Revenge in the House of Usher (1982), by Jess Franco

The film that introduced me to Howard Vernon, and probably also Jess Franco. I should say here there's no use telling me I have the wrong title card on this one--it's a European horror movie so of course there are a million other titles. At least my copy doesn't go by Zombi 5.

In an ancient castle, Dr. Usher (played by Howard Vernon) directs his servants Morpho and Matthias to begin transfusing blood from a living girl into his comatose daughter Melissa. This appears to revive her, but her vitality does not last long and she soon returns to lifelessness. Shortly thereafter, Usher is visited by his former student Alan Hacker (apparently spelled Harker in the script and original dubbing), whom he initially greets with distrust and a lack of recognition, collapsing in a fit which is soon remedied by the local medecin Dr. Seward. Upon awakening, Usher tells Hacker he is a murderer, and has a story to tell him the next day. Shortly thereafter Hacker discovers a dungeon full of women, who tell Hacker that Usher drains their blood--he also discovers an imprisoned Matthias, and is confronted by a strange vampiric woman, before running across Usher in the middle of a blood transfusion. In trying to escape, Hacker trips, and passes out. The next morning, Usher's maid assures Hacker that what he saw last night was just a symptom of "mountain fever," which he believes despite being a med student. However, Usher proceeds to tell him that what he saw did happen, and reveals the whole of what is happening here in the House of Usher. Melissa is suffering from an ailment that must be cured by blood transfusions, as we've already seen. Usher shows us the process by which he acquired the victims of these transfusions, via lengthy stock footage plundered from The Awful Dr. Orlof. He also explains that his sins have tied him to his castle, and when the castle crumbles, so will he, and vice versa. Usher finally meets his end at the hands of the vampire-lady from earlier, who is actually the ghoul of his dead wife. Hacker barely escapes as the House falls in on itself.

For a movie as straightforward as Revenge in the House of Usher, that was one of the hardest plot synopses I've written in a while. There's somehow a lot that happens, with nothing happening at the same time--things make sense, and yet never follow each other. I may be the only person in the world to say this, but this was a perfect introduction to Franco's body of work. It's a strange thing to say, given that Revenge in the House of Usher is actually very unlike the rest of Franco's films; it was a good introduction in that it was amusing enough for me to want to see more. Indeed, Revenge does so much tremendously wrong that it's hard not to laugh at it relatively frequently.

Characters behave really strangely in this movie. For example, when the actresses who play Usher's transfusion victims read "moan in pain" in the script, they portray it as "moan sexually." Given that this is Jess Franco we're talking about, I don't think that's accidental. It's weird, too, that these girls usually only "scream" when the blood starts leaving their bodies, not when the needle is inserted. As far as I know, the needle part is the painful bit of having your blood drawn. It's strange that the moans of the victims are loud enough to attract Hacker to their cell at night, but he doesn't hear them at all during the day. Then again, Hacker is kind of an idiot.

Everyone is kind of an idiot in this. It takes about two or three sentences more than is necessary for people to comprehend basic things. Sometimes, people will just straight up forget things that characters have previously told them, and they'll rediscover it much later as if they were learning it for the first time. For example, Hacker is still shocked by Usher turning out to be a lunatic after his "mountain fever" dream of ladies being bled to death, which in itself follows Usher confessing to murder! Most of Franco's movies are almost absurdly dream-like--this movie even gives itself an open ending as to whether or not Usher's claims were true--but this never comes across as anything else besides utter cheapness. I sometimes question whether this movie had a script, at least in its English version. Oftentimes it is very obvious what's being done for padding, namely the repeated points and the fact that characters just loaf around. Dr. Usher will tell Morpho to go do something, and he'll have to tell him several times just to get him moving. Also, when Melissa revives for the first time, Morpho stands over whispering, "Melissa...you're alive...", over and over, for several minutes. Franco's other movies frequently share this love of padding, but this goes on so long that it loops around to become funny again--even in context to his other films.

And then there is Howard Vernon.

I've seen enough movies with Vernon in them now, and I've tracked down interviews with him, to be reasonably convinced that he usually dubs his own lines in his movies. I've never been able to find out which languages he spoke, but it's not unlikely for a European actor to speak Spanish, French, English, and possibly German all reasonably well. Vernon's dubs become notably more...dramatic as his career marched on, and his performance here as Dr. Usher is no exception. Vernon is simultaneously amazing and horrible in this. His physical performance is great...he still has a lot of the charm that made him suitably creepy as Dr. Orlof twenty years prior. But his lines are--I honestly can't describe them. He makes a lot of weird gibbering old man noises, and moans the words out with a blend of fury and senility. A lot of it is the script. It's hard for anyone to deliver lines like, "Dr. Smegma and the ghost of Theodore Crejin Maliciamain [?] are after me," and "They're damned, all of them...a plague on both their houses," but Vernon pulls it off beyond his parameters. It's a strange blend of earnestness, unintentional camp, confusion, and fatigue. Every moment that Dr. Usher is onscreen makes it worth it.

Vernon's performance helps cement the fact that this is Franco at his least artsiest, at least from what I've seen. Sure, there's still plenty of zoom lens abuse, and characters staring wistfully into the sky, but there's too much bad dubbing for us to care. Franco then jumps onto his old practice of welding himself to a respected (or semi-respected) literary source. Yes, this is yet another Franco movie where he insists on making a bunch of Dracula references. Dr. Seward...Alan Harker...the enormous, foreboding castle where an evil ageless presence rots away. I've seen probably a dozen-plus Franco movies now and more than half of them shamelessly rip off Dracula, even in incidental and unusual ways. It's so weird that his big chance at directing Dracula, as 1970's Count Dracula with Herbert Lom and Christopher Lee, not only failed at cleansing the story from his system (even twelve years later), but also failed at being a satisfying adaptation of Stoker's story--even if it is one of the most accurate. That film's accuracy may be one of the reasons why it flopped so bad for me. But that's another story for another day.

In sum, this movie will make you a Franco fan and a Vernon fan if you aren't already. And here is where I reveal the ulterior motive of this review. I could not proceed further into Howard Vernon's career without this review under my belt, and now I can move on to the next logical step: the Vernon/Franco revenge thriller She Killed in Ecstasy. Aka: the movie where we get to see a 57-year-old Howard Vernon's junk.

Howard Vernon's junk.

So in further sum: heheheheheheheheh; stay tuned. 

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Massacre Mafia Style (1974), by Duke Mitchell

Careers in art can be tricky things. Sometimes you get your one-hit wonders; sometimes you get people who started out great before they crashed and burned; and sometimes--and I don't think we let this happen enough, because frankly we humans can be cruel people--there are people who start out horrible and rise to greatness. We mythologize our creators, sometimes perhaps a bit needlessly. We forget that they're people. I certainly don't mean to dismiss the trend of mythologizing artists, because in a lot of ways I think our culture needs it. By looking up to our painters, writers, filmmakers, etc. we are looking up to what they create. We're enjoying them and the things they make for us. But, for many of us involved in these fields, our work is also, in a lot of ways, just our job. For most of history, those of us who have faced the possibility of starvation have done what we've had to do to hang on--even if it's always love of what we do that brings us back. Thus, it is not always glamorous, but there's nothing in this world that is. And that means that a lot of us have done crap jobs before. Mistakes have been made, as in any job. Take the career of Duke Mitchell, for instance.

Duke Mitchell was once one half of the "comedy" act Mitchell and Petrillo with Jerry Lewis impersonator/plagiarist Sammy Petrillo, with Mitchell being Martin to Petrillo's Lewis. Together they made the movie Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which I would seriously consider a contender for the worst movie ever. Seriously, it's nearly as torturous as Disaster Movie. If I compare a movie to Disaster Movie, I am not fucking around. In any case, Mitchell's first "big" movie was an atrocity. But I'm glad he didn't give up a career in film. Without perseverance and a vision which I wish had been possible in the unworkable mess of Brooklyn Gorilla, we would not have Massacre Mafia Style, a decidedly fascinating attempt at aping (heh) The Godfather. There may be no human-ape transformations in this movie, but there's a lot to look at, both good and bad.

Mimi Miceli is the son of a famous old-time gangster; he has followed his father into Sicilian exile, as Miceli Sr. was deported as a result of his criminal activities. We are introduced to Mimi early on as he and his partner Rizzo shoot their way through a corporate office, slaughtering all the employees with a variety of armaments. Slowly, we learn that Mimi has returned to the U.S. to avenge his father's exile, by taking over the pimps and bookmakers of Hollywood. In doing so, he and Rizzo kidnap a Mafia head and cut his finger off, and then visit him at his son's wedding after getting their ransom dough and releasing him. He apparently appreciates their balls so much that he's willing to let the two take on what they want. We then loosely follow Miceli's adventures, which are meshed with subplots like the attempted formation of the Sicilian Defense League, a group apparently dedicated to squashing anti-Mafia voices in the media. In the end, a man loses everything, and there's a twist ending.

So this is actually, structurally and stylistically speaking, a really well put together movie. It's strange; the general critical opinion seems to be that the movie is clumsy and amateurish, and it's the gore that counts. I found the gore disappointing--red paint, as was the style of the time, but nothing featuring organs and whatnot, even when people are getting their guts shot out. Maybe I really am becoming desensitized (I doubt it). The gore actually is the fakest thing in the movie, at least as far as I know.

"As far as I know." Now, there's a trouble with my reviewing this movie: I'm not Italian. I don't know how strong Duke Mitchell's Italian heritage was but I assume he's on the level. This movie is apparently supposed to be some sort of alternate reality biography...my postulations, without facts. Maybe Duke Mitchell/Mimi Miceli really was a gangster. Maybe his father really was in the Mafia. But there are some things here which seem out of place. For example, I haven't been able to find any independence evidence of an Italian wedding ritual wherein money is put in a piece of bread, which is cut and tossed to the father of the groom. There's a strong sense of authentic sentimentality for Italian culture in Mitchell, but I would feel awkward if he was pulling a lot of this out of his ass.

The reason why I'm so suspicious is that this movie has strange attitudes towards race. It is, um. Horribly racist? At least, the characters are, and that's an important distinction. Part of the Italian characters' racial pride involves racism against black people and Jews. There's a long and uncomfortable sequence where Miceli intimidates a black pimp named--sigh--Super Spook, throwing around the n-word a bunch, and squishing his face around. I don't know what Mitchell was going for here. I mean, we are talking about fucking Mafia hitmen. These guys are monsters--they kill a lot of people, in some pretty bad ways, despite some of their likable traits, like their sentimentality and Miceli's love for his son. I think that means their racism is just meant to make them more monstrous. But again, this is a movie that blurs fantasy and reality (ironically invoking a lot of Italian art films coming out at this time in Mitchell's apparent homeland). Miceli and Mitchell are, in a sense, alter egos of each other. So maybe Mitchell really did hate Jews and black people. If so, I don't know how much I can like this movie.

Thematically, the movie is really hard to figure out, and I watched it four times for this review. At the ending, Miceli explains to his father that traditional crime--I assume the Mafia crime of the '30s and '40s--no longer conventionally exists, because racial politics have shifted, and the hippie movement's predilection for free love and drug use have severely damaged the old-school prostitution and drug-pushing markets. And gangster movies have reduced men like Don Miceli to cartoon supervillains, neutered and deprived of their power. This is subverted in a telling way in the movie's final moments. All throughout the film, people keep telling Mimi he can't bring back the old ways. But the old ways never go away; they just change. Crime changes. Immorality changes. There's always some fresh blood ready to step into the dens of thieves and murderers.

In any case, there's enough history to this film, enough quality, and enough graphic violence to make it worth checking out. Someone smarter than me probably has a better solution to the tangled themes. I hope there's even more words said about this film than what I'm saying here. Mitchell made another gangster picture a year later, called Gone with the Pope. Be back with that sometime soon.

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Jim Anthony vs. The Mastermind is Here!!!

My new book, Jim Anthony vs. the Mastermind, has just been published by Airship 27 Productions! Check out the official press release below!

Airship 27 Productions is thrilled to present the fifth book in their continuing new adventures of that classic pulp hero, Jim Anthony – Super Detective.

Jim Anthony had battled all manner of evil and villainy in his illustrious career as a globe-trotting adventurer. But now he finds himself challenged by three unique criminals, each with devastating weapons of destruction; the Flame Wizard, Baron Strum and Prof. Meteon. Each is determined to wreak unimaginable havoc on the world and vanquish the Super Detective in the process.

The hero soon comes to suspect there is a fourth nemesis; a super Mastermind orchestrating these other villains in a cunning, deadly plot for reasons he is unable to fathom. But the Super Detective is never alone thanks to his various allies ala pilot Tm Gentry and British butler Dawkins and along the way he is joined by the beautiful Maria Flores and her All-Girl Squad. 

Writer Adam Mudman Bezecny has plotted a fast-paced, action-packed novel in four parts creating some of the most dastardly pulp villains ever to challenge the Super Detective.  “This is a really interesting collection,” explains Airship 27 Productions’ Managing Editor Ron Fortier. “Although each of the chapters works very much like a stand alone adventure, ultimately they create a longer narrative plot leading to the Super Detective’s newest arch-fiend, Mastermind.”

Artist Richard Jun provides the marvelous black and white interior illustrations and Adam Shaw delivers the stunning cover based on one of those pieces. All of which are assembled under the guiding hand of Airship 27 Art Director Rob Davis.

 “Jim Anthony is one of our favorite pulp heroes,” Fortier adds happily, “and we hope to continue this series of new books for as long as our readers enjoy them.” So buckle up for a wild ride, pulp fans, this is adventure with a capital A …for Jim Anthony!

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

Now available at Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.

Special thanks to Airship 27, to Adam Shaw for the awesome cover art, and to Richard Jun for the amazing inside illustrations! I'm so excited!

The Devil Bat (1940), by Jean Yarbrough

I technically talked about this before back in The Monogram Monograph, but it's more that I used imagery from it and that's about it. I wanted to keep elements of The Devil Bat loose in The Monogram Monograph because The Devil Bat is a Producers' Releasing Corporation movie rather than a Monogram one. The one commonality between this and the Monogram movies I've covered on the site is that this is a Bela Lugosi Poverty Row flick. It's a classic of the genre, and while there are plenty of reviews of this elsewhere online, I still wanted to talk about it here because there's a lot to love.

Bela Lugosi is Dr. Carruthers, the "kindly village doctor" of Heathville. At once we see that he is performing good old electrical stimulation experiments on bats, causing them to grow to the size of comically fake bat puppets. While stimulating his bats, he clenches his fist and makes a pouty face, like every scientist does in the midst of an experiment. He receives a phone call from his former coworkers at the local chemical factory, who are inviting him to a party where they intend to give him a $5,000 check as compensation for the success his formulas have bestowed on the company. Carruthers views this gift as an insult--apparently, they began using work of his they previously rejected after he left the company, and consequently made a mint. Carruthers' excuse for missing the party, that he is working on a new shaving lotion, is not a lie. However, he does not share with anyone the fact that he has trained his Devil Bat to kill people who wear this aftershave. "You will stuhrrrike!" he tells his Bat. "Yes...you will stuhrrrike." One by one, Carruthers picks off the members of the cosmetics science team, all while being pursued by a reporter named Johnny Layton, played by Ralph from Reefer Madness, and his comic relief sidekick "One-Shot" McGuire. Will they crack the case before it's too late?

The appeal of this movie to me appears almost instantly, being built into the premise. Only in the 1940s could a theatrically released movie get away with featuring a mad scientist who takes revenge on his coworkers with perfume-powered giant bats. Stack that up with the fact that it's Bela Lugosi as the mad scientist, and of course bad movie fans are going to rave about it--it's one of Lugosi's best performances, too. The only other person who I can think of who'd do just as good of a job as Lugosi would be John Carradine. Lugosi is strangely gleeful in this role, being indeed rather kindly at first, before revealing himself to be a relentless and obsessive maniac. Of course, all of his rage is as campy as Bela ever made it. This is probably his second best role, with the first being, of course, his part in Glen or Glenda. After that it would be Dr. von Housen from Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Lugosi's performance is perfectly suited for a movie about incredibly fake looking killer bats who sometimes turn into stock footage of bats when they're up close.

To examine it in detail: Carruthers is indeed kindly to the very last, almost never revealing his true nature to others. He even puts his life on the line to continue to prove his innocence, accompanying Johnny out into his garden to wait for the Devil Bat to arrive, unaware that Johnny intends to throw the lotion on him. Carruthers is an intelligent supervillain. He knows you get more flies with honey than with vinegar. Unlike an uncomfortable percentage of the American public, he is able to keep his vast and confounding rage under control long enough to complete his goals, or come very near to such. He vents by giving little ironic nods that we the audience will pick up on; there's a running gag of sorts where his victims, unaware of what they've just rubbed on their necks, wish the doctor good night. And he always responds with a resonant, "Goodbye," that only Lugosi could purr out. He also tells one of his victims, of the aftershave, "I don't think you'll ever use anything else." Bela clearly had the time of his life in this role, and it's good to see the old bastard happy after everything he went through in life.

Other than that, a lot of this stuff is par for the course as far as Poverty Row horror goes. It has the same stock library cues as many of the Monogram movies, and the screenwriter and cast never have any idea on how to end a scene. To be honest, my watch-through for this review made me think of one Monogram movie in particular, Lugosi's Black Dragons, which also features Lugosi running around killing people out of revenge. But unfortunately his performance in that is pretty terrible, even if I love the movie for its bizarro Monogram twists. I'm glad I've now seen so much of this guy's wartime output--even at its worst it's given me something to work with.

There's one other moment I wanted to mention before we wrap up...the moment where a scientist proclaims the Devil Bat to be the last survivor of a prehistoric species. Okay...how did he come to that conclusion? Surely there was some sign that these were just electrically-engorged bats? I'm no scientist myself, so I don't know. I just know that this zany pseudoscientific bit reminded me of the conference rooms full of scientists spewing bullshit in the early Godzilla movies. It definitely improved the experience.

The Devil Bat is something like Bad Movie Elementary School, but truth be told I only found it last year. This is a Gateway Drug much like Plan 9 from Outer Space or I Eat Your Skin. Touch it, and it ignites like fire. Hold it in your palm. 

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The Bye Bye Man (2017), by Stacy Title

This was a treasure.

Unlike The Book of Henry, I missed this one in theaters, and subsequently caught up to it on a rental. And oh my God, it is really fucking bad. There are several reasons why it is bad and there are several reasons why I chose to review it for the site, which I will greatly enjoy delving into because it means I get to rip this movie a new asshole. I will say initially that I liked this for the same reason why I liked Book of Henry: what the hell are our kids gonna think about us for having taken this crap?

We open in 1969, with a man named Larry running around his neighborhood killing his friends and family, all the while chanting, "Don't think it, don't say it." He wants to know who's told who about "the name," warning that "he's coming." We then cut to a shot a train, and go on to the present day. Three college students, Elliot, Sasha, and John. Elliot and Sasha are dating, but there's an unspoken, Phantom of the Convent-esque attraction between Sasha and John. After getting some strange vibes in the house Elliot finds a drawer left behind by the old owner, which has Larry's motto inscribed on it, accompanied by the words "The Bye Bye Man." Later, Sasha invites over her friend Kim, who is a medium. They hold a seance wherein Elliot reveals he's an Amazing Atheist fanboy, but Kim nonetheless leads the group in a good ol' Hollywood Seance Seizure.

Sasha begins to develop a bad cough, and all three of them begin to hallucinate. These hallucinations all tend to put them in embarrassing or harmful circumstances. They also begin to become aware of the Bye Bye Man, and how he becomes more real to them the more they think about him, and the more scared of him they get. Elliot's research, facilitated by the world's best librarian, brings him to a redacted newspaper article written by Larry, who we learn killed himself with what looks to be the world's tastiest swig of Drain-O after slaughtering the last of the folk contaminated by the Bye Bye Man's influence. He tries to destroy the article, but the Bye Bye Man strikes quickly and makes Kim step out in front of a train; then, he basically makes Elliot seem like a crazy person, leading to him getting arrested. In a hilarious scene, Elliot talks his way out of prison with the most bullshit logic ever, even though his detainer is a hardass high-rank cop played by Carrie-Anne Moss. I cannot describe the conversation they have--it must be seen to be believed. Anyway, in the end, the Bye Bye Man comes for the trio with his N64-graphics CGI dog, and murder and mayhem ensues. Elliot seemingly seals away the evil...or does he?

So this wasn't as bad as the reviews led me to believe. However, it was still an unforgettable experience in vast and dramatic incompetence. I think the best place to start is the first thing I noticed about this film, which is what this film rips off. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the people who made this saw Marble Hornets, the first big Slenderman YouTube show, because the two stories share a lot of commonalities. Both are about young people who come in contact with a curse of sorts wherein an inhuman monstrosity begins terrorizing them after they learn about it and how it gains strength by people learning about and becoming afraid of it. Those who are particularly sensitive to the presence of the entity begin violently coughing, and the entity sends its victims into fugue states where they experience lost time, mood swings, and hallucinations. I do firmly believe that they were trying to cash in on Slenderman here due to the big faceless guy's recent transition to the sellout world of Hot Topic merch, despite the fact that stories of demons conjured up by sheer belief go back for millennia, and they scare the fuck out of me. In case you cannot tell, this movie did not scare me in the least.

This was put out by Universal, by the way. Hey, the Bye Bye Man should be part of the Dark Universe!

Actually, this movie has an uncanny number of production companies. Six or seven by my count. Interesting.

Anyway; this movie also rips off The Babadook, again, by being about a demon which is summoned up by people coming in contact with a record of it. The Bye Bye Man is similarly akin to the Babadook in that he cannot be gotten rid of once he begins haunting people. (For those of you who followed that Gay Babadook meme, I present to you thus the concept of the Bi Bi Man.) His implacability also echoes the entity from It Follows. All of these recent, more successful ideas have been Frankenstein'd together to make something that is nearly hilarious in its plagiarism. You feel the age in the movie, even though it only came out less than a year ago. I know I said that tulpa and other such creatures are among my worst fears, and that's true, but movies like this are helping me break through the fear. I mean, come on. R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour had an episode on fear-conjured demons that was more involving than this, and that came out nearly seven years before this did.

Now, onto the good stuff. At the start of this film, we have some of the same douchey movie college dudebro stuff that makes me come out of the woodworks for the Ouija Experiment movies. It is very much like a semi-white version of Ax 'Em. There is wallpaper of a fish graphically sucking a man's cock. Then, at the housewarming party for the trio, people play baseball with a Nerf football, like it's the tuxedo football game in The Room, or the "one-on-one" scene in Catwoman. There's also weird symbolism involving trains (?) which involves trains running over the three while they stand on the tracks showing us their nude asses. Okay. I think it's supposed to be that the Bye Bye Man is coming for them like a train about to crush them, but it's still pretty stupid. What's not stupid is how a dog which is part of the wallpaper turns into CGI so it can turn to the audience and snarl. Its head even transforms into a skull. This is meant to foreshadow the Awful CGI Dog, which...oh dear God.

This thing is fucking awful. It looks like something out of Where the Dead Go to Die, and if there is any way that that can be a good thing, I don't mean it as a good thing. It's a glossy, overly-smooth mess straight out of one of the Godzilla PS1 games. What makes it even worse is that it's never explained what it is, why it's working with the Bye Bye Man, or hell, what the Bye Bye Man himself fucking is. I'm sure this, too, is part of the Slenderman plagiarism, and they're trying to be all, "It's unexplained which makes it creepier!" But not in something like this. I laughed every time that dog was onscreen for all the dumb issues it brought to the movie's forefront.

(It has also occurred to me that perhaps the Bye Bye Dog is a ripoff of Smiledog, another demon that haunts those who know about it from Internet meme culture. God, I knew there was a reason I dreaded the day Hollywood started stealing from creepypastas.)

Anyway, I have run out of things to say about The Bye Bye Man, at least until the direct-to-video sequel rears its head. Here's the usual point where I recommend the movie, and sing its praises, but here, I'm going to confess that you have to be a straight-up fucking maniac to squeeze any sort of enjoyment out of this. I loved the hell out of it, but again, only because I love watching utter disasters, and because it was better than I anticipated. See it at your own peril--and I mean that gravely.

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The Instructor (1981), by Don Bendell

Some movies start out letting you know they're gonna be awesome. The Instructor opens with two men jogging, but loses focus on them after mere seconds to instead show a street fight between a bearded punk and a punk woman named "Cookie." She almost cuts his dick off with an axe. Castration is usually a good sign for a movie, and I'm glad this one decided to put such a thing--or nearness to it--at the beginning. It was like being greeted with a hug rather than a handshake. The encounter that ensued proved to be a fulfilling one. Let it be known that The Instructor is something special, even if it's not always entertaining.

Our joggers from the beginning are the titular Instructor and his pupil, Thumper Rhodes. The Instructor, as you might expect, teaches at a local karate school. They exposit for us that long ago, the Instructor's wife was raped and murdered by Bud Hart, who runs a rival martial arts academy. Hart's goons are the punks we saw at the beginning of the movie. We follow the Instructor and Thumper as they increasingly come to blows with Hart and his mob, while they are stalked by a ninja who turns out to in truth be a mentally handicapped man who wants to become a karate tournament champion. At one point this man clubs a fellow martial artist to death with his trophy, in a plot I don't remember going anywhere. In any case, this character exists to provide "comic relief" and to be beaten up by children. In the end, the Instructor probably defeats Bud Hart, and gets the girl I didn't know he was after.

The Instructor is, um. Puzzling. On one hand, it hits all the buttons I want to have hit whilst watching a martial arts movie. It features rugged dudes with mustaches and the whole Godfrey Ho-esque feel (while admittedly still being too American to be as crazy as something like Ninja the Protector). Yet I couldn't keep my focus on it for some reason. Even as I was being charmed by things like people catching ninja stars with their shoes and kicking people off motorcycles, I felt a weird fuzziness over the whole thing that left me feeling disinterested. I watched this movie three times for this review, and I still can't entirely remember if Bud Hart died, and if so, how he did. I don't remember when exactly the Instructor's new girlfriend enters the plot. I do remember being confused when we got a flashback to the Instructor finding his wife's corpse. That happened much later than I feel it should have. This is another movie where I feel like it was edited out of order, while knowing fully that that was not the case. Ordinarily I would find this sort of feeling pleasurable, but something is holding me back in this case.

It may be that there's something off about the fight scenes. They don't grip me as much as the material around them--I wouldn't call them lethargic, or lazy, but those two words nag at my mind for some reason. I just remember zoning out during the fight scenes in particular. I think I was bored by them, only really recalling one segment where an Asian martial artist showed up to very poorly use nunchuks and make stereotypical "Hwah!" noises. I probably remember that because it was rather offensive. I also remember the "ninja" getting his ass kicked by children, because I don't easily forget scenes of people being kicked around by kids. These fight scenes are often set to music, but I'm spoiled on the soundtracks from movies like Miami Connection, so these songs didn't hook my attention either, instead feeling as intrusive as the songs in bad musicals.

But there was still a lot I liked about this. Bud Hart is a particularly interesting villain, being not only an evil martial arts instructor as per action movie tropes, but also functioning as a mafia villain, and blaxploitation villain a little bit as well. There's a scene of him having a fancy restaurant dinner with an Italian dude, where they have one of those hush-hush Godfather-style conversations. He's also racist, calling some of the black characters slurs--one almost suspects that he's trying to buy out Sugar Hill's club on the side. He even dips into sci-fi villain territory, beating Khan Noonien Singh to the punch by a whole year in forcing his enemy to shout his name dramatically. Shatner would be proud.

Overall, I liked The Instructor, but this is definitely one that's not for everyone. Pop in Furious or Games of Survival first to get a feel on what you're stepping into. It may shake your focus a little bit, especially when we get to the kickboxing tournament. Actually, maybe slap some Mexican wrestling movies into the mix while you're at it. You're going to need to pick up a taste for endless spectator fights to make it through this one.

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The Love Captive (1969), by Larry Crane

I meant to do this back before I did All Women Are Bad. After all, this was my first Larry Crane movie, and All Women, my second. I mean, All Women Were Bad caught me so off-guard that I couldn't resist. And after that, I always found myself thinking that I had already done this one, just because it's so essential to me that certainly I wouldn't go on without it. But then I smartened up a bit and reminded myself that I have this thing called a search bar and I can, as it were, see what reviews I've already done. And sure enough, I haven't done The Love Captive yet. Let's just get started...we've waited long enough.

Always trust a movie that features "Night on Bald Mountain." Always double-trust a movie that opens with "Night on Bald Mountain." So does The Love Captive commence, before referring itself to our protagonist, a nameless woman who wanders around Greenwich Village. The narrator talks over her wanderings, giving us information on the weird and wild world of Greenwich entertainment, both high- and lowbrow. This narrator condemns movies like Andy Warhol's Flesh and nervously suggests the lady may be a hooker. But that doesn't stop him from creeping on her as she undresses in a hotel room. Eventually our protagonist finds herself in Manzini's Museum of the Macabre, and then the movie really gets going. A fast-paced exploration into Inquisition torture devices, Houdini memorabilia, and vampire coffins ensues, and we jump from brief glimpses of lunatic-painted portraits to extensive fire-eating shows. It's all very overwhelming and wonderful, and if you have a trace of carnival spirit in you, the ridiculous showmanship and spectacle of the whole affair will give you warm fuzzies. Then, our lead is locked inside the Museum after dark, with the intent of making off with a Houdini straitjacket, but she has a surprise in store for her. At night the Museum's werewolves come out! After experiencing a night of terror, she comes back up to her hotel room and has sex with a dude. Then, lesbianism happens. And then, another lady seduces the Museum owner to take it over from him. A dude's junk flaps around in front of the camera, and we conclude.

The Love Captive functions better less as a "movie" and more like a box full of film clips of varying degrees of watchability. Like a lot of B&W sexploitation, you'll want to mosey around the general unappealing softcore fucking, skipping instead to the bizarre travelogue-style footage, and the riveting sideshow touring. The movie is less a "slice-of-life" film and more like a scrapbook laced in with odd tangential Tall Tales. Things that didn't really happen on the vacation, but would have improved it. It may actually also be a slice-of-life film, but for Greenwich Village circa 1969. Y'know, the place and time white hipsters love fetishizing? Well, I guess I can kind of get it. It's hard to resist attractions like Manzini's Museum, or a gift shop that sells a shirt that reads "GODDAMN YOU, CHARLIE BROWN."

Everything about this is so sloppy and weird that it probably is a vacation home-video edited into a sexploitation feature. The hucksters and fucksters of the '60s were desperate enough to do that--it would make them money, after all. Everything is rushed and clipped together. Plotlines vanish and are replaced with alternative circumstances. Various people all dub each other with bad impressions of each others' voices. The music is the same '60s sexploitation library cues every Something Weird fan has heard before and again. It's a marvelous headtrip that I do think only the '60s could produce. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything comes together. I watched Zardoz for the first time recently and this movie is still weirder than fucking Zardoz.

The movie shares this mutant home-video commonality not with A Clockwork Blue...more like the coy, quasi-dignified chuckles of The Hand of Pleasure. The narrator is hilarious. I love voiceovers from movies from this time. They were usually put in to help cut costs, and they really show how slack and alien the scripts for these movies were. This is the history of economics in slow motion--porn grunge seen first hand. This movie, both for its content and its context, is an anthropological dream.

Now I'm starting to get too far up my own ass--I do that when I'm happy. This movie has relieved of me, once again, the weary tensions of our plane. It is my Land of Cockaigne, my Arcadia, my Blue-Rock Candy Mountains. In more serious terms, however, it's yet another record of a crazed brain. It is another gate into the sort of madness that is sometimes necessary to crack open the ice that sheathes creativity. It is another marker by which we understand that the world we take for granted is not always what it seems, and how that's a marvelous and lovely thing. Too often are we Captives of our Hate. We should be Captives of Love instead.

And this movie is so captivating. In good ways and bad. So check it out when you can.

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