Queen of Outer Space (1958)

Queen of Outer Space belongs to the sub-genre of science fiction films from the 50s dealing with encounters with all-female alien societies, along with movies like Cat-Women of the Moon and Missile to the Moon and several others. It’s a sub-genre that combines outrageous sexism with equally outrageous camp. When you notice that the star of a science fiction movie is Zsa Zsa Gabor, you can be fairly sure it’s not going to take a very serious scientific approach to its subject matter.

A routine mission to Earth’s first orbiting space station goes badly wrong when a mysterious ray destroys the station before the horrified eyes of its designer Professor Konrad (who just happens to be aboard the spaceship on its way to the station) and then hurls the spacecraft at a phenomenal speed towards the planet Venus. The crew are relieved to find that Venus’s gravity is very similar to Earth’s, because that means the atmosphere will be breathable.

Exploring the surface of the planet the crew are overtaken by disaster. The one great fear of space explorers is of course that they will be captured by beautiful mini-skirted alien women, and that’s what happens. The horror is compounded by the fact that these women haven’t seen a man in years. It transpires that the men of Venus were banished to one of the planet’s moons after a catastrophic war, and Queen Yllana now rules. She is consumed by an implacable hatred of men, and plans to use her beta disintegrator to destroy the Earth. Not all the women of Venus hate men though. There is a resistance movement of women who want their men back, a movement led by one of Venus’s leading scientists, Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor). Talleah and her chief followers immediately fall hopelessly in love with the spacemen from Earth. To be honest, even if these four clowns were the only men on the entire planet it’s still difficult to understand why any woman would want anything to do with them. The Earthmen and the rebel women must somehow foil the queen’s plans and re-unite the women of Venus with their men.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this film is the writing talent involved in it. The script is by Charles Beaumont, who went on to write many classic episodes of The Twilight Zone and several notable movies (including Roger Corman’s superb Masque of the Red Death) before his premature death in 1967. And the screenplay was based on an unpublished story by Ben Hecht. Although there does seem to be some doubt about whether the Hecht story actually existed since nobody has actually seen it.

Zsa Zsa Gabor makes no attempt to act. She was already well on her way to becoming an actress known more for her outrageous persona and eventful private life than for her almost non-existent film career, and she is there simply to add glamour. Which she does. The other female members of the cast seem to have been selected mainly for their appearance, and they include several beauty queens. This is classic 1950s cheesecake, and the women really are quite stunning, especially Lisa Davis as Motiya. Science fiction seemed to afford costume designers an opportunity to put women into extraordinarily short skirts. The four male cast members are uniformly awful and quite exceptionally annoying. I can quite understand why Queen Yllana wanted to exterminate them.

The sets and costumes are the highlight of the movie. The sets are ludicrous but fun in a very high camp way, and the women’s costumes are glamorous and sexy although perhaps not always very practical.

In a 1950s sci-fi movie you expect ludicrously sexist dialogue and sexist attitudes, but this one is in a class of its own. Of course it was never meant to be taken seriously, director Edward Bernds describing it as an attempt to graft satire onto a very thin science fiction plot. The attempt doesn’t quite come off. I suspect that the things that modern audiences will find amusing in this film won’t be the same things that a 50s audience would have laughed at. But it’s still camp enough to be reasonably entertaining. And it looks fairly impressive. Being filmed in Cinemascope and colour, and very bright and lurid colours they are, makes it even more camp. If you like camp and you like 1950s cheesecake, it’s worth a look.

Naked Rashomon (1972)

The first thing to note about Chusei Sone’s Naked Rashomon is that it has absolutely no connection whatsoever with Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The title seems to have been chosen simply because it sounded like a cool title. Be that as it may it’s an interesting tale of revenge and of people trapped by the past.

By the beginning of the 1970s the advent of television had pushed many Japanese film studios to the brink of bankruptcy, including the oldest of them all, Nikkatsu (founded in 1912). Nikkatsu’s response was to introduce their “roman porno” series, and to concentrate exclusively on these films. This turned out to be a very successful move and Nikkatsu are still around although the “roman porno” series ended in the late 80s. Most people think the “roman” is short for romantic, but it’s actually derived from the French term for erotic novels, “roman pornographique.” In fact the sexual content in these movies is relatively tame.

Since they were produced by a major studio with all the resources that entails these films do not have the slightly home-made rather amateurish look so often associated with exploitation movies. They’re glossy and extremely well made with high production values, and they were made by people who took film-making very seriously. The acting is more than adequate and the approach of many of the directors was quite self-consciously arty. For many directors the genre provided a golden opportunity since Nikkatsu gave them complete artistic freedom as long as they included plenty of sex.

Naked Rashomon opens in 1913. Lord Katsuragawa, a powerful political figure, desperately needs a son to consolidate the family’s future power an influence, but his wife is unable to bear children. He solves the problem by impregnating Shino, the prostitute girlfriend of his bodyguard Todo, and claiming the child as his own. Shino however gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Todo is ordered to dispose of mother and daughter but instead hides them away in a remote part of the country. Nineteen years later the dying Shino contacts Todo and asks him to take over the care of the daughter, Kyoko.

Things become somewhat confusing after this, with the action switching back and forth between the two time periods, but I’m fairly sure this was a deliberate choice by director Chusei Sone. The protagonists are hopelessly entrapped by the events of 1913 and they therefore exist as much in the past as in the present. Kyoko is obsessed with the idea of re-living her mother’s life by becoming a prostitute herself, and by devoting herself to plans for revenge. Shino’s son is equally unable to escape the consequences of those past events, although he doesn’t realise it. Todo is haunted by the shadow of 1913 as well, and by his doomed efforts to make some atonement and to undo the harm that was done. The obsession with the past (neatly symbolised by two almost identical photographs taken 19 years apart) has produced a distorted reality for the people concerned, and this is reflected in the slightly dream-like quality of the movie.

As you expect with a Mondo Macabro release there are plenty of extras. The documentary of the roman porno genre is interesting. This is a genre that has not only been completely unknown to western audiences but it’s also only just being rediscovered in Japan where it’s building up a considerable following among young women movie fans. Which isn’t surprising, since like so much of Japanese exploitation cinema it’s very woman-focused, and it mixes complex female characters with lots of sex, a combination unfortunately rather rare in modern erotica. There are trailers for more Nikkatsu movies soon to be released by Mondo Macabro, all of which look very tempting. I think Watcher in the Attic is a better introduction to this particular sub-genre but Naked Rashomon is still very much worth getting.

Don’t Look in the Basement (1973)

S. F. Brownrigg started his career working for ultra-low budget sci-fi/horror film-maker Larry Buchanan. By 1973 he’d graduated to making his own very low budget movies, starting with a movie that has had many titles (including The Forgotten), although it’s probably best known these days as Don’t Look in the Basement. It’s a movie that combines the do-it-yourself film-making ethos of people like Ed Wood with 1970s gore.

Charlotte Beale arrives at a small and very remote psychiatric clinic somewhere in Texas. The director of this institution, Dr Stephens, has developed some very individual theories about mental illness. He believes that obsessions and delusions should be encouraged, and that when they become extreme enough they’ll burn themselves out and the patient will be cured. He also believes in breaking down the barriers in the doctor/patient relationship, so there are no locks on the doors of any of the rooms. On the morning of Charlotte’s arrival Dr Stephens’ theories have started to go a little awry. One of the patients, who is either a former judge or thinks he is a judge, has just murdered the good doctor with an axe. This leaves Dr Geraldine Masters in charge, and she is determined to carry on her predecessor’s good work.

Nurse Beale finds the patients to be quite a challenge. Apart from the axe-wielding judge there’s Sam, who has the mind of a ten-year-old after a lobotomy. There’s Allyson, who desperately wants to be loved, right now, by anybody at all. There’s Harriet, who is struggling to care for her baby (the baby is in fact a doll). There’s Sergeant Jaffee, who cracked up after getting his whole patrol killed in action. Every night he waits for the arrival of the enemy. There’s a dementia patient, and there’s the disturbingly giggly Danny.

Unfortunately Dr Stephens’ murder was just the first in a series of violent incidents, and after discovering several bodies Nurse Beale decides it might be a good time to quit this job and move on. But first she has to get out of the clinic.

The acting is uniformly atrocious, the make-up and gore effects are unconvincing, the camerawork is unimaginative and the look of the movie is very flat. But Don’t Look in the Basement has some real strengths which just about make up for these deficiencies. There are a couple of very neat plot twists, and there’s an atmosphere of complete out-of-control insanity.

It was an era that saw the George Romero-style of horror film-making becoming increasingly predominant among low-budget American film-makers, with a very heavy reliance on buckets of blood and gore and a moving away from supernatural horror. This movie is to some extent part of that trend, but it lacks the disturbing misogyny and sadistic glee in violence that mark many such movies. And it’s a much more interesting movie than, for instance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It’s in the public domain so the good news is that it’s not going to cost you much, and you can even download it legally for free. The bad news is that the print I saw was pretty rough, with very poor sound. It’s definitely worth a look though. The very bad news is that apparently a remake is on the way.

Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922)

Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr Mabuse the Gambler is in many ways the daddy of all movies in the gangster, crime and film noir genres. Interestingly enough, Lang also invented the science fiction film (Metropolis) and the spy film (his 1928 film Spies). Every criminal mastermind or mad scientist or evil hypnotist from that time on also owed something to Dr Mabuse, although it could be argued that the type originated in earlier German movies like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Dr Mabuse the Gambler is a very long film (you could consider its two parts to be two moderately long films but they don’t stand alone so really it’s one film) but it can’t be accused of being boring. There’s just so much going on, so many wonderful visual touches, some terrific 1920s special effects (especially the use of text on screen, in the scene involving the state prosecutor’s car). And there’s so much outrageousness. It’s a movie that manages to be very pulpy and very arty at the same time. It has a lot to say about the disastrous conditions in Germany in the early 20s, the hyper-inflation, the appalling poverty combined with nouveau riche war-profiteers and black marketeers, and of course Berlin’s famous decadence.

At the same time it’s a great deal of fun, with Dr Mabuse the master of disguise matching wits against the determined and courageous State Prosecutor von Wenk. And there’s psychoanalysis, hypnotism and mind control. What more could you want? Dr Mabuse himself has often been seen as a kind of prophecy of the coming to power of Hitler, a suggestion vehemently denied by director Fritz Lang in the documentary that accompanies the Kino DVD (although he admits that his 1933 movie The Testament of Dr Mabuse does address the issue of the Nazis). The documentary is quite interesting, with plenty of information about Norbert Jacques, who wrote the Dr Mabuse books which were apparently immensely popular in Germany.

The score is as atrocious as every other modern silent film score I’ve come across – it was clearly composed by someone who’d never seen the movie and had no ideas what it was about. But if you let awful scores put you off you’d never get to see any silent movies. Don’t forget folks, they’re silent movies, so don’t be afraid to turn the volume down to zero and just enjoy the movie. The good news is that the Kino DVD looks terrific. And it’s a fantastic, bizarre, unique and very entertaining movie.

High Plains Drifter (1973)

High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood’s second movie as a director, was one of quite a number of revisionist westerns, such as Little Big Man, made at about that time. High Plains Drifter is in some ways the ultimate revisionist western, since it parodies everything that traditional westerns believe in and mocks every cliché of the genre. In a traditional western the townspeople who are threatened by a gang of desperadoes are always decent honest god-fearing people. When the people of Lago in High Plains Drifter are described in those terms, it’s a joke. The townspeople of Lago are greedy, grasping, cowardly and vicious. The gunslinger they hire to protect them should be, according to the conventions of the genre, a fundamentally just man who protects the innocent. In fact the stranger who rides in to Lago turns out to be their worst nightmare. But then these townspeople aren’t innocent anyway.

High Plains Drifter is actually as much a horror movie as a western. It has some absolutely stunning cinematography. The stark beauty of the country where it was filmed, along with the town (which Eastwood insisted on having built in its entirely on location) and the lake behind it provide a magnificently eerie and at times dreamlike backdrop to the movie.

While the Sergio Leone influence is obvious Eastwood seems to have been influenced by Italian cinema in general, and Fellini in particular. This film feels (to me at least) much more European than American. It has a quality of the surreal and the grotesque you don’t really respect in an American movie. Although it’s a violent movie it shows violence as something that breeds more violence. You don’t get that feeling you get in a traditional western that Justice Has Been Done and that all the bloodshed has been in the cause of Law and Order and Truth and Justice. There’s a good deal of unpleasantness in this film, quite apart from the actual violence, but again it serves the purpose of deriding the values of the genre.

i>High Plains Drifter is Eastwood’s masterpiece, and one of the great American movies.

The Swap and How They Make It (1966)

The essence of the true sexploitation movies of the 1960s (as opposed to the softcore movies that followed) was to make movies about sex whilst showing very little indeed. There’s nothing even approaching explicit sex, and often very little nudity. What the best of these movies do have, though, is sexual tension. Joe Sarno’s genius was his ability to exploit that very quality to make serious and surprisingly dark movies about human sexuality.

The Swap and How They Make It is fairly typical early Sarno. As the title implies, it’s about wife-swapping. It’s included in a double-bill from Something Weird Video, paired with another Sarno movie, Sin in the Suburbs. And it’s an ideal pairing. Both movies deal with the boredom and emptiness of suburbia and small-town life, and with people who try to fill that emptiness with sex, especially sex of a slightly kinky kind.

The Swap and How They Make It, made in 1966, deals with two couples who are introduced into a wife-swapping circle (known as The Exchange) in a particularly dreary small town in some unspecified part of the US. Given that the alternatives are playing golf or playing bridge, it’s not difficult to understand why The Exhange is so popular!

At first it all seems like fun. Everybody appears to understand the rules, that it’s just fun and that nobody how many partners you have within the circle your first loyalty is always to your wife or husband. But of course not everyone is able to remain quite so detached, and pretty soon emotional complications arise and jealousies develop. To make things worse, a young unmarried student couple manipulate their way into The Exchange, and they are most definitely not able to deal with the situation. Sarno’s interest in not in sex as such, but in the psychological dimensions to sex, and these are explored with a subtlety that you don’t generally expect in a low-budget exploitation movie.

Sarno’s black-and-white movies have a wonderfully austere quality to them that enhances the atmosphere of boredom. The acting is somewhat amateurish but the rather flat delivery of the dialogue also adds a touch of starkness to the movie.

Both image and sound quality on the DVD are superb. Sarno was a true auteur of the sexploitation genre, and his movies are both fascinating and disturbing, and shed an intriguing light on the sexual morality of an outwardly strait-laced society. Highly recommended.

Horror Hospital (1973)

Horror Hospital is an outrageously lurid and deliriously trashy 1973 British horror film. Its entertainment value lies mainly in its sheer overwhelming awfulness and the fact that it knows it’s awful and it revels in it.

Jason (played by the staggeringly untalented Robin Askwith, a veteran of such classics of British cinema as Confessions of a Window Cleaner) had had one of his songs ripped off by an unscrupulous band manager, and decides to console himself by taking a holiday. He sees an advertisement for Hairy Holidays, a company that apparently specialises in holidays for hippies and sets off for the country. On the train he meets a pretty young woman named Judy, a young woman with such appalling taste that she actually finds Jason attractive. It turns out she’s heading for the same destination, a manor owned by her aunt. The aunt used to run a whorehouse in Hamburg, but now she’s hooked up with a crazed doctor named Storm. The manor is a kind of health farm, but since Dr Storm is played by Michael Gough we know immediately that he’s going to be an evil mad scientist.

Dr Storm trained under Pavlov but had to leave Russia when Stalin came to power. It seems he was too crazy for Stalin’s tastes. The health farm is simply a way of attracting young people to the remote manor here they become subjects for his medical experiments. They are turned into lobotomised human automatons, completely subservient to Dr Storm’s will, and impervious to pain. The reason for these experiments is never made clear. He’s just a mad scientist and it’s the sort of thing mad scientists do. Logic is not this film’s strong point. He has an assistant, a dwarf named Frederick.

Judy and Jason quickly discover that there is evil afoot, but the bumbling Jason finds himself thrown into a cell while Judy is about to become the next candidate for Dr Storm’s surgery.

The movie tries for a kind of high camp feel, but director Antony Balch doesn’t really have sufficient style to pull it off. It still succeeds moderately well as tongue-in-cheek horror schlock, with plenty of unconvincing gore. The crudity of the make-up and other effects tends if anything to add to the fun. The big black car with the scythe blade for executing troublesome patients and ex-employees is a nice touch.

And it has Michael Gough, and even better Michael Gough as a mad scientist, and that’s sufficient reason on its own for seeing this one. Vanessa Shaw as Judy demonstrates a formidable talent for screaming, a talent she exercises at every possible opportunity. Dennis Price contributes an amusing cameo, and Skip Martin is entertaining as the dwarf Frederick. If you like extremely bad horror that doesn’t take itself even moderately seriously and exults in being silly and trashy then Horror Hospital should deliver the goods for you.