Reviews

Bloodeaters is an exceptional independent horror film which was released to theaters (under that terrific title) in the Fall of 1980, and I was lucky enough to catch it first-run at the Pix Drive-In in Bridgeport, Ct.

The film is pretty much a one-man show by Charles McCrann, a corporate financial advisor who apparently made the film as a lark, just to see if he could break into the lucrative horror film market.

Although low-budget and leisurely-paced, Bloodeaters works for several reasons. First of all, the group of dope growers, although technically criminals, are portrayed in a largely sympathetic manner, and their dire fate seems truly tragic, as we watch them one by one succumb to the nefarious doings of their diabolical government; it is an interesting late-model depiction of hippies as outlaw entrepreneurs, and their suffering (or punishment for sins?) comes across as virtually biblical in intensity.

Also, the government agents are portrayed alternately as complicit and yet clueless to the impact their plans will ultimately have, i.e., they are very "human," very fallible.

Finally, the "man in the middle," forest ranger Tom (played by the filmmaker) is an entirely sympathetic character who portrays a man stuck with an impossible task - pleasing his boss (the government) while maintaining cordial relations with the local populace. This thankless task is portrayed well in several scenes, especially when Tom and his wife have to convince a paranoid, and armed, local woodsman that he is friend, not foe.

There is also a touching portrayal of a middle American family, including a special-needs boy and his devoted sister, serious dramatic characters you don't often see in a straightforward horror film of the day.

There is also some light comic relief in the depiction of the ill-fated alcoholic crop duster and his shrewish wife, although their ending is as horrific as everyone else's.

The basic plot-line echoes concerns during this time period over an extremely toxic herbicide called paraquat, which was used widely on marijuana (and other) crops, and caused much illness amongst unlucky victims. In Bloodeaters, the herbicide is tagged "Dromax," but there is no mistaking what they were referencing; even the stoned drive-in audience made the connection!

Needless to say, the transformation of the dope "fiends" into drooling killers (not zombies!) was very exciting to us 1980 drive-in goers, and some of us discussed the film in glowing terms after its viewing.

It is a shame that the film was later retitled "Toxic Zombies," a stupid, generic title that promises something the original film never pretended to deliver - zombies. The poor saps who are contaminated by the government pesticide turn into deranged madmen - not zombies - and so reviews that compare Bloodeaters to something like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead are not only unkind, but incorrect.

It is a sad irony of fate that filmmaker McCrann was murdered in cold blood by the dastardly fiends who brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11. The least we can do now is applaud and remember this man's sole cinematic effort, and never forget that before there were "Toxic Zombies," there was the magnificent Bloodeaters.

Strangler of the Swamp is one of those 1940s cheapies that you either adore or despise. The genre thrillers of that turbulent decade tended to be low-budget quickies designed for quick turnaround, and by no means were they meant to be appreciated by future audiences on TV or in revival houses. That may be one reason why films such as Black Dragons, Invisible Ghost, The Mad Monster and Fog Island by and large have such insipid scripts, pedestrian directing, underachieving performances and woeful production value - they were created solely as commercial product, and nothing else. Which is why, when a film like Strangler of the Swamp comes along, it sort of sticks out like a sore thumb.

For SoS boasts a most unique premise, abundant mournful atmosphere, and some truly creepy moments. Of course, SoS also contains the exact same flaws as its brethren: (insipid script, pedestrian directing, underachieving performances and woeful production values). And as with its cinematic cousins, SoS is slow-moving, a death knell for some contemporary audiences.

Still, there is much to admire in SoS. The patently phony sets, replete with fake foliage, a waterless swamp and ubiquitous stage fog, creates a canned (and uncanny) purgatory worthy of an Ed Wood film.

The trudging, dreary scenario, with sad fools going back and forth, back and forth, seemingly to no purpose, reinforce the purgatory aspect of the piece, and one could easily paint SoS as a threadbare religious allegory of sorts, if one chose to.

SoS has an unabashedly dreamlike ambience, which carries the scenario far. There is also some curiously lyrical dialogue, which is almost poetic at times. The also-dreamy music score, by an uncredited Alexander Steinert, is an undeniable augmentation to the "fantastic" aspect of the piece.

Perhaps the film's genius stroke is that, as the characters are stuck in this dismal hell-swamp for the entire film, the audience, too, is trapped in this very same purgatory, making SoS an interactive film, sort of "Waiting for Godot"-as-grindhouse potboiler.

Charles Middleton as a most tangible ghost is a character straight out of the fantasy realm, and stretches audience disbelief to the breaking point. (It would have been better if they had kept the ghost silent, but then it wouldn't be a dopey PRC quickie!)

One poignant subtext is the scourge of aging, that is, the notion of life as being little more than skulking ever closer to death, symbolized by some notable characters who might be considered elderly, crossing back and forth across the symbolic swamp, in essence traipsing precariously between the realms of life and death.

A silly romantic subplot - an obligatory factor in these programmers - is harmless enough, although without it SoS would have been a much stronger piece (but then it wouldn't be a dopey PRC quickie!).

Overall, SoS works better as tone poem (or spiritual allegory, if you prefer) than as narrative melodrama. So, is SoS a creaky, pretentious art-house bore, or a cinematic diamond in the rough? You decide!

Brain of Blood is Al Adamson's (and probably Sam Sherman's) masterpiece, a thoroughly coherent and highly engaging romp through sleazy exploitation film-land. Apparently shot in a rushed eight days, and having an entire production life of about ninety days, BoB is an example of creative minds working in concert towards a predetermined goal, to good effect. Great characters, a terrific - even epic - screenplay, plausible performances by all, and even excellent cinematography (for this kind of thing) add up to what now looks like a minor masterpiece of the drive-in exploitation genre.

Al Adamson and Sam Sherman had started their own brand, Independent International Pictures, a few years previously, so they were ready and willing when Hemisphere head honcho Kane Lynn came to Sherman with a lament that they had been unable to make a deal for the next Philippines-shot "Blood Island" entry. This film, already produced, was to be released by Roger Corman's New World Pictures as Beast of the Yellow Night. This might have been for the best, as Beast of the Yellow Night is an awful film, having little in common with the previous Blood Island entries; one might conjecture that the Filipino production team was running out of steam, as this last Blood Island entry was so disappointing. This product void on Hemisphere's part proved to be lucky, as BoB is a terrific film, far better than the film it was replacing, and an impressive effort from all involved. Adamson and Sherman had already knocked out a few winners from I-I, including Satan's Sadists, Horror of the Blood Monsters and the impossible Dracula vs Frankenstein.

Although producer Sam Sherman vociferously disagrees, the scenario of BoB runs a great deal like a Monogram/PRC Bela Lugosi quickie of the 1940s, with distinct touches of The Monster Maker, The Ape Man, and even The Corpse Vanishes. What these 40s quickies lacked (along with a coherent screenplay and decent cinematography) was lurid color-soaked gore, which BoB makes up for admirably.

Reusing the brash, bombastic Tito Arevalo score from Mad Doctor of Blood Island was also a genius stroke (even if motivated by economic factors), and lends BoB a creepy jungle-centric flavor which ties it uncannily to its Filipino cousins. Cinematography is unusually arty for this type of film, with many tight closeups of characters, making the sleazy pulp-fiction scenario quite intimate at times. Editing is also good, with some great montage and flashcut work so endemic to this time period. Some gruesome scenes of brain surgery easily fulfill the required "gross-out" factor. Adamson/Sherman even manage to sneak in a thrilling car chase and crash, and an exhilarating foot chase by two characters over a charismatic industrial setting, which ticks off two more "must have" boxes for any respectable drive-in thriller.

BoB ends in an extraordinary epilogue which predicts a horrible techno-fascist future for the luckless citizens of this fictional Middle Eastern country, turning them into lobotomized zombies doing the will of its leader. Credit Sam Sherman with this gruesome ending, told via grim narration annotated by a flashback montage of all the carnage which has led to this dark turning point in history - sort of prescient, I'd say. A dark brilliance haunts this magnificent final entry in the Hemisphere Blood Series, a drive-in legend of note; we even love the Bob LeBar title sequence.

Kent Taylor, 40s leading man who had a mini-comeback (mainly thanks to Al Adamson) appeared first in Brides of Blood, but in BoB takes on a whole new dimension of villainy, as a thoroughly evil, even diabolical mad doctor of the worst kind. Sweet Regina Carrol, Adamson's wife at around this time, gives possibly the best performance of her too-short film career as a rather despicable, duplicitous gold digger whose pretty face and soothing voice hide the heart of a vile serpent. "Zandor Vorkov" also gives the best performance of his too-short film career as a devoted lackey, a small role brimming with pathos and anguish; "Vorkov" was another seriously underused actor. John Bloom shines as usual, playing essentially the same character he played in Dracula vs Frankenstein and The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant: an innocent, giant boy-child who is exploited and abused by the cruel "grown-ups" who surround him. Bloom's performances are memorable, and it is a shame that he did not do more acting along this line. Everyone's favorite little person, Angelo Rossito, makes a terrific sidekick to the mad doctor, essentially reprising his role from the Bela Lugosi horror hit The Corpse Vanishes - and reinforcing the connection between BoB and any number of 1940's Poverty Row programmers. Sweet and saucy Vicki Volante, Adamson's recurring sexy victim, has a notable role as one of the mad doctor's chained victims. An entire reel of BoB is taken up with poor Volante's attempts to escape her dungeon prison, and you get the sense that Adamson was determined to really showcase his favorite female star; these scenes really verge on the fetishistic. Lastly, little Margo Hope shines as another of the mad doctor's blood-donor victims; her inclusion gives BoB a slightly Asian-centric flavor, aiding the attempt to make the film look like it could have come from "over there."

Some folks opine that Beast of Blood is the best of the Hemisphere Blood series, but it is actually the weakest entry - although it has its quotient of excessive gore, sleazy ambience and surreal horror elements (the beast's head on a plate is a highlight), the screenplay is weak, the cinematography pedestrian, and the scenario unfolds in a perfunctory manner. Alternately, Brides of Blood and Mad Doctor of Blood Island boasted lurid pulp screenplays, beautiful cinematography and bountiful production values, making them the two undisputed gems of the Filipino Blood Island entries. Brain of Blood hearkens back to those glorious films, and is a fitting end-cap to the Hemisphere Horror experiment.

Some of us saw each and every one of the Hemisphere Horrors at the drive-in (some multiple times due to sneaky title changes), and we loved every single minute if it. Long live Blood Island!

Turning an about-face from the tiresome slasher antics of Halloween 1 and 2, Halloween III is an entirely different creature, and not a sequel at all, one reason why the film was dismissed upon initial release, and has only found its rightful audience with the passage of time. H3 works because it is a deft combination of mystery thriller and horror film, overlaid with a thoroughly outlandish sci-fi premise, and manages to juggle these disparate elements - for the most part - successfully.

The plot is simplicity itself: a Celtic Warlock steals Stonehenge, using its infernal alien power to eliminate all the children in the world via an invocation of the ancient Gaelic blood sacrifice known as Samhain. Thanks to Nigel Kneale for the wonderful storyline, which in certain uncanny ways is a continuation of his excellent "Quatermass" franchise, in which humanity is threatened by super-powerful alien "outsiders." (Kneale's Anglophilic spirit is most vividly conveyed via the amusing fact that in H3, the Devil is clearly Irish.) Sadly, Kneale had his name removed from the credits when he saw how producers Carpenter & Hill shoehorned some gore effects into what is at heart a conspiratorial science-fiction thriller. But the amazing graphic violence is essential to the plot, and part of the film's enduring charm - just one reason why H3 is one of the great sci-fi/horror hybrids of all time.

Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin are terrific as what first appear to be garden-variety breeder protagonists, but evolve into canny inversions of expected genre stereotype. Atkins plays a morally and spiritually bereft doctor, husband and father, whose ability to run off with the first woman he meets reflects serious internal conflicts - and ironically positions him as an allegorical "hero on a journey" straight out of ancient mythology. Nelkin's memorable character - painted as specifically rudderless because she has just lost her father - effortlessly morphs into a tragic heroine of the old school, doomed by capricious Gods to a dire fate.

Yet the star of the show may well be Dan O'Herlihy, whose portrayal of an evil genius is brilliant, a clever reinterpretation of the "mad doctor" archetype depicted as a cross between a misanthropic toy maker and a cunning corporate predator.

The scenario is most effective perhaps as a trenchant commentary on Television's eminent power to brainwash the masses. The deliberately annoying Silver Shamrock TV commercials are meant to depict (equally annoying) real-world children's television, which, as underscored here, is nothing more than corporate brainwashing and mass indoctrination, to a capitalist/consumer lifestyle certainly, but also to inculcate brand loyalty in obedient, hypnotized consumers: regular Halloween masks are passé; only Silver Shamrock masks will do! The masks themselves are gloriously gruesome things, imprisoning the luckless children in their own eerie death shrouds.

Amongst many fine touches in this beautiful film are O'Herlihy's goon squad, comprised of super-human clockwork assassins, really just big toys designed by a mischievous, if malevolent tinkerer - a nice foreshadowing of the evils inherent in the malevolent Transhumanism movement.

The use of Hi-Tech wizardry in the service of ancient Celtic blood rites is almost too good to be true and - as far-fetched as it sounds - is far more in keeping with the original notion of the Halloween ritual. Although in essence science fiction, H3 does manage to fulfill audience expectations with some marvelous gore sequences, with an emphasis on facial deformity and rapid physiological mutation, and some incredible facial prosthetics by Tom Burman.

The gruesome deaths shown, with snakes and bugs emerging from various orifices of the defiled corpses, clearly allude to the tradition of biblical plagues, and align with H3's notion that modern corporate America has much in common with the spirit of Old Testament curses.

Another of H3's dark messages - eerily in keeping with current events - is that unfettered corporatism is predatory and parasitic. Put more bluntly = Capitalism kills. Naive parents put their faith in a serpentine toy empire, and in the end, lose their children to that insatiable Moloch.

And it is clearly stated in H3 that it is the coordinated collusion between Big Business, Big Advertising and Big Media - that "Unholy Trinity" of late-model capitalism - which creates the compelling socio-cultural juggernaut that has the power to decimate an entire population via demonstrably unsafe "consumer products" - another uncanny reference to events happening currently.

At the heart of H3 is the intriguing notion that ancient occult ritual can merge seamlessly with modern technology to create a diabolical new force for controlling the masses, and the scenario illustrates this disturbing notion brilliantly. The very idea that a madman could - with the aid of "science" - put a magic spell (or more accurately, a curse) on an entire population is an eerie and prescient notion which energizes the narrative of this often-great fantastic melodrama.

A big part of H3's success is due to the gorgeous cinematography of Dean Cundey, which includes some lovely scenes of Santa Mira, the quintessential "factory town," where rural beauty jostles uncomfortably with malevolent industrial intrusion.

Also welcome is an extraordinary synth-based music score by John Carpenter and Allan Howarth, a quantum leap from the dreary scores for the previous two Halloween entries; this time, the music is uncanny, haunting, sublime.

H3 is such an exciting departure from the traditional horror template, one is tempted to call this odd duck something like an "anti-sequel." Science fiction at this time was usually reserved for dull CGI dreck like The Thing, so seeing something this smart and dark was really a breath of fresh air to some.

As for the oft-mentioned and numerous plot holes, a gripping thriller needn't resolve every little narrative glitch to succeed. One reviewer mentioned the theft of Stonehenge, and groused, "Why wasn't this international news?" Well, if this snarky fellow had watched H3 carefully, he would recall that the theft of Stonehenge was in fact addressed, via a breaking-news television broadcast, when Challis is relaxing at the local saloon. Lesson learned: before you complain about supposed plot holes, it's best to actually watch the movie.

And although the finale can be seen as open-ended, it is definitely implied that "the 3rd channel" (ABC?) refused to interrupt their brainwashing - er, "programming," and allowed the blood ritual to continue to completion, thus exterminating all the children in America, at least, and perhaps the world. How did a movie so grim, so angry, so nihilistic, so misanthropic, ever escape the staid gates of Hollywood? It's hard to believe that Carpenter/Hill also released the excruciating Escape From New York the same year, a profound failure which is light years away from the sublime majesty of this extraordinary cultural artifact, which looks better with every viewing, confirming that H3 was indeed a concept ahead of its time.

As for Mr. Kneale, one wonders if his highly modified script for H3 was a response to - or radical revision of - his work on The Quatermass Conclusion (aka Quatermass 4, 1979), the reception of which was extremely disappointing; one might even ponder if Kneale's use of Stonehenge as the occult trigger in H3 was a response to his inability to use said monument in the filming of Q4? If so, turning the main character of Kneale's long-running franchise into a savvy techno-villain was a genius stroke, as Dr. Quatermass was always sort of a boring hero anyways...

Regardless, H3 is stark proof that a bright, fantastic screenplay plus a decent budget can, on occasion, create something rare and subversive and - as witness H3's devoted fan base today - some great films are just ahead of their time. H3 was a bold attempt to mature the tired horror genre, and as most horror buffs are terminal adolescents, it's little wonder they didn't "get" this strange, smart - and clearly visionary - thriller from another world.

Although it was marketed in the US as a titillating "Adults Only!" attraction, The Flamboyant Sex is really a darling piece of 60s "existential alienation" cinema, much deeper than its shabby domestic marketing campaign would suggest; this remarkable Swedish production inhabits that alluring borderland between smut and theater, between low exploitation and high art, a missing link between populist and high-brow culture.

The film opens with a delightful prologue crawl, one of those structural anomalies so prevalent to cheap exploitation films from the the earliest days of cinema, used both to preface the story and somewhat "legitimize" the upcoming (assuredly tawdry) scenario. The ensuing plot is simplicity itself: Barbara and Lena, two Swedish naifs, languish in Paris, penniless and forlorn, as the darker forces of the city stalk them, threatening to swallow them up.

Barbara finds work as an artist's model, baring herself for the cold, cruel eyes of strangers. Lena ends up working at a piteous commercial laundry, a soul-sucking industrial hellscape that could have fallen out of a late Dickens novel. The girls soon learn that youth and beauty mean nothing in a city full of unemployed young beauties.

Barbara is the more worldly one, her sad, slow moral decline both poignant and horrific; she is so enervated by her collapse into depravity she is completely unaware that one of her later pickups is in fact a homosexual. Barbara later stumbles upon the corpse of a derelict, surely foreshadowing her own grim future. Lena remains an innocent throughout her ordeal, her unflappable moral courage aptly illustrated via a touching scene in which she plays with a neighbor child, bringing her as much joy as the youngster, a much-needed momentary respite from the "adult" world, and underscoring her role as an "eternal virgin." At film's end, Barbara has tried - and failed - to escape Paris, and finally lies on her bed, defeated and defiled. Barbara, meanwhile, whiles away the pre-dawn hours dancing to happy Jazz, now completely accepting of her curious destiny.

The film is awash with various slices of urban Parisian life: a Bohemian couple living in romantic squalor, sad animals made to perform humiliating tricks for a heartless master, the bustling, faceless crowds at the ubiquitous cafes, crabby landladies screaming for the rent.

And throughout, there is the undercurrent of jazz (that "decadent" American music) haunting the souls of our protagonists. The breezy, spare jazz score adds immeasurably to the already nihilistic atmosphere, the degraded nature of modern Paris nicely symbolized by this omnipresent noise as well as the violent, despairing, even horrific artwork hanging everywhere, meant to convey sharp moral decline. As well, the jazz clubs feature conspicuous racial mixing, possibly yet another sly stab at the city's moral descent into barbarism? Indeed, one might argue that Art is seen as a demonic force throughout the film, as it is used quite vividly to ensnare and degrade our lovely heroines, "victims of an immature dream about Paris."

In an amazing epilogue (narrated by Bret Morrison!), another foolish ingenue arrives in Paris, blissfully unaware she is about to be swallowed up by this evil metropolis: and it all takes place in one dreary, soul-numbing day! The moody monochrome photography, wonderful neo-realistic pretensions, exotic locations and strong performances make The Flamboyant Sex look at times remarkably like an Ingmar Bergman film of the same vintage, but without all the heavy-handed allegory and ham-fisted meta-theatrics. The film is surely a profound existential tract, about survival and compromise, about the shattering of infantile illusions and the squashing of youthful hubris. That said, American jerk-offs looking for cheap thrills may have been horrified at the unrelentingly morose mood of this compellingly dark film, painting a most unflattering portrait of life amongst the urban damned. Aside from some light nudity, there is precious little of sexploitation in this daringly modern look at postwar life. Pearls before swine, I say!

The Swinger is one of those singular films which seem to define an era, reverently hewing to existing cinematic and narrative convention while radically subverting those elements, an amazing cultural artifact which may make you wonder, "how did something so unique and contrary escape the stifling clutches of studio Hollywood?" The film is, at first glance, a curious and perhaps unwieldy combination of parody and homage to unadulterated old-world sexism; a last gasp, perhaps, of the "old order." A cynic might even sniff that The Swinger is little more than "a psychedelic Don Knotts comedy with sex," but it is so much more.

In some wise, The Swinger is the logical extension of the bedroom comedies of the early 1960s (i.e., Pillow Talk), a "square" Hollywood sex farce that dares to burst its fetters to become something bold and daring; add to this a loving nod to the "youth counterculture" movement of the day, albeit from a strictly traditionalist (one might even say "puritanical") angle. The Hollywood "youth counterculture" film of the 1960s was a precarious, dangerous experiment, creating many casualties (think Skidoo or The Phynx), but The Swinger is a rare example of that diabolical experiment actually working.

The Swinger takes said Hollywood bedroom farce, and invigorates it with some avant-garde experiments in cinematic revisionism, using a formulaic screenplay liberally peppered with trenchant social commentary. The film borrows two common (even hoary) 60s tropes - the imposter pretending to be who he is not, and the time-honored "A Virgin in Babylon" narrative arc of the low sex comedy - and mutates them beyond recognition in the service of something modern and challenging.

What we have with The Swinger is a fascinating example of the changing of the guards, the old Hollywood formula merging with new techniques and contrarian sensibilities to form a curious hybrid - a form completely new and exciting to some. Corny scenes such as the old lech publisher chasing young starlets around his desk - something almost out of the burlesque era - crash into stunningly modern montage sequences, creating an aesthetic disorientation completely energizing to the rapt viewer.

The heart of The Swinger, of course, and arguably the sole reason for its existence, is the extraordinary talent of Ms Ann-Margret. She is not so much actress or singer or dancer here as a force of nature, and her electrifying presence performs a ritual alchemy which energizes the entire film, bringing the tawdry script and the avant-garde montage together in a blissful harmony which serves as vicarious "yin-yang" invocation of powerful socio-cultural forces. Ann-Margret is the embodiment of the divine goddess-warrior, an implacable, unstoppable force with the capacity to revolutionize or overthrow existing social structures; her character Kelly Olsson* radically changes the corrupt phallocentric environment which entraps her - and on her own terms - so in some wise could be considered a strong proto-feminist archetype, all the more ironic in that she uses her "sex" as her main weapon of conquest.

The fact that Kelly eerily mirrors the actress' own travails in Hollywood makes the character virtually jump off the screen (*even more ironic when you consider that Olsson is Ann-Margret's real surname!). One could even argue that The Swinger is semi-autobiographical - at least in an archetypal sense - concerning the treacherous waters a young lady must navigate successfully to flourish (or even survive) in show business. Yet The Swinger doesn't merely showcase its main character: it fetishizes, even obsesses on her, the camera following her around like a love-struck stalker.

In sharp (and crucial) counterpoint to Kelly's blunt sexuality, Tony Franciosa plays a character which - for all his pretensions to progressive liberalism, is strictly a straight-laced, 9-to-5 kinda guy, the perfect conservative foil and dimwit muse for the demonically mischievous Kelly.

Structurally, The Swinger interrupts the narrative frequently to offer some breathtaking, highly stylized montage sequences (including one of the greatest pre-credits sequences of all time); either you appreciate these radical editorial splashes, or you really have no business calling yourself a film buff. The Swinger also features, like its ostensible prototype Bye Bye Birdie, high-energy dance numbers with great choreography, plus several winning examples of breaking "the fourth wall," a not uncommon trick during this time period but done brilliantly here.

Amongst several strong contenders, the infamous "body painting" sequence is likely The Swinger's single greatest set-piece, in essence a subversive attempt to sneak a full-blown sex orgy into a mainstream Hollywood film; in this reckless conceit it succeeds wildly. Also worth noting is a montage of Kelly shopping at swanky Saks Fifth Avenue, an adorable collage of still shots animated to show our heroine's ability to effortlessly alternate between stunning beauty and tomboyish charm.

After baffling and challenging and delighting it's stupefied audience for 80 minutes, The Swinger ends on a deliriously strange high note: after chasing each other around for a bit (with Ann-Margret riding her own motorcycle!), the star-crossed lovers collide, dying horribly in a shocking, gruesome car crash. Just when the audience is recoiling in shock from this traumatic calamity, the film literally rewinds and apologizes, stating that "it" would never end a film in such a downbeat (or lazy) manner. Kelly and Ric end up living happily ever after, in true fairy tale fashion, albeit within a post-modern meta-fable for a new generation.

It is no wonder that a film as "in your face" as The Swinger had trouble finding its rightful audience; some might find its confrontational tone, arty editorial pretensions and shamelessly retrograde aspects just "too much." But others celebrate delicious cinematic anomalies like The Swinger, glorious exceptions to the rule which come along so rarely, and are cherished with fierce devotion when they do. Like Lord Love a Duck and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Swinger is a unique cultural marker of its era, both reflecting and revising its predecessors in ways memorable and uncanny.

You say that Death Ship isn't a disaster movie? Wrongo! Death Ship was released theatrically in the U. S., in the spring of 1980 (I saw it first-run at the drive-in), and the preview distinctly sold it as a disaster film along the lines of popular Hollywood productions of the era such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm and Earthquake. Being a diehard "ghost ship" fan, I had high hopes for Death Ship, but what I saw instead was the worst excuse for a movie I had experienced in many years.

The blame lies largely with co-producer Sandy Howard, known throughout the world as one of the cheapest, most miserly hack producers ever; worse than Harry Alan Towers, and that's saying something. Howard and gang obviously spent NO money on this thing, and it shows, painfully.

The film cuts every corner imaginable, and there are many "cheat shots," where quick cutting and shaky camera movement stand in for where an actual special effect should be.

The casting is wholly uninspired as well. George Kennedy makes a good macho stoic, but he does NOT make a good slow-burn psychotic or possessed maniac. Nope, not even close. Richard Crenna has to be the most boring leading man of all time, and that includes Bert Convy. The rest of the cast are serious nobodies, and they frankly stink.

One of the frustrations with Death Ship - the notion of a Nazi torture ship being eternally energized by the spirits of both tormentors and victims - is terrific, and thanks can go to the brilliant Jack Hill for this promising concept; how the skid-row producers mangled his smart idea is beyond criminal.

The final scenario is lackluster and unfocused, the photography is embarrassing, and the awkward editing actually works to sabotage any suspense the story tries to amass. Finally, the music must be awful, because even after two viewings, I have no memory of it at all.

So, why the 10 stars? Because upon reflection, and after viewing it anew after a welcome rest of 40 years, it seems fair to say that Death Ship might be the worst disaster film ever made, in fact possibly the "Plan Nine" of disaster films - even worse than The Cassandra Crossing! An epic fail on every count, an abysmal example of cut-rate filmmaking at its most cynical and rude, Death Ship may be some sort of bad film legend, as gruesome and ungodly as the legend of the ghost ship the film fails so miserably at portraying. It is encouraging to see that a few other reviewers "got" the joke that Death Ship may be a candidate for inclusion in the great trash film pantheon; it sure ain't a candidate for anything else...

Vampires Night Orgy is one of those classic Euro-Horror legends which remains murky in memory, as it resorts to relentless horror movie cliche, yet retains a vivid quality nonetheless due to its strengths - abundant atmosphere, a quirky music score, and authentic old-European setting. Indeed, although the scenario is set in contemporary times, the story unfolds in a foggy temporal netherworld, and much of the action harkens back to barbaric practices of the dark ages, such as punishing unruly peasants by dismembering them. The attacks of the living dead are somewhat effective, although often filmed too darkly, and the plot sort of peters out in the final reel, but VNO delivers the goods nonetheless. Evil seductive vampiress, human meat, sequential elimination of the protagonists, there's much to like here, and the fate of the small girl still sends shivers up my spine. Considering the production date, it's not hard to imagine VNO being a Spanish attempt at a Night of the Living Dead. My first viewing of this great mess was circa 1975, at the drive-in, along with Paul Naschy's wonderful vampire opus, Dracula's Great Love. Let me just say that both films came across as strictly hallucinatory at the time, and for many years after I could not recall the title of either film. Seeing them today on safe DVD is not a letdown, as both films retain that surreal "Where are we?" quality I so well remember from first viewing. The ending of VNO, with its hint of Brigadoon, is a nice touch, and makes the film more gothic fable than out-and-out horror film. I for one liked the score, with its wild mood swings, as it conveys the dreamy, mythic aspect of the tale quite well. And for some of us, there was nothing better than enjoying English-dubbed Euro-Horror on the big screen - a moment in time long gone...

Arguably one of the great independent horror films of the 1960s, sad reviews stating that The Dungeon of Harrow is "bad," "awful," "cheap" and "terrible" merely reinforce how dramatically the audience for such films has deteriorated over the years - soon, there may be no-one left who is observant enough to appreciate regional indie gems such as this, all the more reason for us remaining fans to champion these remarkable cultural artifacts, from an era long gone.

Filmed almost single-handedly by the infamous Pat Boyette, who started his career in radio and television and ended it as a vaunted comic illustrator for the equally infamous Charlton Comics, Dungeon has the unmistakable flavor of the Texas landscape where it was filmed, and this adds immensely to its uncanny atmosphere.

As stated by Boyette himself in interviews, Dungeon was filmed quickly, cheaply and with a tiny crew, which explains the film's unerringly shopworn look. Yet while philistines decry these aesthetic and budgetary constraints as some sort of self-imposed sin or conscious flaw, in the case of horror films, the cruder the better in many cases, in terms of creating a creepy scenario with a disturbing atmosphere.

Dungeon is, first and foremost, a gothic-flavored comic book brought to life - think of an EC horror comic based on an Edgar Allan Poe tale, or perhaps even a gruesome Classics Illustrated title. The film is shot very artily on well-crafted sets, with unusual color-soaked lighting, making the film look at times literally like comic panels brought to life. A self-consciously melodramatic script, with long dialogue exchanges, and an abundance of voiceover narration used primarily to convey important exposition - florid and very Poe-like - effectively mirror the same narrative conceits in your average horror comic of the day. Even the creepy, tinny library music score reminds one in a sense of the ragged pulp paper used to print these comic books, and adds a definably tactile element to the production. For my money, Dungeon is a very effective (and likely deliberate) attempt at a filmed comic book.

The script is literate, profound and shamelessly verbose. There are some strong performances, especially from William McNulty and Helen Hogan. (McNulty's "Mad Count" is actually quite an extraordinary character.)

In the best spirit of Poe, the themes in Dungeon reflect some of that author's prime obsessions. One of the main themes is genetic deterioration due to the inbreeding of old bloodlines, with madness as an inevitable consequence of familial arrogance and societal isolation.

Another prevalent theme is the Reversal of Fortune, wherein even a sheltered, pampered snob is summarily forced to struggle "Mano a Mano" in a hostile new environment.

And then there is the always-dramatic theme of Innocence defiled, sucked into a vortex of malignancy and decay. As well, the sanctity of the individual is inevitably undermined and contaminated by his contact with society; think "No man is an island."

Finally, the notorious scene in the dungeon, with the Mad Countess forcing herself on our luckless hero, is a viscerally chilling depiction of extreme revulsion to physical and sexual contact, of the proverbial "sins of the flesh," an entirely Victorian notion, conveyed beautifully here. Of course, each and every one of the above themes are dealt with exhaustively in the works of Poe, so Dungeon could easily be called an uncredited adaptation of various tropes of that author's august canon.

Overall, Dungeon depicts a truly Darwinian world, a brutal environment in which life is precarious and survival always endangered. In line with this overarching motif, Dungeon boasts extremely strong content for its day, placing it at the edge of acceptable commercial entertainment. Memorable moments include: the Count trying to drown a mute servant-girl with "poisoned" wine; the Count maiming a sea Captain with a fiery torch in the face; A young woman ripped to shreds by dogs, the bloody corpse graphically displayed; the mute servant-girl stretched on a torture rack, paralyzed with fear. The lurid script reinforces this harsh content in poignant throwaway lines such as, "Poor Ann died from the ordeal of the water torture."

Add to this a deliciously bleak "twist" ending, and you have one of the most pessimistic stories in all of horror, a grim tragedy which ruthlessly conveys the bitter machinations of a cruel Fate.

Curiously, Dungeon also has the distinct vibe of a mystery thriller from the early talkie era and, considering the bizarre color scheme throughout, one could easily imagine the film being shot in monochrome, and then badly "colorized," as the garish colors (on the restored print at least) creates a surreal ambience which often borders on the psychedelic.

As far as being a rip-off or imitation of the then-popular AIP movies based on the dark fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Dungeon actually conveys, through its overtly shabby atmosphere and unbearably grim narrative, the morbid, obsessive prose of Poe better than most of those more mainstream films. The palpable sense of madness, decay and despair in Dungeon elicits the spirit of Poe breathlessly, and the film is far creepier than many of the "Hollywood Poes."

There may be no Gothic horror film of the 1960s as unremittingly dark, morbid and utterly depressing as The Dungeon of Harrow and, considering its humble origins, this stunning film shines as an example of what true talent can accomplish, budget be damned.

If you can't appreciate the singular brilliance of The Dungeon of Harrow, you should return immediately to binge-watching the latest "Showtime Original."

Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker is one of the last great TV movies of the magnificent 1970s, containing some over-the-top elements which make it a jaw-droppingly tawdry and lurid experience. The film is sensationalist to a fault, almost a living tabloid newspaper, detailing in gruesome detail a phenomenon which may or may not have actually existed - young girls hitchhiking with dubious strangers. If this did occur, poor girls! The notion of the sexy virgin hitchhiker was a hardy movie genre during this time period, with films such as Pickup on 101, The Hitchhikers and Girls on the Road examples of theatrical films which took the subject to sometimes surreal extremes. This being a TV movie makes Diary only a tad less sleazy than its theatrical brethren, but not by much.

Charlene Tilton plays Julie, a very good girl who gets a job at a local hot dog stand, in order to save up cash to buy her own car. Sadly, her job is eight miles from home, so she simply must stick out her thumb and hitch rides with random strangers, because of course neither parent can drive her there, god forbid! In fact, the main reason Julie (and her pals) hitch rides with creepy strangers is because their square parents won't buy them cars. What comes to mind first off is the extraordinary naiveté of these cute young things, seriously underdressed in most cases, carelessly hopping into any strange contraption that happens by, a narrative conceit almost too hackneyed to be true. Also unaddressed - excepting in the most peripheral way - is the families' seeming indifference to what is a demonstrably hideous crime wave occurring right in their collective backyard.

Dick Van Patten, the archetypal Dad from Eight is Enough, is pretty humorous as Julie's father, alternately cloying and strident, and coming across as pretty ineffectual overall. Katherine Helmond is adequately long-suffering as Julies' Mom, although Helmond would really hit her stride in Soap, essentially playing a parody of all her thankless "straight" characters from her TV Movie days. Christopher Knight, the middle Brady boy, is kinda creepy as Julie's kinda seedy boyfriend, who - like everyone else in Julie's social circle - seems unwilling to offer any transportation assistance whatsoever. Last but definitely not least, Julie's perky kid sister is played by none other than the delightful Katy Kurtzman, one of the great child actors of the era, who will be forever remembered for her star turn with Burl Ives in the memorable TV movie-musical, The New Adventures of Heidi.

The circuitous screenplay careens all over the place, and seems at times on the verge of crashing completely. The best scenes, of course, are those in which innocent girls find themselves at the mercy of sex-crazed driver-predators. Diary does contain some surprisingly strong scenes, including a really creepy hospital scene wherein one of Julie's pals lies in bed, her face beaten to a bloody pulp, wailing and weeping as she describes her rape and torture by a deranged motorist. Also unnerving are grisly reports of local girls getting raped and murdered by strangers in motor vehicles, gleefully chirped over ubiquitous transistor radios. And, in what has to be one of the most implausible plot points of the entire 1970s, it is actually suggested that Julie might make a career for herself as a sculptress! It should be noted that the title promises a wraparound or framing device totally absent from the film - at no point is it suggested that this sad tale was recorded in Julie's (or anyone else's) diary, depicted either via narrative or voiceover. It just makes for a great title, that's all.

Yet what catapults Diary into sheer "cultfilm legend" territory are the ham-fisted inclusion of two then-recent cultural references, both inserted purely for exploitation value. In contrast to the many sleazy gropers and molesters who (apparently) infest California highways, there is also a bona-fide serial killer loose amongst them, and he drives a big black car (either a Lincoln Continental or a Cadillac, hard to tell). This killer waits in the hills near the main highway, his open pipes roaring like a lion, ready to pounce upon yet another bit of young prey. The car is formidable - immense, sleek, black, with lots of chrome - and the camera lingers on various angles of the sinister vehicle, trying to create the impression that it is a "demon car," possibly piloted by the Devil himself. No self-respecting film buff of the era can fail to see these scenes as crude rip-offs of similar moments in Universal's 1977 smash hit, The Car, the studio's wildly successful answer to Spielberg's dumb and overrated Jaws. Indeed, the fetishization of the "demon car" comes straight from various scenes in The Car, although that terrific film handled the effect much, much better; here, the same impression is created awkwardly, haphazardly, even sloppily - but the spirit is definitely there. And to add insult to injury, when we finally see the driver/killer, he is a non-descript male distinguishable by two telling features: big aviator sunglasses, and a fire-red dress shirt. Again, this image of an oddly-dressed charismatic predator instantly brings up comparisons with Jim Jones, the mad preacher who somehow convinced almost a thousand lost souls to kill themselves for Jones' cruelly misnamed "Peoples Temple" In November 1978. In photos and news footage, Jones - especially in his latter days - was seen to almost exclusively wear aviator glasses (to hide his deteriorated physical condition due to drug use) and flaming red shirts. The similarity is uncanny, and with this TV movie airing mere months after the tragedy of Jonestown, there can be little doubt that this was an opportunistic (and quite tasteless) attempt to add some topical "shock value" to an already very sleazy production.

Yet with all the deadly shenanigans going on, Diary ends almost in a stalemate, as the killer goes free, and a weird, open-ended finale cautions the audience that all those sleazy predators are still out there, and if they catch one, more will immediately leap from out of the shadows. Enough to scare any prospective teenage hitchhiker - and that was probably the point. In a poignant coda, little Katy Kurtzman, shockingly underdressed for a road trip in a bikini and light blouse, stands on a street corner, thumb out, just waiting to be picked off by the next creep to happen by. The tragedy inherent in this grim parting shot can send shivers down the spine, or reduce the viewer to tears. They sure don't make 'em like this anymore, folks!

Something Weird is one of the strangest exploitation movies of the 1960s, and one of Herschell Gordon Lewis' high watermarks, although that isn't a stretch considering the excremental nature of most of his output. Lewis, of course, courted infamy in the industry by cranking out revolting horror pictures which reveled in the torture and murder of females (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, Color Me Blood Red, etc.).

And while SW is not as thoroughly misogynist as the aforementioned legendary gorefests, it is still fiercely anti-woman. The villain of the piece is a real, live witch, a hideous old crone who blackmails unfortunate males into becoming her lover in exchange for the return of lost physical beauty.

And here is where SW becomes inadvertently brilliant, as it ruminates fitfully on the sacred power of physical beauty in a dreary, superficial world of guys and chicks always trying to hit on each other. Lewis' film world is a lowly phallocentric one, where males are always on the prowl for easy sex, and women are either willing dupes for easy pickup, or else unwilling harridans, and therefore acceptable targets for murderous male rage. Lewis' grim, dim-witted cinematic universe is one in which the first thing guys do when they get home from work is sock down a tumbler of whiskey and think of how they're gonna get laid tonight.

The witch is truly something to see. Her alter ego, the beautiful Ellen Parker, is a passable, if low-rent enchantress; but in "witch" mode (in ridiculously awful makeup and wig) the character becomes a thoroughly surreal, cartoon-like illustration of a small child's idea of a witch from a fairy tale book. Even the witch's annoying cackle, like something an untrained junior high school student might assay while attempting to channel Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz, is so unnerving as to be almost diabolical in and of itself. (The actress playing Ellen Parker is Elizabeth Lee, while "The Hag" is credited to "Murdite Arums," but until somebody corrects me, I'm gonna say both parts were played by Lee.) Even worse, there are a couple of scenes where the witch is allowed to cackle for an uncomfortably long time, an editorial faux pas guaranteed to make the viewer squirm in his seat.

This completely infantile depiction of a storybook witch is well in keeping with Lewis' male universe, a childish dimension in which ego-driven man-babies demand complete and immediate satisfaction from all women in their periphery - or else. This "man-baby" archetype is well-illustrated by the two male leads, neither of whom can hide their dimwit lusts and adolescent prejudices, each of whom thus become willing slaves to the "evil hag" who steals their souls, and most importantly, their sexual powers which, in this low-brow swinger's paradise, is certain death.

The weakest element of SW by far is a subplot wherein Mitch is commissioned by the local police force to solve the grisly murders of several females. Two things conspire to make this plot point anemic and unfulfilled. Firstly, although there supposed to be about 7 murders occurring in a matter of months, only two are depicted in any fashion on-screen, and these are shown in a very wimpy, completely confusing and unconvincing manner. This is strange coming from Lewis, who previously reveled in depicting - in great detail and at great length - the gory dismemberment of attractive young women. Secondly, the attempt to place the use of a psychic medium as an aid to detective work in a historical context, as in the real-life work of renowned psychic Peter Hurkos, fails completely due to the lousy script and the equally lousy exposition by the always-underrehearsed actors. Here is where Lewis' films fail most consistently, in their awkward attempts to convey a coherent storyline using daft dialogue delivered by woefully incompetent amateurs.

Yet Something Weird does work as some sort of crazy postmodern fairy tale for mentally crippled adults, as things happen which should only occur in the fairy tale world. Ancient Phantasmagorical volumes appear out of thin air. The witch appears normal and benign to certain people, but as a hideous cackling demon to others.

Most intriguingly, Lewis plays with some metaphysical manipulation in SW, and while the effects themselves are risible, the impact is at times inadvertently profound. When Mitch is first under the influence of his unwanted psychic burden, he writhes in agony on his bed, whilst pulsating strobe lights and bizarre guitar music effectively convey his tortured mental state. Later, when a laughably amoral government agent inexplicably gives Mitch a bottle of LSD pills, his subsequent "trip" is conveyed via long sequences of the poor sap running in slow motion in a red-tinged hellscape - an impossibly lazy and corny effect which should not work, but uncannily does. Bedsheets on wires attack their pajama-clad owners, a bafflingly abstract scene worthy of Artaud's Theater of the Absurd.

Lewis made several movies which toyed with metaphysical concepts completely out of his grasp intellectually and aesthetically, and as pathetic as they are, they are far more interesting than his belabored attempts to annihilate womankind with extreme prejudice. Something Weird is in good company with The Wizard of Gore, The Gruesome Twosome, The Psychic - and even his bizarre kiddie movie, Jimmy The Boy Wonder - in their attempts to tackle wild concepts such as telepathy, psychic torture, parallel dimensions, and time travel, with expectedly mixed results but fascinating nonetheless. (Even Monster a Go Go, Lewis' nihilistic mish-mash of a movie taken from Bill Rebane's unfinished project Terror at Mid-Day, contains enough temporal distortion and structural anomaly to qualify as one of Lewis' bonafide cinematic experiments, as it appears to take place in a defiantly abstract third-person narrative dimension.)

The wild music score (likely by Lewis himself under one of his pseudonyms) greatly augments the weirdness of SW, and is one aspect which should be given major credit for creating this mind-boggling piece of under-achieving cinematic detritus. Tongue firmly in cheek, Lewis coined in his advertising for Monster a Go Go a tagline which could apply to his entire output: "There's never been a movie like this - thank goodness!"

If Something Weird had been filmed in a less artless manner, with better cinematography, tighter editing, and stronger actors given more rehearsals, it might have really been some sort of art-house masterpiece, as the screenplay itself is pretty strong. But then again, with these "improvements", it would not be that deranged piece of brilliantly unique film trash which is "Something Weird."

James Bryan's Hell Riders is the amazing, sublime pinnacle of a very bad movie genre, the outlaw biker gang film. Hell Riders takes every single cliche of that weary, predictable genre and blows it up bigger than life, to glorious effect. The characters are absurdist caricatures of their prototypes, and act accordingly. Action takes place for little or no reason at all, and the ramshackle plot lurches along in fits and spurts. Where Hell Riders excels is in its use of very strong content, making the bigger, better biker films look downright timid by comparison. The Hell Riders gang have no redeeming qualities whatsoever - they are the embodiment of evil incarnate, an engine of destruction manifested to wreak havoc on polite society. Their attacks on hapless citizens are vicious and brutal, their treatment of women barbaric, their main goal the total annihilation of civilization. Set largely in a small, quiet Western town, the use of an old Wild West setting is appropriate, because all of these biker films were really nothing more than allegorical Westerns in modern garb. The finale, in which the beleaguered townsfolk gather heavy artillery and slaughter the bikers with extreme prejudice, is a righteous, cathartic massacre worthy of a Peckinpah film. TV stars Adam West and Tina Louise stand out admirably in what could easily have been thankless roles, and the extraordinary Renee Harmon is delightful as a very unlikely, indeed cartoonish, leather-clad biker moll. Hell Riders takes a shopworn genre and clarifies it to the point of film poetry, and as with Bryan's other films, Hell Riders is photographed brilliantly, and looks far prettier than it has any right to. Not exactly a satire, but certainly something bigger than a straight melodrama, Bryan does in Hell Riders what he did for the slasher film in Don't Go In The Woods, and the urban crime thriller in Executioner Part II - enlarge and expand genre tropes until they literally burst at the seams, creating magnificently bizarre and unforgettable cinematic experiences which defy all attempts to pigeonhole them as merely "bad movies." For my money, this puts Bryan in that august canon of indie filmmakers who create beautiful outlaw cinema on the skimpiest of budgets, along with folks like Ed Wood and Andy Milligan, leaving most similar bloated Hollywood trash in the dust. If Hell Riders is the "worst" biker film ever made, I'll take the worst over the best any day.

Damon Packard is the most unique indie filmmaker working today. He juggles style, genre and time period brilliantly in order to create wholly post-modern melodramas at the home-movie level, insightful fantasy-tinged narratives unlike anything else being made today. Packard's films deal with the "new middle class," the poor, deranged peasants, the 98% forgotten and/or exploited by the ruling elite. Everyone in Packard's universe - as in the world today - lives in his/her own protective reality bubble, which may or may not overlap with another person's reality bubble. There is no longer any point of common intellectual or spiritual ground between humans, and when consensus reality becomes erased, the fantastic becomes mundane. Thus, a Packard heroine may calmly observe waves of black ectoplasm weaving through the morning sky and be completely unclear as to whether it is a hallucination from her troubled mind, or a manifestation from a parallel reality. As "reality" no longer has any common basis of shared experience, all experience may be seen as the revelation of a metaphysical savant, a true "seer," or the mental hiccups of a hopeless nut. Packard's heroes are all the slackers, losers, burn-outs and loonies who can't make it in the "real" world - because nobody knows what is "real" anymore. Yet these sad sacks neither can die, so they suffer the torments of existence in a very concrete hell-scape - the barren, soulless strip-mall "reality" of modern America.

Foxfur is Packard's masterpiece - it clarifies and distills everything which has gone before. Rarely before has an indie filmmaker with such meager resources come up with such a convincingly coherent alternate universe, one wholly surreal yet immediately recognizable. In Foxfur, Packard also creates his most indelible "character," re-painting the post-modern tragic heroine as a mentally-ill, homeless bum, whose truly tragic aspect is that she is nonetheless young, attractive and popular. The lesson is brutal: if a "cute young thing" like Foxfur cannot make it in this brave new world of erased consensus reality, whom can? Yet Foxfur is a "character" only in that she is a recurring narrative anchor within different segments of the film, for Packard's brilliant conceit is to cast the titular character with several different actresses, each "Foxfur" dutifully carrying on her predecessor's expositional duties, while becoming her "own" version of Packard's intriguing melodramatic chimera. Two points are made with this daring, exciting trope - one, that all "Foxfurs" - that is, young women looking for meaning in life - are entirely interchangeable, one easily replacing the other as a societal "type" occurring with stultifying repetition in anywhere U. S. A. Yet another point confronts the first in an intriguing, problematic way. Although ostensibly the "same" person dropped into in a different setting, each "Foxfur" not only looks different (understandable as each is played by a different person), but has a profoundly different personality, a distinctive approach to connecting with the world. One Foxfur is a thinker, one is a cursed neurotic, one is a fearless warrior, one is a searcher for truth, etc. The overarching point is that each person - although they may look like a clone of everybody else - is a singular, unique individual with specific talents, desires and fears, and with a specific life trajectory. Foxfur states unequivocally that even in a mass society the individual is sacred, even if the recipient of that dubious honor sees themselves as just another flop in a sea of losers.

Foxfur meditates brilliantly on the everyday torments of modern urban life. In this post-modern hellscape, random encounters lead to shocking epiphanies, and the quietest moment can lurch suddenly into graphic violence. The explosive nature of modern culture is consistently expressed by one of Packard's indelible archetypes - the obese, frustrated American male, his teetering always on the verge of violence. In short, civilization in the Packard universe is a horrible, comical stalemate, in which nobody gets anywhere, yet spends all their waking hours trying. Overriding all this is a dark reality as bleak as it is farcical - the complete absence of an abiding, coherent reality, a stiflingly phony world lacking meaning or history. In this sterile purgatory, nothing is known or knowable - a horrific existential clown show in which idiots bump into each other and apologize, "Do you know where I am supposed to be?" Foxfur's world is a murky inferno of lost souls, in which one character can sincerely ask another, "Why are you in a wheelchair?", while the other can honestly sigh, "I don't know..."

Yet the most extraordinary revelation in Foxfur is that the world "as you know it" ended in 1982. Not in a grimly existential way, of course - we still live, breathe, eat and sleep (or at least we think we do) - but in a spiritual, metaphysical sense, which any sensitive soul who was alive in the early 1980s could sense clearly. What changed in 1982 was something intangible, and certainly not something which could be easily chronicled. What changed in 1982 was the nature of "reality" itself, and one of the ways in which this shift was immediately "visible" was in the creative arts. Popular culture since 1982 became profoundly dumb, fake, obvious, redundant, and cannibalistic of earlier cultural products, all the while looking more slick and corporate. Right around 1982, movies, TV and music all started to sound "phony," polished but empty, lacking a certain "soul." It was impossible back then to articulate what was going on, and indeed many of our peers didn't even notice, thinking that 1980s culture was "terrific." But some of us saw... and I am convinced Packard saw, too. Packard has astutely captured on film the disintegration of modern culture, and its replacement with idiot zombie-slave culture - a genius stroke, surely, from the Alejandro Jodorowsky of post-modern America.

Don't Go in the Woods is a simple yet highly effective low-budget riff on all those boring corporate "slasher in the woods" movies, with a naive charm and joie de vivre sorely lacking in similar Hollywood product.

Firstly, the characters are real people, not spooky Hollywood clones, and they convey far more humanity than their Central Casting clones in similar films.

Even better, Woods features an egalitarian cross-section of humanity traipsing through the forest, a breath of fresh air after most other slasher flicks, which always insisted on a gang of Aryan high school brats and jocks. Boring! In Woods, we have the main group of young people. Fine. But, the Woods is also visited by an ornithologist, a pair of cute overweight tourists, a guy in a wheelchair, a frisky honeymoon couple, and a single mother with her baby. Real people - just like in real life - not merely rejects from high school detention hall.

The killings are well done, brutal and bloody and imaginative, and briskly edited for maximum effect. The villain, also, is a very real and entirely plausible character, light years away from the fetish-infested mask-wearing goons of the Hollywood slashers. One can certainly picture a lone man living in the wilderness becoming a killer after getting sick of all these clowns invading his home.

And the madman's lair is a sublime stroke of genius, a creepy cabin filled with all sorts of god-knows-what, an Ed Gein hellscape with a touch of Texas Chainsaw Massacre thrown in. Scenes taking place in the cabin are extremely unsettling, as the characters trapped inside, as well as the audience, don't know what kind of serio-human goop they may be falling into.

Yet despite all the grue, Woods is really quite beautifully filmed, with many gorgeous daytime scenes, and it doesn't rely on the easy "cheat" of having everything spooky happening at night, like most Hollywood borefests do. Add to this a truly weird and unsettling music score, which enhances and annotated the suspense scenes in an uncanny manner.

Finally, Woods ends with a truly inspired ironic ending, which declares that the natural world's revenge against malignant man will continue forever.

One reason most clowns probably dismiss this movie as bad is that the sheer "realness" of Woods is indeed unsettling, and most fools are so brainwashed by trite, predictable Hollywood horror like Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc., that when a quirky independent production like Woods comes along, it shocks their white bread aesthetic terribly. But some of us will champion a "real" movie like Woods over manipulative corporate garbage any day of the week.

James Bryan is one interesting filmmaker. And I like to think that Bryan did have tongue-in-cheek when making this, possibly his masterpiece. It seems that the grammatically correct title should be "Don't Go Into the Woods," so Bryan's choice of title may be a sly wink to the viewer: Don't Relieve Yourself In the Woods!

Although films such as Metropolis (1927) precede it, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes may be the first, or one of the first, movies for the Babyboomer generation to deal with the concept of Transhumanism, the merging of the human being with modern technology. Although dealt with in a primitive, largely comical fashion, the film does offer some sobering lessons in the appropriate use of power and technology, and is prescient in many ways (a curious conceit in many of the Disney live-action films, which almost seemed designed for an unseen future).

When young charismatic Kurt Russell gets (very improbably) imbued with all the knowledge of a state-of-the-art computer, he not only becomes a genius, but also an arrogant jerk, and is humbled only after he accidentally loses his temporary status as world's smartest man. The lessons are simple but profound: knowledge without wisdom is barren, and power without compassion is corrupt.

These lessons are illustrated well by the cartoon villain, Cesar Romero, who uses his considerable power to run horse races and gain filthy lucre, probably one of the basest (if universal) uses of power known to man.

As with most Disney live-action films of this vintage, Computer comes across as something between a TV sitcom and a Hollywood farce along the lines of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies. The film takes place in middle-class Suburbia, a generic "Anywhere, U. S. A." setting appropriate to the target demographic. The film is well-scrubbed and colorful, and depicts an always-sunny, always-hopeful America free from worldly care or woe, an insular sort of post-modern paradise.

There are lots of familiar faces here, with Joe Flynn and William Schallert being standouts. Cesar Romero makes a good cartoon villain, and Richard Bakalyan is surprisingly good as his luckless henchman. It is also amusing to see Pat Harrington Jr. As a straight-laced game show MC, drawn along the lines of Art Fleming, Hugh Downs, Allen Ludden and/or Robert Earle.

The film also offers an intriguing look at academia, it's constant competition with its rivals, and chronic begging for state funds. Also intriguing is the solidarity of the extremely enterprising student body, a motif both impressive and progressive.

The special effects are about what you'd expect for this type of film, and in the instance of doctors looking inside Kurt's brain and seeing a montage of computer screens, are best taken as allegorical rather than literal.

The film's only real flaw is it's shabby treatment of women, a problem with many films of this era, and certainly with many of the Disney films. There is exactly one female character of any import in the entire scenario, and she is a whiny, subservient lackey to the male collective, mere window dressing and quite sad to boot.

Films such as D. A. R. Y. L. Would soon take the "computer adolescent" theme to new heights, but for its time, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes was a fascinating trip for youngsters into the new and potentially life-changing world soon to be dubbed "the computer age," which underscores a time-honored lesson: with knowledge comes power; with power comes responsibility.

First, the show is called Trouble With Father, not The Trouble With Father. Adding the "The" implies that this early family sitcom is about a dimwit patriarch who has to be taught how to live amongst others by his long-suffering family - essentially an object of ridicule or scorn. In fact, the show deals rather sympathetically with father Stuart Erwin's attempts to navigate the sometimes treacherous postwar suburban American landscape, and coming out a better man for it. The program was obviously meant as both entertainment and a moral lesson to early TV audiences. For instance, one episode has Erwin flipping out over all the noise in his world - coming from high school basketball games, small children playing Cowboy & Indian, and teens doing the jitterbug in the living room - significantly, the commotion all emanating from the youthful exuberance of the coming generations. Erwin and wife June escape to a sleazy downtown hotel for a restful vacation, only to be assaulted by drunken guests, rowdy convention attendees, even the implication of call girls in the vicinity. The Erwins soon rush home to the sacred cacophony of the family nest. Lesson? Any attempt to abandon your family - i.e. The younger generation - in a vain desire to recapture your own lost youth - will result in you diving headlong into the seedier side of civilization, amongst those immature adults whose arrested development sentence them to a wasted lifetime of debauchery and dissipation. Only by accepting your responsibility to society - especially in the production and upkeep of future generations - does a person find meaning and purpose in life. In short, after a certain point, we no longer live for ourselves, but for our children. Pretty heavy message for an early sitcom, and quite poignant as well. The serio-comic tone of the show is enhanced greatly by the conspicuous absence of a laugh track, which suggests that Trouble With Father was intended as both comedy and drama. And decades after the fact, it still works as both.

Frozen Scream is one of the most memorable no-budget horror oddities of the glorious 1970s, a magnificently bizarre heap of cinematic goop without peer, a sacred treasure to any self-respecting film nerd. Stumbling upon this extraordinary mess on a double-feature VHS with the equally deranged Executioner II was akin to tripping over the Holy Grail on a midnight drunk. The hilarious comic-book plot is about attempts to extract the life essence from involuntary citizens to obtain the secret of immortality, but as any true junkfilm junkie knows, plot is just an excuse upon which to hang a film experience, with all its aesthetic and structural detours making (or breaking) a great badfilm.

Frozen Scream seems to have been filmed in grainy 16mm, or else very shoddy 35mm, and the film quality is subpar, further diminished by crummy video transfers throughout its sordid distribution life. The sound recording is murky at best, and necessitates the use of (not) helpful voiceover narration to attempt to regain the story for the hapless viewer. Of course, the narration only further obscures and nullifies understanding, adding one more layer of confusion to this astounding cinematic misfire. One of the film's main flaws (or charms, depending on your viewpoint) is the fact that there is virtually no live sound, and characters are usually overdubbed. This lends yet another layer of otherworldly verisimilitude to the film, and the main heroine in the film is actually dubbed like a cartoon character, a very odd decision which lends the whole thing a compelling aesthetic artifice. This glaring combination of grainy visuals and muddy sound makes the whole scenario appear to take place in some sort of existential bubble, perhaps a hazy purgatory for lost souls - the viewer included; throughout Frozen Scream, the viewer is tempted to exclaim, "Where are we now?"

The acting is uniformly stiff, from a bunch of well-meaning underachievers, and one would not be surprised to find the players were yanked from the local community college drama class. One cannot blame these subpar thespians, for they were surely doing their best with the material they were given. Producer/star Renee Harmon is a fascinating character in her own right, a German emigre who fancied herself some sort of acting coach. Harmon's very presence launches Frozen Scream into the rarified air of vanity project misfires, and Harmon's later efforts such as Night of Terror do not disappoint in positioning her as some sort of latter-day Ed Wood character, a low-rent wannabe with delusions of grandeur. In particular, Harmon's hilariously failed attempts to deliver important exposition through her thick-as-mud accent renders comprehension null and void, adding yet another layer of obfuscation to any attempt at understanding this wholesale fiasco. Harmon, who looks for all the world like a fading European beauty queen, really steals the show, and she is the indisputable heart of Frozen Scream. Botching each and every one of her numerous lines acts as a shameless sabotage to the film, and illustrates why Ms Harmon may indeed be the female Ed Wood, an amateur filmmaker whose sheer audaciousness makes them bigger than life, and an instant legend. Harmon's partner in crime is a Fop male scientist named Sven: imagine Albert Einstein as assayed by Groucho Marx. As a couple, the two are absolutely hilarious, possibly the most ridiculous "mad doctors" ever committed to film; Harmon's hyper-masculinity jibes nicely with Sven's effeminate character.

The film gets off to a fine start, as Harmon starts the movie as a floating god head, speaking of the wonders of immortality over an angry rolling sea. A snide male narrator quips in response, "Why would anyone want to live forever in a world like this?", an important observation considering the film's wildly fatalistic finale. When our snide male narrator later quips, after one of Harmon's especially egregious dialogue scenes, "A pretty bad acting job, I'd say...", it is a purely self-reflexive moment in a film which seems, at times, proud of its own awfulness.

As for the locations, they shift willy-nilly from familiar to obscure, and the viewer never gets a sense of where he is, feeling trapped in this obtuse, creepy netherworld of odd and baffling places in the middle of nowhere. The haphazard, at times almost random editing goes a long way in creating a confusing, non-linear structure which adds greatly to the haunting, dreamlike quality of the piece, and it is in the inchoate structure, which defies narrative logic at every turn, that Frozen Scream really catapults itself (perhaps inadvertently) into "art film" territory. Yet at first appearing shoddy, the cutting is actually very astute, including subliminal flash cuts, an ubiquitous editorial motif during this time. Last, but not least, the music score is annoying, grating and intrusive, adding yet another layer of otherworldly (even confrontational) ambience to this most unique film experience.

The main theme - people consciously lacking a soul, and living in an eternal hell-limbo - is a good one, and although the scenario treats the theme in a roughshod way, it still manages to make an impact, surely in spite of itself. The finale, taking place in a dismal bargain-basement laboratory, actually works, due to the creepiness of the villain couple, the insanity of the dialogue, plus the images of frozen male corpses standing at attention, waiting for their assignment to kill. The heroine loses her battle against evil, and becomes one of the undead. Even better, in a rousing epilogue, the hero finally gets his dearest wish - to have his girlfriend love her "forever" - before the evil Ms Harmon stabs him in the eye with a hypodermic needle. Shock endings to strange movies don't get much more surreal than this, folks. (The "Frozen Scream," of course, is the awareness of being trapped in eternal life, the sought-after gift of immortality being, in fact, a curse.)

Frozen Scream is a remarkable cultural document, a shocking exercise in delirious, unhinged outlaw cinema. In fact, Frozen Scream passes over the viewer as some sort of lovely drug-fueled hallucination, and the wise viewer will not spend too much time trying to "understand" something so deeply disturbed as this incredible film. Frozen Scream comes across as something dangerously close to "pure cinema," film unspooling for the sake of the art form itself, and logic, understanding and entertainment be damned. Indeed, Frozen Scream is one of those sacred cultural texts which goes beyond the valley of the bad into that divine land of true cinematic hallucination, in good company with other vaunted cinema abstracts such as Plan Nine From Outer Space, The Atomic Brain and Blood Freak. Yet curiously, some sad losers call this astounding monstrosity "boring." Frankly, anyone who could be bored by this mesmerizing 85-minute mind-trip should be placed in a folder marked "If you're bored, you're boring."

The Cassandra Crossing is one of those jaw-droppingly bad disaster epics of the 1970s which is too awful to be real, a thick, juicy slice of pure celluloid junk (and admittedly quite fun, if you refuse to take it seriously). Hack producers back then thought they could grab some big name stars, toss them the tritest script they could find, cobble together some lame special effects, and people would flock to the theaters. And for a short time, they did, until the audience realized that a good disaster epic has to be big, and I mean BIG.

The perfect disaster film must have a great script, top players, and most importantly characters which adhere to stereotype but manage to become lovable, believable and bigger-than-life. Also, absolutely top special effects are needed, and here is where many canny producers "went cheap" and sabotaged their projects beyond repair. A very few films managed to work this magic, The Poseiden Adventure and The Towering Inferno two rare examples. More often than not, the formula fell flat on its face, with self-important trash such as The Swarm and Earthquake prime examples of gloriously vapid Hollywood rubbish. The Cassandra Crossing is even worse than these because, as a British/Italian co-production, it also suffers the many flaws of international co-production at its worst.

The cast is exorable, with Ava Gardner and Martin Sheen particularly hilarious as an entirely ill-matched couple. Yet their implausibility is given a run for its money by pitting saucy European uber-wench Sophia Loren against effete fop Richard Harris, about as preposterous a coupling as one could imagine. Adding insult to injury, these forlorn "power couples" are given the most inane, superficial backstories conceivable.

But by far the worst character in this tiresome flop is Burt Lancaster as a full-of-himself military general. His character is loathsome (puportedly, the actor was loathsome as well), and his scenery-chewing is actually painful to watch, especially when he is given self-pitying lines such as, "I know that being a military man today isn't too fashionbable, but I do my job, and I do it well!" Ya think, Burt? Maybe your career choice is not "fashionable" because the military has been the cause of most of the world's death, poverty, political instabliity and overall suffering for the past one hundred years or so? Maybe that's why nobody in their right minds likes a soulless military goon such as yourself?

The whole premise of the film is wrong, too. Didn't the producers or writers realize that having the "disaster" be an invisible virus was certain death to the entire project? As the film proves conclusively, scenes of people shivering, coughing, and fainting have zero dramatic impact, and come across as comical rather than terrifying.

An entirely hasty subplot, which almost seems added on, about a train heading towards a rickety bridge to certain disaster, was done much better ten years previously, in several episodes of the tremendous Supermarionation program Thunderbirds - and more convincingly, to boot. (One of the film's producers was Lew Grade, also a sponsor of Thunderbirds, so maybe he fancied The Cassandra Crossing as some sort of giant live-action version of Thunderbirds? If so, wrongo!)

The sad, sad finale, in which toy trains fall off a toy bridge, is so risibly amatuerish as to be a conscious insult to the patient audience, who had been hoping against hope for at least a thrilling climax to this sorry debacle. It takes a certain talent to make a boring movie about a runaway train, but here it is. Fascinating in a morbid way, like watching a car wreck, The Cassandra Crossing offers a dire warning to us all: stay away from bloated big-name movie trash!

In all fairness, the always-precarious disaster epic genre was ripe for parody by this time and soon, smart films such as The Big Bus, Concorde: Airport '79 and Airplane! Placed this genre where it really belonged: in the comedy section.