THE DARK

d. John Cardos (1979)

The original storyline for The Dark was fairly straightforward: an abused child is held prisoner in an attic until he reaches adulthood. When a house fire kills his abusers and sets him free he heads to the city and, completely unhinged, begins a brutal killing spree, averaging a murder a night and earning the nickname ‘The Mangler’. With the death count rising, it’s up to the Police, an investigative journalist, the father of a murdered girl and an eccentric psychic to find The Mangler and stop him in his tracks. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, but it works. Halfway through filming, having already fired director Tobe Hooper, the producers decided that aliens were the big thing, so The Mangler should be an alien, effectively throwing the film against the wall and letting it slide ignobly to the ground, bloodied and bent out of shape.

The alien looks like a werewolf or a make-up free Gene Simmons in a lumberjack outfit, a huge shambling thing with grey, putrid flesh. It possesses enormous strength, is impervious to bullets* and can fire lasers from its eyes, and, believe me, it fires lasers from its eyes a lot. It doesn’t like being set fire to but then, to be honest, who does?  In the end analysis, it’s an extremely crappy thing to ruin a film for, and what remains is a mass of non-sequiturs and undeveloped detail, with promising characters and situations cut off and cauterised in favour of expedient gimmickry that doesn’t make any kind of dramatic or cinematic sense.

As a final insult, the producers bookend the ruin with bullshit, firstly with a caption which pontificates about the certainty of life on other planets and that, like some nasty earth creatures, aliens might prove to be aggressive and deadly to man and, finally, with a concluding narration in a gravelly voice which states 'it was an encounter that has no explanation or understanding', i.e. 'Fuck knows what happened there. Right, see you later’. It’s extremely unsatisfactory, especially as it wastes a decent cast, a good cinematographer, Panavision, a $2m dollar budget and an unusual and interesting score** – this isn’t shoestring or amateur film-making, it’s just what happens when artless, greedy people are calling the shots.

*  I can understand how aliens might not be killed by a bullet, but this creature is literally shot a thousand times in the course of the final ten minutes. It’s clearly organic, so, at the very least,  wouldn’t bits of his body be torn apart, or severed? If nothing else, Wouldn’t the sheer weight of the bullets slow him down?

** In moments of tension, the soundtrack has a sibilant, insistent voice whispering ‘the dark-nessssssssssssss’.

THE RETURN OF DRACULA

d. Paul Landres (1958)

Count Dracula is a colossal failure when you think about it. He’s wealthy, charming, attractive; he can transform himself into a bat, a wolf, a rat, a fog and has the capacity to live forever. But he’s incompetent and arrogant, a fatal combination that means he is vulnerable to mortal men who have none of his advantages, but are simply sharper, smarter and more organised.

The Return of Dracula illustrates this perfectly. In an attempt to reboot the Dracula franchise for the drive in generation, Dracula comes to atom age California under the assumed identity of a man he murdered back in Transylvania. America was built on immigration, of course, and, under normal circumstances, would have provided Dracula with everything he needed to continue his career as a supernatural serial killer: lots of people, bags of space and plenty of opportunity. With a bit of planning he could spend eternity flitting from state to state, free from suspicion, safe from harm. Instead, he moves in with a suburban family, smashes all the mirrors and starts acting really suspiciously. Within a few hours he has bitten the family cat to death and, a couple of days later, he kills a woman who lives a few doors down. It’s just bad management. Why couldn’t he charm the community he is living in, establish a really good alibi and then fly over to another town to slake his inhuman thirst?

In a small town, of course, the arrival of a dark, surly foreigner followed by a sudden, unexplained death leads to some immediate dot joining so, within a few days he’s being pursued by the crucifix and stake wielding forces of good. Even then, he eschews the chance to put on his cape and move on, instead carrying on as indiscreetly as before. This hubris quickly turns him into a mouldering skeleton with a piece of sharp wood in his chest - again. 

He never learns, does he?

DESPERATE LIVING

d. John Waters (1977)

I'll be honest and admit that, up until now, I hadn't seen a John Waters film that predated 1988's Hairspray, mainly because I could never quite remember which one it was where Divine eats dog shit and that was a moment of cinematic history I was happy to miss. Dangerous Living doesn't go that far, although it does feature multiple murders, sexual assault, vomit, mass cannibalism and someone hacking off their own recently transplanted penis with a pair of blunt scissors. It seems obvious to say that the film is in bad taste, but actually it goes beyond taste, it’s just in a feverish zone of high camp and offence where anything goes, and you either like it or you hate it and want it destroyed with fire. For me, it’s grotesque and hilarious, full of memorable and baroque dialogue and, most of all, outrageous people behaving badly and having fun.

Mink Stole plays Peggy Gravel, a shrill, neurotic housewife fresh out of the sanitorium who amplifies every tiny experience into grand opera. When the neighbourhood kids accidentally hit a baseball through her window she takes it as an assassination attempt, shouting 'don't tell me I don't know about Vietnam'. When she finds her son and daughter playing Doctors she screams 'my daughter has been raped - and now she's pregnant'. This hysteria has fatal consequences when her husband tries to calm her down and Peggy assumes he is trying to kill her. The Gravel's huge, black, kleptomaniac, dipsomaniac maid, Grizelda (Anita Lane, absolutely the star of the show) intervenes, sitting on the husband's face and killing him. Peggy and Grizelda go on the run, just getting out of the city limits before being pulled up by a cross dressing cop. In return for their underwear and a couple of sloppy kisses the Cop lets them go on the understanding that they should put themselves in exile in Mortville, a shanty town populated by misfits and criminals, all ruled over by the cruel and perverse Queen Carlotta. All this accounts for about ten minutes of screen time and, in legend, was where, during the premiere, the critic from Good Housekeeping walked out.

What follows is an amazing cavalcade of pantomimic action, all filmed on a set made out of bits of plywood, cardboard and rubbish placed in a field in Maryland. Every actor is in  top form and top gear, all the time, emoting, screeching, rolling around on the floor, taking their clothes off or putting them on backwards. It sounds tiring but, actually, it's like watching a mad school play delivered by naughty children. There are adult fairy tale elements too, with the wicked snaggle toothed Queen and her retinue / army of well hung leather boys, not to mention a lot of lesbianism, some rabies, inter-gender wrestling, rat eating and someone having a gun inserted into their anus. 

Best of all, there's line after line of incredible dialogue. I have a number of favourites but I'll limit myself to one example that is now stuck to the inside of my brain forever like a piece of filthy discarded bubblegum:

'He's not a garbage man, he just helps pick up trash at the nudist colony'

A work of crazed and evil genius. 

STONE

d. Sandy Harbutt (1974)

The wide, wild and slightly lawless open country of Australia would appear to be the perfect environment for outlaw biker gangs and, indeed, some preliminary research on an obscure new thing called ‘Wikipedia’ would indicate that there are currently around a dozen such groups operating down under at the moment, the largest comprising around 2,000 members. Mainly concerned with drugs, guns and beating each other to death with clubs, I’ll bet that every single one of them has seen Stone, the first Aussie biker film, a labour of low budget love that combines a loose documentary feel with a somewhat undeveloped crime story to create a fascinating document of a previously hidden lifestyle.

When The Gravediggers, a Sydney based biker gang, witness the bloody assassination of an environmental campaigner, they find themselves under attack from an unknown assailant. Members of the gang are killed by explosion, by being forced off the road into the sea and by being decapitated by a taut wire strung across the highway. Stone, a long haired undercover cop, is assigned to the gang, initially receiving a rough welcome. As he learns more about the group he begins to understand that their lifestyle, for all its violence and anarchy, is a family that provides a home for misfits, rejects and outsiders, and that their motivations and ambitions mirror Stone’s own hitherto unexplored non-conformism (what other Aussie cop owns leather trousers?).

The film jumps from one vignette to the next, only picking up the plot with twenty minutes to go. It doesn’t matter, as what we see is engaging and thought provoking and the protagonists, although not likeable in any conventional sense, have character and realism. My main concern was the inequality between the members of the gang and their molls, a band of attractive young women who, inexplicably, are entirely besotted by the grizzly, greasy, toothless and generally quite elderly bikers. Cliché would have it that good girls love a bad boy, but these antiquated hobos haven’t been boys for quite some time. Also, they’re not particularly good girls.

There’s a great scene where Stone gets to know the gang, learning a little more about who they are, where they came from, how they ended up together. Everybody is smoking a joint, and the camera goes in and out of focus with each inhalation, a queasy but effective way of involving the audience in an intimate, intoxicated moment of relative peace before the bloody climax. Actually, there are two bloody climaxes, the second of which ends the film in a surprising but entirely satisfactory way. The final message is quite clear: you don’t ‘sort of’ belong to a biker gang, mate: you’re either in or you’re out.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

d. Irwin Allen (1957)

When I first saw this film at the age of about five or six, it made an indelible impression on me and, for years, I thought it the most incredible epic ever made. Ah, the illusions of youth. Watching it now, this crazy canter through history is clearly cobbled together, with new material filmed on a series of tiny indoor sets heavily supplemented by lots of clips taken from other, much more expensive, films.  

The premise is that mankind has developed a 'super H bomb' around sixty years earlier than expected, so The Supreme Court of Outer Space (yes, that's a thing) holds a tribunal on a piece of mist shrouded celestial wasteland to ascertain whether mankind is capable of holding such power, or whether they should be encouraged to simply detonate this doomsday weapon, thereby extinguishing human life once and for all.

On the side of man: Ronald Colman, distinguished in his London Fog overcoat, tweed hat and silver sliver of facial hair. The prosecuting counsel is Mr. Scratch, the Devil himself, played suavely and convincingly by the superlative Vincent Price in a morning coat and a pair of red silk gloves*. The trial consists of Colman saying how wonderful humans are, and Price saying how terrible they are. Sometimes this is done in reverse order. We see the whole history of the world played out in a semi ironic, high camp series of vignettes starring a variety of ageing stars: the forty something Hedy Lamarr plays the teenage Joan of Arc, for instance; an ancient looking Peter Lorre is the twenty something Nero. As you might expect, Harpo Marx is Isaac Newton**.

Ultimately, the tribunal fails to come to a decision: mankind is as good as it is evil; as noble as it is savage. A pretty fair assessment, really. The court is adjourned and scheduled to reconvene at a later date when, according to Judge Cedric Hardwicke as he glares down the barrel of the camera at the audience, the verdict will be 'UP TO YOU', i.e. stop messing about with nuclear bombs, you jumped up tools.

*  Price is accompanied by his 'apprentice', Nick Cravat: acrobat, mime, circus colleague and film co-star of Burt Lancaster, as well as the nimble fellow in the furry suit on the wing of the plane in the incredible Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. 

**  Chico and Groucho also have roles, as a Monk and Peter Minuit, respectively. Astoundingly, it didn't occur to anyone on the production to put them in a scene together, which really is a crime against the Universe.