Rolls-Royce Baby (1975)

Rolls-Royce Baby is something of a rarity - a Lina Romay movie not directed by Jess Franco. So it has curiosity value if nothing else.
It was directed by Erwin Dietrich, the man who has been described as Switzerland’s answer to Roger Corman. Dietrich of course produced many of Franco’s 1970s movies. Rolls-Royce Baby has no pretensions to being anything other than a skin flick, albeit a classy skin flick.

Lina Romay plays a model/adult actress named Lisa Romay, known as the Rolls-Royce Baby. In between modelling assignments she likes to drive around the countryside in her chaffeur-driven vintage Rolls-Royce and have sex a lot. Usually in the Rolls-Royce. Having sex in the back of a car does have a certain amount of style if the car is a vintage Rolls.

The movie is a little thin on plot. Basically we just have a beautiful rich young woman who likes to drive around in her Rolls-Royce and have sex a lot. She has sex in her car, and out of it. In fact she has sex just about everywhere. Of course it wasn’t always this way for her. Before she could afford a Rolls-Royce she had to have sex in trucks. This no doubt motivated her to save her pennies so she could buy a nice car. There’s a lesson here for us all. If I could get to have sex as often as Miss Romay does in this film I’d certainly be saving for all I was worth.

As for characterisation, essentially what we have is a study of a beautiful rich young woman who likes to drive around in her Rolls-Royce and have sex a lot.

That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t address any serious issues. It certainly addresses the problems of rich young women who like to drive around in Rolls-Royces and have sex a lot. It appears that these women, contrary to what you might expect, actually don’t have too many problems apart from the perennial one of finding a sufficient number of people to have sex with. And if you look like Lina Romay then finding willing partners is not all that onerous a task.

Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun. In this movie Erwin Dietrich proves that a girl and a car will do just as well. They could afford a flash car for the movie since they were able to save a considerable amount of money on Miss Romay’s wardrobe (which consists of one very flimsy see-through negligee and a pair of high-heel shoes).

Rolls-Royce Baby doesn’t make too many demands on Romay as an actress. All she’s really required to do is take her clothes off. Although that’s not strictly accurate since as far as I can recall she never actually has her clothes on. Romay gives it her best shot however and she does manage to convey some sense that perhaps this woman isn’t quite as carefree as she appears to be, that perhaps there’s a certain emptiness in her life. Some movies contain gratuitous nudity; you could say that in this case Lina Romay contributes some gratuitous acting.

There have been erotic film-makers (Radley Metzger and Joe Sarno being the obvious examples) who have managed to make erotic movies that are more than just skin flicks. Erwin Dietrich is not of this company and Rolls-Royce Baby has no great claims to artistic merit (if such claims mean very much).

Visually the movie aims for that mid-70s classy softcore erotica feel that made Emmanuelle such a huge hit, and it achieves that aim reasonably well. It’s rarely sleazy but it’s definitely erotic. It’s difficult to dislike a movie that features such a prodigious amount of Lina Romay nakedness. Do you need to see this movie? That really depends on how you feel about Lina Romay nakedness, a question I leave for you to decide. It’s softcore although it’s perhaps (at times anyway) at the raunchier end of the softcore spectrum.

The German DVD from Ascot Elite Entertainment is an all-region PAL release and looks superb. It also includes the English dubbed version.

Galaxy of Terror (1981)

Galaxy of Terror was made by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in 1981 and as you might expect one of the joys of this movie is counting just how many other science fiction movies it rips off. Its most obvious debt is of course to Ridley Scott's Alien and it was clearly intended to be marketed as a low-budget version of that movie although it arguably is closer in feel to Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires.

It does have a framing story that sets it apart slightly. It’s a very silly framing story but it certainly adds to the fun. We start with some kind of mystical old woman playing Space Invaders with a guy called the Master. He’s about to end the spaceship Quest off on a mission to an obscure planet. Another spacecraft, the Remus, crash-landed there and the Quest’s mission is to rescue any survivors.

It soon becomes apparent that there are unlikely to be any survivors. Something horrific has happened, but what? The crew of the Quest have other problem. They’re a collection of misfits and losers. If you were going to assemble the crew least likely to survive such a mission this would be it. They hate each other and they’re all borderline crazy.

They eventually discover that the only thing they have to fear is fear itself but that doesn’t help them one bit.

It’s an odd cast. There’s Ray (My Favourite Martian) Walston, there’s Erin Moran from Happy Days, and some cult fixtures like Robert Englund and Sid Haig. The acting is high on intensity and hysteria and low on real acting but in an oddball movie like this it works.

The real star is probably the production designer, a guy named James Cameron at the beginning of his career. On a limited budget he achieves marvels. The movie looks expensive, strange and doom-laden. The special effects are another powerful argument in favour of old school special effects as compared to CGI. The sets are terrific. Cameron would go on go bigger, but sadly not better, things.

There’s plenty of gore of course. There’s not much nudity. Only one scene really, but it’s certainly a memorable one. A female crew member gets attacked by a gigantic slimy maggot thing. First it sucks all her clothes off, then it rapes her. It’s amazingly, staggeringly sleazy. There’s not much more you can say about it. Even more extraordinary is that the scene as shot was apparently even sleazier but was cut to get an R rating and the original version unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) was destroyed.

The plot doesn’t make a huge amount of sense and the further the movie progresses the less sense it makes.

It’s all entertaining enough in a very schlocky B-movie way. You probably really have to love the 80s to love this movie. It’s a very bad movie but it can be enjoyed as a slice of 80s kitsch.

Shout Factory’s DVD release is exceptionally good, probably better than this movie really deserves.

Gate of Flesh (1964)

Seijun Suzuki is one of my all-time favourite Japanese movie directors but although Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon) is one of his more admired films I was slightly disappointed by it.

Seijun Suzuki’s reputation rests mainly on his 1960s crime films for Nikkatsu Studio, such as Youth of the Beast, Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill. They’re influenced by film noir but with a bravura visual style and and an over-the-top almost psychedelic feel with more than a touch of the surreal.

Gate of Flesh is often described as a pink film although most pink films of that era were made by small independent production companies rather than major studios like Nikkatsu. It follows the lives of a group of Tokyo prostitutes during the postwar period of the American Occupation. These prostitutes band together and decide they don’t need pimps. They will control their own destinies and make their own decisions. They live in a huge bombed-out basement.

It sounds like a good arrangement but in fact the girls are far more brutal towards each other than any pimp would have been. They have a rule that sex must always be charged for. Giving a man free sex is the worst offence imaginable and is punished by ferocious floggings. The girls seem to take great pleasure in inflicting these punishments on one of their own. Now their little collective faces a major threat in the persons of two outsiders. One is Maya, a new girl. The other is a small-time hood named Shintaro Ibuki (played by Jô Shishido who seems to pop up in most of Seijun Suzuki’s movies).

All the girls want to sleep with Ibuki and it’s only a matter of time before one of them is caught giving him unauthorised free sex. Ibuki is heading for troubles of his own with a criminal deal involving stolen penicillin (a valuable property on the postwar black market).

My big problem with this film is that I just didn’t care about any of the characters. The fact that they’re all thoroughly unpleasant isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw, but unfortunately they’re also uninteresting.

The movie’s biggest strength, in fact it’s only strength, is its visual brilliance. You expect that in a Seijun Suzuki film, and this one certainly delivers in that area. It’s like the plot of a dreary Italian neo-realist movie but the visual world of the movie has nothing whatever to do with realism. It’s like a nightmare dream landscape. The basement that the prostitutes live in is very claustrophobic, a bit like a gigantic womb. One thing I found interesting is that visually the movie seems to get less and less realistic as the movie progresses.

The mood is unfailingly bleak, which is perhaps something I’m growing a little tired of. I’m also getting a little weary of the kind of cheap anti-Americanism that permeates this movie (and so many other Japanese movies of that era). And I’m not even American.

As far as its credentials as a pink film go it’s very tame although by the standards of Japanese cinema in 1964 it was pretty hot stuff.

Pagan’s all-region PAL DVD release is hardly outstanding but the picture quality is reasonably acceptable if rather washed out.

All in all a brilliantly made movie about some not very interesting and exceptionally vicious people.

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975)

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze was envisaged as the first of a cycle of movies based on the Doc Savage pulp novels. Sadly the rest of the series never materialised.

George Pal, the legendary producer of 1950s and 1960s science fiction films, co-wrote the screenplay as well as producing. It was in fact his last completed film.

It was based on the first of the Doc Savage books. Clark Savage Jr, known as Doc Savage, returns to New York to find that his father,the famous adventurer and philanthropist, has died. The cause of death was reported as a tropical disease contracted on an expedition to Central America. When a mysterious assassin makes an attempt on Doc’s life and his father’s papers are destroyed in a deliberately lit fire Doc starts to suspect that Clark Savage Sr was the victim of foul play.

The would-be assassin is an Indian, a member of a tribe believed to no longer exist. Doc and his five faithful companions set off to the Central American republic of Hidalgo to try to pick up the trail, surviving another assassination attempt on the way.

They become suspicious of the activities of a certain Captain Seas whose luxury yacht is in the harbour at Hidalgo. With the help of the beautiful Mona they eventually find the fabled Valley of the Vanished. This land had been bequeathed to Doc by his father. The deeds had been stolen and it’s soon clear why someone didn’t want Doc to take possession. There is gold there. Lots of it. The villains, led by the sinister Captain Seas, are mercilessly exploiting the locals. Doc and his friends are determined not just to gain his inheritance but to save the tribespeople of the valley.

The difficulty with this sort of movie is knowing just how camp to make it. This may well have been the reason for this particular movie’s commercial failure. It was perhaps too comp for serious Doc Savage fans but not camp enough to satisfy those hoping for a pure spoof.

1975 saw the commercial failure of another movie based on a series of immensely successful cult novels, a movie that was also intended to be the first of a movie series -Royal Flash, based on the Flashman novels. I suspect it failed for the same reason - adventure film fans weren’t really prepared for a film that approached the genre in such a tongue-in-cheek manner, but it didn’t go far enough to succeed as a comedy. I happen to like Royal Flash, and I like Doc Savage as well.

The use of John Philip Sousa’s martial music in Doc Savage, with lyrics socially added, works quite well.

Ron Ely, better known from the 1960s Tarzan TV series, make a fine Doc Savage. There’s no problem with the rest of the cast but a slight weakness is that Doc has too may sidekicks. This works well enough in the books where each of his followers manages to contribute something to the plot by making use of their special skills - one is a great chemist, one an electrical wizard, one an engineer, etc. The movie doesn’t make much use of these special abilities so that while Monk, the archeologist Johnny and the lawyer Ham are reasonably memorable characters, and well (if rather broadly) acted, the other two sidekicks are completely forgettable.

The best decision made by the producers, in my view, was keeping the 1930s setting. The early scenes in New York look fabulous. They look more like a comic-book vision of New York in the 30s than the reality but that’s a major plus and gives these scenes a wonderful flavour. Overall the the movie is very impressive visually. The telephone answering machine using vinyl disks is a very cool touch!

The balance between adventure and camp is well maintained, and the tongue-in-cheek element never becomes annoying. This is a hugely enjoyable movie.

It’s been issued on DVD-R in the Warner Archive series. Picture quality is extremely good. Well worth picking up.

Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (1973)

Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (La morte negli occhi del gatto) isn’t quite certain if it wants to be a gothic horror film or a giallo or a psychological thriller, but whatever it is it’s kind of fun.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Antonio Margheriti as a director. He doesn’t command the kind of adulation that people like Fulci command but he’s actually better than a lot of the more fancied Italian genre directors of his era.

I’m not quite clear as to exactly when the events in this movie are meant to take place, but it’s definitely meant to be in Scotland. The MacGrieff family have attracted a few slightly unsavoury local legends and they have more than their fair share of skeletons in the family closet. The current nominal head of the family is the young Lord James MacGrieff. He mostly stays in his bedroom and is reputed to be mad. He does not get on with his mother, Lady Mary.

Lady Mary is short of money and the upkeep on their castle is expensive. She’s hoping to get some money out of her sister who is currently paying a visit along with her oddly named daughter Corringa (Jane Birkin). Corringa has just returned from her convent school from which she was in fact expelled although the family don’t know that. Despite this she’s a rather innocent soul.

The family includes the dubious hangers-on that you expect in a horror movie. There’s a creepy doctor named Franz (played by the always wonderful Anton Diffring). And there’s Suzanne, a rather sexy French teacher although we soon have reason to suspect that she’s perhaps not entirely respectable. In fact not even the tiniest bit respectable. There’s also the newly arrived parish priest and he’s a bit odd as well.

At first Corringa thinks Lord James is a rude arrogant pig but gradually her views start to change and pretty soon she’s comprehensively in lust with him.

Naturally a series of murders begins. Old family legends about vampires surface again. Coffins are empty when they shouldn’t be. There’s a cat that seems to be on the scene whenever a murder takes place. And then of course there’s Lord James’s pet ape.

By this time you may be thinking that this movie makes absolutely no sense at all. And I’d have to agree with you. But this is the world of eurohorror where plot coherence is strictly optional. Much more important ingredients are style, weirdness, energy and sleaze and this movie has all of those elements. Does it have enough of them to compensate for the extreme silliness of the story? In my view, yes it does.

The acting is in general pretty broad but Anton Diffring and Jane Birkin add both class and competence. Birkin’s then husband Serge Gainsbourg plays a minor role as police inspector.

And did I mention that this movie features a guy in a gorilla suit? And it gets extra bonus points because the ape plays no role whatsoever in the movie. They just thought it would be cool to have a guy in a gorilla suit. I thoroughly approve. Actually just about everything in this movie is gratuitous, it’s like the writers just thought they should throw in as much cool stuff as possible.

The Blue Underground DVD looks terrific but is a bit light on extras - just a brief interview with the film’s co-writer Giovanni Simonelli (who has some interesting reminiscences about working with Antonio Margheriti).

Not exactly a classic, but entertaining in its own enjoyably muddled way.

Island at the Top of the World (1974)

What could possibly be better than a movie featuring zeppelins? How about a movie featuring zeppelins and Vikings? There is such a movie - Disney’s 1974 Island at the Top of the World.

You could describe this one as an attempt to get a Jules Verne feel although it’s not actually based on a Verne novel.

It is the first decade of the 20th century. Wealthy business Sir Anthony Ross (Donald Sinden) had quarreled with his son Donald, and Donald as a result had set off on his own to explore the world. Specifically, to explore the Arctic regions. And had promptly disappeared. Now his father is determined to find him.

He recruits a somewhat sceptical anthropologist, Professor Ivarrson (David Hartman), who had led several expeditions to the Arctic. Ivarrson explains that it’s too late in the season to set out now, but Ross assures him that’s no problem. They won’t be using dog sleds or anything primitive like that. They’ll be going by airship!

Captain Brieux is the French engineer responsible for designing and constructing the airship Hyperion, and he is also its commander and pilot. He’s initially reluctant but since Sir Anthony Ross has financed his airship research and is in fact the owner of the Hyperion he doesn’t have much choice. Of course being a Disney movie there has to be a cute animal, in this case the gallant captain’s poodle. The captain would not even consider leaving her behind.

After finding the Eskimo guide who had accompanied his son in his explorations they set out in the Hyperion for the mythical Island of the Whales, the place where the whales go to die. It appears that the island isn’t so mythical at all. It exists, and it’s a rather surprising place. It is heated by hot springs and all manner of volcanic phenomena so that in spite of being so far north it’s quite fertile. It is a true lost world. But the Hyperion’s crew were not the first to find this fabled island. The Vikings beat them to it by a thousand years. And the Vikings are still there!

The Vikings are initially friendly enough, until their high priest the Godi decides that the airship is a sign that an ancient prophecy is about to be fulfilled, that their land is to be menaced by savage invaders. The fact that the invaders comprise a middle-aged businessman, an enthusiastic but entirely harmless scientist, an eccentric French engineer and one small dog has no effect on the Godi’s certainty that these dangerous invaders must be destroyed.

Some of the Vikings are however extremely friendly, and remain so. Donald has been living peacefully with a Viking farming family and he has fallen in love with the beautiful blonde daughter of the family, Freyja.

The plot provides plenty of action, with our adventurers chased by Viking longships as well as various aerial mishaps. It’s very much a kids’ movie but it’s still highly entertaining and adults with a yen for zeppelins and Vikings will have no cause for complaint.

There are no big name stars but Donald Sinden rises to the occasion in splendid style and overacts his heart out. Captain Brieux is a stereotypical movie Frenchman, excitable but brave. The other cast members are quite adequate.
The special effects are extremely variable. Some are excellent, some are very iffy. It doesn’t really matter. Even the dubious effects don’t spoil the fun. And the longships and the zeppelin are terrific, and that’s what matters.

Disney’s Region 4 DVd is a little disappointing. Picture quality is not fantastic and there are zero extras.

An enjoyable adventure romp.

Thunderball (1965)

By 1965 James Bond fever was it its height. The steadily increasing commercial success of the series was destined to reach a peak with the fourth film, Thunderball. This was the third and last Bond movie to be directed by Terence Young. As he explained afterwards he had made the first Bond film (Dr No), the best of the Bond films (From Russia With Love) and the most successful (Thunderball).

And it has to be said that all the Bond films Terence Young directed are great fun. Thunderball boasted the biggest budget of the series up to that time and it’s visually impressive. Somehow though it’s not quite as much fun as Goldfinger. In Largo it has a less interesting villain than the earlier films, and although the cast includes no less than three glamorous Bond women none are quite as intriguing as Pussy Galore.

The theft of atomic bomb was one of the staples of 1960s spy movies. In this instance the bombs are stolen from a hi-jacked British Avro Vulcan bomber. The hi-jacking method is ingenious and provides probably the most visually interesting scenes in the film. As you might expect, SPECTRE is behind this dastardly plot to blackmail the British government.

As so often in this movie series 007 finds himself in the Caribbean, and surrounded by beautiful women. There’s the obligatory casino scene and there’s one of the most large-scale underwater battle scenes you’re ever going to see, a sequence that undoubtedly chewed up a very large slice of the budget. Connery did some of the underwater scenes himself.

There are some gloriously extravagant sets, with the SPECTRE headquarters being particularly impressive. Largo’s huge motor yacht, the Disco Volante, is the sort of vessel every diabolical criminal mastermind dreams of owning.

Interestingly enough the novel Thunderball, published in 1961, was originally a film treatment. Ideas from the film treatment were incorporated by Ian Fleming in the book (leading to a celebrated court case) so the novel could technically be described as a novelisation. Delays engendered by the court battle meant that this ended up as the fourth Bond film, rather than the first as was originally intended.

Sean Connery was by this time very comfortable indeed in his role as Bond. Luciana Paluzzi, Claudine Auger and Martine Beswick provide the glamour. Adolfo Celli is very god as Largo although the character doesn’t quite have the larger-than-life feel of a great Bond villain.

It might sound like I’m damning Thunderball with faint praise but it is in fact a highly entertaining movie. It’s not by any means the best of the Connery Bond movies but any Bond movie with Connery is worth seeing.