Dream No Evil (1970)

Filmmaker John Hayes often created B-movies that were spiced with interesting weirdness, such as the surrealistic thriller Dream No Evil, but it’s telling that he frequently returned to the safe harbor of directing porn. To put it bluntly, he was a hack. Which is why it’s frustrating to watch Dream No Evil, which has worthwhile elements but never quite clicks. The confusing story tracks Grace MacDonald (Brooke Mills), a sexy young woman warped by childhood trauma. Specifically, she was abandoned by her father and raised by the members of a church. As a sexy young adult, she travels the country with Reverend Paul Jessie Bundy (Michael Pataki), participating in revival-meeting spectacles. It’s unclear why she doesn’t spend more time with her fiancé, Paul’s brother, and it’s unclear why she’s frigid. In any event, Paul’s hot for Grace. One day—please don’t ask for details—Grace encounters a pimp who moonlights as an undertaker, and he claims to have the corpse of Grace’s father in his workroom. He takes Grace there. Then her dad, Timothy MacDonald (Edmond O’Brien), rises from the dead and kills the pimp/undertaker. Later, Timothy plays an accordion and scowls while Grace dances for Paul, repeatedly flashing her panties at the preacher. As the title suggests, we’re meant to interpret these events as episodes from Grace’s dreams, but suffice to say Hayes lacks the skill necessary for putting across a persuasive combination of fantasy and reality. Weird stuff happens without much in the way of context or explanation or impact. So while Dream No Evil presents a lot of strangely lurid content, it’s hard to discern what purpose the content serves—and therefore nearly impossible to say whether Hayes achieved any thematic goals.

Dream No Evil: LAME

The Bat People (1974)

          The problem with The Bat People isn’t that the premise of a man turning into a bat is ridiculous, because creature-feature history is filled with outlandish transformation stories. The problem is that The Bat People is dull. Structurally, the picture follows the familiar template. Protagonist Dr. John Beck (Stewart Moss) receives the wound triggering his change very early in the movie’s running time. Thereafter, he suffers seizures around the same time that mysterious killings occur, causing John to fear that he’s become a killer. His long-suffering wife, Cathy (Marianne McAndrew), seeks help from a friendly physician, Dr. Kipling (Paul Carr). Meanwhile, grotesque cop Sgt. Ward (Michael Pataki) identifies John as a suspect. Et cetera. Of such slender thread countless werewolf and vampire tales have been spun. Yet in those other creature features, the creature gets featured. In The Bat People, viewers don’t see the monster—represented as an early makeup creation by the revered artist Stan Winston—until nearly the end of the story.

          Accordingly, the murder scenes involve generic POV shots, making The Bat People feel like some random serial-killer saga. Worse, almost everything that happens between the murders is drab and repetitive, such as the myriad vignettes of John staggering while his eyes roll over white. There’s not nearly enough weird stuff along the lines of John grabbing a mannequin from a store window and pummeling the mannequin’s head against pavement. Leading man Moss is a poor man’s Bradford Dillman (let that simmer in your brainpan), and leading lady McAndrew renders passable work at best. This means the heavy lifting falls to exploitation-flick regular Pataki, who puts as much oomph as he can into a clichéd role. Some viewers might find a few scenes in The Bat People creepy, such as the one depicting the final fate of Pataki’s character, but getting to these mildly rewarding moments requires trudging through a whole lot of guano.

The Bat People: FUNKY

Mansion of the Doomed (1978)

          Fast-moving shocker Mansion of the Doomed has the shape of a classic mad-doctor movie from the ’30s or ’40s, though the gruesome makeup FX and shadowy cinematography are unquestionably modern. The simple story concerns Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart), an eye surgeon who goes around the bend when his beloved adult daughter, Nancy (Trish Stewart), loses her sight in a car accident. Aided by his compliant wife, Katherine (Gloria Grahame), Dr. Chaney drugs Trish’s fiancé, Dan (Lance Henriksen), surgically removes Dan’s eyes, and places them into Nancy’s head so she can regain her vision. Dr. and Mrs. Chaney then lock Dan in their basement dungeon—because, really, doesn’t every good home in an affluent suburb have one of those? When Dan’s eyes fail, Dr. Chaney abducts a succession of people, repeatedly replacing the eyes in Nancy’s head while telling her that each time her vision fades and revives, it’s the result of some mysterious procedure he performed while she was anesthesized. You can figure out where it goes from there. The eyeless prisoners in the dungeon plot an escape, and Dr. Chaney becomes more and more reckless as his mental state deteriorates. Although Mansion of the Doomed is highly formulaic, it’s an enjoyable little thriller, more cartoonishly spooky than genuinely frightening.
          Plotwise, the film bears more than a little resemblance to French director Georges Franju's cult-favorite thriller Eyes Without a Face (1960), which concerns face transplants instead of eye transplants. Even the main setting of a mansion was lifted from the earlier picture. Mansion of the Doomed has energy, but it's a shameless enterprise on virtually every level.

          Hollywood veteran Basehart gives an entertainingly twitchy performance that’s forever verging on camp, and it’s a kick to see this early performance by Henriksen—later to become a cult-favorite star of fantasy-oriented films and television—even though he delivers most of his performance from behind a Stan Winston-designed makeup that obscures his eyes. Producer Charles Band applies his signature veneer of low-budget cheesiness, borrowing every stylistic trick he can from the Argento and De Palma playbooks with nary a trace of artistry, while director Michael Pataki (better known as a C-list Hollywood actor) powers through scenes with clumsy but relentless efficiency. There’s even a friendly nod to the sort of old-school fright flicks after which Mansion of the Doomed is patterned, since the main character’s name abbreviates to Dr. Len Chaney (read: Lon Chaney). All in all, a fun serving of empty calories for horror fanatics. FYI, this picture’s myriad alternate titles include Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood, Massacre Mansion, and The Terror of Dr. Chaney.

Mansion of the Doomed: FUNKY

Grave of the Vampire (1972)

Enervated horror flick Grave of the Vampire has a solid premise and at least one memorably perverse scene, but the combination of lifeless dramaturgy and stiff acting renders the piece impotent. Here’s the premise. When two lovers sneak into a cemetery one evening, they happen upon the crypt of Caleb Croft (Michael Pataki), a rapist and murderer who rises from the dead because he’s actually an ancient vampire. (Never mind that he was electrocuted and buried, and never mind that his resurrection defies even the sketchy logic of monster movies.) Caleb rapes the woman, who subsequently gives birth to a child that she raises by nursing him with blood instead of milk. When the child reaches adulthood as James Eastman (William Smith), he tracks down Croft, who has assumed a new identity as a college professor specializing in vampirism. (Again, never mind.) James uses detective work and eventually a séance to confirm that Croft is the creature who violated his mother, then seeks vengeance. Excepting the clumsy mechanics of the storyline, the underlying notion is fun—a vampire begets a son, who then wants payback. As for that perverse scene, it involves James’ mother discovering his taste for plasma. She accidentally cuts her finger and drips blood onto her baby’s face. He laps up the stuff, so she slices open her breast and he suckles the wound. If only the rest of the picture had that much nerve. Pataki, usually cast in humorous or thuggish roles, is atrocious, employing a community-theater version of sophisticated diction and moving like he’s got a wooden board tied to his back. Smith, badly miscast, spends most of the picture sitting in chairs while seething, so his powerful physicality is mostly wasted. All in all, Grave of the Vampire plays like a bad episode of Dark Shadows.

Grave of the Vampire: LAME

The Dirt Gang (1972)

More biker-flick trash about brawling, debauchery, and rape, The Dirt Gang presents all the clichés of a low-rent genre without any of the redeeming values found in the genre’s best pictures. Set to crappy, horn-driven rock music that sounds like it was recorded in 1962, rather than a decade later, The Dirt Gang depicts the violence that occurs when a group of bikers stumbles onto a movie company shooting in a western ghost town. Initially hassling the Hollywood folks for free food, the bikers then hold the movie company hostage, raping every woman in sight and beating the tar out of the one tough guy who dares to rebel against the bikers. Notwithstanding some backstory about how the tough guy used to be a biker himself, plus a subplot about the movie’s leading lady using sex to mollify the leader of the biker gang, that’s pretty much the whole narrative. The Dirt Gang is so enervated that a major narrative thread gets abandoned for no reason—during the first act, the bikers murder several cops, but after the bikers escape the crime scene, the incident is never mentioned again. Huh? Performances in The Dirt Gang range from serviceable to substandard. Sporting an eyepatch, Paul Carr invests the role of gang leader Monk with forgettable menace. Playing a loutish biker with a taste for parading around in his tighty-whiteys, B-movie stalwart Michael Pataki offers his usual mixture of growled vulgarities and silly movie-star impressions. Nominal leading man Michael Forest, as the tough guy, provides little except an imposing physique, although Jo Anne Meredith—playing the aging actress who employs her wiles for self-preservation—conveys an enjoyable hint of cynicism before her role becomes mere eye candy during a long nude scene. Fitting its title, The Dirt Gang is grungy enough to make the viewer want a shower.

The Dirt Gang: LAME

Dracula’s Dog (1978)

Dull and silly, Dracula’s Dog—sometimes known as Zoltan: Hound of Dracula—lives down to its ridiculous title. Although the film has a fair amount of visual polish given its shoestring budget, the script is so unrelentingly brainless that the movie elicits boredom more than any other reaction. In the goofy opening scene, Russian soldiers excavating a cave discover a crypt bearing the family name “Dracula,” and a coffin spills from the crypt. For no discernible reason, a soldier opens the coffin, discovers a figure with a stake through its heart, removes the stake, and then watches as the figure reconstitutes into a Doberman with vampire fangs. The dog kills the soldier, pulls another coffin from a crypt, and removes the stake from the figure in that coffin, reconstituting half-human/half-vampire henchman Veidt Smith (Reggie Nalder).. Instead of reviving their old master, Veidt and the dog decamp to Los Angeles, where they seek out Michael Drake (Michael Pataki), last survivor of the Dracula family line. Does any of this make sense? No, and neither does the “plan” of stealing Michael’s blood for some nefarious purpose. Much of the picture comprises drab scenes of Veidt watching Michael enjoy a camping trip with his family, and then telepathically commanding the dog to make mischief once the sun goes down each night. Even with the occasional scene of the dog chomping onto the neck of a human or another dog, this picture is numblingly boring, especially because the rinky-dink musical score is such an assault on the ears. Compounding these problems, it’s embarrassing to watch the great José Ferrer trudge through idiotic subplot scenes while portraying a Van Helsing-type pursuer.  

Dracula’s Dog: LAME

Delinquent Schoolgirls (1975)

Not many grimy B-movies blend the exploitive textures of softcore porn with the giddy flavors of gay camp, but Delinquent Schoolgirls manages to do just that. It’s a rotten movie, no question. Nonetheless, it contains passages that are weirdly compelling, even though most of the running time comprises leering shots of buxom women dancing, stripping, swimming, or otherwise moving their bodies in such a way as to fill the screen with undulating mammary glands. (We’re talking topless jumping jacks, topless karate, and so on.) The picture opens in a prison for the criminally insane, where psychotic inmate Carl (Michael Pataki) receives electroshock therapy. Returning to his cell, Carl conspires with raging queen Bruce (Stephen Stucker) and serial rapist Dick (Bob Miner) on an escape plan. The men break out of prison and stumble upon a nearby school for girls, where the only students in residence are troublemakers who were denied vacation passes. Carl and his cronies force the women to display themselves while selecting just the right young lady to kidnap, but eventually the women rebel against their captors. Predictably, Delinquent Schoolgirls is a disaster in terms of characterization and story, though some puerile viewers will be pleased with the endless variety of nude and/or semi-nude scenes featuring attractive starlets. (The less said about the subplot concerning a middle-aged teacher who drugs and rapes one of his students, the better.) Leading man Pataki’s attempts at spicing his performance with humor are weak, since his main gag involves second-rate impressions of Daffy Duck, W.C. Fields, Clark Gable, and others. It’s also difficult not to feel embarrassed for Minor, who must incarnate the ugly cliché of an animalistic, sex-crazed black stud. And then there’s Stucker, beloved by comedy fans for his bizarre turn as air-traffic controller Johnny in Airplane! (1980) and Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). Stucker is cheerfully flamboyant in every scene, though his finest moment is undoubtedly playing piano and belting out “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” while Minor’s character rapes a housewife in the next room.

Delinquent Schoolgirls: LAME

Pink Angels (1972)

          A truly bizarre artifact from the era when homosexuals were still viewed as society’s freaks, this “comedy” depicts the misadventures of a motorcycle gang comprised exclusively of transvestites as they travel from northern California to Los Angeles for a drag “cotillion.” Although the six bikers disguise themselves as Hell’s Angels, wearing fake facial hair as well as denim-and-leather ensembles tricked out with Confederate and Nazi paraphernalia, the dudes are as flamboyant as the day is long, so the would-be humor of the film stems from incidents during which they drop their butch façades to discuss dresses and makeup in fey lisps. Part of what makes Pink Angels such a confusing film is that it’s hard to decide whether the portrayal of gays is affectionate, derisive, of satirical—or even some queasy combination of all three.

          After all, the bikers are only shown doing two mildly “bad” things: inflicting damage on some property when they’re putting on their tough-guy routine, and playfully applying makeup to the men in a rival gang while those men are passed out from drinking. Considering that many films of the ’70s depicted gay men as homicidal psychopaths, the vision of homosexuality in Pink Angels is positively genteel by comparison. That’s not to say, of course, that Pink Angels is any kind of a worthwhile movie. Quite to the contrary, Pink Angels is an amateurish mess with very little characterization or plot. Furthermore, the movie is burdened with a nonsensical running gag about a maniacal military general whose climactic encounter with the gay bikers inexplicably spins the movie in a downbeat direction. Therefore, the best way to watch Pink Angels—presuming one is masochistic enough to do so—is to marvel at the sheer weirdness of the enterprise.

          For one thing, Pink Angels is far from subtle. In one early scene, the bikers hit a roadside food joint, and then lasciviously consume hot dogs while making double-entendres about phallic-sounding motorcycle parts including “ram shafts.” Later, the bikers tromp through a grocery store looking for items like “man-handler” soup. (At the time the film was made, the phrase “man-handler” was used in ads for the Hungry Man line of frozen foods.) Sometimes, screenwriter Margaret McPherson’s attempts at gay patois are clichéd (“What did you have in mind, fancy pants?”), and sometimes McPherson conjures lines that are merely strange (“I’m sick and tired of you, you fickle pringle!”) Every so often, however, McPherson lands a genuinely amusing line, as when the lead biker brazenly tells a cop that his motorcycle’s storage compartment is filled with drugs and “an 8-by-10 of Robert Goulet.”

          Adding to the overall surrealism of Pink Angels is the appearance in the cast of he-man actor Dan Haggerty, who spent most of the ’70s portraying mountain man Grizzly Adams in movies and TV shows. For Pink Angels, he plays a member of the straight gang that parties with the gay bikers (don’t ask), so Haggerty makes out with a black hooker, wakes up to discover he’s wearing makeup (and bows in his hair!), and hits on a transvestite whom he believes is a woman. Even though Pink Angels is actually quite dull to watch all the way through—the picture feels much, much longer than its 81-minute running time—it’s difficult to look away from things as peculiar as the Haggerty scenes. Plus, because Haggerty and tough-guy character actor Michael Pataki (playing the leader of the straight gang) are the only familiar performers in Pink Angels, the illusion of the movie having emerged from some ’70s-cinema dreamscape is nearly complete. In fact, even after watching the whole thing, it’s still challenging to believe that that Pink Angels exists. Seriously, how many other drive-in movies were made about gay bikers?

Pink Angels: FREAKY

Sweet Jesus, Preacherman (1973)

Confusing, sloppy, and dull, the cheaply made blaxploitation flick Sweet Jesus, Preacherman has an interesting flourish here and there, but these grace notes are not sufficient to make the picture worthwhile. Roger E. Mosley (later to costar on the TV series Magnum P.I.) plays a hit man named Holmes, whose primary employer is a mobster named Martelli (William Smith). When Martelli starts losing control over a black ghetto, he hires Holmes to take the place of the local preacher as a means of infiltrating the community and rooting out crooks who are undermining Martelli’s operation. Seeing as how the movie introduces Holmes by showing him commit several flamboyant murders, like lighting a man on fire and tossing him off the balcony of a high building, the filmmakers don’t exactly make a persuasive case that Holmes is the right guy for a job requiring subtlety. Nonetheless, we’re told that Holmes grew up around Baptist preachers, so he knows how to talk the talk. As soon as Holmes assumes his position behind the pulpit, however, the movie wanders off into subplots about community activists, street-level dealers, and a state senator (Michael Pataki) whom Martelli wants to influence; as a result, Holmes gets lost in the narrative shuffle as supporting characters grab unnecessarily large chunks of screen time. Directed by one Henning Schellerup, Sweet Jesus, Preacherman is so disjointed that some scenes are cut up and dispersed throughout the movie, and so padded that unimportant montages, like that of a pimped-out dealer strutting down the street, drag on forever. The idea that Holmes can pull off his ruse never gains credibility, and a mid-movie plot twist involving Holmes’ sudden desire to seize control of the ghetto comes out of nowhere. Mosley is just okay, though he works up a decent head of steam during his first sermon as a fake preacher, and Smith’s exuberant over-acting is wasted because his character is a cipher.

Sweet Jesus, Preacherman: LAME