Todd Garbarini
Entries from January 2019
BY TODD GARBARINI
The
1970’s were a time of much spookiness and speculation in this country. Unidentified
Flying Objects (UFO’s), a publicity-shy Plesiosaur called Nessie steaking out
the Scottish Highlands, Sasquatch “sightingsâ€, ghosts, satanic cults, witchcraft,
and the threat of nuclear catastrophe highlighted the newspapers when Vietnam, Richard
Nixon and Watergate weren’t. Between 1977 and 1982, Leonard Nimoy’s narration
provided the basis for nearly 150 speculative and generally outright creepy
episodes of In Search Of…Similarly-themed
television specials were even categorized by TV Guide as “speculation†in their
genre listings. I even recall a scenario in 1979 that was reported in a local
newspaper concerning the discovery of ribcages and bowls of blood at a nearby
campground. Yikes!
May
1970 saw the release of Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, a
grimly-titled caveat in eschatological terms detailing the end of the world and
destruction to humankind as we know it (it was followed up in 1972 with Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and in 1982 with The
1980s: Countdown to Armageddon). The genesis of this line of
thinking has its roots in the Holy Bible, specifically the Book of Revelation
which is the final book of the New Testament. What better way to get the word
out than in a major motion picture? The book was optioned for a film in 1976 by
Pacific International Enterprises, known as PIE for short, which was both a
film production and distribution company founded two years earlier by Arthur R.
Debs (it folded in 2001) for
the purpose of releasing “family filmsâ€. How they came to the subject of
Armageddon is anyone’s guess. Between 1976 and 1978, interviews were conducted
with renowned thinkers, scientists and religious folks to get their views and
interpretations of the Bible and the promise of pestilence.
The
film sports the same title as the book and was released in a good number of
neighborhood theatres on Wednesday, January 17, 1979. It opens with a sequence
involving a group of men chasing a Gandalf wannabe up a mountain (in reality,
Vaszquez Rocks in California where Captain James T. Kirk fought the Gorn in the
Star Trek episode “Arena†in 1966) and pushing him to his death. These are
actors, of course, and they look like they might have tried out to be the
apostles in Martin Scorsese’s first attempt to bring The Last Temptation of Christ to the screen via Paramount Pictures on
a minimal budget. Orson Welles appears with a skull meant to represent the fallen
man from thousands of years earlier and sets the film’s tone by explaining how
the ancient Hebrews believed that a prophet was God’s Man and spoke the Words
of God, foretelling, many centuries before, of events to come. The prophet was
killed because he wasn’t accurate one hundred percent of the time and therefore
was deemed a fraud.
The
film talks of the Anti-Christ entering the world of politics – shades of Omen III: The Final Conflict (1983)? There
are many predictions made using stock footage to enunciate impending doom. However
interesting or frightening the claims, the orator’s guessing of the timeline is
vague at best. Something that was
correctly predicted at the time of the film’s shooting was the estimate of the
world population 40 years hence to be roughly 8 billion people. It is closer to
7.5 billion, but not a bad estimate.
Earthquakes,
world famine, floods, killer bees (I recall this threat in 1979 and wondered
how they came about. The film provides the not-so-surprising explanation) were
the stuff of disaster movies in the 1970s. I’m not sure if Planet Earth is a statement of veracity or pure bollocks, but it’s
an interesting examination of prophesies, nonetheless.
The
film has been recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber/Scorpion and the transfer is
exceptional. There are two bonus features. The first is a making-of featurette
that runs fourteen minutes and is comprised of interviews with nearly ten
people behind-the-scenes. Roger Riddell is the film’s producer who discusses
how the movie came into being. Alan Belkin, President of American Cinema, a
division of American Communications Industries, shares his memories of the
film. The rough cut was two hours; the film’s running time is 86 minutes. Composer
Dana Kaproff provides an exceptional score that is one of the film’s
strongpoints (it deserves a soundtrack album release) and he explains his role
as a composer. Tom Doddington, head of Sound and Production, explains how Orson
Welles was a consummate professional, going so far as to record his voiceover
at his house. Thomas Nicely, one of the actors running in the opening sequence,
also weighs in. Lynn McCallon and Anne Goursaud were editors on the film. Jean
Higgins, Head of Production for American Cinema, and David Miller, Head of
Distribution, discuss the film’s marketing.
Bonus
features consist of a selection of trailers: theatrical trailer and TV spot for
The Late Great Planet Earth (1979); Go Tell the Spartans (1978) theatrical
trailer, Charlie Chan and the Curse of
the Dragon Queen TV spot; The Apple
(1980) theatrical trailer; and The
Salamander (1981) theatrical trailer.
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BY TODD GARBARINI
If
you’re one of the many moviegoers who are unfamiliar with the Jacques Lacerte
thriller Love Me Deadly, you’re not
alone. A product of early 1970s low-budget motion picture production, this film
is the sole title directed by Mr. Lacerte who passed away in 1988. Lensed in
1971 and released in San Francisco right around the same time as Gerard
Damiano’s wildly popular and controversial couples-flick Deep Throat in June 1972 just before the Watergate burglary, the
film played in roughly ten markets, including rained-out drive-ins, before it nearly
disappeared from view. However, there are subsequent movie posters for the film
that have the audacity to mention William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and give the impression that spiritual
possession is somehow to blame for the unsavory goings-on. It’s not.
Love Me Deadly was originally titled Kiss Me Deadly, however Mickey Spillane had
the rights to that title, hence the name change. What is billed as a story of
demonic diabolical deeds is rather a heartbreakingly tragic tale of a young
woman who cannot seem to connect with men…who are alive. The film never really
seems to get a grip on how it wants to play out the subject matter at hand but
you get the feeling that the director is attempting to pass the film off as
some sort of dissertation on necrophilia which, in my humble opinion, is one of
the most incomprehensible, disgusting, and desperate of all sexual proclivities
and one that I can only hope is
relegated to the cinema. I interpreted the film from a much different
perspective, so each viewer might see something differently due to the film’s
inability to construct a single tone.
The
opening credits play over images of a happy young girl, Lindsay Finch, playing
with her father who dotes on her, pushes her on a swing, and comforts her when
she falls. As an adult, Lindsay (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) is a looker who tries
her best to make friends with attractive men. She leads on Wade Farrow (the
late Christopher Stone of 1981’s The
Howling and 1983’s Cujo, sans his
trademark ‘stache) only to rebuff him when he makes sexual advances. Like Harold
and his pal Maude, Lindsay looks through the newspapers and attends afternoon
wakes of complete strangers although her reasons for doing so are far more
disturbing: she attempts amorous contact with the recently deceased. While
about town, she hones in on men who bear a resemblance to her father whom we
can safely assume has passed. Meanwhile Fred (Timothy Scott), a funeral
director of Morningside Mortuary (the name anticipates 1979’s Phantasm), catches her and persuades her
to join him after hours in necrophilic activities with similarly afflicted
gonzos who don black mass-like capes in a ritual prior to becoming intimate
with corpses, the victims of Fred’s nocturnal cruisings along the Sunset Strip
in search of johns and prostitutes.
Lindsay
takes a liking to Alex Martin (Lyle Waggoner) whom she sees as a father figure.
They court and marry soon afterwards, although their bedroom habits suffer
greatly as she’s unable to allow Alex to make love to her. He’s patient and
even sleeps in another room yet becomes suspicious of his wife’s behavior when
he follows her to the funeral parlor and sees her enter the premises. When he
asks her about it later on, she denies going there at all. A brief conversation
with the housekeeper who practically raised her leads Alex to the cemetery in
the film’s most heartbreaking scene wherein Lindsay is dressed in pigtails,
playing around her father’s grave like a child. Anyone who has seen enough
horror films knows how the film will end so while it’s not a shocker, it’s actually
tragically sad given how her father died and the guilt that Lindsay feels. This
is the biggest issue that I have with the film. While the ads promise one
thing, what you get is something much different. The biggest evidence of this
is in the inclusion of elegiac songs sung by Kit Fuller that play over the kinderscene that opens the film and the romantic
silliness between she and Alex. This is, a sequence that seems to have been borrowed
from the overlong romantic interlude that plagues Clint Eastwood’s otherwise
crackerjack Play Misty for Me (1971),
with Roberta Flack crooning on that film’s soundtrack for nearly five minutes. The
original movie poster even claims that Lindsay is 18, however she’s clearly in
her early to mid-twenties.
Continue reading "REVIEW: "LOVE ME DEADLY" (1972); CODE RED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION"
By
Todd Garbarini
Following
the financial success of John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978) and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the
13th (1980), movie studios were making slasher films in large
quantities. They didn’t necessarily want
to, they just knew that there were scores to be made at the box office. Producers
and directors alike were trying to come up with the next big franchise to keep
pumping out money makers for years to come. The success of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
directly inspired The Toolbox Murders
(1978). Likewise, Maniac (1980),
released in New York City on Friday, January 30, 1981 (the same day as David
Cronenberg’s Scanners), was the
result of a brainstorming conversation between the film’s eventual director
Bill Lustig and his friend Frank Pesce (who can be seen as the restaurant manager
in James Toback’s 1978 film Fingers
and as fugitive Carmine in Martin Brest’s 1988 comedy Midnight Run. His life story was also the subject of the 1991
comedy 29th Street,
directed by George Gallo who, incidentally, penned Midnight Run). The idea was to make a horror film that could be
billed as “Jaws on land.†Jaws (1975), of course, changed the
cinematic landscape and how movies are distributed and promoted using catchy tag
lines, effective advertising campaigns, and rolling out a film in hundreds of
movie theaters at once. It also provided the basis for obvious and cheap
imitations and rip-offs. Maniac isn’t
so obvious to the untrained eye.
Shot
back-to-back in the fall and brutal winter of 1979 with much of the same crew from
Friday the 13th, Maniac stars the under-rated,
under-utilized and, unfortunately, late Joe Spinell, an actor of considerable
range who, despite his intimidating stance and demeanor, was actually a
thoughtful and exceedingly nice personality on the set and behind-the-scenes,
always eager to help fellow performers. Here he plays Frank Zito, a middle-aged
man who lives alone in a New York City apartment amid toys and mannequins who
double as his friends and personal company following a childhood ruined at the
hands of an overbearing and physically abusive mother whom he lashes out
against when he comes into physical contact with women. Following in the
footsteps of the slasher films of the time, Maniac’s
theme of an outcast with sexual hang-ups has provided more than enough fodder
as a theme for disturbed young men who engage in ruthless killing sprees. Frank
converses with the mannequins which are adorned with the real scalps and
clothing of women who met their end at his hands, thus giving credence to the
notion that serial killers keep trophies of their victims, a point spouted by
Clarice Starling in The Silence of the
Lambs ten years later. Not all his victims are women, however. One night he
follows a couple and shoots the man (Tom Savini!) point blank with a double-barreled
shotgun before adding his girlfriend to his macabre collection. On another night he spots two nurses at a
hospital (one of them is played by former porn actress Sharon Mitchell) and
follows one of them into a subway bathroom in the film’s creepiest and most
unsettling sequence.
A
chance encounter with a photographer named Anna (Caroline Munro, who actually
got her start as an actress after someone took her photograph and entered the
winning image into a contest) leads him to her apartment. Anna doesn’t appear
to be the slightest bit concerned that he obtained her name and address from
her camera bag and invites him in! They soon begin a platonic friendship, but one
of Anna’s model friends, Rita, catches Frank’s eye at one of her photo shoots
and soon meets a terrible end. Anna is oblivious to this fact until she
accompanies Frank to his mother’s grave with flowers and all hell breaks loose
and heads towards an ending that is inspired until the final shot which is
often relegated to the domain of slasher films, most notably Michele Soavi’s
1987 stylish giallo classic Stagefright.
Maniac developed a notorious reputation for
its then-shocking violence, angering feminists from coast to coast. While it’s
still fairly disturbing even by today’s standards, there is an argument to be
made that AMC’s The Walking Dead is
infinitely more savage. Shot on 16mm, the film holds up very well and has now
been made available on Blu-ray in a three-disc set that includes a transfer
mastered from a 4K restoration of the original camera negative.
Continue reading "REVIEW: "MANIAC" (1980) BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FROM BLUE UNDERGROUND "
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