SUDDEN DEATH

d. Eddie Romero (1977)

We’re back in the Pearl of the Orient Seas* again, this time finding out about the hitherto hidden world of ruthless sugar barons, greedy, amoral men who are prepared to displace native people and destroy the environment in order to make a dollar, a sweet, sweet dollar. These men are so cartoonishly evil that, when their nice managing director tries to make reparations to the native people for the wholescale destruction of their homes and habitat, they have his entire family, including two little boys and a baby, shot to death, leaving the badly injured executive for dead.

Out of danger, but still full of grief and shotgun pellets, the man tracks down the legendary Harrison ‘Duke’ Smith (little Robert Conrad, wiry and in very tight trousers), a man who has had an illustrious career as a state sanctioned murderer, terrorist and all round good guy / undercover bastard. Now living out an idyllic retirement in a shack on the beach, he initially refuses to help, giving his about to graduate teenage daughter and a beautiful young girlfriend as reasons to stay alive.

When the man is subsequently burned alive, and Duke’s daughter tuts at him in disapproval, he finally decides to get involved, although his motivation is far from clear. I mean, firstly, teenage girls tut all the time and, even so, the guy is now a charcoal briquette and the rest of his family are already dead, and Duke didn’t know any of them, so what’s the point apart from the fact that feature films aren't usually twenty seven minutes long?

Enlisting the help of his old friend Wyatt, a sharp black martial arts expert, he roots out the conspiracy and takes out the nasty Sugar Barons one by one, at first almost by accident and then with accelerating zeal and sadism. Towards the end, you realise that this noble mission has unleashed a psychopath, a man who is so used to killing that it has become his default setting.

The film’s pacing is glacial for the most part, but then culminates in a spectacular last ten minutes, where even the camera struggles to keep up with the action. The last third of the film is greatly enlivened by the addition of ex-surfing champ and all round lunk / hunk Don Stroud, here playing a dandyish but socially awkward Corsican hitman called in to take Duke out before he can murder everyone in Manila. I like Stroud, but he often makes strange acting choices, here speaking in a weird, cotton-mouthed way, as if he wants to try an accent but is embarrassed by it. The battle between two professional killers ends in a bruising and very bloody encounter in an icehouse, where quick cutting is used to convey violence and to disguise the fact that Stroud is at least a foot taller than Conrad.  

The final moments are not entirely unexpected but are genuinely gut-wrenching, and the use of carousel music to accompany the horror is a masterstroke, symbolising both the grotesque tableau and the breaking of a over-stretched mind. It’s tough stuff.

*The Philippines, mate.

SAVAGE SISTERS

d. Eddie Romero (1974)

Another blog entry, another low budget, high entertainment Filipino made exploitation film, this time a broad romp about a proposed revolution in a fascistic 'banana republic' and the hunt for a briefcase containing a million dollars that will help finance the whole thing. That's the whole plot. 

Inconsequential but fast moving, the film looks like it was fun to make, although post-production stories of having to use the jungle as a bathroom and a cave filled with bats as a dressing room perhaps put a different perspective on it. It's mainly a lot of running around, gun play, martial arts and John Ashley showing off as an amoral but endearing entrepreneur who wears leopardskin underpants and has sex with everybody.   

As is often the case in these films, the female characters are at the forefront, and the three stars are black, white and Asian, which accounts for the film's alternate title, Ebony, Ivory and Jade. Yes, these women are there to be looked at, but they also kick arse and are always one step ahead of everybody else, and their motivations (greed; revenge; freedom) are clear and believable. The Ebony element is provided by Gloria Hendry, a striking looking and talented actress whose greatest performance was pretending to find Roger Moore irresistible in Live and Let Die. 

The usual suspects show up to support the stars: Sid Haig (as a sadistic panto Mexican) and the ever-present, always welcome, inexplicably still alive Vic Diaz (he looked close to death forty five years ago), here playing a bandit called One Eye who wears a tight t shirt that sits atop his pot belly and, when he turns around, reveals far too much bum crack, i.e. any.

The once all-conquering cycle is clearly running out of steam, but is still a good way of passing the time. Life is short, my friends, you must take your meagre pleasures while you may. The body count is ridiculously high, by the way, but even torture scenes are played for laughs so you don't really notice. Good times.  

TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN

d. Lee Sholem (1949) 

One of my great heroes is Johnny Weissmuller, so I'm not predisposed to like Lex Barker, the man who replaced him as Tarzan after 16 glorious years. I'm not an unreasonable person, however, so I thought I'd give Barker the benefit of the doubt and see how the interloping twat does at filling Johnny's loin cloth (although I'm assuming Barker got a new loin cloth when he started. I certainly hope so).

These days, Tarzan's Magic Fountain would be described as a franchise reboot: new lead actor, some new sets, some new matte paintings - and a return to some of the gruesome violence that the series was originally notable for but became less prevalent as the films became popular with children. This is counter balanced by an awful lot of comic relief, mostly Cheeta related. There is still a reliance on (often badly matched) stock footage, much of which has already appeared in Tarzan films many, many times over.

The story meanders around a long lost aviatrix (40s horror favourite, Evelyn Ankers) and the idea of a hidden jungle city that has the secret of eternal youth. It's not particularly interesting, and there is an 'of its time' sub-plot where Jane takes charge of an expedition in order to demonstrate all that she has learned from many years of living in the jungle. It's a total disaster, and it's not long before she's lost, covered in killer ants and caught in a flash flood, flapping her arms around and shouting for Tarzan. That will teach the woman to try and do stuff.

So, what does Barker bring to the role? Well, he's fifteen years younger than Johnny Weissmuller, and, understandably, in better shape (Johnny filled out a bit when he hit 40). His biggest contribution, however, is smugness: his Tarzan is extremely pleased with himself, and forever smirking at some private joke or other. It's not an admirable quality, nor is the fact that he wears espadrilles all the time. 

As ever, the film ends on some Cheeta related tomfoolery. This time, Cheeta drinks from the magic fountain of youth and turns into a baby Howler Monkey. A baby Howler Monkey. They must think we are fucking idiots. 

SPASMO

d. Umberto Lenzi (1973)

Ah, Giallo, Italian for complicated. Sort of.

Giallo films are intricate, intriguing, surprising. They are fixated on murder and fear in the fast lane of the twentieth century, and feature attractive people with fabulous homes, cool clothes, fast cars and strange, unnatural urges. There is always at least one character who is a psychotic sex killer, and part of the game is working out which one (or two, or three) it is.

Spasmo is a text book example of its class, a triumph of style over substance. Almost everything is here for effect, so much so that the film resembles a less tedious Whitehall farce, filled with non-sequiturs: characters who drive miles to say a couple of ominous lines and then drive off again; women and men who are introduced just to be murdered; dead people who are neither dead nor people (one of the characters has an obsession with lifelike female mannequins, and likes to hang them from trees); shadows, mistaken identity, unlikely coincidences.

There’s a great kinetic energy to the film, as if it relies on perpetual motion or knows it’s a fairly flimsy house of cards that would collapse with the merest breath. Everything is heightened, racked up, piled on. In an amazing lighthouse on a cliff edge filled with caged birds of prey the camera cuts rapidly between headshots of the characters and the birds, each staring down the camera in turn as Ennio Morricone’s superb score stabs and swoops. The effect is slightly ridiculous, but wonderful, operatically dramatic. Perhaps the owl knows what’s going on, as no-one else really has a clue – or a care, it’s not that sort of movie.    

English actress Suzy Kendall – born Freda Belpin – lends extra quality to proceedings: she's beautiful and moves like a model, but is also excellent at screaming and pulling ‘urgh’ and ‘arrgghh’ faces. She is ably supported by an equally photogenic cast: this is Giallo, so everyone is good looking, except for the ugly ones, who have more than a touch of the grotesque about them.

PRESSURE POINT

d. Hubert Cornfield (1962)

I've always loved films about psychoanalysis, mainly because they provide so much scope for offbeat and inventive attempts to turn the objective camera into a subjective eye. I particularly enjoy dream sequences, haunting visuals, unusual staging, blurred edges, atonal electronic music and lots and lots of mime. Pressure Point is almost mainstream in many ways, but has some fascinating components that keep it plenty weird enough for consideration on this somewhat specialist blog. 

The very great Sidney Poitier is the prison psychiatrist, Bobby Darin the prisoner patient, an American Nazi imprisoned when the USA entered the war with Germany. They are diametrically opposed from the outset, of course, but the tension between the racist loser and the black high flier sparks some soul searching from each of them, which makes for a fascinating conflict. 

Their sessions together open up all sorts of odd, abstract flashbacks from Darin's less than illustrious past, sometimes staged in anonymous dreamscapes (the scenes where a young Darin bullies his imaginary friend), sometimes in Poitier's office (the venue for a fantasy about Darin ordering an elephant to stand on his pathetic hypochondriac Mother's head). It's pretty intense, particularly the restaging of a unsettling incident in which Darin and his drunken friends play Noughts and Crosses on every available surface in a bar - including the landlord's wife.   

Although the narrative is framed as a fairly conventional tale of triumph over adversity, Pressure Point does a lot more besides, riveting the attention and stimulating the imagination, and the performances, particularly from the under-rated Darin, are excellent. 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, USA

d. Denis Sanders (1959)

Dostoevsky goes beat, man. Well, sort of. George Hamilton plays Robert Cole, a beer can bongo playing high school drop out with a very punchable face and a massive superiority complex. Ray believes that he is special, an Alexander the Great, a Napoleon Bonaparte, albeit one who lives in a Los Angeles bedsit and spends most of his days either asleep or drifting aimlessly around amusement arcades. Cole believes that important people like him shouldn't have to operate within the normal moral framework of society and that, as they know best, they should do whatever the hell they like. Typical student, really. His view is that if, for example, he had beaten a pawnbroker to death, then he probably had a very good reason, and he's too clever to get caught, so let's leave it at that.    

I haven't read Dostoevsky's original novel (I haven't read ANY Dostoevsky, please don't tell my mates), but I am familiar with the basics, which is just as well as you certainly don't get any help from the film itself, which cleverly reconfigures the source material so that it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Despite the inherent drama of the storyline there is no tension here whatsoever and the narrative is reduced to a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes in which an out of their depth cast are left spouting cod philosophical non sequiturs in lieu of characterisation and dialogue. The music is quite good, though. 

The Cole/Raskolnikov character needs an actor able to convey a fierce intellect, a complex personality and a monstrous personal philosophy. Instead we get a very young George Hamilton, who looks a bit thick and keeps stiffly throwing his arms in the air and shouting. With a better actor the film might have had a chance but, as the producer later admitted, they simply couldn't afford Anthony Perkins.   

I didn't set up this blog to be mean to films, by the way, but Crime and Punishment, USA is pretentious and poorly executed and it would be dishonest of me not to say so - and I'm nothing if not a deeply moral and upright person.   

DEATH PROMISE

d. Robert Warmflash (1977) 

When I was at junior school, about a thousand years ago, once a week our teacher Mr. Crockett would let us perform a play of our own devising on a rotational basis. In my group - boys only, of course, because girls were horrible  - we never really put much effort in, either blatantly ripping off something we’d seen on telly or coming up with some nonsense about robot teachers or someone setting fire to the school. When inspiration ran completely dry, we often just improvised, returning again and again to the twin preoccupations of pre-pubescent boys: fighting and friendship. These 'plays' involved kung fu, sword fights, stabbings, stranglings, shootings, wrestling, boxing and a huge amount of male bonding: hand shaking, back patting, affectionate arm punching. The high five hadn't caught on in the UK at the time, and the fist bump was still under development. It was an amateurish, childish vision of what it meant to be a grown up man: violence, camaraderie, heroism, cuddling, no women. And that, dear reader, is what Death Promise reminded me of.  

Two tough New York guys, one white, one black, one short, one tall, neither in any kind of employment, spend their days jogging in matching track suits and training – hard – at the martial arts club. To show that they are friends, they touch each other constantly. When ruthless developers try to evict them from their apartment building, using a variety of nefarious means (turning off the utilities, starting a fire, infesting the building with rats) the guys find any number of arses to kick, somewhatr exacerbating the problem and culminating in the murder of the short white guy’s father. Eaten up by grief, hungry for revenge, he flies off to an exotic dojo where he becomes so disciplined that he can catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks. Shit hot and invincible, he returns to the Big Apple to kill those dirty scumbag landlords one by one: by bow and arrow, by poison, by putting a bag of angry, hungry rats on someone’s head.

Each time he crosses a name off the list he and his tall, black friend nod sagely, clasp hands and look into each other’s eyes for just a beat too long. It's very funny, not because it’s homoerotic but because it absolutely isn't.   

Somewhat stilted in terms of drama, the film only really comes to life during the fight sequences,  although luckily these take up about 75% of the films running time. The last half hour is literally just one big battle, eventually descending into hysterical madness as angry men scream wildly and uncontrollably at each other, tearing off their tight shirts to kick and punch the shit out of each other really slowly. It ends with a dummy representing the main villain being thrown off a roof, and it’s not a good dummy either - which is great. Highly recommended!