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.

I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

d. Gene Fowler, Jr (1958)

Despite the sensational title, this is quite sombre, serious stuff. In it, an advance party of aliens arrive on earth and take over the minds and bodies of some of the male inhabitants of a small town. What do they want? Well, their own females have all died in the wake of a nuclear war, so they are after wives and girlfriends, which somehow seems much worse and far more presumptuous than simply zapping everybody to death and taking over the planet.

The aliens here are a fantastic conception, with hideous tentacled faces that are reminiscent of Lovecraft's cephalopod-like Cthulu. Their space suits seemingly provide them with an artificial atmosphere, and glow and vibrate so that they are hard to see, like a hallucination - or a nightmare. The aliens have the husks of their kidnap victims back in the mother ship, hanging mindlessly in the air, hooked up to some sort of transmitting device that allows the aliens to inhabit a facsimile of their bodies and access their memories and thought patterns - and their wives, especially their wives*. 

Even so, the aliens make unconvincing humans, at least as far as their wives are concerned: they can't have kids for a start (their scientists are working on this), dogs and cats hate them and, incredibly for 1950s America, they don't touch alcohol, not even cocktails. Naturally, they don't last long and are ultimately hunted down by a good old fashioned angry mob and killed, collapsing and coalescing into a pool of dirty bubbles as they die.

The final shot is of hundreds of saucers leaving the earth's atmosphere and moving on to the next galaxy: defeated, ugly men, still desperately looking for love.

* In the outwardly prim and proper 1950s, 'marriage' is synonymous with sex. The inference is quite clear: these fucking aliens are fucking our fucking women.

I MARRIED A WITCH

d. Rene Clair (1942)

There's something slightly demented about 1940s comedies. Perhaps its the mix of elegance and slapstick, like panto performed in evening dress, or that the tempo and volume are just on the edge of too fast, too shrill. Either way, they certainly seem strange to me, which is not to say that I don't enjoy them very much.

I Married A Witch is a lovely film, full of good humour and bags of energy, slightly frantic, often chaotic. But there's some darkness in there, too: it starts with the execution of a witch and her warlock father, after all, and is quickly followed by a montage of the misery inflicted on a single family by the dying witch's curse. When the oak tree planted over their graves is hit by lightning their imprisoned spirits are free to wander the earth in the form of smoke - and, even then, they still have revenge on their minds.

The witch is given a body, the beautiful, elfin form of Veronica Lake, with her little girl voice and phenomenal bone structure and, of course, her famous lopsided hair. Her witch is wicked, mischievous, relentless and absolutely adorable. When she drinks a potion intended for her victim (stiff old Frederic March), however, she falls desperately in love with him, a state of events that impairs her powers and incurs the wrath of her much less forgiving father (a surprisingly malevolent presence).

Some things I learned about witches from this film: they live incredibly long lives (the father is half a million years old, his daughter a mere 200 odd thousand); they are responsible for most of the great disasters of history (Pompeii is mentioned); they can reanimate corpses and live inside them (the father does this with someone who has just been burned to death. The body is still hot so, when he sits down, the chair catches alight) and, finally, 'love is stronger than witchcraft' (even if it's love created by witchcraft, apparently). It's all very informative, and beautifully frothy and funny - and marvellously macabre.

THE NAKED WITCH

d. Larry Buchanan (1961)

She's a Witch! And she's naked! What else do you need to know? Well, despite its no budget look and sound (about the standard of a home movie with dialogue recorded on a dictaphone in an aeroplane hanger), it's actually rather good.

Starting off with a ten minute prologue on the history of witches, this film does little wonders with scant resources. Despite some confusion over when the Dark Ages were, the prologue manages to be informative and engaging using only a reverberating voice over, a rostrum camera and a reproduction print of The Triumph Of Death by Peter Bruegel, a work of hideous imagination and horrific detail. 

After this comes an interesting if somewhat familiar tale of resurrection and revenge in the unusual setting of a German community in Texas. When a student rather foolishly pulls the stake out of the heart of the corpse of a long dead witch, the sorceress comes back (naked, and considerably more coiffured and made up than in the flashbacks) to murder the ancestors of her original accuser. It sounds fairly hackneyed and, yep, it's super cheap, but the dialogue is intelligent (although delivered poorly) and the story trajectory comes in at a pleasing angle. Despite the title, there's no smut and the witch is generally obscured by shadow, a negligee or, occasionally, a black smudge on the screen. There is some twilight skinny dipping.

The soundtrack is less successful, mainly sounding like a slightly inebriated man in the corner of the room prodding an over-amplified Bontempi organ but, just before she gets re-staked, the witch does a sensual interpretive dance routine to a really great exotica track, so even that works out in the end.    

So, yes, an unexpected hit. That said, even if it had been appalling I wouldn't have cared, I'm just here to enjoy myself.

TEEN-AGE CRIME WAVE

d. Fred F. Sears (1955)

According to the prologue of this film, teenage delinquency is ‘a plague’. I don’t disagree with that but I always think of delinquency as being no worse than some petty crime and vandalism, maybe some minor violence, somewhere between high spirits and childish frustration at the adult world. I'm clearly very naïve as here the teens start off with armed robbery before very quickly moving on to several murders, including the shooting of a police man.

The protagonists are Mike Denton and Terry Marsh, a teenage Bonnie and Clyde with a penchant for guns and heavy petting in public. Mike is about five foot four, has a scar on his face and a chip on his shoulder. He’s the sort of person for whom it’s not enough to have a gun, he has to keep pushing it in people’s faces. You can’t want for the tough guy act to slip and for him to start snivelling and bawling.

His girlfriend Terry wears a satin blouse and talks out of the side of her mouth in a clipped hardboiled tone, like Mae West and Jimmy Cagney's lovechild. She has no intention of being taken alive, which is just as well, as she won't be. A victim of sorts, she’s had a tough upbringing (think Cinderella but without any of the magic stuff, especially not a handsome prince) and cries and moans in her sleep.

Most of the film is taken up with a siege at a mid-west farmhouse. It all gets pretty intense, so it’s a relief when the duo and their hostages break out and take to the road. The climax takes place at the Griffith Observatory, more famously used at the end of Rebel Without A Cause*. There’s a real humdinger of a fist fight in one of the rotating telescope domes, and Terry gets her wish, evading capture by being shot in the back and killed. The beaten and bloodied Mike, under arrest, breaks down and cries like a big old baby, or rather like the little kid he actually is - and well he might, as his next stop will be the gas chamber.

* The James Dean film came out barely a month before Teenage Crime Wave, so it may have even been a coincidence. But I doubt it.