The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

A lot of film-makers have has the “worst director of all time” label affixed to them. In many cases quite unjustly. After watching The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! I’m prepared to believe that Andy Milligan on the other hand thoroughly deserves the title.

It’s not that the premise is bad. In fact it’d the kind of idea that could have given birth to an extremely good horror movie. This is a period piece, set in England in 1899 (and Milligan apparently designed the costumes himself). The Mooneys are a very ancient family, so naturally there is a family curse. In this case it’s lycanthropy, but lycanthropy of a hereditary variety. The problem is so bad that the family has more or less stopped breeding. They still exist because the elderly patriarch of the clan has invented an elixir that can prolong life almost indefinitely. Their long-term survival though depends on being able to reproduce. Of this patriarch’s progeny the only one with a realistic chance of producing viable offspring is the youngest daughter, Diana. Her mother’s blood was still untainted at the time of Diana’s birth.

Diana has selected a suitable husband, but the rest of the family are not convinced of the wisdom of her decision to marry. There is also the question of where she will live. Her father sent her to medical school to acquire the skills needed to help him in his experiments, experiments that may hold the key to the family’s future. When she brings her new husband home tensions start to rise, and Monica (the most spectacularly unhinged of the Mooney females) is particularly hostile.

There’s plenty of potential in this plot. All it needed was a competent scriptwriter to turn it into a coherent story, a skilled director and a good cinematographer to add the necessary atmosphere. Unfortunately in this case all these roles are filled by the same person, that person being Andy Milligan, and he’s equally inept in every department of film-making. Chaotic is the word to describe this movie. Not chaotic in an inspired way, or chaotic in a fun way, but chaotic in a tedious and confusing way.

He’s also managed to assemble a cast of extraordinarily awful actors. The combination of atrocious acting with a poor script would be bad enough, but this is also an unbelievably wordy script. These are actors who should be give as little dialogue as possible, and they’re required to talk incessantly. This is necessary as Milligan seems to have no notion whatsoever of using visual means to advance the story, so every plot point has to be explained by means of lengthy stretches of excruciating dialogue. There are also sub-plots that go nowhere at all.

The rats in the title are only there to justify some totally gratuitous animal cruelty, and as a desperate attempt to cash in on the success of Willard the previous year.

There’s very little gore and no sex, but since the print I saw was a downloaded public domain print I have no way of knowing if it had been cut or not. The running time seemed a little short so I suspect it had been cut.

Truly awful movies can have a certain charm, and there are moments of such utter insanity in this film that at times it almost becomes entertaining, and it’s certainly an experience. It’s not an experience that I personally would care to repeat, but it is an experience.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Yes, more Brian de Palma. This time it’s Dressed to Kill, from 1980. Another de Palma movie that seems to have enraged almost everybody, and again it’s a movie I see as being essentially a black comedy.

It’s another Brian does Hitchcock movie, but for these who haven’t seen it I can’t say which which Hitchcock movie it’s inspired by because to do so would give away much of the plot. Although I suspect de Palma expected us to see the surprise twist ending coming a mile away, and that seeing it coming was intended as part of the fun.

This movie starts with Kate (Angie Dickinson) pleasuring herself in the shower while watching her husband shave and then getting attacked by a stranger, but in fact this is just a fantasy she’s having while she and her husband are having their usual very unsatisfactory (for her) sex. Right away de Palma established that he’s playing games with us. Kate then has her usual session with her psychiatrist Dr Elliott (Michael Caine), and she makes an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him. By now she’s feeling pretty negative about herself, but a chance encounter in the museum that afternoon leads to some very steamy and confidence-restoring sex.

The museum pick-up is the most celebrated scene in the movie, 22 minutes of dialogue-free pure visual film-making brilliance that is enough on its own to justify seeing this movie. It’s very Hitchcockian, but this is no mere homage, this is de Palma showing us he can do Hitchcock just as well as Hitchcock could, and it’s sufficiently well done to justify the extraordinary conceit required to make such an attempt. If de Palma sometimes puts style ahead of substance then as long as the style is as good as this I’m not complaining.

Kate’s little sexual adventure has unexpected consequences, and to reveal any more concrete plot details would entail too great a risk of spoilers. Suffice to say that the story ends up with a teenage boy technical wizard and a high-class hooker (played by Nancy Allen) playing amateur detective.

Michael Caine was perhaps an odd casting choice as the psychiatrist, for reasons I can’t go into, but he does a reasonable job. Angie Dickinson (an underrated actress who deserved to be offered more good roles) is extremely good, and Nancy Allen is excellent as the hooker with not quite a heart of gold but with plenty of substance to her character. The movie was much criticised by some feminist critics but I think Nancy Allen’s strong, smart, complex, resourceful and courageous hooker is one of the more interesting female characters you’ll find in 1970s American movies. And Dennis Franz plays a tough New York cop. Yes I know Dennis Franz always plays a tough New York cop, but he has nobody to blame but himself - he just does it so well.

Being a de Palma movie there is of course a certain amount (OK, quite a bit) of sleaze and voyeurism, but again I’d say that if you can do sleaze and voyeurism with this much style then let’s have more sleaze and voyeurism.

Dressed to Kill shows a breath-taking mastery of technique and it’s highly entertaining as long as you don’t make the mistake of treating it as a serious thriller. I don’t think it’s as good as Body Double but it’s still a terrific movie.

Dominique (1978)

Dominique (aka Dominique Is Dead) is a rather old-fashioned sort of movie to have been made in 1978. It appears to be a traditional kind of ghost story, but really it’s a psychological thriller very much in the style of the movies Hammer were doing in the early 60s, movies like Paranoiac and Nightmare.

Unfortunately Hammer not only did this kind of thing first, they also did it much better. Once you figure out the kind of movie that Dominique is then the plot becomes all too predictable, and the plot twists more or less announce themselves. It features a fairly strong cast but they don’t really get to extend themselves to any great degree.

Dominique (Jean Simmons) is a very wealthy woman married to moderately successful stock-broker David Ballard (Cliff Robertson). David has a beautiful and much younger half-sister named Ann (Jenny Agutter). Dominique had an accident some time earlier and has never been quite the same since. She seems forgetful and confused, and even a bit mad. This madness, or perhaps the fear of madness, drives her to suicide. But after her funeral it seems she is reluctant to stay dead, and David finds himself haunted. He hears strange voices, and a piano playing when there is no-one there, and keeps seeing a figure dressed like his late wife. Is this the ghost of Dominique?

David persuades the family chauffeur Tony (Simon Ward) to join him in a midnight foray to the cemetery to check on Dominique’s coffin. And then a mysterious headstone appears, next to Dominique’s, with David’s name on it.

Cliff Robertson is adequate in the role of David, and Simon Ward is shifty and obsequious as the chauffeur. Jean Simmons and Jenny Agutter are both talented actresses but they have little to do in this movie. Flora Robson and Judy Geeson also make appearances but their parts are sadly underwritten. In fact most of the characters are underwritten.

There’s some reasonably effective moody cinematography. Michael Anderson’s direction isn’t especially inspired. The pacing is a little slow but the main problem is that the plot just isn’t clever enough to maintain much interest.

This is a harmless enough time-killer but it’s not really worth the effort of seeking it out. Get hold of some of Hammer’s early 60s black-and-white horror thrillers instead to see how this type of movie should be done.

These Are the Damned (1963)

You don’t really expect to find Joseph Losey directing a movie for Hammer Studios, and you don’t expect Losey to be doing a science fiction movie either. But Losey was surprisingly versatile (as evidenced by his wonderfully camp spy spoof Modesty Blaise) and These Are the Damned (also released as The Damned) is an interesting and challenging science fiction film.

Simon (Macdonald Carey) is an American tourist in Britain who tries to pick up a young English girl. Joan (the girl) is acting as bait for a motorcycle gang led by her brother King (Oliver Reed) and the hapless Simon gets beaten up and robbed for his trouble. Joan isn’t happy with her life and finds herself drawn to Simon. She seeks him out on his boat, and makes a kind of apology. King and the gang show up again and King orders her to come with him. She makes a split-second decision and instead joins Simon on his boat. With King and his gang after them they hide out in the remote house of an eccentric female artist, and when pursued they find themselves inside a secret military establishment. And there they meet The Children.

The Children are more or less kept prisoner. There is something decidedly odd about them. For one thing, their body temperatures are abnormally low, very very low indeed. In time we discover they were created as the result of an accident, and are being raised in secret and in captivity by the military as the future of humanity after a nuclear war. They are adapted to extreme levels of radiation. Simon, Joan and King now find themselves as unlikely allies recruited by The Children as a possible means of escape.

The movie works by presenting us with a series of apparent oppositions and parallels. King is an outsider, the leader of a gang of hoodlums. But the leader of the secret military establishment, a senior civil servant and an ultra-respectable pillar of the establishment, has his own gang - the soldiers who follow his orders as blindly as King’s thugs follow his, but these soldiers and civil servants are in effect hoodlums on a global scale, making their plans for nuclear war. Both have rejected life and chosen death. King has never had a girlfriend, and is determined to stop his sister from having a boyfriend. He is angry and frightened. The leader of the project has also rejected life in the form of the woman artist with whom he has obviously had some kind of romantic attachment, and he has chosen death. He is as fearful as King, and in both cases this fear causes them to turn away from life and embrace death.

The crimes of King and his gang are violent, but small-scale. They pale into insignificance compared to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by the government an the military. The cruelty of the treatment of The Children is something that King, for all his faults, would never stoop to. If we can countenance such acts, and if people can carry out such acts in the name of duty, then perhaps we as a society have also rejected life.

It all sounds very serious, and it is in fact a rather bleak film. It makes its political points with a certain subtlety though (especially compared to heavy-handed efforts such as On the Beach) and there’s a human story there to keep our interest.

Macdonald Carey is adequate, Oliver Reed is, well he’s Oliver Reed so you know what to expect. Shirley Anne Field is impressive as Joan. The child actors portraying The Children manage to be both moving and strangely chilling.

As so often with Hammer films the real star is production designer Bernard Robinson, ably assisted by some superb black-and-white cinematography by Arthur Grant. The look of the movie is superb. The secret military establishment is a textbook example of capturing the right atmosphere without spending a lot of money on elaborate sets. The place has a look that is both creepily sterile and very modernist, with The Children’s accommodation being the bureaucratic mind’s idea of a cheery home for captive children. A kind of combination of modern prison and play centre.

This is the kind of intelligent science fiction movie that Hammer were very god at doing in the 50s and 60s and for which they don’t really get sufficient credit. Losey makes his points without preaching, and the result is a movie that is emotionally effective without being excessively manipulative. An interesting little movie, well worth seeing.

Lustful Addiction (1969)

Writer-director Nick Millard (often credited as Nick Phillips) was one of the more interesting sexploitation film-makers of the 60s and early 70s. At a time when the trend was either towards “roughies” featuring sexual violence or sex comedies, Millard pursued his own obsessive path, turning out some amazingly dark but intriguing movies. Obsession was what interested him, whether it be sexual obsession or (in this case) drugs. Lustful Addiction is really more a drugsploitation movie than a sexploitation movie.

Jean is a junkie, in the last stages of a downward spiral. After having sex with her dealer in exchange for heroin she decides to take a walk. And she meets Tad. Tad is a nice boy, the sort of man she might have been able to find happiness with, if she wasn’t already married to heroin. There’s to be no happy ending for Jean, or for Tad either.

Filmed in black-and-white without synchronised sound, this movie captures an atmosphere of sordidness, desolation and desperation that is almost overwhelming. The voice-over narration is reminiscent of Beat poetry and should be hopelessly pretentious and cringe-inducing, but strangely enough it works. It also features one of the strangest strip-tease routines you’ll ever see. Rather like watching a woman having convulsions while removing her clothing. It’s this sort of weirdness that makes these 60s/70s sexploitation movies so intriguing. They really don’t make movies like this any more.

There are graphic scenes of junkies injecting drugs and the despair and the willful urge to self-destruction that characterises addiction are depicted with unflinching honesty. Millard very successfully treads the fine line between either demonising the addict or depicting addicts as helpless victims. It’s clear that Jean has been offered a way out, an escape from the life that is destroying her, but she is unwilling to take the steps needed to save herself.

There’s a reasonable amount of sex and nudity but this movie must have been uncomfortable viewing for grindhouse audiences seeking nothing more than a cheap thrill. It’s a movie that is more likely to arouse feelings of utter emptiness and existential angst than to arouse sexual lust! The zoo scenes of the monkeys are another example of Millard’s ability to take elements that could so easily come across as clumsy and obvious clichés and make them genuinely disturbing.

It’s not as good as his slightly later and absolutely superb Pleasures of a Woman but it’s still a heady and surprisingly successful blending of art and sexploitation. This is 70s hedonism at its most futile and shallow, all the glamour stripped away. It’s the hangover after the party.

The stark black-and-white cinematography provides the appropriate visual ambience, and although Millard’s direction is sometimes quirky it’s undeniably effective. And he gets surprisingly compelling performances from his cast of unknowns.

It’s released by Seduction Cinema as part of their Retro-Seduction line, a selection of sexploitation movies from the 60s and 70s paired with modern remakes. The modern remakes are generally of little interest, but in this case writer-director Misty Mundae really has tried to capture the same spirit of nihilistic despair and utter hopelessness. She hasn’t quite succeeded, but she deserves credit for respecting the original enough to at least make the attempt (and given that she was only 23 at the time it’s not that bad an attempt). And both Mundae and Ruby LaRocca do some actual acting.

In any case Seduction Cinema’s Retro-Seduction line is one I highly recommend. They’ve picked some exceptionally interesting movies, the transfers are extremely good, and there are usually some worthwhile extras.

The Escapees (1981)

In some ways Jean Rollin’s 1981 film The Escapees (Les paumées du petit matin) would seem to be a radical departure for him. There are no vampires and no supernatural elements, nor are there any of the science fictional elements that characterised his 1980s zombie movies. But in fact the lack of vampires makes no real difference at all. This is still a Rollin film, it has the feel of a Rollin film and it displays exactly the same preoccupations as his vampire movies.

The making of the movie was beset with considerable difficulties as his distributors forced Rollin to accept an outside screenwriter (Jacques Ralf ) who rewrote the director’s original script. Unfortunately this new script was more or less unfilmable so Rollin ended up shooting the movie mostly from his own original script but incorporating the better elements of Ralf’s contribution. Rollin wasn’t entirely happy with the result, nor were the distributors, and the movie pretty much disappeared without trace.

Some years later a cable TV channel bought a package deal of the director’s movies and on a whim he threw in The Escapees as well. When people finally got to see the movie their reaction was surprisingly favourable and as a result Rollin rediscovered his own movie and decided it wasn’t so bad after all. In fact considering its troubled production history (and other problems caused by the very limited budget on which it was made) it’s a surprisingly successful effort.

Two girls are confined to a lunatic asylum. Marie has cut off herself off from the real world entirely and is virtually catatonic. Michelle is the opposite - she confronts the world much too aggressively. Locked in her room and confined in a straightjacket she spots Marie through her window, sitting in her rocking chair in the garden and endlessly rocking back and forth. She tries to attract her attention, and (against the odds) she succeeds in doing so, for one brief moment breaking through the wall Marie has built around herself. Marie comes up to her room and releases her from the straitjacket. Michelle announces her intention of escaping from the hospital, and Marie insists on coming along as well. Michelle is appalled that she’s going to have this strange disconnected girl tagging along after her but she has little choice.

After leaving the asylum the girls have a series of encounters with other groups of outsiders. As Rollin explains in the accompanying interview, the girls have no world of their own, no place in which they belong (when asked where she intends to go the only answer Michelle can offer is that she wants to go elsewhere, to any elsewhere at all), and they now come into contact with three other very different worlds, all populated by misfits of one sort or another. They meet a travelling carnival on the road, and befriend a likeable thief named Sophie. The star attractions of the carnival are its two beautiful black exotic dancers, who are also prepared to offer private entertainments to male patrons for an additional fee. Later they find themselves in the seedy but fascinating world of Madame Louise’s cabaret. Lastly they discover the world of the bored and decadent rich who are slumming it in the cabaret, and Marie find herself the target of an attempted seduction by a lesbian couple, while Michelle must fend off the advances of the lesbians’ rather smooth male friend. The inability of both Marie and Michelle to cope with this situation triggers off the rather unexpectedly violent ending.

All these worlds encountered by the girls are somehow unreal. They’re not the real world, or perhaps the real world actually is just as strange and perhaps none of us know if the world we inhabit is real. Rollin has always been indebted to the surrealists and that influence works particularly well in this case, especially given the fact that we’re seeing events through the eyes of two girls who were after all inmates of an asylum for the incurably mentally ill. They don’t look at the world in a conventional way, but who is to say if their view of the world is more or less valid than anyone else’s. This is a Rollin movie, so reality is not exactly a fixture that can be taken for granted.

This movie also illustrates more clearly and more effectively than any of his other films the influence on Rollin of his favourite painter, Camille Clovis Trouille, especially in the carnival and cabaret scenes.

As in so many of his movies we once again have the twinned female protagonists, and as always there is the question whether they are doubles or refections of one another, or possibly aspects of a single woman, or of all women. As the girls are mad this twinning becomes more interesting. Both are in a sense incomplete. Marie is terrified of sex, Michelle is terrified of showing her feelings. Marie is excessively introverted, Michelle is the opposite. By being together they become complete. There’s no suggestion of any kind of lesbian attraction between the girls - it’s more like a sisterly bond of a particularly intense kind, so intense that they are almost one person, united against the world.

The performances of Laurence Dubas as Michelle and Christiane Coppé as Marie are exceptionally effective. Rollin favourite Brigitte Lahaie has a relatively minor role as one of the wealthy lesbians, and as usual in Rollin’s movies she’s very good, and of course looks stunning. The Escapees has a very similar feel to Rollin’s very unconventional zombie movie Night of the Hunted, made a year earlier. Both movies have a desolate feel to them, with stark modern settings replacing the gothic settings of his earlier films but with the result being a kind of urban industrial gothic atmosphere. There’s also a wonderful and strangely moving scene in a deserted ice rink (much to his delight Rollin discovered that Christiane Coppé was a champion figure skater and decided to make use of her talent). By the standards of the average Rollin film there’s very little sex and nudity, in fact there’s none at all until very late in the picture. This works rather well, since it’s clear that both girls have some major issues in this area so that when they’re finally confronted by a sexual situation it makes the dramatic ending more effective and more convincing. As in Night of the Hunted the sex scenes are used sparingly but they’re crucially important.

The Escapees is not a perfect film, but it’s still one of Rollin’s most interesting efforts. If you’re a fan of his work I highly recommend this one, although if you’re not familiar with his movies it’s probably not the best place to start. The Redemption DVD looks pretty good considering that this was very nearly a lost film, and it includes a very worthwhile interview with the director.

Satan in High Heels (1962)

Satan in High Heels is another weird gem from the vaults of Something Weird Video. This one isn’t really sexploitation, it’s more like a cross between sexploitation and those “racy” Hollywood shockers of the late 50s and early 60s, movies like Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers, with perhaps even a hint of film noir, but done on an ultra-low budget and with a little bit of extra added sleaze.

Stacey Kane (played by Meg Myles) is a dancer in a burlesque show on an amusement pier. Which is bad enough, but getting her boss to part with any of the money she makes for him makes it just that little bit more annoying. When an old boyfriend shows up and announces he’s kicked his heroin habit and sold his first story so now they can be together at last, she sees her chance. Separating the boyfriend from his $900 isn’t difficult. It’s not a fortune, but it’s enough to get her on a plane to somewhere else, anywhere else, and the rich sleazy businessman she meets on the plane provides her with another opportunity - the possibility of a job as a singer in a club. And she only had to sleep with him once in order to get an introduction to the club’s manager, Pepe.

She gets the job, and she gets to meet the club’s owner, Arnold Kenyon. Kenyon maintains a facade of married respectability but he always likes to have at least once attractive young girlfriend. And the spectacularly endowed Stacey will suit him nicely. He finds it east enough to pay off his previous lady friend, but Stacey meanwhile is having to deal with a number of complications. She’s staying at Pepe’s place, but the lesbian Pepe would clearly like to have Stacey in her bed as well as in her apartment. And then there’s Kenyon’s cute but hopelessly irresponsible son - Stacey is keen to sleep with him but his dad is just as keen to sleep with her, and neither of them can afford to upset Dad. She also has to cope with the hostility of the club’s reigning star, Sabrina (whose hostility is hardly surprising given that Stacey makes no secret of her intention to replace her as the club’s star attraction). Stacey’s determination to have stardom, money and the cute boy is going to involve her in some fairly precarious balancing acts.
This movie’s great strength is its fascinating cast. Meg Myles is a competent actress and makes Stacey something more than just a conniving bitch, although she’s certainly that as well. Sabrina, whose 41-inch bust almost equals Stacey’s endowments, plays herself and she truly is a bizarre but amusing creation. Del Tenney, later to achieve a kind of fame as the director of the schlock classic The Horror of Party Beach, plays the club’s gay piano player who takes an instant dislike to Stacey. And Grayson Hall )from Dark Shadows) gives a scene-stealing performance as the very butch Pepe.

There’s no sex or nudity (apart from a split-second glimpse of nudity) but the whole movie is pervaded by an ambience of sexual deviance. It’s done very effectively and without spelling anything out. Del Tenney doesn’t overdo the queeniness. Stacey’s taste for leather gear (a taste clearly shared by Pepe) and the riding crop she employs as a stage prop both contribute to the general atmosphere of kinkiness.

It’s a very competently made film, with none of the slightly amateurish feel you get in some sexploitation movies of this period. It’s an odd mix of seriousness and camp. This is sexploitation noir, wallowing in the seedy half-world where show business and crime co-exist and corruption is the norm. There’s no misogyny in this movie - everyone is equally corrupt and equally amoral, male or female, gay or straight. They’ll all stab you in the back to further their careers, or to protect their reputations. It’s delightfully cynical and bitter.
This is not advertised as one of Something Weird’s double-feature DVDs but in fact it does include a second feature-length movie, The Wild and the Naked, as well as a couple of short films and the usual assortment of trailers. The second feature displays a fair amount of print damage which may be why Something Weird didn’t promote this one as an actual double feature. Satan in High Heels though looks splendid, and is a classic piece of early 60s sin and sleaze.