The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965), by Bert Williams

2010 was probably when I first starting keeping the prototype form of the list that would become the A-List. I could no longer count my favorite trash movies on two hands, much less ten hands, so in order to make sure I didn't forget something in the long course of time, I started writing shit down. There was a secondary list to this, of course, which is the list we all make, the list of movies we want to see when we have a chance. Beneath this second list, though, was yet another list, which not everyone keeps. This was the list of Lost Films for whose return I would wait eternity. This included movies so rare that they might as well be lost.

In eight years, I've found some of those movies: Death Brings Roses is the one that comes to mind the quickest. I'm still looking for The Weird Ones, Sasqua, Amanita Pestilens, and many others. But out of all of them, I never expected The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds to be found. It was lost; as in, all-copies-incinerated lost, London After Midnight lost, not-a-single-frame-remains lost. And yet fate, or something greater, finds a way, and a complete copy of Bert Williams' 1965 exploitation epic was found in an abandoned movie theater just last year and streamed on MUBI. Response has been limited--after all, most people reading this review will have never heard of the film before, and it's just an exploitation movie. But I'm baffled by the few reviews that do exist that say that the film is "nothing special" or "forgettable." On the contrary: I believe that Nest deserves to be enshrined among one of the inner circles of the Trash Pantheon, demonstrating attributes that make it akin to films like Sledgehammer and Manos: The Hands of Fate.

A Liquor Control Department agent named Johnson--no first name--is dispatched to take out a nest of crummy bootleggers, led by the rather unpleasant-looking "Doc." His father was killed by bootleggers, but through sheer dopiness Johnson will prevail. He only regrets having to leave behind Pat, his notably-younger, notably-hotter wife who apparently can't have sex for reasons that are never explained. Eventually Johnson's cover among the bootleggers is blown and he's forced to go on the run into the swamps. Here, he witnesses a strange naked blonde girl who dances around in the swamps wearing a plastic see-through mask very much like the one the killer wears in Sledgehammer. She tries to kill him in a VERY jarring sequence, but he escapes and is taken it by Harold, the groundskeeper of the remote Cuckoo Bird Inn, who honestly does look like Torgo's cousin. The Cuckoo Bird Inn is run by the tyrannical Mrs. Pratt, who, like most people in this movie, CAN ONLY COMMUNICATE WITH YELLING. She also abuses her daughter Lisa in a style much in the same way as Carrie's mom, but Johnson is stuck there until he's done recovering. Oh, but did I mention that Lisa almost perfectly resembles the nude girl who tried to murder Johnson earlier?

The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds makes a lot of wrongheaded decision that lead to it being a very strange watch. I want to start with the fact that our main protagonist is an idiot--but a debonair idiot. Like, his entire character is that he's some kind of ill-mannered bumpkin, but at the same time, he's played up as if this is really charming somehow. He tells Mrs. Pratt, "You're a real attractive woman..." (she isn't) "...just like my sister!" (?!?). Then there's the fact that Pat, his wife, who vanishes without a solitary trace by the film's second half, isn't interested in sex with him, but she takes the blame for this without explanation. There's also a recurring gag of sorts where Johnson keeps crushing Harold's thumb, and it's never really clear if he's deliberately trying to provoke him or if he's just an imbecile.

Johnson also sweats a lot, but so does everyone else. Seriously, there may be more sweat in this than in the Ms. Blandish remake. It is a dour, sour-slick movie, Apocalypse Now-like at times, with lots of high, grungy shadows and claustrophobic grimy indoors. That's before we get to some of the film's more gruesome surprises. The grindhouse has arrived, hallowed be it's name--if this movie came later it would be an appropriate bridge between Manos and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but for now it instead forms a sort of link between Manos and Spider Baby; or, the Maddest Story Ever Told. It's still pretty tame by modern standards, but all these films are cousins to each other--distant echoes probably of the shitty, unnecessarily-praised 1932 Old Dark House (which incidentally starred William "Boris Karloff" Pratt), yet still more powerful in the end than that drab, stupid film could ever be. The initial scenes with Lisa in her plastic mask are legitimately scary, and caught me completely off guard the first time I saw them. They feature plenty of boosted shrieks and sped up footage, which hints at the garbled talent director Williams frequently but inconsistently portrays.

The film starts huffing and puffing when it reaches its final revelations, which include such wonders as Harold's gory secret, the reason why Mrs. Pratt abuses Lisa, and the nature of the "Chapel" the ultra-religious Mrs. Pratt keeps on the Inn property. In all my viewings I've zoned out a lot while watching it. However, the film's multiple climaxes are totally bananas, and frankly, middle chunks aside, so is most of the rest of the film. It's not only scripted off-kilter, making it a strange story no matter how it could end up directed, but it's directed bizarrely as well, with lots of uncomfortable angles and an insistence on having characters face away from each other as they talk. Part art drama, part exploitation gore flick, Nest of the Cuckoo Birds actually is an unsung micro-classic, though it achieves such status entirely in trash terms. Its blend of humorous lapses of judgment and legitimately heart-rending horror sequences makes it something every trash film fan should track down immediately.

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Smoking Guns (1934), by Alan James

How much of this "joke" is predicated on prejudice? How much of my amusement is derived from the simple fact that, even after dedicating a quite a lot of words to talking about them, I'm still not used to B-Westerns completely and utterly blowing me out of the water? 2017 is a year for walking against the wind in many things--so it's healthy for me to go on insisting that these movies have some sort of value. I've encountered few fellow trashsters who have found the same sort of passion I have for digging through the tedious and repetitious tides of old '30s cowboy flicks in search of gold. But I'm gonna do my part to make it a thing, damnit! Why should '80s slashers, '70s roughies, and '60s sexploiters have all the fun? At this point I've cast aside my old superstitions. Smoking Guns cements, now and forever, that Westerns can contain the same levels of perverse oddity that afflict the weirdest movies I've featured on this site.

Ken Masters is a young man who has been accused of the murder of Hank Stone's father Silas--however, Ken knows that Hank himself is the killer. When he confronts Stone with that knowledge, he is driven out of town, and he hides himself out in the Amazon rainforest (as you do). A ranger by the name of Dick Evans tracks Ken out to the jungle and arrests him--Ken is only too happy to return to civilization, as he wanted to stay back in town and face Stone far and square. As Evans takes Ken back through the jungle, however, he contracts malaria, and is forced to let Ken shoot their handcuffs off to go find help after it transpires that he's lost the key. Fortunately, Ken is an honorable man, and not only gives the ranger his gun back, but returns with a canoe as promised. Not so fortunately, their voyage down the Amazon becomes sheer horror when Evans decides to open fire into a horde of crocodiles, which sends them after the two. Evans is bitten on the leg, leading to gangrene; Ken knows how to operate but rather than face the knife, Evans kills himself.

Then the movie gets really weird...yeah, it actually gets weirder. Somehow, Ken gets it in his head that he and the dead ranger are dead ringers for each other, despite the fact that their actors have zero resemblance. He returns to civilization disguised as Evans, and runs into the awkward fact that Evans had a girlfriend, the somewhat improbably-named Alice Adams. It doesn't take long before "Dick" reveals that he's rather ill-suited for impersonating a dead man in front of his loved ones, as he's forgotten Alice's nickname of "Kitten," and praises music the real Dick hated while disliking that which he liked. Still, she takes the truth, when he comes forth with it, surprisingly well. From there on out, Ken uses every advantage he gets to close in on his man.

Much to my dismay, the majority of Smoking Guns' goodness is packed into its first half. The second half of the film is a typical B-Western, and not one of the very good ones...long shots of people creeping around in the dark, broken up by protracted, foot-dragging gunfights--and that's saying nothing of the obligatory square dancing scene. Oh, and the racism. I really don't want to dwell on this, so I'll just say that there is a black butler named "Cinders" who Mantan Morelands the hell out of every scene he's in. And because he's in so many scenes, you'll probably want to skip most of this second half with the assurance that it's a '30s Western, and good triumphs in the end. In-universe. In out-universe terms, good did not triumph, because they forced an actor to completely demean himself for the mild amusement of the white audience. So don't be afraid to ditch the second half if you want.

But man, that first half. Was there really so much demand for movies set in the Amazon in 1934 that they needed to spend a good chunk of the story there? Was it impossible, in the days of the Old West, to contract malaria and gangrene within the confines of the United States? Maybe it's not the Amazon...maybe it's just Florida. But I'm pretty positive it is meant to be somewhere in South America. I am absolutely not complaining about any of this. The South America sequence is entirely contingent on a hilarious amount of improbably bad luck for our characters stacked on top of some of the weirdest passes of the Idiot Ball I've ever seen. Keep in mind, we go straight from Dick Evans confidently arresting Ken to his decline into malaria, with the swiftness of the dissolve implying very little time has passed. Evans spends part of this scene laughing insanely as the disease drives him out of his mind. It's an arresting composition, giving us the impression that he was able to make it all the way out here by himself just fine, but the second he joins up with Ken, he starts going insane. This is built up by the fact that he trusts Ken, a fucking outlaw, enough to hand him his gun! It's not like he really needs much persuading to go all buddy-buddy with Ken, as they speak amiably to each other upon first meeting, and he eats Ken's food, even though Ken could've easily rubbed an Amazonian frog on that meat with the intent of prying the handcuff keys off the ranger's cold corpse. Evans' fate is ultimately his own fault as he shows not a single shred of spine in the face of animals who were gonna leave him alone if he didn't fucking shoot them. It's almost impossible to believe this man was a cop. He must have traveled to the Amazon in a goddamn air-conditioned rickshaw.

Then, Ken seriously overestimates his ability to impersonate a man he barely knew. What's more, the deception generally works! People believe that he is Evans, despite having no beard, a different hairstyle, and, let's just face it, a completely different face. And poor Dick Evans, for all the suffering he went through in the course of just doing his job (well, and being an idiot), is completely forgotten, as Ken steals his identity, his horse, and, ultimately, his girlfriend. If there's a theme to Smoking Guns, it's that if you are noble, you will have a good ending, unless your name is Dick Evans. There's such a strange passion and intensity to the direction and action of all these improbabilities that it feels deliberate--almost wholly detached from the absurd cheapness that affected many of the big studios during the Great Depression. This movie was made by Universal, meaning it was one of the better Westerns out there.

And that shows. Contrast that with The Phantom Cowboy or The Irish Gringo and you'll see that there was at least a little money behind Smoking Guns. And yet, the movie had to be on the market fast, damnit. I don't what they were thinking. I just feel, somehow, that they were thinking. Consequentially, Smoking Guns is an essential B-Western, second only to The Phantom Cowboy by the depressing anti-merit of replacing Ptomaine Pete with racism. Fast-forward when you feel like it and keep your eyes peeled for the good bits.

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