Looking for mushrooms.
While I tentatively get the Dusk to Dawn Project (v. 2) under way, I might as well throw this out there: There’s a number of films I’d very much like to cover for this that have proven a little elusive. If anyone has a line on where to find a copy of any of these, I’d be really appreciative. (Not that I expect anyone reading this to have a print of Santa’s Christmas Circus or a non-German-dubbed The Manson Massacre in storage somewhere, but maybe an old taped-off-HBO copy of Birds Do It, Bees Do It or the VHS of The Stepdaughter, which I’ve missed opportunities to purchase affordably at least three times?)
Anyway, here’s the missing pieces. Gimme a holler if you can make any of them un-missing. (Also, if anyone has a copy of Randall Clark’s book At a Theater or Drive-In Near You, I’d kinda like to read that.)
Birds Do It, Bees Do It (1974, Nicholas Noxon & Irwin Rosten)
Blazing Battle (1983, Imam Tantowi)
The Brave Little Tailor (1956, Helmut Spier) [the English dub, preferably, but even a subbed version would help, since the extant OOP German DVD has no subtitles]
Danish Love Acts (1973, Erwin C. Dietrich)
The Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1965, Adolfas Mekas)
The Fountain of Love (1966, Ernst Hofbauer)
Four for the Morgue (1962, John Sledge)
Hard Candy (1976, Stephen Gibson) [the hardcore version; a softer re-edit is available on an OOP DVD under the title M 3-D]
Helga (1967, Erich F. Bender)
Isle of Sin (1960, Johannes Kai)
Kenner (1969, Steve Sekely)
Lost in Pajamas (1968, Radim Cvrcek)
Macabro (1966, Romolo Marcellini)
Maniacs on Wheels (1970, Guido Malatesta)
The Manson Massacre (1971, Kentucky Jones) [original English-language version - there’s a German-dubbed print out in the wilds of the greymarket, but I speak zero German]
Martin the Soldier (1966, Michel Deville)
The Mating Urge (1959, no director credited)
Nest of Spies (1956, Jean Stelli)Pigeons (1970, John Dexter) (due on DVD in the near future from Scorpion Releasing!)
The Road Hustlers (1968, Larry Jackson)
Sabu and the Magic Ring (1957, George Blair)
Santa’s Christmas Circus (1966, Frank Wiziarde)
Sexy Susan Sins Again (1968, Franz Antel)
The Stepdaughter (1972, William W. Wall)
Summerlust (1973, William R. Kowalchuk)
Tobo the Happy Clown (1965, Edward Finney and William Rowland)
The Tough One (1966, Jose Luis Romero Marchant)
2000 Years Later (1969, Bert Tenzer)
Violated! (1974, Albert Zugsmith)
The Weed of Crime (1962, Jun Fukuda)
Women for Sale (1969, Ernst Hofbauer)
Yakuza Deka: No Epitaphs for Us (1971, Ryuichi Takamori)
Tear up the map, draw a new one.
I’ve never been good at sticking to things. I don’t think I’ve ever finished something I set out to do, honestly - eventually, it gets to be a chore just keeping myself going. This has only gotten worse in the years since I’ve taken on a modicum of responsibility at my job, gotten married and so on. This is why I haven’t written much these last few years.
But these days, I can’t stop myself from thinking that the Dusk to Dawn Project… well, there might be something there. When put together, the films I’m dealing with aren’t just amusing, unpretentious entertainments - there’s a whole world, an alternate history of cinema that says important things about the prevailing culture in which they swam. The more I turn it over in my head, the more it becomes clear: If I finish one damn thing, this has to be it.
So, that’s what I’m going to do. Go back to square one, start clean. In the past, I’ve tackled these films haphazardly as I acquire them; now, I’m going to attempt to do this in roughly chronological order, to give a sense of how things progressed, how trends waxed and waned. Accordingly, the first entry will be up soon on Claude Alexander’s THE WONDROUS MIRACLE OF BIRTH, which actually isn’t as old as I figured it to be but does make for a solid bridge between the roadshow days and the time period with which I’m dealing. The reviews I post here will hopefully be more comprehensive than some of my earlier stabs at this stuff, yet they probably still won’t represent the final product in my head - there’s still a lot of reading, a lot of research that I have ahead of me. Think of these as skeletons of eventual men.
So there it is. This is what I must do. Hopefully, you’ll find some value in it. If you do, let me know. I could use the encouragement.
From the Shelf/D2D update #87: The Babysitter (1969, Tom Laughlin as “Don Henderson”)
(Featured in 42nd Street #2.)
Acquired: Last week, from Amazon.
Seen before?: Nope.
The Babysitter is about a midlife crisis cured by humping. And not just any humping - humping a free-spirited 19-year-old blonde who is decidedly not your wife. Such wonderful things the movies teach us these days!
Sarcasm aside, this black-and-white piece of cheesecake from the man who would be Billy Jack has more going for it than first blush would reveal. George Carey is credible in the lead role of George Maxwell, whose life is turned upside down by, respectively, pixieish babysitter Candy Wilson and sultry blackmailer Julie Freeman (who just wants Maxwell to acquit her biker boyfriend of murder). Carey articulates Maxwell’s frustration at the arc of his life (mostly his sex life) with more aplomb that I expected from a cheap potboiler such as this. Patricia Wymer isn’t nearly as effective as Candy - she’s a terrible actress, and you can see her thinking about every word she has to utter - but she’s certainly a lovely-looking young lady, and her lack of inhibition is nothing to sneeze at.
The script, too, is stronger than it seems at first. The dialogue is oft-dopey - in the film’s goofiest scene, Maxwell and Wilson initially bond over tacos, with the older man expressing admiration and wonder for the younger generation’s openness to new experiences, leaving me to wonder how sheltered this guy is if he lives in Southern California and doesn’t know what a goddamn taco is - but the plot takes some unexpected turns and generally seems to be trying its best to keep us on our toes while we mark times between nude scenes. Candy may ultimately be a grindhouse version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she ends up being an unusually active iteration of the type. She leaves Maxwell better than she found him because that’s what she’s supposed to do; her selflessness, however, does not extend to Julie.
Also, this film contains gratuitous lesbianism and gratuitous biker rape. Not that everything about this film isn’t gratuitous.
Up next: Probably a childhood thing…
D2D update #86: Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971, Roger Vadim)
Forgot to add this one to the mass update (I still haven’t really shuffled the recently-released 42nd Street #5 into my database lists), which is just as well since I actually saw it roughly two years ago. At any rate, it’s pretty freakin’ awesome - shares a lot of common ground with Lord Love a Duck but is more openly brutish about its misanthropy. Rock Hudson has a grand old time playing against his own image, and the ending hearkens forward to the painful cynicism of Massacre at Central High (and, much later, Heathers). Where is the DVD for this one. Where.
D2D entry #71-#85: Cleaning house
From the communal to the personal…
It’s been a very long while since I’ve updated the status on the Dusk to Dawn Project - I’ve still been watching these films, I just haven’t been writing about them. This year, though, I’m gonna kind of back-burner this in favor of another thing that I’ll talk about in the next day or two. So it’s high time I squared away these forgotten entries. Won’t be much here, just a couple of lines on each flick. So… let’s do this.
#71: Korean Connection (1972, Lee Doo-yong; featured in Dusk to Dawn #1) Chintzy, low-grade Korean-made chopsocky. Follows a pattern familiar to anyone who’s seen more than, say, two of these, as a down-and-out high-kicker hiding inside the bottle gets a chance to redeem his shamed honor via violence; notable mainly for possibly the worst dubbing any single film has ever received (sound effects get forgotten and shit like that).
#72: The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973, Luigi Batzella; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2 and Dusk to Dawn #4) Muddled like many of these Gothic Eurohorror things are, but lacks that crucial spark of inspiration that buoys the genre’s worthier examples. So it just seems silly and vaguely dull. Batzella would acquit himself much better a year later with Nude for Satan.
#73: Shogun Assassin (1980, Kenji Misumi & Robert Houston; featured in 42nd Street #2) The Citizen Kane of clip jobs - Houston manages to take the near-three hours that comprise the first and second Lone Wolf and Cub films and distill them into a workable eighty-minute feature that follows a coherent plot and serves up a shit-ton of hyperactive action without sacrificing either the elegiac tone of the source or Misumi’s considerable visual artistry. Shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is, but it appears to have been made with a modicum of respect, which makes all the difference. Bonus: Now I know where the sampled dialogue in the Cage song “Agent Orange” comes from!
#74: The Force Beyond (1978, William Sachs; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2) What a heap of happy horseshit. Pseudo-documentary supernatural nonsense is somewhat amusing in its brazen attempt to unite all manner of unexplained phenomena under the umbrella of alien activity, but that amusement only goes so far before this becomes tiresome. People didn’t actually believe this nonsense, did they?
#75: Hell’s Chosen Few (1968, David L. Hewitt; featured in Dusk to Dawn #1) I used to hate the biker genre, but it’s starting to grow on me. This two-bit entry has a lot of issues (acting’s weak and the cliche-ridden script does no one any favors) but also has in its favor an authentically scuzzy vibe - for better or worse, it feels like something made by people who know a thing or two about the subculture and feel a kinship with it. It’s mangy and threadbare, but I think I like it anyway.
#76: Mother Goose a Go Go (1966, Jack H. Harris; featured in Dusk to Dawn #5 and Dusk to Dawn #7) Agonizingly unfunny attempt at making a “hip,” “with-it” sex comedy about a fella whose attempts at consummating his marriage are constantly thwarted by his bizarre reaction to fairy tales. Features precious little sex or nudity (the prurient will have to settle for swimsuit cheesecake and a visibly embarrassed Tommy Kirk as the man with the dong problem), and features even less in the way of humor that isn’t labored, strained, overbaked, ham-fisted, etc..
#77: Cockfighter (1974, Monte Hellman; featured in Dusk to Dawn #8) One of Warren Oates’s best performances (and that’s saying quite a lot) is the linchpin of this offbeat character study. Warren’s a professional trainer of fighting cocks who’s takena vow of silence until he wins a big tournament, for reasons which become clear as the film unfolds, and while most actors would use that as a license to mug it up, Oates underplays as much as he can while still getting his point across. Instead of gesticulating wildly, he opts for a serene economy of movement and allows his expressive eyes to do most of the heavy lifting. It’s a terrific turn by a reliably terrific actor. The animal violence is very real and unfortunate, but it’s also an integral part of the milieu, and Hellman to his credit doesn’t celebrate or sensationalize it.
#78: Teenage Mother (1967, Jerry Gross; featured in 42nd Street #1) Hilariously cruddy and misguided, like someone shoved a ‘50’s-JD flick into the Brundlefly machine with a live-birth square-up reel. Despite the scenes of attempted rape and premarital sexing, this feels weirdly innocent given the time frame of its crafting (I can’t recall any nudity), which makes the eventual dive into a graphic anatomy lesson feel all the ickier. And hey - there’s Fred Willard! What’s he doing here?
#79: Teenage Graffiti (1977, Christopher G. Casler; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2) Snore.
#80: Enter the Ninja (1981, Menahem Golan; featured in 42nd Street #3) Completely retarded but also cheesy in all the right ways, right on down to Franco Nero and His Amazing Porno Mustache. Nero’s maybe the only Italian B-actor who seems not just believable but inevitable as a ninja, and his rough-and-tumble charisma goes a long way towards keeping this thing teetering on the positive side of the entertainment scale. Also, there’s ninjas. Ninja action all over the damn place. It’s a juvenile sort of fun, but then I never claimed maturity as a string point.
#81: Tom Thumb (1957, Rene Cardona; featured in Dusk to Dawn #2) Given the nutty inspiration that flows through Cardona’s wrestling movies, it’s kind of startling how stodgy this kiddie flick is. It’s threadbare, but not in an amusing way - just in a cheap way. Fairly dull, really, which is just a shame.
#82: The Big Bad Wolf (1957, Peter Podehl; featured in Dusk to Dawn #6) This screwy thing, on the other hand… I don’t know what to make of it. Clearly a lot of thought and time has gone into its look, and all that effort resulted in the single most hideous excuses for costumes and set design that I think I’ve ever seen. The costumes worn by the actors in the goat suits in particular, with their enormous heads and empty sunken eyes, are indescribably creepy. Is it appropriate for kids? Content-wise, sure - it’s no worse than any other Grimm Brothers tale. But I imagine the horrifying eyesores wandering through the tattered forest landscape could cause a raft of nightmares.
#83: Savage Sisters (1974, Eddie Romero; featured in Dusk to Dawn #1, Dusk to Dawn #10 and 42nd Street #2) See how many times this film pops up in these compilations? That’s because, aside from a surprising lack of nudity, this is the quintessential ’70s grindhouse flick. It’s a Filipino women-in-prison/jungle-action movie; as such, it features women in prison, guns, explosions, double crosses, women using sex as a weapon, Banana Republic politics, smart-ass one-liners, an ethnically diverse crew of ass-kicking ladies (including Cheri “Ginger” Caffero!), elaborate methods of murder and Sid Haig as a heavy with a ludicrous accent. It’s shameless and sleazy and in its own way kind of perfect.
#84: The Cavern (1964, Edgar G. Ulmer; featured in Dusk to Dawn #9) Ulmer’s last feature, this tough and claustrophobic WWII-set obscurity about a group of soldiers trapped in a cavern after an avalanche first seems like it’ll be another allegory about Getting Along, but that’s not Ulmer’s bag at all. He has no big fish to fry - he just wants to spin a solid yarn, and that he does in fine style. Features early, accomplished work from both John Saxon and Larry Hagman and maybe the greatest title card ever written. Somebody please resurrect this sharp little piece of pulp so it can find the audience it deserves.
#85: Magic Christmas Tree (1964, Richard C. Parish; featured in 42nd Street #5) A little snot-nosed brat encounters a witch who gives him a magic ring. This magic ring, when used properly, can summon forth a magic talking Christmas tree that grants wished. So, naturally, the selfish kid decides to abduct Santa Claus. It’s even wackier than it sounds, with public-access-level production values, random bursts of weirdness (a giant shows up at the end, just because) and the world’s worst child actor. After seeing the trailer, I was expecting something hysterically awful, and I was decidedly not disappointed - this thing’s golden. I think I found my new favorite Christmas movie.
D2D entry #70: Private Duty Nurses (1971, George Armitage)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #8.)
Pale, dull retread of The Student Nurses. Offers nothing that wasn’t already done better in the first film, unless the inclusion of a drug-trafficking plot line counts as progress. Hackwork at its laziest - a prime example of trying too hard to strike while the iron was hot. Maybe some auterist can defend this within Armitage’s filmography. They can have it.
D2D entry #69: The Student Nurses (1970, Stephanie Rothman)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #8.)
A fascinating mess, mainly for all it tries to do within the framework of its nubile-nurses-in-L.A. setup: Rothman, producer Roger Corman and all others involved are not so much trying to eat their cake and have it too as much as they’re sampling from several different cakes at once and trying to make one cake out of the crumbs left behind. It’s a free-love nudie flick, plus it’s a soapy drama, plus it’s an issues flick, plus it’s a girl-power flick. The social-problem impulses are the most interesting thing the film has to offer, mainly because they’re muddled and conflicting (I’ll elaborate once I find my notes, but I remember there being some push-pull tension between idealism and activism, especially as presented in the plot thread about the Hispanic nurse who falls in with a radical-left revolutionary). Rothman has a sharp eye and puts as much polish on this as she can given the limited resources, and if her actresses aren’t the finest thespians around they still acquit themselves well enough within the framework of their cast-to-type roles. Also, they look damn good out of their clothing.
D2D entry #68: The Centerfold Girls (1974, John Peyser)
(Featured in 42nd Street #1.)
Halfway between an omnibus and an Americanized giallo, this slash-and-jiggle number could have only been made in the ’70s… and maybe that’s a good thing. The thing is split into three parts, each part following a different centerfold girl, with Andrew Prine’s moralistic mad-dog killer as the linking device. The second and third sections offer some low-grade entertainment value, and the climax offers the ever-awesome Prine squaring off against fierce Amazonian blonde Tiffany Bolling, which comes pretty close to redeeming everything before it. But there’s the matter of the opening segment: It follows a young nurse who drives into the woods (for a job, if I remember correctly - it’s been a few months), only to be victimized by both Prine and a group of nasty hippies straight out of a Last House on the Left ripoff. The tone in this segment is ugly (the sequence, as set up, is basically suffer-suffer-suffer-die), but the real problem is that Peyser and co. don’t seem set up to handle this brutality; the remainder of the film, while sleazy, is nowhere near as heartless or vicious as this first bit, and leading off with such material creates a permanent imbalance. Something like Night Train Murders can get away with this level of sadism and horror because its makers demonstrate a basic understanding of the material’s potency and a commanding formal control. Here, it’s just misogynistic window dressing.
D2D entry #67: Commuter Husbands (1973, Derek Ford)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #3 and Grindhouse Universe.)
Commuter Husbands is a film caught between two worlds. On one hand, it’s firmly in the tradition of classic English sex-comedy humor, with lots of mishaps, misunderstandings and cheeky double entendres. On the other, it’s a film well aware of changing social mores and the new permissiveness. Derek Ford plants a foot in both camps, and his resulting film is something that, while not entirely successful, gains a surprising amount of interest from the push-pull tension between what was and what will be. It’s structured as an omnibus, with gorgeous narrator Gabrielle Drake relating tales that examine the battle of the sexes. In the battle of the sexes, there is naturally sex, and this being the ’70s, that means a shit-ton of nudity (especially in the second story, which features a plumber stumbling into an orgy when he’s asked to fix the hot tub); yet, the resolution to each story involves a certain level of moralism and punishment for transgression. Ford is undeniably interested in the swinging lifestyle and getting cute birds to strip their kit off (as I understand it, he started splicing hardcore pornography into his later films for foreign markets), but the proper British soul still lurks within him, so the loose and the swinging don’t come out on top - most of the stories end with some measure of humiliation for those with perverse impulses (a peeping tom gets caught and forced to break a long-standing routine, a philandering married couple is forced to confront each other’s infidelities), and all of them result in a return to an idea of a man-woman middle-class status quo. (There’s also a likely soupcon of class commentary in the gist of the film, though Ford only gets overt about it during the plumber’s story.) It’s that space in between desire and social propriety into which Commuter Husbands wedges itself, and on those terms it’s modestly successful. As a film, otherwise, it’s rather spotty, with cornball humor and dry stretches alternating with the occasional flash of wit. But it does have something at least going for it, which puts it ahead of a good many other films.
D2D entry #66: Car Wash (1976, Michael Schultz)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #2.)
There were two major strains of blaxploitation cinema in the ’70s, and while the first strain is the more popular owing to its liberal use of exploitable elements and indulgence of black-man power fantasies, there’s certainly no discounting the second, more positive and less lurid thread represented by films such as Black Girl, Cornbread, Earl and Me and today’s little number. (This dichotomy, incidentally, still exists today, with Killa Season on one side of the gulf and Tyler Perry on the other.)
But just ‘cause there’s no violence or nudity doesn’t mean there’s no entertainment value. Car Wash may have a secondary agenda to transmit images of black culture that doesn’t involve murder, but its primary objective is to be a good time at the movies. Boy, is it ever. Boisterous, rambunctious and full of good vibes, this thing is winning and hilarious. And dig that cast - the large ensemble includes George Carlin, Bill Duke, Lorraine Gary, Garrett Morris and Richard Pryor in a showstopping cameo as an openly money-hungry preacher who has the freakin’ Pointer Sisters as his choir.
This isn’t to say that there’s nothing on the film’s mind. This is an exemplary example of a genre for which I have a weakness — the Community Movie, wherein the lives and actions of a small subset of people stand in for a larger idea of community. This manner of synecdoche, of trying to encapsulate something expansive into something smaller and more intimate, generally fascinates me. The metaphor here is obvious: The denizens of the car wash represent the American black experience circa 1975. You’ve got your hard-working fellas, your lovers, your fighters, your layabouts, your drag queen, your hardline Muslim convert, your young men and old men and everyone in between. What’s ultimately valuable is how this broader picture boils down into a consideration of the options available for surviving under the System, with Duke’s angry Muslim radical posited against Ivan Dixon’s put-upon ex-convict-turned-car wash floor manager. If the film advocates Dixon’s quiet persistence over Duke’s accusatory rage as a way to make social progress in a social system still controlled by white men, it does so without entirely stigmatizing Duke’s stance; Duke’s stance is as palpable and understandable as it is misguided. (The film is less charitable towards the car wash owner’s son, a white upper-class college-lib goofball whose attempts to use Mao’s Little Red Book as a tool for connecting with his father’s employees invariably meets with ridicule.) The dichotomy between peaceful persistence and revolutionary rhetoric gets complicated, though, when one reflects that Dixon is also the man who wrote and directed The Spook Who Sat By the Door, a film about a black man covertly using the weaknesses of the System against itself to foment a violent revolution and arguably the most politically radical film to emerge from the blaxploitation genre. Food for thought, eh?
