BREAKER! BREAKER!

d. Don Hulette (1977)

I like Chuck Norris. Not in an ironic, post-modern way, I mean I genuinely and sincerely like him. He was 37 (although he looks younger) when he made Breaker! Breaker!, a huge hit that was the start of almost two decades as a leading man in American films. He's a nice, all American hero: blond, quiet, capable, likable, he's respectful to the ladies and nice to the Village Idiot. He's slow to rouse, but dangerous to cross. It even takes him twenty minutes and a huge amount of provocation before he unleashes his first roundhouse kick.

Chuck plays a trucker whose little brother goes missing while driving a delivery of TV meals across the country. The kid has been tricked into driving through a corrupt one horse town, arrested on trumped up charges and given a choice: a $250 fine, or 250 days in jail. When he tries to escape by crashing through a window (he's Chuck's brother, alright), he is badly beaten, tied hand and foot and chucked into a barn. Big mistake.

The town is a Kritarchy, presided over by an erudite but alcoholic judge called Trimming, who is not only the Law and the Religion there, but also the store keeper, bar keep and everyone's Boss, like a Hillbilly Roy of Wroxham. He and his toothless serfs make a living crushing impounded vehicles and selling them for scrap, as well as making moonshine that they distribute by helicopter.

When Chuck eventually comes to town, driving a Ford van with an American Eagle airbrushed on its side, the whole dirty enterprise comes tumbling down. The Judge's men keep Chuck pretty busy, and there's a wonderful sequence where he walks along the unmade street being attacked by every guy in town, each of whom he beats up and throws to the ground. He's so assured in his mission he even has time to fall in love. Finally, fed up with the hassle, he finds his brother and a CB and calls in his truck driving pals, who trash the place and leave it in smouldering ruins. 

Chuck has a final face off with a fairly secondary figure who is elevated to chief villain at the last moment. They have a slo mo slug fest in a corral that is also home to an angry, tethered horse. When Chuck finally kicks the guy to whatever Valhalla hicks go to, the horse jumps over the fence, free at last. This is America, man, fuck with freedom, you'll get the flat sole of the wrathful boot of REAL justice.

Two additional features that particularly struck me about this homely but never hokey production: 

1. Chuck is no ordinary trucker, also being a Karate instructor who specialises in Third Eye Manifestation. He does this wearing a black open necked shirt with a gold sequined collar.

2. Secondly, the brilliant Jack Nance is featured in a supporting role. This film was made in 1977, the same year that Eraserhead was finally finished. Nance keep his cowboy hat on at all times, presumably to hide his Lynchian pompadour.  I miss that guy a lot.

A fun film, but then, hey, I like Chuck Norris. 

NOT OF THIS EARTH

d. Roger Corman (1957)

‘Do not run from me, Nadine, I am going to dispatch you’

As you might have guessed, I watch a lot of films with aliens in them. Occasionally they are benign, but mostly they are predatory and with conquest on their minds. The necessities of low budget film making render a full scale alien invasion virtually impossible, of course, so the idea of a lone envoy, an advance scout is a recurring motif. The sole alien has the fate of the Earth in his or her hands or, rather, it is up to us to thwart his or her plans before the Earth is taken over.

In Not Of This Earth the extra-terrestrial is a pockmarked middle aged man with an archaic turn of phrase and a house in the suburbs. Mr Johnson (probably not his real name) has sensitive ears, and his eyes are permanently covered by impenetrable black shades. He’s here because there has been a nuclear war on his planet, Davanna, and now everybody is dying of a disease that is turning their blood to dust. His mission is to find out whether human blood is a compatible substitute. If it is, they will invade; if it isn’t, the world will be destroyed.

To be honest, Mr Johnson is a bit of a horror, being a murderer and a vampire and having gloopy pupil-less eyes that, when turned on a human being, burn out their retinas and parts of the brain. When he’s not killing teenagers, winos or vacuum cleaner salesmen and draining their blood, he’s kidnapping people and sending them through a dimensional portal to be experimented on, or giving a female alien the blood of a rabid dog. He's far too evil to be wholly successful and so is thoroughly defeated. 

The fact is that you can’t just come down to Earth and start stirring without expecting human beings to fight back. We may be primitive, perhaps, and lack mind control and killer eyes, but, by Christ, we’re feisty, and it’s just a matter of time before we find a way to fuck you up.

THE CAPE CANAVERAL MONSTERS

d. Phil Tucker (1960)

For all its power and wealth and air punching bravado, America is a frightened country: scared of infiltration, scared of domination, scared of difference, scared of dissent, scared of being unable to follow the manifest destiny invented to give them the excuse to do whatever they want. In The Cape Canaveral Monsters the Americans come up against aliens who share this self-centred obsession, but rather impudently have a manifest destiny of their own: to own and rule Earth.

The aliens take the form of hyperactive balls of light whose jittery movements are accompanied by discordant, disorienting music. They have the ability to live in human corpses, and live in human corpses they do, starting their invasion by causing a fatal car crash and casually moving into the male and female victims. Both are hideously disfigured, and the male corpse has his arm ripped off, but the aliens reason that they're not entering any beauty contests and there are lots of spare arms out there and, besides, the bloke alien can always stick his clearly not missing arm down the side of his trousers and hope for the best.  

Their mission is to disrupt missile tests at Cape Canaveral using some sort of magnetic ray gun. Whatever it is, it works. The idea is to destabilise the space programme and prepare the way for an alien invasion. Only a sex obsessed young scientist and his put upon girlfriend can save the Earth and after 70 minutes of fairly uneventful narrative, they do. It ends on an ambiguous note, so the Americans stay scared and angry, their default position. 

Not a bad film, but that doesn't make it a good one. It's okay, and I'm okay with that and so should you be.       

THE LOST WORLD

d. Irwin Allen (1960)

Arthur Conan Doyle's tale of an unknown Amazonian plateau populated by dinosaurs and savage primitives was first filmed in 1925, and has been adapted umpteen times since. This version is from Irwin Allen, the parsimonious producer and director of such television classics as Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space. Allen spent a fair amount of money on this production, so made sure he got the most out of it by recycling clips from it for years to come. 

Unable to justify the expense of stop motion models, Allen simply glued horns and shit to some standard lizards and let them loose on miniature sets. The results are unconvincing, especially when a gecko blunders into shot and someone shouts 'My God, a Tyrannosaurus Rex!'. When a giant spider is needed (there's always a need for a giant spider in films like these) he simply blows up film of a normal spider to enormous proportions and uses an optical effect to colour it day-glo green.

The two best things about the film are ginger: Jill St John as a spoiled and slightly mercenary heroine, the sort of pretty thing on the make who comes on a dangerous expedition wearing red go go boots and carrying a poodle, and the great Claude Rains as the indomitable Professor Challenger, a man with hair and a beard as fiery as his irascible temper. 

Rains was born in Camberwell in abject poverty (nine of his brothers and sisters died in childhood), and grew up with a thick London accent that he never completely eradicated. A very dignified actor, his professional speaking voice is careful and cultured, a sort of dry purr but, when he gets excited and speaks quickly, every now and again you can quite plainly hear the twang of his native Cockney. It's a very endearing trait, and one that you'll listen out for from now on, I hope.    

CURUCU, BEAST OF THE AMAZON

d. Curt Siodmark (1956)

Routine technicolor exotic adventure potboiler with a variety of vicious animals and some shrunken heads. The titular beast is an extraordinary thing, a sort of malevolent parrot with piercing blue eyes, fearsome tusks and slashing talons: it's also fake, a ruse by a native witch doctor to keep the white man and his disease ridden civilization away. 

The fakeness of the monster doesn't really matter, however, as elsewhere real nature is working overtime to demonstrate it's redness in tooth and claw. The protagonists are attacked by crocodiles, several big snakes, a spider the size of a dinner plate, a jaguar and a load of piranhas, represented several times with mismatched, washed out stock footage. 

Shot on location in Brazil, the film never really takes off, despite being punctuated by somewhat manic dance routines and having a beefy male star who never stops smoking, regardless of whether he's eating, kissing or having a medical examination.

I was particularly impressed by the no nonsense heroine, played by Beverley Garland. She is beautiful, yes, but she's also a doctor, a scientist and an explorer, a person of great intelligence and nerve who is determined to make the world a better place. These qualities are even noticed by our carcinogen addicted hero who admiringly says: 'You're not frightened of anything, are you?' Disappointingly, she responds 'Of course I'm frightened, I'm a woman'. Bah.   

THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER

d. Ronald V. Ashcroft (1958)

A young, pouting woman with extraordinary eyebrows, dressed in a skin tight iridescent metal catsuit and shimmering with radiation, arrives from outer space on a mysterious mission. Finding herself in a secluded forest, she stalks towards the only occupied place for miles around, a cabin occupied by a geologist and his dog. On the way, she kills a fox, a snake, a black bear and the members of a criminal gang who have kidnapped an heiress. Her silvery fingers are deadly, and the merest touch from her means radium poisoning and instant destruction. It's a bad situation, especially as she seems unstoppable by conventional means, i.e. she is shot about thirty times and it makes no difference, but these are Americans, so they just keep on firing into her.

Eventually, the geologist is able to whip up a cocktail of acids that kill the murderous alien and dissolve her away, leaving behind nothing but a trail of animal and human corpses and a medallion that contains a message from the President of the United Federation of Planets (or something like that) saying hello to the Earth and asking if we need any help with anything. It seems the young woman was merely an galactic emissary on a good will mission, a revelation that makes no sense at all unless the President of the United Whatnot of Whatever is an idiot, as sending a kill crazy person dripping with death to the middle of nowhere with a message of interplanetary importance was always bound to end in abject and embarrassing failure.

Super cheap, majorly clunky, the film only really jerks into life when the shiny un-smiley alien psycho lady is on the prowl but that's okay, as she's on the prowl for fifty minutes of its sixty five minute running time.  

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

d. A. Edward Sutherland (1940)

The Invisible Woman has very little to do with H.G Wells, instead being a frivolous screwball comedy full of broad performances and lots of knockabout humour.

John Barrymore is the head scientist, a twinkly eccentric who has discovered the secret of invisibility. When he advertises for a human ‘victim’, he gets Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce), a headstrong young woman looking to heed ‘the call to adventure’. The experiment requires the subject to be naked, a detail that attracts much prurient interest and a great number of jokes, even though the most you see is a pair of bare legs. The story is padded out with a bit of romance and a subplot about a gangster who wants to steal the process but, for the most part, it’s mainly about glasses of brandy and lampshades and cats whizzing about with no visible means of support whilst supporting characters look on aghast. If you like that sort of thing (I do), it’s a lot of harmless, undemanding fun.

Barrymore is in his late fifties here, but looks in his seventies. He gives a good but pantomimic performance, but then the production isn't notable for its subtlety.  In a change from the usual self-parodying roles of this era, the script only makes a couple of references to his real life reputation as a drunken ne’er do well and womaniser, and even lets him declaim a few Shakespearean lines. Bearing in mind that he has only a year and a half to live he seems in pretty good form, but then, for all his troubles, he was always a good actor.

DEATH HAS BLUE EYES

d. Niko Mastorakis (1976)

A Greek curiosity that resembles a James Bond film scripted by the team behind Robin Askwith’s Confessions films, Death Has Blue Eyes (aka The Para Psychics) can’t make up its tiny mind as to whether it’s a comedy, a drama or a soft porn film. It is most definitely stupid, however, and more sexist than even a film from the mid-seventies should reasonably be.

We follow the misfortunes of two vain and gormless fools who, unbelievably, are supposed to be Vietnam Special Forces veterans. In their heads they are international playboys, but in reality they are moochers, freeloaders and con men, tricking their way into a hotel and charging their disgusting looking meals to someone else’s room. They don’t wear shirts under their jackets and all of their clothes are too tight. They talk like damaged children. They are two of the most unattractive male leads in film history. Actually, just history.

The discovery of their shabby, petty ruse leads them to start working as bodyguards for a rich woman and her daughter, a beautiful girl who happens to be able to use her mind to kill people and blow things up. The ‘boys’ are hired to protect her against foreign agencies that would like to put her powerful, deadly brain to their own unpleasant uses – or in some pickling vinegar.

Although it’s interesting to see Greece from a non-touristy point of view, the script rambles on to no great effect for too long. When there is action, it is done in a pedestrian, amateurish way or is undercut by the inanities of the script. In the most impressive sequence, the protagonists are sprayed with machine gun fire from an aeroplane as they run across a beach. The lead doofus looks up at the sky and shouts ‘you could have killed us, you bastard’. Well, yep.

The story can only be concluded by one of our stupid heroes pushing an old lady from a roof, thereby severing the mental link that has turned our heroine into a human bomb. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. The old lady had such a surprised look on her face.

This isn’t the end, although it should have been. Over the credits, we see the now rich  protagonists seemingly settled into a ménage a trois on a beautiful, deserted beach. As the credits roll, the two idiots start to tussle, eventually progressing to a brutal fist fight. It’s a needlessly confusing coda to a largely unrewarding experience.       

ENTER THE DEVIL

d. Frank Q. Dobbs (1972)

Slightly sluggish but intermittently interesting movie set in the Texas desert close to the border with Mexico. A laid back deputy with a little blond moustache and a taste for the Senoritas investigates the growing number of tourists, rock collectors and spelunkers who have gone missing in the area, little suspecting that they are the victims of a bloodthirsty satanic group who dispatch their sacrifices in a number of unpleasant ways: by sword, by rattlesnake, by barbed wire, by fire, oh, and by crucifixion, always by crucifixion.

There's something terribly cinematic / dramatic about a cave at night filled with a hooded, robed coven, especially when they are carrying flaming torches and chanting ominously in Latin, which is just as well, as these scenes are shown more than once and go on for ages. 

A sudden and surprising death ups the ante for a bit, but it shifts into a lower gear until a fairly predictable revelation and a bloody massacre conclude events. The last word belongs to the County Sheriff, who says he is going to seal up the devil's cave once and for all: 'maybe dynamite will put an end to all this foolishness', he drawls. Foolishness? A game of Knock Down Ginger is foolishness, the deaths of twenty people in the name of Satan is a different thing entirely.

SPACE AMOEBA

d. Ishiro Honda (1970)

Japanese monster movies are a little like sushi: they look great and they are lots of fun, but they’re not exactly what you might call filling. Nevertheless, like sushi, I enjoy them very much. I like the rubbery monsters, the comical mugging, the stock characters. I like the way that the films only really come to life when the monsters are on the screen, and only really catch fire when you have one or more fighting and smashing things up.

The Space Amoeba in question attaches itself to an unmanned space probe, which crashes into the sea near a desert island, one of the many isolated atolls in the archipelago of greater Japan. The amoeba resembles an electrical current, or a neon sneeze, and attaches itself to living organisms, taking control of their minds and greatly increasing their size and aggression levels. Over the course of the story we see a giant cuttlefish (erroneously described as an octopus), two giant crabs and a giant turtle. They are all angry and like the taste of human beings, particularly the wriggling, screaming ones.

The amoeba clearly has its red beady eye on world domination but is somewhat thwarted by its inability to conquer a small island populated only by a superstitious native tribe and a half dozen city slickers with guns, grenades and lots of petrol. Eventually, it takes over a human being, who gains super strength and a maniacal glow. In the version I watched, this character is dubbed by an Australian, which is slightly confusing for a Japanese man but not a disaster. The problem is that, along with his chin beard, black glasses, white safari suit and constant chuckling to himself, the Aussie twang only accentuates his resemblance to Rolf fucking Harris. Happily, he throws himself into a live volcano when his humanity briefly returns. Maybe Rolf could go and do the same.  

THE MANSTER

d. George Breakston and Kenneth G. Crane (1962)

Regular readers may have noticed that many of the films written about here are concerned with transformation, mainly of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable sort: people shrink or grow; they die but stay alive; they become bestial and unhinged or taken over, mostly at the gnarled hands of bad science, pure evil or alien conquest. Is that the worst thing, do you think? To become other, to turn into someone or something that you can't manage, and to know it is happening, to feel yourself slipping further and further into the void. Is it a metaphor for the human condition? Does transformation evoke old age, illness, death? Yes, in these films transformation is death, and can only be cured by more death including, ultimately, your own. I need some Propranolol.

In The Manster, jaded US foreign correspondent Larry Stanford is on his last assignment in Japan when he meets genius geneticist, Dr. Suzuki. Suzuki is interested in 'the beginnings of life' and seems nice enough despite keeping his brother and wife in the basement, having turned them into a hairy white ape and a disfigured hag respectively. While Larry has a Mickey Finn induced nap, Suzuki injects him in the neck with a serum designed to turn the hapless journalist into an entirely new life form.

In time honoured fashion, the first Larry knows about it is when he notices he has a very hairy hand. Next, he is startled to discover an eyeball embedded in his shoulder. After a few out of character homicidal rampages, an additional head emerges from him, malevolent and wizened, resembling a fairground coconut with comedy teeth. Head two is murderously angry with everything and everybody, not least Larry, who he wants to get away from as quickly as possible, ultimately leading to a violent split between host and parasite. 

As Larry reverts to human form, his erstwhile spare head and body conveniently having fallen into a live volcano, there is barely a second to wonder if Larry will pay for his crimes before the film's abrupt end. Let's hope the Japanese police are prepared to blame it all on the psychopathic man monkey and let Larry go home.  

THE CURSE OF THE STONE HAND

d. Jerry Warren (1964)

The Curse Of The Stone Hand only really makes sense if you know the story behind the production, so here it is. Producer Jerry Warren, a man who revelled in his reputation as a hack, grew tired of the expensive and time consuming process of making his own films, so took to buying foreign productions, hacking them to bits and dubbing them, filming a few inserts, recording some narration and putting them out with a sensational new title. It's not art, baby, but it is most definitely commerce.

This film is made up of two other movies, one from Argentina and one from Chile, and there are some new and poorly matched framing sequences making it a sort of poor man's portmanteau, or poormanteau as I have now decided it must be called. 

The first story looks like it might have been quite good in its original form, an occasionally stylish tale of a man who joins a gambling club where the price of membership is to kill or be killed, depending on the turn of a card. The editing is so choppy to render it almost unintelligible, but you are just able to get the gist. It doesn't help that Warren compulsively cuts any scenes that feature more than a couple of lines of dialogue (too hard to dub) and clearly has no idea that Durham is not on the outskirts of London. It's a frustrating experience.

The second story is completely incomprehensible, but is something about a depressive nobleman and the terrible way he treats his family. Again, it looks like it was probably quite well crafted at one time but, apparently cut by a third, the edited version provides little more than movement and sound. There is endless, meaningless narration and new clips of old John Carradine to pad out the running time (and give Warren a directing credit) but none of it helps. The ending, a new sequence, posits the idea that the nobleman locks himself in a basement and paints a series of self-portraits as he dies. It's ridiculous, but his mouldering skeleton provides a minor shock to close on.

So, a terrible film, but a fascinating concept. Warren was clearly some sort of monster but, luckily, he was in the film industry, one of the few professions where that really isn't a problem. It's a shame in many ways, as, every now and again, there are glimpses of a much better film waiting to be coaxed out. Oh well. As Jerry might say 'fuck it, it's only a movie''.  

THE MAD MAGICIAN

d. John Brahm (1954)

It's the late 19th century, and curly haired Don Gallico (Vincent Price, one of the patron saints of this blog) wants to be a stage magician but, because he is a humble and rather nervous sort of person, he is stuck making tricks for other less talented and far less pleasant performers. When Don's big chance is ruined by his horrible. grasping employer (a man who also stole Gallico's wife and keeps bragging about it), something pings under the pressure (it might located be in his eye, which keeps twitching) and he becomes a committed maniac, wearing homemade masks and murdering people all over the place: by buzz saw, by strangulation, by cremation. 

Like a lot of murderers, once he solves his first problem by killing someone he soon finds that he becomes extremely busy. As the film progresses he becomes less sympathetic, more ruthless, increasingly unhinged and, because this film was originally made in 3D, he also has to keep throwing stuff at the audience, too - playing cards, water, flames, sawdust - it's just a relief that there are no sex scenes.

The Mad Magician is reminiscent of director John Brahm's earlier film Hangover Square (1939), even down to the scene where Gallico disposes of a corpse using a handily placed bonfire. The great Mr. Price gets to play several roles under a variety of latex disguises but reserves his best characterisation for 'The Great Gallico', a shy guy who is simply too nice for show business, and too crazy to live. 

The film is also worth watching if you have ever wondered what Zsa Zsa Gabor did before she became Zsa Zsa Gabor: she was an actress, apparently, though not so you'd notice. 

MANSION OF THE DAMNED

d. Michael Patacki (1975)

Somewhere there's a film about a respected surgeon /scientist who driven by an obsession for discovery, or in order to save a loved one, breaks his Hippocratic oath and leaves his ethics behind in order to conduct an illegal experiment / perform an illegal operation. It all works out, and the doctor spends the rest of their life making amends for their lapse. This is not that film.

When eye specialist Dr Chaney's beautiful young daughter is blinded in a car accident,  he and she are almost driven mad by grief, and he sets out to make good his mistake (he was driving). Strangely, he picks on his daughters boyfriend, a colleague of his from the local hospital where he works. It's a odd choice as his sudden disappearance is always going to raise questions. It works temporarily, but soon he is on the look out for fresh eyes. He's not very good at the random murder game, so he sets up pretend job interviews and fake house viewings - later he tries hitch-hikers, winos and, in the creepiest section, abducts a young girl and promises to take her to Disneyland (when she escapes and he is chased by two men, he captures them and uses them instead). None of this works, and his daughter, now horribly scarred by excessive surgery, is utterly miserable.

Worst of all, the doctor's victims are in a conveniently placed jail cell beneath the titular mansion, sleeping on mattresses and constantly screaming and groaning about their lack of eyes. I'm a pretty peaceful sort of person (most of the time) but it took me about ten seconds of wailing before I started wondering why he just didn't kill them all.

Slightly murky, dreamy, the film only has credibility because it stars Richard Basehart and Gloria Grahame, formerly award winning stars between fifteen and twenty years past their prime. Oscar winning Grahame has little to do and, with an immobile top lip (caused by, ironically, too much surgery), has little she can do, although it's nice to see her (she died in 1981). Richard Basehart was a always a pretty good actor, slightly hammy and fruity, but of a tradition. Unfortunately, that tradition was no longer required in New Hollywood so he ended up making a hundred or so episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a show that started out inexpensive and unpretentious and ended up cheap and embarrassing. No wonder he was drunk for most of the latter part of his life.

Finally, it's worth noticing aliens star Lance Henrikson here in an early supporting role. His early life was fairly itinerant and his education was broken up to the extent that he didn't learn to read until he was thirty. I hope he at least got a few of the classics in before this script arrived.

Finally finally, given its obsession with sight loss, shouldn't this have perhaps been called Mansion of the Dimmed? Well, maybe, I don't suppose it matters now.

HITLER'S CHILDREN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

At first I wondered why, in 1943, US audiences were watching a film about the dangers of Nazism set in 1938, especially as America had already been at war with Germany for two years. Then I thought about the timing and realised that it was probably preparing them for D-Day: when there is sacrifice ahead, it's a good idea to remind people what it's all for.

In order to connect with audiences, the film uses a handsome boy and a pretty girl, a sort of Nazi Romeo and Juliet: he is a German born in America; she is an American born in Germany, and they love each other, despite their political differences. In the early days, it's picnics and sing-a-longs in the stereotypical hale and hearty way of the old Fatherland, all jolly rucksacks and strudel. When Hitler begins his conquests, however, things change. The boy joins the SS and the girl, because she has 'German blood' is sent to a re-education centre for lessons in National Socialism. 

Being a decent, freedom loving girl she doesn't take to the teachings of Herr Hitler one bit, of course, so is publicly whipped and scheduled for enforced sterilisation. The boy, belatedly realising that Nazism is as fucked up a philosophy as you can get, tries to save her, but is arrested. He has time to denounce Hitler at his trial before he and the girl are shot.

Heavy stuff, but then what else could it be? A light musical would have been completely inappropriate. Behind the fractured love story we occasionally get glimpses of other heinous policies: the rounding up of Jewish schoolchildren, no doubt destined for concentration camps; talk of the extermination of the physically and mentally impaired to further the bloodline of 'the master race'; the suggestion that it is the girl's duty to get pregnant by an approved Aryan at the soonest opportunity, no relationship required. The overall picture is of a sick, almost surreally inhuman society presided over by sadists who are either thugs or pseudo-intellectuals or an unsavoury combination of the two. 

Hitler's Children was an absolutely enormous box office success. Propaganda is always propaganda, of course, no matter which side it comes from, no matter how many facts (or lies) it contains. It's purpose is to create the collective frame of mind where it is okay to hate, to fight, to kill, to die - and this film, with its emphasis on the way the Nazis stamp down on personal expression and individual liberty, chimed absolutely with American audiences. They've always been very big on the old freedom thing in the US of A - for Americans, anyway.         

GIRLS IN PRISON

d. Edward L. Cahn (1956)

There’s not much to distinguish Girls In Prison as anything other than a very generic b-movie: a mass stabbing, perhaps, a slight allusion to lesbianism, an earthquake that facilitates an escape, a prison chaplain who is a bit too interested in one of the new inmates. Much of the film is just as you’d expect, and given the advanced ages of most of the cast, the definition of 'girls' is fairly loose, to say the least.

The best thing in it is Adele Jergens as Jenny, top dog and matriarch of the prison. Jenny is fairly genial most of the time, even likeable and kind, but is hard as nails when it comes down to tin tacks, a gun wielding, wavy peroxided, scarlet lipped force of nature. She’s absolutely gorgeous, even when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette (actually, especially when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette). The film would be almost insufferably dull without her.

After an hour and twenty minutes of molasses slow mayhem, the film climaxes in a bruising brawl and a gun fight. It’s a good way to end any drama, I find. After the dust has settled and the wonderful Jenny has gone the way of all pistol packing mama's, we end on a close up of a church steeple while some quasi-religious music plays, as if God has in some way been responsible for the restoring the balance of law and order. Rubbish. God was not responsible, although maybe he set off the earthquake to punish some other sinners in the general area. As for the rest, omniscient he may be, but micro management is not exactly his style. 

CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS

d. Bob Clark, 1972

Bob Clark directed a number of films that would fit perfectly here, not least the disturbing and hallucinatory Death Dream, and one of the best ever Sherlock Holmes films, Murder By Decree. At the end of the decade, he blotted his copybook by kick-starting the teen sex comedy genre with the execrable Porky’s but, hey, nobody is perfect, least of all you. 

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was Clark’s full directorial debut (he only co-directed She-Man: A Study of Fixation) and has a more than a whiff of a student production about it: it’s talky, quirky and democratic - everybody gets a monologue or a bit of business. Appropriately, his cast were drawn from his college friends, and the characters they play share their own real first names. They all give good performances with one exception, but as the actress in question was married to the director at the time he probably didn’t feel comfortable to ask her to stop rolling her eyes. 

The Children of the title are actually a troupe of hippy-ish actors, all aged somewhere between 18 and 35. They are led by Alan, an awful little popinjay of a man-child who, by virtue of paying their wages, belittles and humiliates his colleagues at every turn, presumably to make himself feel better about his own unlovely inconsequence. Alan adores the sound of his own voice, and uses litanies of big words as alliteratively as he can. He also likes a joke, as long as it’s at someone else’s expense: the worse his victims feel, the louder and longer he laughs. His latest put on is for the group to travel to an old cemetery on a small island with a Grimoire full of incantations that he claims will reanimate the dead. In pursuit of this, they lightheartedly desecrate graves, rob corpses and wage warfare with each other through passive aggressive wisecracks. 

Given their youth and groovy wardrobe, it’s all a bit like a bitterly amusing episode of Scooby Doo guest starring The Manson Family, something that I really do wish existed. When the dark spell unexpectedly works, however, and long dead mouldering corpses start to punch their way out of the dirt (hungry, of course, for fresh human flesh) it leads to a chaotic, bloody, atmospheric finale that sucks all of the comedy out of this comedy horror and leaves us with a sense of dread, especially when we see the shambling, insatiable corpses happily hopping onto the troupe’s boat and setting off for the mainland... The moral of the story: never, ever join an acting group. 

Just time to mention my favourite part of the film, its score. Played by Carl Zittrer on, I'm assuming, a car sized synthesiser, the music comes in big, fat slabs of atonal electronic noise, sounding at even its most melodic like someone hitting the keys of an organ with a mallet. It makes no attempt to do anything other than just creep us out and, as such, is excellent.    

THE NIGHT THE WORLD EXPLODED

d. Fred F. Sears

A dedicated scientist invents a machine that can forecast earthquakes just in time to predict that the world is about to be destroyed by a series of uncontrollable explosions. The cause is Element 112, a previously unknown type of rock that (rather like the stuff in Monolith Monsters, but in reverse) increases its mass when it dries out, then explodes with enormous force. Nobody is quite sure why this is happening, or where all the stock footage came from, although a pretty young scientific intern has a theory: ‘it’s like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources’*.

An early-ish example of an eco-disaster film, The Night The World Exploded is cheap but charming, if slightly confusing (the disasters take place during the day for a start). Despite being just over an hour long, however, and being about exploding rocks and volcanoes and the end of the world, it does drag a little bit, not least in the scenes where we watch people descending rope ladders into the Carlsbad Caverns for about ten minutes.

* Later on, the chief scientist comes up with a theory: 'it's like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources'.

MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS

d. Fred Williamson (1976)

Towards the end of this intermittently action packed film, Johnny Barrows (Fred Williamson) faces off against a an old enemy: a wiry, greasy, long haired polo neck wearing assassin. They make Kung Fu noises and a pantomimic and clunky fight ensues. The bad guy puts Johnny down and looks around for something to finish him, eventually spying a small rock, which he lifts with both hands as if it weighs a tonne, raising it above his head with enormous difficulty. Johnny reaches under his sweater and dispatches his opponent with a concealed throwing star. It was at that precise moment, about thirty years ago, that my brother and I decided this was one of our favourite films of all time.  

Full of incident and guest stars, spare of plot and sense, Mean Johnny Barrows is essentially a shaggy dog story about a principled action man and highly trained ex-soldier who retains his personal integrity despite homelessness and poverty before eventually accepting a job as a Mafia hit man and taking out the members of a rival syndicate who are selling drugs to black communities. Make no mistake, it’s jarring to see Fred Williamson cleaning a toilet and eating things out of bins but it clarifies why, when he is offered the money and land he needs to make a fresh start, he reluctantly takes it. Williamson is an extraordinary figure in cinema – an actor, writer and director who isn’t very good at any of those things but has had a long career based around his supreme self-confidence and the fact that it is pretty much impossible to dislike him, no matter (or perhaps because of) how ridiculous and puffed up he appears to be. Williamson who, like a number of black male stars of the era*, made his name on the American Football field, is at his daftest in fight scenes, which he either refuses to take seriously or takes too seriously, resulting in  much comedy gurning, silly noises and over-expressive hand gestures.

Along with Stuart Whitman, R.G Armstrong, ex-Tarzan Mike Henry and Elliot Gould(!), there’s the wonderful Roddy McDowall, one of my favourite actors, here playing a weaselly mobster / florist with great humour and his usual piercing intelligence / total bemusement. Post Planet of the Apes, the already expressive Roddy became even more animated, his nose crinkling and forehead furrowing compulsively, as if trying to be seen under heavy make up, whether he's wearing it or not. It makes me like him even more, and I already like him a lot.

I give this film my highest critical and analytical rating: it’s a hoot, and you'll be glad you watched it from the first seconds to the caption on the final frame -

'Dedicated to the veteran who traded his place on the front line for a place on the unemployment line. Peace is hell'.

 *Jim Brown; Rosie Grier; Bernie Casey; O.J Simpson...

VELVET SMOOTH

d. Michael L. Fink (1976)

Blaxploitation essentially presents an Afrocentric world where super hip, super smart, super fly black people easily swat away Whitey's conventions and rewrite injustices for themselves. It's a macho, often unconscionably sexist place, but there is also room for distaff John Shafts: beautiful, intelligent, strong women who can kick arse just as well as their male counterparts. Sometimes, as with the Pam Grier characters Coffy and Foxy Brown, our heroines are driven to action by revenge or necessity; sometimes, like Cleopatra Jones and the wonderfully and even more improbably named Velvet Smooth they're just preternaturally cool and in charge from the get go. 

Velvet (Johnnie Hill, who gives a slightly stilted but appealing performance and only ever appeared on screen in this one film) is a sassy and switched on private eye investigating a hostile and violent takeover of her ex-boyfriends crime syndicate. That's the story, a fluid ounce in a quart pot. Velvet is calm and collected and sleeps with whoever she damn pleases. She has two girlfriends who help her out, and they're a formidable team, so much so that they solve the mystery in about fifteen minutes and then have to hang around for the rest of the movie.

The crime lord is a surprisingly nice guy, who spends his spare time having pillow fights and has a very distracting braided pig tail hanging out of the back of his afro. He's played by a gentleman called Owen Wat-Son, a surname I'm familiar with but have never seen spelled in quite that way before. Wat-Son was also a martial arts instructor, and was responsible for the interminable fight scenes here, where the same dozen guys get beaten up again and again, one after the other*, really, really slowly. Rather cheekily, Wat-Son has a featured fight of his own, which is notable for having most of the action sped up to make him look shit hot, but nevertheless remains more Benny Hill than Bruce Lee.

Clearly filmed on the fly on the streets and in hastily reconfigured and re-purposed borrowed rooms (you can see the light patches where pictures were recently hanging), Velvet Smooth fails to live up to the sophisticated promise of its title in almost every way but has an endearing earnestness about it, as well as a Kojak gag that must have been out of date by the time the film crept into selected cinemas.

* Why do villains never attack en masse? If you greatly outnumber your opponent, it's moronic to give them the advantage of being able to knock you off individually. Pile in!

THE BURGLAR

d. Paul Wendkos (1957)

'We, the dead, welcome you'.
 

Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea, weary as hell) is a career criminal, a break in expert. He has never been caught, never been photographed, never been finger printed. Neither has he ever been particularly successful, living in a series of crummy rooms in slummy streets, eking out a living for himself and his adopted sister, Gladden (Jayne Mansfield!). They are in love with each other, but something always gets in the way: life, usually, and Nat’s higher sense of obligation and morality to the girl he has looked after since she was a kid. Maybe if things were different they could be happy, live a different life. Maybe. Nat is like a sleepwalker, locked into himself, indifferent to almost everything apart from the instinct to put one foot in front of the other. Even love is a burden. 

Nat decides that he needs a big score, so forms an ‘organisation’: him, Gladden, a whining weakling called Baylock and a sleazy psychopath called Dohmer. Together they steal a sapphire necklace from a shifty spiritualist called Sister Phoebe. It’s worth a cool $150,000, and they think they can get $80,000 for it. What they actually get is death, hunted down by a crooked cop who wants the necklace for himself.

As you might expect from a film noir based, like Nightfall, on a book by arch fatalist David Goodis, The Burglar is dark, inky black in places. The characters are lost causes, stuck on predetermined routes to sordid ends. They all need someone to talk to, someone to listen. They will end up unsung, unremembered, unburied, left in crumpled heaps or in hastily dug holes by the side of the road. The drama is played out in huge sudden close ups and in flashing action cuts, all to the blaring of an occasionally intrusive brass and vibes score. Everything about this grim little story is played big, as if it mattered, as if any of it mattered.

At the climax, in the bustling amusement arcades and tourist attractions of Atlantic City (‘the playground of the world’) the characters play out their last scenes in sudden isolation, as if they are the only people on the planet. In the end, Nat finally gets what he wanted all along: he is put of his misery. Gladden survives, the only one young enough and innocent enough to still have a shot at something else, at someone else. What happens to the necklace? Who cares?