Prehistoric Women (1967)

OK, let’s be honest. Nobody is going to argue that Prehistoric Women is even remotely a good film. This is not Citizen Kane. It’s not even the Citizen Kane of cheesy jungle adventure movies. But it is great fun, and it is very very camp.

A big-game hunter leading a safari through darkest Africa stumbles upon a lost world. This is a world ruled by dark-haired women. There are also a great many blonde women but they’re kept in a state of cruel slavery. At first there appear to be no men at all, but later we find that the men are kept in a state of even greater subjection and humiliation, chained together and forced to work in a huge cavern.

The evil queen of the dark-haired women is Kari (Martine Beswick). David (the big-game hunter) first encounter one of the blonde women (Saria, played by Edina Ronay) making an escape attempt. Both are taken to Kari. Kari is being entertained by the dancing of her blonde slave girls. This is not the only function the blonde women serve; from time to time one is chosen as the bride of the demonic rhinoceros god thing that the tribe worships.

The white rhinoceros had once been plentiful in these lands, but was hunted to extinction. Now there is only a statue of the rhinoceros, but there is a legend that the land will be freed from bondage when the white rhinoceros returns.

The unfortunate brides of this god are never seen again after their wedding days. There is something even worse in store for poor David. It seems that he is destined for a fate that strikes fear into the hearts of all men - to be forced to satisfy the insatiable lusts of the beautiful evil queen. A terrifying prospect indeed. Naturally David refuses indignantly to serve as Kari’s sex toy, and he is cast into the cavern with the other men. At least there he only has to endure back-breaking labour and brutal torture, which is obviously preferable to being forced to share the bed of a gorgeous sex-crazed queen.

Young David bears his fate stoically since he has fallen in love with the beautiful blonde Saria. Of course you know there’s going to a rebellion and the plot unfolds in the expected way.

This movie was also released under the title Slave Girls but despite the luridness of the title it’s all very tame. There’s no nudity at all. There’s not a huge amount of violence either although there is a slightly gruesome scene in which Kari despatches a challenger to her power.

Michael Carreras has a fairly low reputation among Hammer’s directors but this is not a movie you’re going to see for anything other than its camp appeal. Which it has in abundance. In fact it may go close to being Hammer’s campest movie ever, which is saying quite a lot.

These women may not have anything other than the most primitive stone age technology, but clearly they have at least invented hairspray and cosmetics. They all sport elaborate 1960s hairstyles. Just because she’s living in a jungle doesn’t mean a girl can’t be well-groomed. This is the sort of thing that makes me love movies like this.

It also has that wonderful shot-in-a-studio look to it. The increasing trend towards location shooting has ruined movies like this - they always work best when they look as artificial as possible and this one looks very artificial indeed.

It goes without saying that a great deal depends on the quality of the beautiful evil queen. Is she beautiful enough? Evil enough? Sexy enough? In fact Martine Beswick scores very highly on all counts. And she throws herself into her role with enormous enthusiasm, chewing the scenery with great abandon.

Apart from the high camp delights the movie also has the kind of deliciously kinky implied naughtiness that movies used to have back in the days when very little could be shown but a good deal could be suggested.

This may be one of Hammer’s silliest movies but it delivers plenty of entertainment. If you have a taste for 60s camp then it’s an absolute must-see.

Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988)

Most film-makers who take the works of the Marquis de Sade as their starting point elect not to attempt a straight adaptation of any of his books but rather to do films that try to capture some of the feel or some of the philosophy of de Sade. Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (Akutoku no sakae) falls into this category.

By 1988 Nikkatsu had abandoned the roman porno movies that had kept the studio afloat for the previous decade-and-a-half. As a result the sexual content in this movie is much more tame than would have been the case a few years earlier. The best of the roman porno films were a bold combination of sex, art and experimentation and in this case director Akio Jissoji is attempting something similar but with more artiness and less sex.

In the years before the Second Wold War a Japanese nobleman becomes obsessed with de Sade. He founds a theatre company that he uses as a means of exploring his own interpretations of the ideas of the Divine Marquis as well as his personal obsessions with sex, power, jealousy and cruelty. He recruits his actors exclusively from the criminal classes. They are mostly thieves and whores. Most of them share his decadent tastes so their time is devoted as much to games of sexual power as to the theatre itself.

Or rather the games and the plays overlap. The movie works on three separate levels of reality, or unreality - the performances of the plays, the rehearsals of the plays, and the offstage interactions between the players. All three layers intersect and reality and art become impossible to disentangle.

Sexual betrayals are played out on stage and behind the scenes. The nobleman manipulates his lover into a sexual liaison with one of his actors (who is also a thief), while at the same time they are playing out a similar situation on stage. The nobleman has always believed he could remain in control, pulling the strings and forcing everyone around him to dance to his tune, but he discovers he is as vulnerable to feelings of jealousy as those whose lives he manipulates.

The plot isn’t easy to follow in detail but this turns out not not be a disadvantage. It might even have been a deliberate ploy on the part of the director. With art and reality bleeding into each other the protagonists themselves are not always sure what part they are playing, or where the dividing line is between onstage and offstage.

If this all sounds very arty and pretentious, it is. But Akio Jissoji’s visual imagination makes it a lot more entertaining than you might expect and the lines between the theatre and real life are blurred so successfully that you can’t help but be fascinated.

The movie is helped by some very effective acting performances. One of the strengths of Nikkatsu’s roman porno films had been the luscious period detail. They may have been relatively low-budget productions but Nikkatsu was still a major studio with the resources to provide lavish sets and costumes. That’s not so much in evidence in this movie but perhaps that was intentional, an attempt to give it more of a feeling of unreality.


As with virtually all Japanese exploitation movies there’s a political subtext with the Sade-obsessed nobleman being drawn into political conspiracies.

This being a Mondo Macabro release you expect the transfer to be superb, and it is. There are some reasonable extras, including an unfortunately all-too-brief interview with Jasper Sharp. Sharp probably knows as much about Japanese erotic cinema as anyone outside of Japan and I’d have liked to hear a bit more from him.

Personally I found this movie to be slightly less impressive than some of Nikkatsu’s earlier roman porno movies but it’s still an intriguing and offbeat movie, another fascinating slice of movie weirdness from Mondo Macabro.

Shivers (1975)

Shivers (or to give it its original US title They Came from Within) was David Cronenberg’s first real feature film. Many of the obsessions that run through his work can be seen in this movie so it has perhaps some mild historical interest for that reason. Unfortunately it’s an unbelievably bad movie so if you’re not a Cronenberg completist avoid this one.

I happen to be a major fan of Cronenberg’s work. I consider both Crash and Dead Ringers to be masterpieces. Shivers is simply an embarrassment. In an interview on the DVD Cronenberg admits that his early films were heavily influenced by American underground movies. And Shivers has all the hallmarks of a underground movie - excruciatingly bad acting, inept editing, a flat visual style, a penchant for cheap shocks and a generally infantile tone.

The setting is an ultra-modern (by 1975 standards) apartment building on an island in the St Lawrence River in Montreal. The Starliner is more than just an apartment block though - it’s an entire town in miniature with its own shops, its own medical centre, etc. Were presumably supposed to see this as some kind of comment on the evils of modernist architecture and capitalism.

The doctors at the medical centre have been conducting experiments with parasites. On of the more deranged of these medicos has a theory that parasites can be created that will be over to take over the functions of damaged bodily organs thus making organ transplants unnecessary. Of course these parasites have escaped into the building, and they apparently have the effect of making people sex-crazed.

Cronenberg explains in his interview that he’s a firm believe in not implying anything - all the horror should be shown. Shivers is a classic example of the drawbacks of that approach. When your monsters look too silly to be scary your only option is to try to gross the audience out. The results are almost invariably, as in this case, tedious.

There are some good ideas here, but the film has no dramatic tension, no suspense, no surprises, no unexpected twists. Just a series of gross but silly images.

For a movie that concerns itself with parasites that supposedly drive their victims to sexual frenzy it’s also curiously un-erotic. Later in his career Cronenberg became very good indeed at depicting disturbing aberrant eroticism but sadly there’s no trace of that quality here. Even Lynn Lowry (who had demonstrated in Radley Metzger’s Score the previous year that she could be very disturbingly sexy indeed) fails to generate much excitement, even when she takes her clothes off in a desperate attempt to keep the audience interested.

Cronenberg even gets a dull performance out of Barbara Steele.

Cronenberg and Kim Newman, in discussing the movie, use the words transgressive and subversive a lot. They’re great words, but all too often in practice they end up being things that 19-year-old film students think will shock their parents. And Cronenberg was 32 when he made the movie, which is a bit embarrassing.

I haven’t changed my opinion on Cronenberg. I still think he’s one of the best and most interesting of modern horror directors. Everyone is entitled to one bad movie and its always good to get it over with early in your career. One does have to feel a bit sorry for the Canadian taxpayers who financed this clunker.

The Prism Region 2 DVD suffers from atrocious sound quality, but given that this was a low-budget movie that may be a problem with the source material rather than the DVD. And the dialogue is so awful that most of the time not being able to understand it is actually an advantage.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

The Spy Who Loved Me, released in 1977, was one of the most successful of the Roger Moore James Bond films.

A British nuclear ballistic missile submarine vanishes without trace. The natural inclination would be to blame the Russians, except that one of their nuclear submarines has disappeared as well. The Russian intelligence services have assigned their top agent Major Anya Amasova, Agent XXX (Barbara Bach) to the job, while the British have (inevitably) assigned James Bond.

One thing that is known is that someone has developed the technology to track nuclear submarines, and the technology is on sale to the highest bidder. Bond journeys to Egypt to find the mysterious someone who is making the sale, and to his considerable surprise finds himself ordered to work with a partner - the top Russian spy. As you might expect Bond is pretty soon trying to persuade her into bed but there’s a complication - events in Austria a short time earlier have given the Soviet agent a grudge against him and she informs him that as soon as their mission is completed she intends to kill him.

There is of course a diabolical criminal mastermind behind the mystery of the vanished submarines, and his fiendish plan isn’t quite what Bond expected it to be. It’s not the usual international blackmail plot - Karl Stromberg dreams of a new future for humanity under the sea, but first he must destroy existing civilisation.

There are plenty of impressive action sequences, there are cool gadgets, there are spectacular sets. And yet somehow it falls rather flat. The problem is the relationship between Bond and the beautiful Russian spy. It has lots of potential, but it just fizzles aimlessly. Given that she wants to kill Bond but that she also seems to want to sleep with him there should be some sparkling dialogue exchanges, but the dialogue is singularly lacking in zing.

Her homicidal intentions towards Bond should provide some real zest but the script totally fails to develop this angle. I have no idea if Barbara Bach can actually act but certainly in this film she is given nothing to work with and her performance is uninspired.

I’ve always found that the most satisfactory Bond movies are the ones where the Bond Girl (whoever she may be) gets to do more than just look decorative. Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, all make the female lead central to the plot and manage to be slightly more than just action films.

Curd Jürgens is a favourite actor of mine but he is also, although to a lesser extent, let down by the script. Again there is a lack of the kind of witty dialogue exchanges that would have added some interest. Which is a pity since witty dialogue is exactly the sort of thing at which Roger Moore excels.

On the plus side Caroline Munro is fun, as always.

Détente was in the air during the 70s so the plot was timely. The aquatic headquarters of Stromberg is pretty cool although perhaps a bit too reminiscent of Dr No’s headquarters.

For my money this one, although entertaining enough, doesn’t make into the top rank of Bond films.

Phantom from Space (1953)

Phantom from Space isn’t going to make anyone’s greatest movies of all time list but it’s an amusing and entertaining slice of 50s American sci-fi.

Radar stations pick up an unidentified craft traveling at very high altitude and at a fantastic speed. The craft is slowly losing altitude and airspeed, and finally disappears. Shortly afterwards unexplained interference starts to play havoc with radio reception. The Communications Commission has its radio trucks out trying to trace the source of the interference.

Then a series of odd murders takes place, involving a mysterious stranger, strangely dressed and wearing what looks like a diver’s helmet. Witnesses aren’t entirely certain but they have the impression there was no face inside the helmet!

The usual team of scientists that you expect in a 1953 sci-fi movie are called in to investigate, along with the police lieutenant in charge of the murder cases and an air force officer. They find the stranger’s clothing, and discover it’s made if an unknown material. And the helmet has an air tank attached, but the mixture of gases it contains would be instantly fatal to a human. Given all this plus the fact that the stranger appears to be invisible it takes an extraordinarily long time to come to the fairly obvious conclusion that they’re not dealing with someone from our planet.

Phantom from Space addresses what was a very popular them in 50s science fiction. It was assumed that of course we would eventually encounter aliens, but would they be friendly or hostile? More importantly, would we be able to tell the difference? Would we be able to communicate on any meaningful level? The movie doesn’t deal with the issue in great depth but it does deal with it reasonably convincingly.

It starts out appearing to be another alien invasion movie but it becomes more and more doubtful that the alien is really an invader. What I like about this movie is that it leaves things open. The mystery is never resolved, and the humans are left wondering if they could have handled things better. They’re also left with both a sense of wonder and of loss.

That’s not to suggest this is a forgotten classic. It’s very much a B-movie, but a B-movie that at least has a few ideas.

It’s also very talky, but that’s more or less par for the course for low-budget movies of this vintage. One of the great attractions of any fun science fiction movie is the technobabble, and this one has some truly classic examples. My favourite piece of pseudoscientific gobblydegook is when the chief scientist theorises that the alien may not be a carbon-based lifeform, but a silicon-based lifeform. Glass is made of silicon. And glass is transparent. Therefore it makes sense that the alien should be invisible!

The acting is standard B-movie acting, the special effects are ultra-cheap, there’s lots of stock footage of interceptors being scrambled to meet the mysterious alien spacecraft. That it does have though is really cool 1950 high-tech radio cars with gigantic radio aerials. They’re a lot of fun.

If you’re a fan of 50 American sci-fi this one is worth seeing. The public domain print I saw was pretty rough but I believe there’s been a quite decent DVD release.

Mundo Depravados (1967)

Mundo Depravados is an odd little sexploitation murder mystery from 1967, notable mostly for featuring strip-tease artiste Tempest Storm in one of her very few straight acting roles. Tempest Storm is of course one of the great ladies of American burlesque. I use the present tense deliberately - she’s not only still with us, but as recently as 2008 was apparently still performing. The plot concerns a sex killer stalking women who appear in a bizarre TV exercise program. This TV program is associated in some obscure way with a burlesque theatre, with the sleazy TV host being a business partner of Tango (Tempest Storm), the lady who not only runs the burlesque theatre but is also its star attraction. The murders are being investigated by two detectives who also provide the comic relief. They’re pretty incompetent as cops, but when they suddenly break into an impromptu comic routine you have to be grateful that they decided on law enforcement rather than show business as their primary careers. The murders are lacking in anything even remotely resembling graphic violence and in fact have a very cartoonish feel to them. The entire movie is of course not to be taken the slightest bit seriously. There are naturally (this being primarily a sexloitation flick) various ingenious excuses to show the young ladies without their clothes on. The nudity is fairly tame. It’s notable mostly for the fact that these are actual women who look like women rather than famine victims or the products of cosmetic surgery. This is of course one of the most endearing things about 1960s sexploitation movies - the actresses usually looked pretty much like ordinary women. We also get to see Tempest Storm perform. Rather surprisingly she isn’t just included for that reason and Tango is in fact the central character in the film. So she has to do some real acting. As an actress she’s terrible but luckily everybody else in the movie is equally bad so it doesn’t matter, and she does have a certain presence. And it’s the sort of movie that is enhanced rather than damaged by the awfulness of the acting. This is not a movie that has any artistic pretensions whatsoever. It’s straight grindhouse fare but it has a certain undeniable charm to it. There’s some delightfully kooky dialogue and it has that slight touch of weirdness that connoisseurs of the genre look for. Of course the most important question you will be wanting to ask is - does it include nude go-go dancing? The answer to that question is a definite yes. It comes as part of one of Something Weird Video’s two-movie sets, paired with The Love Cult (which I haven’t yet watched). The DVD transfer is pretty good. It’s probably not a must-see for fans of sexploitation but it’s worth a look.

Anita: Swedish Nymphet (1973)

The opening credits of Anita: Swedish Nymphet (Anita - ur en tonårsflickas dagbok) tell us that this is the true story of a nymphomaniac. This might lead you to expect that you’re about to see a typical 1970s sex comedy. But this is a Swedish erotic film. These are the people who gave the world Ingmar Bergman. There are no laughs in this movie. It takes itself very seriously, and it’s somewhat self-consciously arty.

This might sound a trifle dull, but don’t despair. This film does star Christina Lindberg, and she can make absolutely anything worth watching. It might also be worth mentioning that she’s naked for a considerable proportion of the movie.

She plays a teenager named Anita whose life is being destroyed by her compulsive need for sex. To make things more difficult for her she can only have sex with any man once, after which she will have nothing further to do with him. Since she needs to have sex several times a day she faces a major problem. Sweden does not have a large population, and she’s rapidly running out of men.

She’s also earned herself a somewhat dubious reputation in her home town. No-one at her school wants to know her. Her parents constantly compare her unfavourably to her studious good girl sister. The town’s prostitutes regard her as unfair competition. These factors, along with the man shortage, have driven her to hanging out at the local railway station where she snares men from out of town and drags them off and has her way with them.

Things are getting a little desperate when she meets a rather quiet young male college student. Erik lives in a household full of musicians but he’s a psychology student as well as being a musician. He becomes very interested in her case, genuine full-blown nymphomaniacs being fairly rare, and decides to take her on as a psychology project. He’s also rather drawn to her which is not altogether surprising since apart from being a nymphomaniac Anita is a rather sweet girl. But knowing her history he is determined not to have sex with her. That’s rather a challenge because Anita finds it very difficult to spend more than a few minutes with a man without trying to get his trousers off.

Erik soon realises that Anita’s sex obsession has two main causes. The first cause is that she regards herself as worthless because her parents neglect her emotionally and favour her sister. The second cause is that despite spending most of her waking hours engaging in sexual acts she has never had an orgasm. Diagnosing the causes of her nymphomania was easy, but now he has to find a way to overcome these twin obstacles to her happiness.

The very earnest tone of the film, especially when combined with the lurid subject matter, the huge quantities of sex and nudity, and the half-baked pop psychology could easily invite ridicule. That it doesn’t collapse into utter silliness and pomposity is due entirely to star Christina Lindberg. Ms Lindberg may not be the world’s greatest actress but she’s competent and the role is well within her acting range. She also has undoubted charisma, and she has an intensity that works well here. And most importantly she’s able to make Anita extremely likeable, and she also manages to avoid any wallowing in victimhood. In addition to which Ms Lindberg is of course a remarkably beautiful woman.

The mixture of high moral seriousness with outrageous exploitation elements makes this a rather amusing movie. Nobody could possibly take it as seriously as it takes itself but Anita herself is sympathetic enough and engaging enough to make the seriousness bearable.

It’s included in the Region 2 three-movie set Swedish Erotica from a company called Revelation. It’s fullscreen and the picture quality is deplorable but it is a Christina Lindberg movie and if you’re a fan of hers you’ll want it anyway, and the set includes another very good movie of hers called Exposed which makes it a reasonable buy.