SATAN'S CHILDREN

d. Joe Wiezycki (1975)

Rape revenge films are always mean and tawdry: no matter how satisfying the revenge element is, there always has to be a disturbing attack to set up the story. Here, there's a slight twist on standard exploitation mores: the victim is a teenage boy, a runaway from an intolerable home life who meets an older guy who he hopes will be a friend and mentor but instead turns out to be  the scumbag leader of a gang of scumbag abusers. The scumbags all take a turn with the unfortunate youngster then dump his ripped and torn body in the middle of nowhere, where he is discovered, semi-conscious, by a group of satanists. How lucky can one boy be?

The satanists are all young, hippy-ish and in the thrall of a super louche smoothie called Simon, who gives orders in a slow, quiet voice whilst fiddling with his Zapata moustache. He talks of The Master as if he were the area manager. It's a ridiculously tough group – disciplinary infractions are punished by execution by hanging or, if they're being generous, by burying you up to your neck in sand and covering your hair in syrup to attract the ants.

Strangely for an unconventional cult of sexual freedom and social anarchy they are dead set against homosexuality to the extent that poor Bobby, even as a rape victim, is treated with suspicion and labelled a 'loser' who was 'weak' enough to 'let' himself be abused.

The only way Bobby can prove himself is in the bloodiest terms possible. He escapes, pushes two of the pursuing Satanists into quicksand (actually a hole filled with plaster of paris and washing up liquid), goes home, hits his mean Dad over the head with a bottle and bundles his wicked stepsister into the boot of his car before finding and shooting his attackers and cutting off their heads and putting them in a bag which he presents to Simon as proof of his sincerity, proving himself as a ‘winner’: a bright eyed boy with a bright arsed future. His stepsister (who is more unpleasant than plain evil) is handed over to the group as a kind of cult-warming present, to be tortured and, eventually, crucified.

It’s a remarkable film, really, despite clear technical limitations: the sound often overlaps or gets suddenly cut off; special effects and pyrotechnics are on show; several key scenes lose dramatic intensity by simply being too dark. The cast is made up entirely of students, which occasionally shows, but actually helps create a terrifying vision of a post-Manson USA where disaffected youths are being corrupted, abused, degraded and turned to the dark side all across the country without anyone knowing about it.

BABY FACE NELSON

d. Don Siegel (1957)

Americans love outlaws, and cinema, so it's not surprising that most notable American criminals have been commemorated on film. Yet these notorious people, whether they are Jesse James or John Dillinger, Butch and Sundance or Bonnie and Clyde, have something else in common besides celluloid immortality: they're all scum bags. Despite the glamour and mythology that springs up around them, outlaws are very rarely Robin Hood style philanthropists, or even oppressed people striking a blow against the system. Instead they are usually violent criminals, ruthless, amoral people who steal and kill and spread misery and fear: fascinating but not exactly admirable. 

Take Lester Gillis aka Baby Face Nelson, as played here by Mickey Rooney. This character has but one redeeming feature, the love of a beautiful woman (Carolyn Jones). By the end of the film, even she is becoming sickened by his blood lust and, it would seem, his death wish. Nelson is a monster, no-one is safe around him and no matter how much money he steals, how many people he kills, he never stops, he can't stop. The real Nelson died after being shot seventeen times. Even then he managed to make it home and die in his bed, a defiant final 'fuck you' to the world. Here, his wife administers the coup de grace in a graveyard after he is fatally wounded, which is a more obviously dramatic finale, but a less satisfying one.

Director for hire Don Siegel doesn't particularly distinguish himself here, but he keeps everything moving. Outlaws life stories always seem to have a kind of fatal momentum, anyway, a short, quick charge to death or imprisonment. Rooney is far too old to play Nelson (Nelson was dead at 25, Rooney is pushing 40) but has the right look and the right stature (throughout Nelson is referred to as 'shrimp' or, ironically, 'the big man' - he doesn't like it). His performance has two gears, a sort of closed off auto pilot that allows him to function on a day to day basis, and a murderous, explosive anger that drives him onwards. This uncontrollable ire is the focus of one of Siegel's few directorial flourishes, a big close up on Nelson's face as he swears revenge, his right eye twitching involuntarily with rage.       

WOMEN IN BONDAGE

d. Steve Sekely (1943)

Cheap but potent propaganda, Women In Bondage takes the unusual step of showing Nazi Germany on the home front, and from the perspective of the women caught up in the mad world of Hitler and his murderous stooges. 

All women must join a paramilitary organisation, for instance, and spend their time marching, identifying enemy planes and informing on their friends, colleagues, neighbours and anyone else who dares question the Fuhrer. On their spare evenings, the girls are expected to be sexually promiscuous, particularly with soldiers, doing their bit to keep the master race well stocked. Then there are the intrusive medical examinations, and the obsession with Aryan purity (one girl is unable to marry her SS man boyfriend because she fails an eye test), as well as other sundry surprises that the insanely inhuman and unsentimental logic of the Reich throws up (a woman's husband returns from the Russian Front a hero but an impotent invalid; she is officially instructed to get pregnant by his brother instead). 

It's occasionally strong stuff, and is particularly successful in the way that it presents the regime (quite realistically) as a sick but ultimately rather banal bureaucracy that, like all totalitarian states, can only function by the constant exertion of force, a mountain of paperwork and a willing workforce of goon-like enforcers. 

Please note that the title refers to bondage in the sense of serfdom or slavery, not the act of tying or binding for sexual pleasure. Although there is a bit of that, and some whipping.   

BLACK SAMSON

d. Charles Bail (1974)

I love Blaxploitation films because they generally make absolutely no apologies and they cut straight to the core of popular cinema. These are films filled with sex, action and wish fulfillment and packed with entertainment. The protagonists are not only larger than life but they are big and bold enough to bust out of their societal cage: impervious to pain, irresistible to the opposite sex, ineffably cool, unbelievably tough, they are righteous dudes and bitches, sticking it to The Man, whoever and wherever The Man might be.

Samson is one of these righteous dudes. He is a big mahogany hewn motherfucker who keeps his neighbourhood tight, running it like a benign dictator, although he’s not afraid to hand out a couple of taps with his ceremonial twatting stick if he needs to. He’s down on drugs and crime, and, through his popular bar at the hub of the community, he provides his subjects with beer, topless go-go dancing and the sad novelty of his pet lion, perhaps the biggest victim of Samson’s pre-eminence. The lion looks drugged up and utterly miserable, laid on the bar in a torpor, or a stupor, his eyes dim and dead.

The lion, along with a wardrobe of garish dashikis and a gold topped staff, is clearly part of Samson’s shtick, his chains of office. As a fiend for accuracy this jarred with me, as the original Samson that they are clearly alluding to didn’t even like lions, instead tearing one apart with his bare hands and leaving its corpse to rot. When he passed by again a few days later, a swarm of bees had built a hive in its decaying stomach, prompting the maxim ‘from the strong came forth the sweet’: the phrase, and a rendition of the dead lion and the live bees, still appear on Lyle’s Golden Syrup tins today. Who says that blogs can’t be educational?

Into this relatively balanced and peaceful environment comes the Mafia, in the person of a ambitious, young-ish mobster played by William Smith – a man who has appeared in over three hundred films, none of them much good. His villain is a real master class in scumbaggery, an abuser of women, a bully, a creep and wearer of loud checked trousers. This cracker piece of pockmarked shit wants to take over Samson’s patch and arrogantly thinks it will be easy, an assumption he will live to regret - but not for long.     

The film culminates in a mad battle where the locals gather on roofs to hurl old fridges and air conditioners at the mobsters while being shot in the face and falling to their deaths. It’s carnage. When the battle is won, Samson, curiously absent during the fighting, strides into the fray like a General, surveying the death and destruction with a damp but undamaged eye, nodding sagely at the mayhem he has presided over. To his credit, and most unlike a general, he tears his shirt off, puts his huge dukes up and, after a bruising and protracted scrap, beats the obnoxious and unrepentant Smith to death.

Threat neutralised, villain dispatched, equilibrium is restored in Samsonville, and the topless go go dancing begins again, perhaps with even more abandon. It’s nice to know who’s in charge. For some, anyway, the lion couldn’t give a monkeys. 

THE GIANT CLAW

d. Fred F. Sears (1957)

The Giant Claw is surprisingly considered for a film about a massive killer bird from outer space which looks like a cross between a new born vulture and Rod Hull's Emu. The enormous (and enormously goofy looking) winged monster is, in fact, from a galaxy many millions of light years away, a galaxy made of anti-matter. As such, the Giant Claw (for the record, it has several giant claws) is impervious to our weapons and so flaps around the world quite freely, destroying planes and trains and cars as if they were simply slightly shabby scale models, knocking the tops off buildings and chomping down pedestrians and parachutists like screaming fleshy tic tacs.  

It takes a lot of collateral damage and a great deal of convoluted sort of science chat before the forces of humanity are able to blast the creature out of the skies for good, although, before hand, and to their great satisfaction, they do manage to find its nest and scramble its huge solitary egg with a couple of sniper rifles.

This film went by so quickly it almost felt like a dream, just not as realistic. It works very well on its own terms and the super-sized death turkey with its mohican hair-do (or is it a wind blown comb across?) and tombstone teeth is a once seen, never forgotten creation.

BLOOD FREAK

d. Brad F. Grinter (1972)

We've all seen cautionary tales about the dangers of drug consumption, and those of us who like our films psychotronic will have seen our fair share of movies about the transformative powers of mad and unsanctioned science. Blood Freak manages to combine these two hot topics to present us with the far out story of a narcotics fiend who turns into a turkey.

Hunky Herschell is just back from Vietnam, with only a badly burned arm and a dope habit to show for his tour of duty. While riding from town to town on his chopper, he meets up with Angel, a Bible spouting dolly bird who, despite her obvious moral rectitude, takes him to a hippy drug party and introduces him to her wilder and more switched on sister, Ann. Sultry Ann sets her cap at the upright, uptight Herschell, and conspires with her sleazy drug dealer to get her target to smoke an instantly addictive joint, after which he falls into bed with her.

Herschell gets a job at the local poultry farm where, for extra cash, he chows down on turkey that has been illegally experimented upon. Soon afterwards he has a seizure and, when he wakes up, he is surprised to find (as are we) that he has the big, gnarled head of a turkey cock and major collywobbles from drug comedown. Actual turkey, cold turkey: it’s a very clever metaphor. Doubly damned, he now creeps about grabbing addicts and slitting their throats, drinking their dope rich blood like coca cola while his supposedly dead victims cough and splutter as the strawberry syrup goes into their eyes and up their noses. 

This madness is interspersed with sardonic commentary from director, Brad F. Grinter, a permanently smoking grizzled guy who has clearly lived hard and well and reads his erudite words from an offscreen piece of paper, perhaps due to short term memory loss. Grinter concludes this outrageous story by saying that it is 'partly based on fact, partly based on probability', clearly bullshit. In the end analysis, though, this is a film about a vampire turkey that manages to entertain without a knowing nod, a wink or an arched eyebrow, so it's pretty much beyond normal criticism as far as I'm concerned. 

OCTAMAN

d. Harry Essex (1971)

Octaman isn't a very good film in any respect, but it has a massive amount of chutzpah, not least in its ambition to make a feature length movie with virtually no budget and hardly any script. Half of what money there was must have gone on two past their best name actors: former Gulliver, Sinbad and Jack the Giant Killer, Kerwin Matthews, and Italian erstwhile ingenue Pier Angeli, who would accidentally overdose on barbiturates shortly after the production wrapped (I say ‘accidentally’, but perhaps she was trying to avoid attending the premiere).

The rest of the cash was obviously spent on the Octaman rubber suit, because we see it from every angle - and it looks pretty good: two legs, six tentacles and a dome shaped head, fiery red eyes and a hideous toothy hole for a mouth, a perennially open 'o' that looks a bit like Paul McCartney's mouth, or a cats arse.  We don’t see any obvious zips or a visible pant line (common monster costume mistakes) but we can see that the suit is in two parts, the bottom half of which is the world’s craziest and leggiest pair of green slacks.

As in most monster films, the Octaman wants revenge on the humans who have encroached on his land and ruined it (as you might surmise from the existence of a massive, land walking octopus, Octaman has been mutated by industrial pollution) but here they have also stolen two of his kids, one of which died in a bucket en route to the lab, with the other dissected alive by a local 'scientist' (he doesn't even wash his hands). What follows is a cat and mouse chase, assuming the cat is a bloke in a rubber suit who moves very, very slowly and the mice are idiots who do everything they can to continually blunder into the cat's flailing tentacles. 

Lives are lost, lives are saved, guns are cocked, shots are fired. There's a subplot about a failing circus and the two main characters are a sweet couple, middle aged people engaged to each other. After what seems like a long time, Octaman is finally shot enough to disappear back into the toxic water with an ignominious plop. Often, films like these try to finish on an ambiguous note or perhaps set the scene for a sequel, but here 'The End' appears before the ripples have even subsided, no question mark, no ellipsis, that's the end of that.