Ms Stiletto (1969)

You take a basic adventure tale set in the 17th century, with a noble family despoiled of its lands and brutally murdered by a powerful neighbour, a cruel and rapacious baron. You have the sole survivor of the murdered family, a master swordsman, devote his life to gaining revenge and regaining the family lands. But you make this sole survivor a beautiful young woman who happens to be a master swordswoman, and you add lots of sex and nudity. You can’t really lose with a formula like that, can you? And in fact Ms Stiletto really is a good deal of fun.

The original title of this 1969 Italian-German co-production was Isabella, duchessa dei diavoli, literally Isabella, Duchess of the Devils. As a child Isabella Frissac witnesses the murder of her family by the wicked Baron von Nutter. She is saved by a faithful servant, grows up among gypsies, and learns to use a sword as well as any man. She never forgets that her sacred duty is to destroy the wicked baron.

She insinuates her way into the chateau (the chateau that used to belong to her own family) in the guise of a prostitute. She enlists the aid of the baron’s dissipated and jealous younger brother. There are various double-crosses, lots of sword fights, some romance, lots of opportunities for our heroine to take her clothes off, the obligatory dungeon torture scene, the obligatory lesbian sex scene when our heroine gets seduced by one of the baron’s ladies, and there’s even a topless sword-fighting scene. More or less everything you could ask for in a eurosleaze movie of this era.

Plus there are really nice 17th century costumes, and a very gothic chateau (with the obligatory secret passage-ways of course).

Brigitte Skay makes a gorgeous heroine as Isabella, she handles a sword fairly convincingly, and she looks very fetching in 17th century male attire (although she also gets to wear some pretty nice dresses as well and a rather sexy harem girl outfit which is probably totally out of period but hey she looks good in it). She’s not the world’s greatest actress but her performance is lively and works well enough. Mimmo Palmara makes a suitably wicked and depraved wicked baron.

There’s plenty of action, some reasonably executed stunts, and no-one is silly enough to allow logic to slow down the plot. And there’s lots of nudity. It was apparently based on one of those 1960s Italian erotic/action comic books (or fumetti) and the movie captures the comic-book feel quite well. Director Bruno Corbucci (brother of the more famous Sergio) does a very competent job.

This is a remarkably obscure movie that I hadn’t even heard of until very recently, and it’s yet another interesting European cult movie that is fairly difficult to track down.

It’s silly and fun in a campy tongue-in-cheek way, it’s fast-paced and it looks good. Enjoyable undemanding entertainment.

Captive Wild Woman (1943)

I’ve always said that you can’t go wrong with a movie that features a guy in a gorilla suit. And if the movie also features John Carradine as a mad scientist, you really should have a sure-fire winner on your hands. Universal’s 1943 picture Captive Wild Woman is proof that in sufficiently incompetent hands even such guaranteed ingredients for success can let you down. 

Fred Mason (Milburn Stone) works for a circus, capturing wild animals and training them. He has just returned from Africa with no less than twenty lions and tigers, plus an added bonus, the most fearsome jungle creature of all, a gorilla. Mason dreams of not merely training the animals, but actually doing a major circus act featuring both lions and tigers (which as everybody knows are natural enemies in their jungle home). His girlfriend Beth is worried about her sister, and has had her placed in an exclusive sanatorium run by the famous specialist Dr Sigmund Walters.

Dr Walter (John Carradine) believes that glands are not merely the answer to all human illness but also the key to the creation of a super race. Through Beth he gets to meet the circus people, and to se the animals being trained. He is very excited by Cheela, the female gorilla. She could prove very useful to him in his experiments. 

 Being a mad scientist he immediately hits on the idea of creating a gorilla/woman hybrid. It turns out that Beth’s sister Dorothy was suffering from an excess of sex hormones, so if he can inject her surplus hormones into the gorilla he should end up with an ape-woman. He’ll need a human cerebellum though, but fortunately he has an annoying female assistant who is starting to cause trouble (some nonsense about medical ethics) so has no problem getting his hands on the requited human brain. The result is just what he had hoped for - Cheela has now taken on the form of a human woman. A beautiful, strangely exotic woman. He christens her Paula Dupree. 

And being a mad scientist, he has hypnotic powers over her. It turns out that Paula has a strange effect on lions and tigers. This is presumably because they’ve seen Tarzan movies and know that gorillas are the king (or in this case queen) of the jungle. Fred decides that Paula could be useful to him in his animal act, exercising a calming effect on the big cats. This works quite well, but unfortunately Paula isn’t quite human. She has strange animal passions and lusts. She has a particularly strong lust for Fred, but Fred has this annoying girlfriend. 

The expected plot developments play our exactly as you would expect. The biggest problem the movie has is the very extended animal training sequences. They’re much too padded out, and modern audiences will find them distastefully cruel. They’re mostly there to disguise the extreme thinness of the plot.

This movie reminds me a lot of another movie in the same Universal boxed set, Night Monster. It’s a basically good idea very poorly developed. The idea of human/animal hybrids wasn’t original, but making the hybrid an attractive female with a confusing mixture of human and animal emotions and lusts was a promising variation on the basic idea. Sadly though the movie doesn’t focus enough on Paula herself, so we don’t really get to know her well enough to feel her tragedy. 

Part of the problem may have been that Paula was played by Universal’s new discovery, an exotic beauty named Acquanetta. The studio billed her as The Venezuelan Volcano although she was actually born in Wyoming. It’s difficult to judge her acting based on this film because she’s given so little to do and has no lines, but one suspects that the studio had little confidence in her ability to do anything more than look exotic and glamorous. 

John Carradine does his best to rescue the movie, giving one of his best insane scientist performances, and being even more crazed and monomaniacal than usual. The other performances are fairly forgettable. Edward Dmytryk directed, but the low budget and the use of stock footage for many of the animal sequences mean he has few opportunities to show any real flair. 

At only 61 minutes the movie still feels much too long, but at the same time the important scenes involving Paula really needed more time. It’s a moderately entertaining time-killer that could almost succeed as a silly fun camp classic if it were not for the unpleasantness of the animal scenes. 

The DVD transfer is very good, but I’m really starting to wonder if the effort put into this Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive boxed set was worthwhile. So far I’ve seen two of the five movies, and they’ve both been duds.

Octaman (1971)

Monster of the deep movies can be fun, but it’s a sub-genre that has produced more than its fair share of spectacularly bad movies. Some of the really bad ones are the most fun, but for every inspired camp masterpiece like The Horror of Party Beach there’s an equally uninspired clunker.

I have a nomination for the worst ever monster of the deep movie. Octaman, unleashed on an unsuspecting world in 1971. If fact I'm going to nominate it for an all-round achievement award. It has a dopey title, a silly premise, lousy special effects, poor cinematography, leaden pacing, bad acting, embarrassing dialogue, uninspired direction and a lame script.

Plus it commits the one unforgivable sin. If you have a really crappy monster you really should try to avoid showing the monster too often, especially early in the film. Especially in broad daylight. Especially in close-up. But that's what Octaman does.

It also has no suspense since we know what the monster is, what it looks like, and what created it within the first five minutes.

As a special bonus it includes lots of clumsy speechifying about ecology, and about philosophy, life, the universe and everything. All the acting is terrible, even from Pier Angeli (who had been a real actress at one time). And it has the most beloved of horror movie clichés - the fairly small party is constantly splitting up into smaller groups to make it easier for the monster to pick them off.

The plot, if anyone cares, involves a team of ecological scientists who discover a giant half man/half squid created by radiation. They want to capture it for study, but it wants to capture Pier Angeli, although possibly not for study.

This is one of only a handful of movies that Harry Essex made as a director, although he wrote a considerable number of screenplays, and indeed wrote the script for this effort as well. There’s nothing here to suggest that he had any great talent in either area.

This 1971 Mexican/US co-production is almost silly enough to be entertaining. If you’re in the right mood, you might actually manage to enjoy this one. But you really will have to be in the right mood. I love guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster movies as much as anyone, but this is not exactly a classic of its type.

It’s included on a Region 4 DVD double-feature which is still worth buying because the other movie, First Spaceship on Venus (an East German-Polish science fiction film), is truly excellent.

The Plumber (1979)

The Plumber is one of Peter Weir’s least-known movies. It was made for Australian TV in 1979, for a very low budget even by the standards of 1970s Australian movies, but it actually shows Weir at his best.

It was a return to the kind of black comedy combined with horror with which he’d had considerable success early in his career.

Jill (Judy Morris) lives with her husband in on-campus accommodation at Adelaide University. He’s a moderately successful academic who’s come up with a theory (which no other academic takes seriously) that nutritional problems in the New Guinea Highlands are caused by ritual cannibalism, a practice thought to have been stamped out many years before. Jill is also an anthropologist. The fact that they are anthropologists is actually quite crucial to the story. Their apartment is filled with artifacts from other cultures, in fact from every culture but their own. Even their erotica (for which they apparently have a bit of a taste) is non-European.

Jill is about to have a spectacular encounter with another culture, but this is another culture must closer to home. And unfortunately one she has never studied. She is about to to come face-to-face with a real live member of the working class. This will be an epic clash of cultures. Max is a plumber, and one day he knocks on the door to inform her that he’s come to fix the pipes. She wasn’t appear there was a problem with the pipes, but he assures her that those are the worst plumbing problems of all - the ones you don’t know about.

His initial estimate that the job will take three hours proves wildly inaccurate. Days later he is still there. Jill’s bathroom has been entirely demolished. The plumber shows no signs of leaving. And he’s displaying a slightly excessive interest in Jill. Jill’s husband is so busy chasing government grants for his latest research project and angling for a cushy UN job in Geneva that he takes little notice of Jill’s problems with the increasing annoyingly and intrusive plumber. And the bathroom continues to look like a bomb site.

Jill’s attempts to report the matter to the university authorities get her nowhere. When he finally becomes much too familiar with her she tells him to get out of her house. But she is convinced that he is watching. And when she tries to have a shower the bathroom suffers the plumbing disaster to end all plumbing disasters. And there’s Max the plumber on the doorstep, telling her she’s going to have to get used to him.

Judy Morris is always a reliable actress and she pays Jill with the right mix of arrogance, paranoia, and slowly increasing anger and fear. Ivor Kants is very good as the plumber - not quite threatening enough to give Jill a reason to call the police but threatening and intrusive enough to be highly unsettling. And it really isn’t at all clear what he’s actually after. He’s been in her house for weeks. If he wanted to rape her he’s had plenty of opportunities. That doesn’t seem to be what he wants. Maybe he’s hoping she’ll weaken and decide she wants him. It’s the doubt about his intentions that makes him so disturbing, and Kants plays the role to perfection. Candy Raymond contributes a good supporting performance as Jill’s slightly randy friend Meg.

Weir maintains the ambiguity of the situation with great skill. We keep waiting for something overt to happen, and Jill keeps waiting for the same thing, but nothing really happens. As a result the tension becomes almost unbearable.

The ending is delightfully twisted and in keeping with the overall black comedy feel.

There are all kinds of subtle commentaries on gender and class politics, and on cultural politics. But it’s done with extreme subtlety. You never feel you’re being lectured at.

This is a wickedly clever little movie, suspenseful and highly entertaining, intelligent and amusing. It was arguably Weir’s last great film. Highly recommended.

The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1967)

The Girl with the Hungry Eyes is part of a two-movie set of Harry Novak-produced sexploitation movies from the 60s released by Something Weird, the other being the excellent The Agony of Love. Both were written and directed by William Rotsler, who also directed the wonderful sexploitation/horror flick Mantis in Lace. Those three films on their own are enough to establish him as one of the most interesting directors working in this field during the 60s.

All three movies are stylish and visually interesting, and are a good example of the advantages for a low-budget film-maker of working in this genre - as long as you included some titillation and could keep within a very limited budget and a very tight shooting schedule most producers didn’t really mind what else you did. If you wanted to get arty, that was no problem.

The Girl with the Hungry Eyes is the story of two lesbians, Tigercat and Kitty. Well Tigercat is a lesbian. Kitty isn’t quite sure. She’s had some bad experiences with men, and Tigercat was there for her when that happened, but on the other hand some men seem rather nice and some are definitely rather hunky. Kitty’s confusion about her sexuality comes to a head when the two women pick up a man named Tom whose car has broken down. Kitty and Tom started getting acquainted and Tigercat throws them out of the car. She can’t stand being without Kitty though, so she goes back to retrieve her, to find Kitty mating with her Tom in a field. Tigercat does not take this well, and the whole episode ends in an act of extreme violence.

Tigercat and Kitty are back together, but Kitty keeps thinking back to the events of the past that have led her to her current situation. She’s been involved with some low-life guys, but they weren’t all bad. One of them, Brian, was pretty nice and they were very much in love until the relationship ended due to a misunderstanding.

Kitty’s doubts about her sexuality come to the fire again during a mildly psychedelic lesbian sex party (the highlight of which is an extended topless go-go dancing routine by sexploitation icon Pat Barrington). Tigercat comes to blows with a butch lesbian who’s been making movies on Kitty, and while Tigercat is pummeling her rival senseless Kitty flees. The rest of the movie is occupied by Tigercat’s frantic efforts to find her vanished girlfriend.

What really makes this movie work is the performance of Cathy Crowfoot as Tigercat. She might not be the world’s greatest actress but she has real presence, and she makes Tigercat an intriguingly ambiguous character. She’s not just a stereotypical predatory lesbian. Her violently obsessive jealousy and possessiveness are certainly scary, but her equally obsessive love for Kitty makes her a somewhat sympathetic character as well. And she makes a convincing lesbian. That’s another fascinating feature of the film. Lesbian sex was always one of the staples of sexploitation and of porn, but it’s almost always lesbian sex involving women who are very obviously straight. But this movie gives the impression of having been made by someone who had actually met real lesbians.

Like other exploitation movies of its era it’s also a great time capsule of 1960s attitudes. The sexual revolution was just beginning, and thriving gay and lesbian subcultures were developing. Experimentation with sexuality and gender roles was the order of the day.

It may sometimes seem that I take these sorts of movies more seriously than they deserve to be taken, but I’ve always felt that exploitation movies often reflect such social tensions in a much more direct and honest way than mainstream movies, and this movie is a good example. It deals with male fears of lesbians stealing their women, but it also deals with lesbians’ fears of heterosexual men stealing their girlfriends! Kitty’s ambivalence about her feelings towards both men and women and Tigercat’s struggles to assume a male role are both portrayed with surprisingly complexity. Kitty’s old boyfriend does deliver a little speech on the unnaturalness of the lesbian lifestyle, but this was almost certainly the traditional exploitation movie square-up - a moral message inserted to justify the movie’s treatment of controversial subject matter.

It’s also a terrific time capsule of 1960s style, with Tigercat’s amazingly sexy mid-60s Corvette being a highlight, and some great mid-60s LA streetscapes. And some terrific hairdos!

It certainly has its flaws. The 85 minute running time is much too long for the very slight plot. It could easily have been cut to around 60 minutes, and it would have benefited considerably. I guess I have a fairly high tolerance for these sorts of movies - I love the style and the campness.

The image quality varies quite a bit, some scenes being very grainy while others are very sharp. This is probably more to do with the source material than anything else. Being a low-budget film it may well have been shot on a variety of film stocks including short ends (unused leftovers from used cans of film). The picture quality is still quite acceptable and it's another highly entertaining double feature from Something Weird.

Foxy Brown (1974)

You can’t really go wrong with a blaxploitation flick directed by Jack Hill and starring Pam Grier. While Foxy Brown isn’t quite as good as their first blaxploitation collaboration, Coffy, it’s still enormous fun.

Pam Grier is Foxy Brown, a smart woman with plenty of attitude and confidence but some real problems. Her biggest problem is her loser of a brother. It’s not just that he’s an habitual criminal, he’s also the world’s most unsuccessful criminal. Foxy has to get him out of one jam after another.

Her other problem is her boyfriend. He’s a nice guy and they’re totally in love, but he’s also an undercover federal narcotics cop with a price on his head. At the moment the bad guys think he’s dead, and he’s had plastic surgery to change his appearance. It was a good plan, and it might have worked except for Foxy’s low-life brother. He has no morals, but he has a naturally suspicious mind, and he notices that Foxy’s new boyfriend Michael reminds him vaguely of the old undercover cop one. And he senses that this insight could be worth some money to him.

Pretty soon Foxy finds herself going up against the big drug boss, a beautiful but exceptionally ruthless white woman. This crime ring also runs a stable of high-class call-girls, but their job is not to take money for the organisation but to provide sexual favours to powerful judges, law-makers, politicians, cops, etc. This is the reason the police have found it so difficult to get convictions against members of this organisation. Foxy decides to apply for a job as a call-girl. Given her glamour and her spectacular figure she has no problems getting in. She and another girl are sent out on an assignment to keep a judge happy. He likes black girls, and being provided with two beautiful black girls should certainly keep him onside. The other hooker, Claudia, turns out to be less than happy with her employees and she’s also a rather feisty lady so she’s happy to help Foxy bring down the evil crime queen.

There’s the usual mix of action with a touch of camp that you expect from Jack Hill. The violence isn’t graphic, but it’s done with style. There’s some nudity, but not much. Pam Grier takes her clothes off less often than usual. There’s outrageous 1970s interior design and fashions, and lots of afros.

Pam Grier was so good in these types of movies because she was more than just a hot body combined with kickass attitude. She has a basic likeability so you always want to see her get the better of the bad guys.

The plot is fairly silly, but in an exploitation movie that’s more likely to be an advantage than otherwise. The main thing is it’s an adrenaline-charged 90 minutes of entertainment with style, and it never makes the mistake of taking itself seriously.

If you’re new to blaxploitation or if you’re not familiar with the fabulous Pam Grier then Coffy is probably a better place to start, but Foxy Brown is fun in its own right. It’s also great to see a movie in which a black woman requires no help from the men in her life in order to sort out her problems, and their problems as well. And she does this with a mix of kickass attitude, intelligence and guts.

The Region 2 DVD is what you expect from MGM. The movie looks good, but there’s a shameful lack of extras. But if you shop around you can pick this one up very cheaply indeed.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

If George Roy Hill had asked anybody in 1972 whether it was a good idea to try to film Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five their advice would probably have been - don’t even think about it. Maybe people did give him that advice. In any case Hill went ahead and filmed it anyway, and the result is one of the most interesting American movies of the 70s.

It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and Vonnegut loved it, but it died at the American box-office. It’s since been more or less forgotten, and most people who’ve heard of it assume it was a turkey. It’s hard to imagine the director of such staggeringly mainstream movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting being able to successfully film an unfilmable Kurt Vonnegut book, but that’s exactly what he did.

Billy Pilgrim, the hero of the story, has come unstuck in time. His life has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. He moves randomly between past, present and future although in fact his life is simply a collection of moments and past, present and future have little meaning. He lives some of these moments over and over again, and not all of them occur on Earth. A significant part of his life takes place on the planet Tralfamadore.

Billy was training to be an optometrist when the Second World War intervened. He is taken prisoner by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and as a prisoner-of-war he is present in the city of Dresden when it is fire-bombed by the Allies. This was one of the most horrific episodes of the war, causing a greater loss of life than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and being all the more horrifying since Dresden was not a military target. Vonnegut himself was in fact a prisoner-of-war in Dresden when it was bombed, and this was in some ways the central event in his life.

Billy’s experiences in the war are crucial but the movie, like Billy’s life, cuts back and forth to other events both before and after the war. Billy’s postwar life as a respectable and rather dull optometrist, a pillar of the community and president of the local Lions’ Club, is enlivened by other strange events. He survives a disastrous plane crash, which of course he knows is going to happen because it’s happened to him before. He has a wife and son on Earth, but he has a kind of second family on Tralfamadore. He was kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians, but they just want to observe and study him. They’re particularly fascinated by the mating habits of other species so they provide him with a potential mate, a sexy Hollywood starlet named Montana Wildhack. She’s about as big a contrast as one could imagine with Billy’s wife on Earth, but he loves them both in his own way. He accepts Montana Wildhack as part of his destiny, just as he accepts everything else that happens to him.

The most pleasing thing about the film is that Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller assume their audience will not be panicked by the non-linear narrative and will work out what’s going on. The cuts between various episodes in Billy’s life are not explained. They just happen. For a mainstream Hollywood movie in 1972 that’s a fairly bold approach. The movie’s commercial failure suggests that perhaps Hill was a little too bold, but artistically it’s the right approach.

The movie successfully preserves Vonnegut’s sense of the absurdity of life. It also captures his black comedy, which is done rather subtly in the movie which again proves to the right approach - the juxtaposition of the mundane and the horrific provides the black comedy, and there is no need for the actors to try to play any of the scenes in an overtly comic way. They play it straight, and the results are funnier and more disturbing as a result.

Michael Sacks, an actor with a remarkably short career, is superb as Billy Pilgrim - innocent but accepting. Valerie Perrine attracted most of the publicity at the time because of her frequent disrobing in the movie. Her role as Montana Wildhack is really fairly minor. Her performance can best be described as adequate, but she has the right mix of innocence and sexiness for the part.

The scenes of the bombing of Dresden are exceptionally well done. Hill resists the temptation to sentimentalise the events or to consciously manipulate the audience’s responses. This matter-of-fact treatment is much more effective, and the events in themselves are sufficiently harrowing not to require editorialising.

While the movie omits parts of the novel it does this mainly to keep the running time within acceptable limits (it runs for 104 minutes). Most directors today would have succumbed to the temptation to try to include too much. There is no attempt to dumb down the story.

This is an adventurous, complex and intelligent movie, a relic of a time when major Hollywood studios were still prepared to take risks and to accept the reality that on occasions those risks would not pay off at the box office. I caught it on Australian television (on the ABC so it was uncut and commercial-free) but it’s available on DVD. It’s well worth seeking out.