corman film, Swamp Women, made the same year. Swamp Women is also made on a budget of almost nothing, and the acting is equally bad. It doesn’t need any budget, though, while The Day the World Ended needed at least a few dollars spent on the monster make-up. And the bad acting in Swamp Women adds to the fun, the movie being an outrageously camp (and fantastically entertaining) women convicts on the run movie. The Day the World Ended is just too ambitious, and takes itself too seriously. The endless moralising and the religious homilies get very tiresome. Moralising is always a danger in a nuclear armageddon movie, and Corman lacked the experience at that stage to keep that tendency under control. It’s the story of a handful of survivors of a nuclear war, holed up in a house in an isolated valley, and fighting off attacks by mutants. It really doesn’t even work as an exercise in camp, the tone being so ponderous and the pacing being so leaden. Still, it shows Corman even this early in his career playing around with different genres so it has some historical interest.

The Killing of Sister George (1968)

The Killing of Sister George is a movie I’ve seen many times. Robert Aldrich, who directed the film, has become one of my favourite directors. It achieved considerable notoriety at the time it was released in 1968. The Region 2 DVD I recently bought presented the movie in widescreen and uncut. I’d actually never seen the uncut version. The movie is about June, a middle-aged soap opera actress who is almost always referred to as George, the name of the character she plays, Sister George. She lives in London with her lover Alice, known as Childie. When it appears that her character is going to be killed off (that’s the killing referred to in the title) her world starts to crumble.

What makes this movie so surprising for 1968 is that their lesbian relationship is treated so casually. Only a few years earlier in William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour homosexuality is still something to be whispered about. Traditionally when homosexual characters have made an appearance in Hollywood movies they’ve almost invariably been shown killing themselves or at least ending up unhappy as their punishment. The ending of The Killing of Sister George is much more complex than that. And George herself (wonderfully played by Beryl Reid) is a complex character, a person who finds it difficult to survive in the world because of her absolute refusal to compromise – she makes no effort to hide her sexuality, she makes no effort to hide her scorn for fools, she expects the world to accept her as she is. Alice (a superb performance by Susannah York) could easily have become a stereotype, the femme lesbian who collects dolls in a relationship with the butch George, but in fact her character is also complex. While in the case of George what you see is what you get, Alice’s character is revealed gradually as we see that there is more to her than the childlike persona she adopts with George.

This is a very moving story, but the film is also extremely funny – lots of humour, most of it black (my favourite kind). A very good movie that repays repeated viewings.

The Iron Rose (1973)

The Iron Rose is perhaps Jean Rollin’s least-known movie. At first glance it’s easy to see why – although it was made in 1973 and thus comes in the middle of his vampire cycle there are no vampires, and the erotic element is very subdued for a Rollin film (although it does have a clown, another Rollin trademark). In fact, though, this is a very typical Rollin film with all his usual themes and imagery and the visual poetry that is the main reason for seeing his movies. A young couple wander through a graveyard. They decide it would be fun, and romantic, to make love in an open crypt. Time gets away from them, darkness falls, and when they emerge they cannot find the path that will lead them out of the cemetery. They are in a city of the dead, they are lost, and the call of the dead is strong. It isn’t easy to distinguish life from death, or dream from reality, or love from hate, and one’s reason can easily give way to madness. But is this a story about someone going mad, or is it simply a dream of madness? And if it’s a dream, who is doing the dreaming?

As you expect in a movie by Jean Rollin, dialogue is sparse. You could eliminate the dialogue and it would make little difference – not because there is a lack of content, but because Rollin’s images are so strong they simply do not require dialogue to support them. The images are also ravishing! It’s a movie that is both decadent and romantic. Is it a horror movie? Perhaps, but this is subtle horror, and is more akin to a movie like Polanski’s Repulsion than it is to the average horror film. I’ve seen five Rollin movies, and I’ve liked them all, but this one is now my favourite. This is movie-making at its most poetic, disturbing and beautiful. I can’t recommend The Iron Rose too highly.

Night of the Lepus (1972)

By 1972 film-makers had shown humanity battling the threats of giant ants, giant spiders, killer bees, giant gila monsters, killer shrews and sundry other murderous mutant wildlife. It was becoming something of a challenge to think of new and convincing threats. And then someone came up with a brilliant idea to breathe new life into this now rather tired sub-genre. How about giant killer bunny rabbits? I mean bunny rabbits are pretty scary to begin with, aren’t they? So giant killer bunny rabbits would have to be absolutely terrifying. Thus was Night of the Lepus born.

You might think that the only possible way to make a movie about giant carnivorous rabbits would be with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but in fact Night of the Lepus is played absolutely straight. Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh are scientists working on a biological method of controlling a plague of rabbits somewhere in the US south-west. Unfortunately their experimental method of preventing the rabbits from breeding turns them into gigantic carnivorous bunnies that breed like, well, rabbits. The acting from the support cast, which includes with DeForest Kelley (from Star Trek) and Rory Calhoun, is uniformly awful. The biggest problem with this movie, though, is that real rabbits are used, with miniature sets to make them look huge, but they still look like rabbits. And it’s hard to enjoy watching rabbits being shot, machine-gunned, set on fire and electrocuted, especially when you can’t avoid the very strong impression that the rabbits being shot, machine-gunned, set on fire and electrocuted are actual living rabbits. What could have been an enjoyable so-bad-it’s-good movie experience becomes a little sickening. So unfortunately Night of the Lepus turns out to be a lot less fun that one might have expected.

The Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

The Shiver of the Vampires (Le Frisson des vampires) is my third Jean Rollin movie, And I’m becoming quite the Rollin fan. Once again his debt to the Surrealists is very much in evidence, and once again this is neither a conventional vampire movie nor a conventional horror movie. It is, however, slightly less surreal and slightly closer in feel to traditional horror than his earlier Rape of the Vampire (Le Viol du vampire). Rollin’s movies are very much image and mood-driven rather than plot-driven – if you like a strong straightforward story you’ve picked the wrong director! Fortunately Rollin’s images (helped along by the rather wonderful music by a progressive rock band of the era called, I believe, Acanthus) are impressive enough to stand on their own. His use of colour is dazzling. Being a Jean Rollin movie there is of course a positively staggeringly amount of nudity, so if you have a problem with nudity you want to stay right away from this one.

A young wife and her new husband pay a visit to he old (and visually magnificent) chateau owned by two of her cousins, who are now deceased. Sort of. They also encounter some other odd denizens of the chateau, and discover the results of her cousins’ researches into old religions. The most striking of these inhabitants are the two maids – Rollin seems obsessed by the idea of female twins or doubles, and although these two young women a clearly not related (one being blonde and very European and the other being Asian) they still seem like twins. As usual with Rollin the characters are all to some degree ambiguous, and the events of the film are equally ambiguous. The feel of the movie is very, very trippy – this is a real treat for lovers of late 60s/early 70s psychodelia. There are also some amazing entrances by the vampire Isolde, but I’m not going to spoil things by telling you any details. I don’t think this film is as good as Rape of the Vampire or Requiem for a Vampire, but for fans of arty Eurohorror it’s still a must.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

I finally got to see Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Movies about youth culture made by people who don’t really understand that youth culture often turn out to be embarrassing. While Beyond the Valley of the Dolls superficially seems to be a satire of the youth culture of 1970 it really isn’t. It’s more a satire on, and at the same time a celebration of, all pop culture. And director Russ Meyer and screenwriter Roger Ebert do understand pop culture. It plunders just about all of pop culture from soap operas to superhero comics, from pop music to the sort of soft porn exploitation movies made by people like Russ Meyer. No human being has ever talked the way these characters talk, especially Ronnie Z-Man Bartell whose speech is a bizarre mixture of Shakespeare, philosophy, pop psychology, comic book and Hollywood-speak. As a result the movie has a kind of timeless quality. It’s not dated because it was never really in date. It just is, and you either accept it or you don’t. While this movie is very obviously (from the point of Meyer and Ebert) an exercise in camp it’s also a movie made with surprising skill. Meyer’s direction is energetic and imaginative. The acting is awful beyond belief but it’s awful in an interesting way. Meyer apparently directed it as if he was directing a serious movie, spending time discussing with the actors their motivations in the scenes they were about to film. As a result the actors don’t seem to know if they’re supposed to be really acting or not and the results are very strange but absolutely fascinating. Dolly Read is simply wonderful as Kelly – she has the right mix of wide-eyed naiveté, bright-eyed enthusiasm, a kind of rampant but innocent sensuality, good humour, all combined with no acting talent whatsoever. She’s a delight. John Lazar as Z-Man is eccentric almost to the point of grotesquerie. He’s acting his little heart out and the result is bizarrely entertaining.

The whole movie is funny but the ending is a kind of apotheosis of weirdness, weirdness taken to heights and to places no-one had previously dared reach for. It’s extremely violent and very very funny. The violence is so silly that you can’t really be offended by it. I enjoyed every moment of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.