ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN

d. Charles Barton (1940)

What a great villain Peter Lorre was. Here, he plays a man involved in 'the dirtiest racket ever invented': white slavery. His modus operandi is to recruit parolees, offering them a home and a job, before flying them to his private fiefdom, Dead Man's Island (there's a clue there, really) where he chains the men together and forces them to mine for diamonds until they expire of fatigue, disease or malnutrition or get killed by the brutal guards. 

The diminutive Lorre pads around the island on crepe soled shoes, wearing a boxy lounge suit and a pith helmet. He never stops smoking, and the resentful lighting of his cigarette by underlings is a recurring motif of the power he wields, and the hatred he inspires. He alternates between sudden, hysterical rage and a kind of somnolence, as if he is exhausted with his own evil. There's a telling little scene where he gets in a temper and shoots his housekeeper's monkey (not a euphemism, an actual monkey). Fury spent, his heavily lidded eyes close in ineffable weariness. He has a beautiful wife, who absolutely detests him, so he sits and listens to her play the piano and smokes and smokes and smokes.

A dedicated undercover agent (who apparently spends two years of his life in a state prison to maintain his cover) is on Lorre's tail and soon infiltrates Lorre's operation - and his wife. Interestingly, Lorre knows all about the agent and, in fact, has actively sought him out - in order, perhaps, to facilitate his own downfall.

An undemanding but satisfying film, this is an ideal choice if you like corporal punishment as there are literally lashings of lashings, or if you like to watch people being shot or stabbed in the back, because there's a fair bit of that too. It's undeniably all about Lorre's character, though, and, when he dies, stabbed by his monkey grieving housekeeper, you almost feel sorry for him - but not quite, he's a creepy little bastard and a rotten Boss.

THE MOLE PEOPLE

d. Virgil W. Vogel (1956) 

The Mole People is a legendary b-movie, a sort of barometer of the psychotronic. It's cheap, ridiculous and has men grown dressed up as moles - but it is also inventive and entertaining and commits itself fully to the endeavour. There is no smirking, no camp, no sense that this film (about the discovery of a race of evil Sumerians who have survived for 5,000 years by living under an active volcano) is anything other than the greatest story ever told. This sense of purpose, this dogged belief, is essential in the creation of great b-movies, as any doubt or irony always shows on screen.

There's very little to dislike about this film, even if you're a historian, a Sumerian or, perhaps, even a mole. A catalogue of simple pleasures: the brief prologue in which the enthusiastic and engaging Dr. Frank Baxter runs through some hollow earth theories and introduces the film as a fable; the Sumerians themselves who still wear ancient costumes and have genetically mutated after years underground to become albinos, so much so that they are terrified by electric torches and are burned to death by direct sunlight; the fact that they have enslaved the original inhabitants of the volcano, the Molemen,  who are whipped by the Sumerians constantly as they scrabble around in the dirt looking for the mushrooms that everyone eats for every meal EVERY DAY. I was also entertained by the interpretive dance set to an accompaniment of gongs and bongos and, perhaps most of all, I enjoyed Alan  Napier* as the High Priest, caked in white face powder and wearing rheumy contacts and a straggly moustache, beautifully declaiming his lines with the dignity and diction of a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

I am smiling rather than sneering and quite sincere when I say that this is one of the high watermarks of low quality films. I absolutely guarantee that you will enjoy it more than anything else on telly this evening, so why not give it a go? 

* Best known as Alfred the Butler from the Adam West Batman series.

THE TOY BOX

d. Ronald Victor Garcia (1971)

America, the 1970s. Thirty or so slightly grimy young people – a Manson-lite band of drop outs, dissolutes and runaways – gather at a seemingly abandoned mansion to play childish games, roll around in the nude and to take lots of drugs. Laughter and dancing are the key points – and strip poker, which they’re obviously all terrible at because the players are all naked all the time. Periodically, as they periodically do, a clock chimes, summoning knots of people to an upstairs bedroom where they are expected to perform carefully prepared dramatic vignettes on a sexual theme: a prostitute and her pimp; a sexy picnic; a butcher with a taste for necrophilia; a woman who has sex with her bed sheets. The mini plays are performed to an audience of one, Uncle, an elderly white bearded man with empty eyes who, to all intents and purposes, is as dead as a door nail.

Creepy, pervy, dead Uncle can talk without moving his lips and move things without touching them, materialising props for his young performers like drugs, money and, as things take a sinister turn, knives, pitchforks and axes. Uncle likes to be entertained, and the standard in/out just isn’t doing it for him anymore.  

  

The question of what is happening and what Uncle represents is eventually answered by briefly veering into another genre completely. It’s only slightly satisfactory, but it’s enough. A film like The Toy Box has no rational explanation, and nor does it require one. It’s just completely and utterly mad from start to finish, in the best possible way. 

In essence a softcore porn film with an actual story that gradually takes precedence over the smut, it most closely resembles one of Jess Franco’s flesh obsessed fever hallucinations, an illucid dream. All cinema has a dreamlike quality, of course, but a certain low cost, low quality type of film sometimes more closely resembles the memory of a dream – the fragmented recollection of something that was inchoate and incomplete in the first place. Those one's are my favourites.

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

d. Donald W. Thompson (1972)

There's no time to change your mind / 

                        The Son has come and you've been left behind...

I’m not a religious person (far too cynical), but I am fascinated by the odd and occasionally disturbing things people of faith so fervently believe in. A classic example  is The Rapture, which is the subject of A Thief In The Night, the first of four Evangelical films made in the 70s and 80s that examine this phenomena in unprecedented detail.

As you may know (and if you read this), The Rapture is the moment when true believers (dead and living) will be raised into the heavens to join Jesus Christ. This is usually interpreted as an instantaneous event, i.e. one moment they will be there, the next they will be gone, forever. In typical style, true believers are those are only those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal saviour, and nobody else, no matter how much they believe in God or how nice they are will be accepted. It's the Christian church,  the selection criteria is not kindness, but compliance. This miracle will, of course, cause widespread social unrest, and will lead to the formation of a fascistic world government who will brand the remaining population with 666. Jesus will then come back to save the day, but it will mean the end of the world. There, now you know as much as I do.

This film, which is carefully and professionally presented, has lots of great moments: a fairground conversion to religion; a cobra snake attack; the realisation that loved ones have vanished; sinister broadcasts from the head of the emergency world government, The Imperium; a look at the stuffy bureaucracy of fascism; a helicopter chase, and a dream within a dream framework that almost manages to avoid cliché. Astonishingly, it is claimed that this film has been seen by 300 million people across the world – and it’s really, really weird. Result!

My favourite part of the film is its opening, in which an amateur band of teenagers sing Larry Norman’s song about The Rapture, I Wish We’d All Been Ready (later covered by Cliff Richard). It’s very earnest and intense, occasionally off key and sets the scene perfectly for the madness to come.