Don't Relinquish Your Crazy

Here's a rarity for you: a gaslight movie with a male victim. 1962's The Premature Burial is a Roger Corman movie very loosely based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. At first I thought it was no more than pretty, ridiculous schlock but I started to like the movie more as it went on.

Ray Milland plays Guy Carrell, a wealthy gentlemen residing in a massive manor located on a perpetually mist shrouded moor.

I mean, the fog machine must have been running every single day of shooting. Whether it's a desperate chase, a pleasant afternoon stroll, or, of course, a funeral, it always looks exactly the same outside, which helps give the whole film a dreamlike quality.

The house is beautiful, too, with lincoln green walls, brown wainscoting. and cherry Red Vine candles. But note the fellow's brown tweed tailcoat. I think the costume designer never heard of a frock coat.

Emily (Hazel Court) pleads with Guy to marry her, promising eternal, unfaltering devotion. Of course, once they're married, she starts trying to change him, like insisting he give up his silly, morbid obsession with premature burial.

She has him destroy the elaborate tomb he's set up with a casket that breaks apart when the occupant pulls a cord. But, naturally, given the title of the film, we all know what's coming.

The movie is ridiculous but in such a dreamlike way it kind of works. Apparently Francis Ford Coppola was assistant director on this one. Some of the production design kind of recalls Coppola's Dracula.

The Premature Burial is available now on The Criterion Channel as part of "Grindhouse Gothic", a collection of Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Queen Stole Her Crown

I don't know why but I expected more from a movie called Queen of Blood. This 1966 American film, produced by Roger Corman and directed by Curtis Harrington, owes a lot to a Soviet film called Mechte Navstechu, including its screenplay and its best footage, which is ripped right from that film. But Queen of Blood does have Basil Rathbone in one of his last roles and Dennis Hopper in one of his first along with the always entertaining, and frequently underrated, John Saxon.

We meet Saxon in some lunar office space chatting up a coworker (Judi Meredith). The two go to lunch, where they run into Dennis Hopper and a friend, before they see a broadcast from Basil Rathbone, who plays Dr. Faraday, leader of this space exploration institution.

Around this time, we also start seeing footage from the Soviet movie of an alien ship. All the footage from Mechte Navstrechu is pretty gorgeous and ominous, filled with darkness and lurid colour.

The Sci Fi business of the humans investigating a crashed alien ship is developed decently enough and the plot turns out to be about an alien blood-sucker, played by a compellingly exotic Florence Marly. But mostly I came away from the movie wanting to see the Soviet original.

Both Rathbone and Hopper seem pretty checked out. For different reasons, of course.

Queen of Blood is available on Amazon Prime.

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The early rabbit thwarts the trusty knife.
At dusk, a dozen miles stretched ahead.
They gathered works for tea from flowers rife.
Remembered films would put the vamp to bed.
The bank was softer than the magma needs.
A sleeping dragon dreamt of vagrant beers.
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A flying nose rewrote the daisy bed.
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It happens fate was little like we read,
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Gratuitous Fury

Somewhere in the Philippines, where blonde mafiosos run a death match martial arts tournament, a pretty blonde black belt seeks her missing sister in 1981's Firecracker. Released through Roger Corman's New World Pictures, it's about as schlocky as it gets, but maybe with a higher level of competence than you might expect.

Jillian Kesner stars as Susanne, an undefeated karate champion from the U.S. who has surprising difficulty beating up random thugs on the streets of the Philippines. Two guys manage to tear off almost all her clothes before she finally finishes them off.

According to the trivia page on imdb: "The fight scene where Jillian Kesner's bra was sliced off was a legitimate accident while filming. Director Cirio Santiago decided to leave it in the movie while editing."

This so clearly not true it's pretty hilarious. Yeah, he accidentally had the camera zoomed right in on her chest when the sickle passed right over it. The information is even more suspicious when you consider that on the same trivia page is a paragraph describing how Roger Corman mandated this and another scene specifically to work more nudity into the film.

The other scene is a sex scene between Susanne and the mob's top cage fighter, Chuck (Darby Hinton), a man whose tidy 'stache already marked out "gratuitous sex scene" in his destiny.

But that's not all, oh, no. When Chuck gently places the distraught Susanne in his bed, he turns off the lights and turns on a special pink light he has for such occasions.

All while dreamy piano music sweeps over the soundtrack. This is maximum cheese.

Actually most of the score is pretty interesting, a genuinely exciting, funky electronic beat. Though I later learned it was recycled from New World's Shogun Assassin, a heavily modified version of two of the Kozure Okami movies.

The locations in Firecracker are pretty decent and apparently authentic and there's some real creativity in the action scenes. There's an ambush in a river where some mobsters get their cars stuck before being shot at from both river banks.

The thugs chase Susanne through a pretty interesting factory with many bladed farming and carpentry implements put to gratuitously bloody use. Some poor security guard gets it right through the sternum with a scythe.

Kesner's stunt double is pretty easy to identify because the long blonde hair is suddenly swapped out for a wig that looks like a glittery white pom pom. But that means it's clear to see when Kesner is doing her own fighting and that's actually for a good 95% of the time. She's not bad--she clearly did some real training. Even better are a number of the supporting characters, including a Bruce Lee wannabe in the climax.

Firecracker is available on Amazon Prime.

When the Alien Attacks, Remember Sex

It's hard to say if 1982's Forbidden World is a decent science fiction film sabotaged by porn elements or a decent porn sabotaged by sci-fi elements. Neither side of this intriguing hybrid quite asserts itself enough to argue for one or the other though both have some surprisingly good elements to commend them.

Maybe it needed just to be a different kind of porn. Dawn Dunlap as Tracy Baxter, a naive research scientist with perfect hair, walks through an intricately detailed corridor wearing lingerie as casual wear. The production design on this movie is way better than it needs to be for a porn parody, partly because sets designed by James Cameron were reused from Galaxy of Terror. Both films were produced by Roger Corman--and I'd wager Corman was not shy about jumping into the director's chair here. Going all the way back to the 50s, his films persistently feature cheesecake that doesn't quite gel with the various genre films' subject matters.

Tracy, the anachronistic porn princess, becomes the film's POV character despite the initial setup framing things with an intergalactic "troubleshooter", a cocky old hand named Mike (Jesse Vint) who travels with an android, Sam (Don Olivera), who inexplicably resembles a Cylon.

Once he gets to the station where genetic experiments are being carried out as part of an effort to battle a food crisis, the camera's attention tends to stay with Tracy or Barbara (June Chadwick) before sticking mainly with Tracy. Even when Mike and the others go outside to pursue the escaped alien-esque mutant, we're given over-the-shoulder shots of Tracy watching them through a monitor.

Hmm, that rock looks familiar. Watch out for Gorn!

The plot takes an ironic turn when it turns out the mutant menace is turning people into self-sustaining sacks of protein perfectly suitable for its digestion. Poetic justice for attempting to solve a food crisis? Something like that. I do like the look of the monster in its final form, which is something like a cross between the Xenomorph and the cover of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The production design is good and some of the effects are really cool. The first guy who's attacked after Mike shows up has a massive hole in his head when he's found (by Tracy, of course). The station medical doctor (Fox Harris) declares the man is somehow, incredibly, still alive. And he stays alive as his body slowly breaks down. This results in a really eerie shot of the mangled thing staring mutely at the doctor, subtly breathing.

If it'd started talking like the Cryptkeeper it might've just been cheesy but the effect is subtle enough it works. But next to this we have naked Tracy in the sauna wearing sunglasses.

And I have to say, her attitude in these shots is kind of cool even if she mainly just completely does not fit in the film. Maybe if she looked a bit more like a scientist, a bit nerdier, if she came off as a little sharper instead of kind of like a big bunny. If part of her expertise were a combination of anthropological and genetic research into sexuality that somehow related to the station's experiments, maybe there could have been a harmonious, shall we say, intercourse between the film's sci-fi and pornographic elements. On the other hand, there is kind of a fun, Space Quest/They Live cheesy 80s vibe to the film. Maybe there just needed to be more wisecracks and hamburgers.

Forbidden World is available on Amazon Prime.

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Completed cakes alight upon the lip.

The Copy is Made of Greasy Foam

Wandering through a high fantasy world, David Carradine finds himself caught between a ganglord, a warlord, and a lot of naked women in 1984's The Warrior and the Sorceress. In fact a remake of Yojimbo, it compares unfavourably to the original in just about every way.

Unlike Sanjuro in the original Kurosawa film, who's a world weary samurai but still shocked to see a dog wandering around carrying a human hand, Carradine's "Dark One" laughs when he sees a woman and child being killed at the beginning of the movie. Instead of Kurosawa's vision of the one man who could stand in the middle of turmoil and mitigate or stop the trouble we have a much more cynical, vaguely defined character. His motives are entirely mercenary as he pits one side against another until he realises one side's favourite slave is the sorceress Naja, played by Maria Socas.

It was brave of Socas to appear topless throughout the entire film (apparently Naja's choice) though, as a surrogate for the sake brewer's captive in Yojimbo, a tiny part, her character is still less developed. Her vague motives having to do with a hazily defined lost order where she was at a high place in the hierarchy also gives the Dark One his vague motive for helping her--he used to be a knight or samurai in that same order and so naturally her subordinate. So instead of the world Kurosawa created where a rough around the edged ronin decides to help people on his own impulses, we have a surly swordsman who reluctantly manifests his loyalty to an old party.

Carradine appropriately plays the role with less warmth than Toshiro Mifune played his counterpart in Yojimbo, which also has the effect of making him a lot less interesting to watch.

Produced by an uncredited Roger Corman, The Warrior and the Princess has big goofy 80s fantasy sets to put Masters of the Universe to shame and the ganglord is a low budget Jabba the Hutt knock-off who's best friends with a cheap lizard hand-puppet. The film's kind of satisfying on a cheap, greasy schlock level and it's available on Amazon Prime. Though you're a lot better off watching Yojimbo on The Criterion Channel.

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A paper box contained the cookie hosts.

An "Alien" Movie

Star Wars and Alien inspired many filmmakers who produced films with varying degrees of success. On the lower end of the spectrum is 1981's Galaxy of Terror, directed by Bruce D. Clark and produced by Roger Corman, who supposedly directed an infamous scene where a woman is raped by a giant worm. To call this film schlocky would be something of an understatement but its production design, partly by a young James Cameron, is surprisingly good, if pretty liberally derivative of Alien, and there are some nice performances from Grace Zabriskie and Sid Haig, though all the actors are sabotaged a bit by an incredibly bad script and editing job.

In the future, humanity is ruled by a man with a glowing red blob for a head. He sends out a rescue ship to a planet where another ship has crash landed. Grace Zabriskie, who was forty at the time, commands the rescue vessel with her hair dyed grey.

Even when she was young, it seems, she was cast as an older woman. The rest of the crew seems vaguely patterned off the Nostromo crew. Erin Moran plays Alluma, "the ship's empath" according to Wikipedia. She seems a bit like a prototype for Deanna Troi, even more than the Deltan in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Her ability isn't really talked about much, which feels odd, as does Sid Haig's apparently religious attachment to a pair of crystal shurikens he carries.

I guess Star Wars had given people the idea it could be really effective if you introduced a lot of alien concepts without explaining them. But where George Lucas effectively created the sense of a strange place and collection of cultures that way, Galaxy of Terror just feels like it's missing a lot of scenes. This feeling gets even stronger when some characters die and it takes a while for the other characters to get around to noticing.

There are small roles for Robert Englund and Ray Walston. Taaffe O'Connell plays Dameia, the woman assaulted by the worm, a scene that takes the movie into remarkably hentai-esque territory. The lighting and the creature effects for the scene, which amounts to a guy in a suit with floppy proboscises, are noticeably of lower quality. Despite O'Connell and her body double's admirable commitment to the scene, it's not likely to convince even the most sensitive viewer that a genuine molestation is taking place. It lacks the sincerity of the Erato from the Doctor Who serial The Creature from the Pit.

Other challenges the crew encounter in a remarkably H.R. Giger-ish structure include evil doppelgangers and giant, insect aliens who clamp onto people and crush them. What links all these together? Apparently the concept is that the characters are facing their deepest fears. There's sure nothing organic about that extrapolation but I guess that's par for the course. This movie did make me smile.