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!  

DEATH BY INVITATION

d. Ken Friedman (1971)

If you’re looking for pace and excitement, then this film is not for you. Languid to the point of being in a stupor, the story concerns a reincarnated witch, Lise (Shelby Levington, excellent), who, three hundred years after her execution in Salem, is able to wreak her revenge on the descendants of her chief persecutor in modern day Staten Island.

Lise is attractive, intelligent, nonchalant, cool and sexy as hell. She starts by insinuating herself into the family as a trusted friend, before callously killing the family’s teenage son, and suspending his dismembered corpse in a plastic bag in a cupboard. She then decapitates their teenage daughter and ‘helps’ their six year old girl fall down the stairs to her death. All the while she wears black and pulls sympathetic faces, supporting the family through their grief as she plans her next diabolical move, building up to taking out the patriarch, a bumptious, arrogant drunk who just happens to look exactly like the man who killed her all those centuries ago.

Lise is not really a witch by deed: she doesn’t cast any spells or hop about in the nude invoking the goat of Mendes or Gaia or whoever or whatever witches invoke. In fact, there is no evidence that she ever sticks a pin in anything. Lise is a witch by character, full of strength, resolve, defiance. Her mission is about revenge, pure and simple, executed with strength and cold, relentless intent.

Right at the beginning of the film, Lise tells the nerdy, doomed teenage son a long story about a primitive tribe where women were the leaders and the hunters and the men merely acolytes and hand servants. When the women were challenged by an alpha male, they pursued him through the woods and, when they caught up with the upstart, tore him apart with their hands and teeth for his impudence. It’s a mesmerising monologue, performed well, and lets us know that she can’t stop, won’t stop in her mission, despite the fact that, with the exception of the father, who is a real piece of work, the rest of her victims seem ordinary, totally harmless, certainly undeserving of death and misery and loss on the scale inflicted upon them. Their niceness is irrelevant, however, Lise wants her pound of flesh, and isn’t bothered about how she balances the scales.

A slow but quietly immersive film, reeking of comedown and 1971, that only loses points towards the end by having Lise fall for a guy who bullies her into loving him and thus diminishes her powers and her will to kill. As if.

CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

Noted endocrinologist John Carradine has made the familiar transition from dedicated scientist to unhinged maniac. He steals a friendly gorilla from a circus and implants it with the glands of his nurse, who made the mistake of suggesting that he was probably working too hard. The result, somewhat improbably, is a beautiful, exotic looking woman who he names Paula Dupree (she's played by Acquanetta, 'the Venezualan Volcano', actually born in Wyoming).

Because he's mad and drunk on his own cleverness, the doctor takes his creation back to the circus, where it becomes clear that Paula has a miraculous power over animals: they are shit scared of her. She is immediately enlisted as an assistant to the big cat tamer, her main role being to stand outside the cage in a spangly outfit just looking intently at the lions and tigers*. Occasionally, if they become unruly, she will look harder, perhaps arching an eyebrow. It's nice work if you can get it, though, presumably, there isn't a massive amount of demand for that sort of talent.

Falling in love with the big cat tamer sends powerful emotions coursing through her reconfigured body, however, breaking her new glands and unleashing her inner gorilla. By the time she is shot by an over zealous cop (nothing much changes in America) she has fully reverted to her old, hairy animal self, but there is a moment roughly halfway between her initial retro-transformation from human lady to ape woman to gorilla in which she is probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

* These scenes feature Clyde Beatty, the world famous animal trainer. It is amazing to watch him face down a dozen snarling big cats, but his methods leave a lot to be desired. There is also a lot of footage of lions and tigers fighting each other, an incredible but unedifying spectacle.