A Taste of Evil (1971)

          If a barrage of logic-bending plot twists, a handful of familiar actors, and pervasive woman-in-peril atmosphere are sufficient to hold your attention, then you’re the target audience for 1971’s A Taste of Evil, a distasteful but watchable telefilm starring two very different Barbaras, onetime Golden Age star Stanwyck and Peyton Place player Parkins. Rounding out the top-billed cast are Roddy McDowall, Arthur O’Connell, and William Windom, while the behind-the-scenes notables are prolific TV director John Llewellyn Moxey (whose career spanned 1955 to 1991) and writer Jimmy Sangster, best known for the entertainingly lurid Hammer horrors he wrote and/or directed. These folks’ assorted skillsets give A Taste of Evil a smidge more cinematic verve than the average telefilm, even though the picture is most assuredly schlock.
          In a bleak prologue, a 13-year-old girl is sexually assaulted on a sprawling estate. Cut to a decade later, when the now-grown Susan (Parkins) returns home from an overseas mental institution. She’s welcomed by her mother, Miriam (Stanwyck); her alcoholic stepfather, Harold (Windom); and the family’s simple-minded groundskeeper, John (O’Connell). Susan endures several bizarre episodes, seemingly getting chased through woods, discovering a corpse that disappears in the time it takes Susan to get help, and so on. Enter Dr. Lomas (McDowall), whom the family hires to help Susan navigate trauma. Per the Hitchcockian-psychological-thriller playbook, viewers are tasked with guessing whether Susan is unwell or being gaslit—and, if the latter is the case, by whom. To Sangster’s credit, this brief telefilm juggles so many plot elements that it’s possible to overlook major clues, especially because some of the twists, once revealed, are ludicrous. (Incidentally, this was Sangster’s second pass on the same narrative—A Taste of Evil recycles a premise he originated for the 1961 Hammer production Scream of Fear.)
          Stanwyck, ever the consummate professional, does her best to sell this hokum and therefore neither distinguishes nor embarrasses herself. Parkins’s take on PTSD is too glassy-eyed to register emotionally, so she’s more of a delivery device for Sangster’s yarn-spinning than a proper leading lady. And while the film largely squanders McDowall and Windom, O’Connell’s portrayal engenders a bit of empathy. Yet this is ultimately more of a writer’s piece than anything else, so it’s a shame Sangster didn’t bring his A-game; the characterizations are sketchy at best and much of the dialogue is clumsily expositional. Nonetheless, even though everything about A Taste of Evil will quickly evaporate from the viewer’s memory—save perhaps the queasy opening sequence—the flick is just cynical and nasty enough to provide a few kitschy kicks.

A Taste of Evil: FUNKY

Mean Johnny Barrows (1976)

Yet another dud from the Fred Williamson assembly line, this somewhat nonsensical thriller features Williamson, who also produced and directed, as a Vietnam vet who drifts in and out of homelessness and jail before reluctantly accepting a gig as a hit man for the mob. One can sense that Williamson meant to make a statement about America’s failure to find useful work for its returning warriors, and there’s also an element of race, because a prologue depicts the title character getting hassled by a white commanding officer. Yet Williamson’s storytelling is so clumsy that huge pieces of the narrative seem as if they’re missing, and thematic points are delivered by vague implication instead of actual literary devices. It’s also distracting to see Roddy McDowall hilariously miscast as an Italian mobster, and to see Elliot Gould play a cameo as some kind of hyper-articulate street poet. Williamson obviously called in some favors, but the effort was wasted. Anyway, the bulk of the film concerns the relationship between ex-GI Johnny Barrows (Williamson) and mobster Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman). When Johnny arrives at Mario’s restaurant one night looking for a free meal, Mario recognizes Johnny as a former football star and somehow knows everything about Johnny’s military service. So when Mario’s family becomes embroiled in a mob war, Mario persuades Johnny to kill for Mario’s family. Left unanswered is the question of why Mario doesn’t already have competent gunmen in his employ, and why Mario expends so much energy recruiting Johnny. No matter. Mean Johnny Barrows unfolds in a series of sludgy vignettes, most of which are boring and trite. Gould’s one scene is amusing, and R.G. Armstrong lends his signature flair to the role of a scumbag auto-shop owner, but too much of the film comprises Williamson posturing his way through macho behaviors that never coalesce into a believable character.

Mean Johnny Barrows: LAME

Arnold (1973)

          A disastrous attempt at a black comedy that plays like an Edgar Allan Poe story transformed into a idiotic comic strip, Arnold opens with one of the strangest scenes in all of mainstream ’70s cinema. As guests stand nearby to witness the ceremony, sexy young blonde Karen (Stella Stevens) weds wealthy older man Lord Arnold Dwellyn (Norman Stuart), who happens to be propped up inside a coffin because he’s dead. Even within the realm of would-be outrageous comedy, this scene makes absolutely zero sense. Nonetheless, the filmmakers soldier on by presenting a twisty plot that’s predicated upon the exacting demands of Arnold’s will. Karen gets Arnold’s money so long as she lives under the same roof as his corpse for the rest of her life. Yet Karen has other ideas—she’s conspiring with Arnold’s craven son, Robert (Roddy McDowall), with whom she’s romantically involved. When Robert is killed under mysterious circumstances, Karen begins to suspect that Arnold made arrangements before his death to knock off relatives who covet his money.

          The notion of a killer operating from beyond the grave should be exciting, but in the hands of the hacks behind Arnold, it’s just goofy. Arnold “communicates” via prerecorded cassette tapes, but the tapes contain such specific dialogue that it’s as if Arnold somehow knew exactly what each of his friends and relatives would do and say during every minute of every day. Similarly, the traps that the killer sets for victims are contingent upon people taking particular actions at particular times. Despite featuring many colorful big-screen veterans (other cast members include Victor Buono, Bernard Fox, Farley Granger, and Elsa Lanchester), Arnold is a chore to get through. The lighting is flat, the music is ghastly, the sets are flimsy, and Stevens gives an embarrassingly bad leading performance. Worst of all, Arnold is timid. Had the folks at Bing Crosby Productions (yes, really!) bothered to contrive a storytelling style as crass as the film’s underlying premise, Arnold might have become a bad-cinema milestone. As is, it’s just tacky.

Anrold: LAME

The Devil’s Widow (1970)

          Released in the U.S. under the deceptive moniker The Devil’s Widow, this strange thriller is a uniquely Celtic bit of business that was filmed and released in the UK as The Ballad of Tam Lin. Based on an old Scottish myth, which evolved over centuries of adaptations in literature and song, The Devil’s Window is the only movie directed by veteran actor Roddy McDowall. A gifted photographer, McDowall approached the task of making his first movie with predictable visual flair. However, he demonstrated zero affinity for storytelling. McDowall even did a poor job of modulating performances, because the acting in The Devil’s Widow runs the gamut from excellent (leading man Ian McShane) to mediocre (ingénue Stephanie Beacham) to terrible (top-billed star Ava Gardner). That said, perhaps something was lost in translation while the movie crossed the pond, because the behavior of the characters often seems inexplicable to American eyes. And when the picture transforms into a full-on supernatural horror show during the climax, the tonal shift is bewildering.

          The film begins at the sprawling Scottish estate of Michaela Cazaret (Gardner), a middle-aged woman of unclear national origin who populates her castle and its grounds with swinging young people. One of them is Tom Lynn (McShane), who is Michaela’s current lover despite being many years her junior. When Tom meets pretty and wholesome local girl Janet Ainsley (Beacham), daughter of the town vicar, he slips away from Michaela to begin a relationship with Janet. Michaela responds viciously, culminating in the final sequence wherein she uses drugs and/or enchantments to drive Tom mad. Throughout most of the picture, the nature of Michaela’s household is completely unclear; on the one hand, she seems to exert mind control over her young playthings, and yet on the other hand, Tom demonstrates free will. Similarly, the reasons behind Janet’s attraction to Tom are mysterious, especially when she realizes that Michaela is some sort of dragon lady with otherworldly powers.

         McDowall tries to mix cynical vignettes of world-weary party people with lyrical passages of young lovers shutting out the rest of the world, and the two elements clash. Moreover, the characterization of Michaela never makes sense. Is she crazy, magical, or just lonely? Gardner’s unfocused performance provides few clues. The Devil’s Widow looks lovely, thanks to intricate lighting by cinematographer Billy Williams, and McDowall deserves credit for trying a few interesting things, such as a scene comprising freeze frames and several weird effects during the finale. What all of it means, however, is anybody’s guess.

The Devil’s Widow: FUNKY

The Cat from Outer Space (1978)

A lesser offering from the live-action arm of Walt Disney Productions, The Cat from Outer Space features the tepid mixture of science fiction and slapstick that was all too common among the company’s ’70s offerings. The filmmakers try to enliven a fundamentally uninteresting premise by bludgeoning viewers with elaborate production values, familiar character actors, and laborious plotting—yet it’s hard to know which exactly which audience the people at Disney had in mind for this one. The main plot is silly nonsense about an alien, who happens to look like an ordinary housecat, enlisting the help of earthlings in order to repair his spaceship, while at the same time avoiding capture by soldiers and by a crime boss who wants to use the alien’s technology for nefarious purposes. However, a major subplot revolves around a hard-drinking compulsive gambler and his attempts to defraud bookies and gangsters by using the aforementioned technology in order to change the outcomes of sporting events. And then there’s the requisite infantile love story, because the cat’s main human accomplice is a nerdy scientist who can’t find the courage to court the coworker he loves. The gambling stuff and the romantic material would seem to be of little interest to very young viewers, and yet it’s hard to imagine grown-ups tolerating endless scenes of special-effects tomfoolery. (Picture lots of objects and people levitating.) Making matters worse, The Cat from Outer Space is dull and flat, despite fairly brisk pacing, simply because the character work and storytelling are so perfunctory. By the time the movie lurches into a convoluted rescue sequence at the end, all traces of charm and novelty have disappeared. Anyway, the picture does boast an eclectic cast of comedy professionals, each of whom does what he or she can with the script’s limp gags. Actors appearing in The Cat from Outer Space include Ken Berry, Hans Conreid, Sandy Duncan, James Hampton, Roddy McDowall, Harry Morgan, and McLean Stevenson—yes, that’s two commanding officers from the classic sitcom M*A*S*H for the price of one.

The Cat from Outer Space: LAME

Scavenger Hunt (1979)

          Producers have spent years trying to mimic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the all-star comedy epic about an international treasure hunt. Lesser attempts, such as Scavenger Hunt, succumb to predictable problems including bloated running times and underwritten characters. Trying to adequately service roles for a dozen or more principal actors seems to vex even the most well-meaning filmmakers. Additionally, trying to maintain the desired level of hellzapoppin excitement for an entire feature film usually drives the people behind pictures like Scavenger Hunt to rely on chases, screaming, and slapstick—all of which get tiresome. Inevitably, the initial sugar rush leads to a crash. Although Scavenger Hunt is largely a disappointment, especially considering the incredible array of gifted comic actors appearing in the film, it has some meritorious elements. Cowriter/producer Steven Vail and his team (mostly) avoid taking cheap shots at ethnic stereotypes, and they play a clean game by opting for family-friendly jokes instead of lurid ones. It’s not difficult to see the frothy confection the filmmakers had in mind.

          The premise, naturally, is simple. When multimillionaire board-game titan Milton Parker (Vincent Price) dies, his would-be heirs are forced to compete in a scavenger hunt that will determine who inherits the Parker fortune. On one team is Parker’s greedy sister (Cloris Leachman), along with her idiot son (Richard Masur) and her slimy lawyer (Richard Benjamin). Another team includes Parker’s son-in-law (Tony Randall) and the son-in-law’s kids. Next up is a duo comprising two of Parker’s nephews (played by Willie Aames and Dirk Benedict). Still another team features Parker’s household help—the butler (Roddy McDowall), the chauffeur (Cleavon Little), the chef (James Coco), and the maid (Stephanie Faracy). The wild-card contender is a dimwitted taxi driver (Richard Mulligan), whom Parker included because the cab driver accidentally killed Parker’s business partner, making Parker rich.

          You can figure out where this goes—as the teams pursue items on their lists, the evil people bicker and steal while the virtuous people help each other. Some scenes that presumably were meant to be comic highlights fall flat, including a lengthy bit of McDowall supervising his team’s theft of a toilet from a hotel bathroom. Cameos from random actors (Ruth Gordon, Meat Loaf, Arnold Schwarzenegger) add little, and the gags are uninspired. Nonetheless, director Michael Schultz keeps everyone upbeat and moving fast, so several sequences generate mild amusement, especially the anything-goes finale. Additionally, while none of the performances truly stand out (excepting perhaps Benjamin’s vigorous turn as a long-suffering schmuck), the vibe is consistently and pleasantly silly.

Scavenger Hunt: FUNKY

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

          While not actually a good movie in terms of artistic achievement and/or narrative ambition, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is in some perverse ways the epitome of its genre. Throughout the ’70s, filmmakers made innumerable ennui-drenched flicks about young people hitting the road for crime sprees that represented a sort of anti-Establishment activism. In the best such pictures, the wandering youths articulated their angst so well that their actions felt meaningful; in the worst such pictures, the basic premise was simply an excuse for exploitative thrills. Since Dirty Mary Crazy Larry exists somewhere between these extremes, it’s emblematic of the whole early-’70s road-movie headspace. The picture also has just enough cleverness, reflected in flavorful dialogue and oblique camera angles, to validate the existence of genuine thematic material, even in the context of a trashy lovers-on-the-run picture.

          Peter Fonda stars as Larry, an iconoclastic driver pulling crimes to earn money for a new racecar. Riding shotgun during Larry’s adventure is Deke (Adam Roarke), an accomplice/mechanic. During the movie’s exciting opening sequence, Deke breaks into the home of a grocery-store manager (Roddy McDowall) and holds the man’s family hostage while Larry waltzes into the store to collect the contents of the store’s safe. Unfortunately, Larry’s most recent one-night stand, Mary (Susan George), tracks Larry down during his getaway—she steals his keys and threatens to tell the cops what he’s doing unless she lets him tag along. Thus, Deke, Larry, and Mary form an unlikely trio zooming across the Southwest with police in hot pursuit. Working from a novel by Richard Unekis, director John Hough and his assorted screenwriters do a fine job of balancing talky interludes with high-speed chase scenes, creating an ominous sense of inevitability about the drama’s impending resolution.

          Still, the characterizations are thin—although the crooks’ main pursuer, Sheriff Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow), is an enjoyably eccentric small-town lawman—and the performances are erratic. Roarke anchors the getaway scenes with a quiet intensity that complements Fonda’s enjoyably cavalier persona. Englishwoman George, however, is a screeching nuisance, presumably impeded by the task of mimicking redneck patois. She’s so annoying, in fact, that it’s easy to laugh when Fonda berates her with this bizarre ultimatum: “So help me, if you try another stunt like that, I’m gonna braid your tits!” Dirty Mary Crazy Larry zooms along as fast as the cars featured onscreen, delivering several nerve-jangling crash scenes and generally setting an interesting trap for the reckless protagonists. Yet the movie’s ending changes everything, and the finale is so quintessentially ’70s that it’s reason enough to check out this hard-charging romp.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: GROOVY

Laserblast (1978)

An early effort from grade-Z movie producer Charles Band, who later achieved cult notoriety with gory flicks like Re-Animator (1985), this amateurish sci-fi thriller features the numbing combination of a brainless script, cheap production, lifeless acting, and terrible special effects. Clearly, there’s a reason why, as of this writing, Laserblast occupies the No. 77 slot on IMDb’s “Bottom 1oo” list of the worst movies ever made. While that distinction might be unnecessarily harsh, there’s virtually nothing to recommend in the picture. Among its myriad shortcomings, Laserblast tells a silly story with watching-paint-dry tedium; a pair of B-list actors (Roddy McDowall and Keenan Wynn) appear very briefly, despite their prominent billing; and the flick even disappoints by delivering only meager amounts of exploitation elements like gore and skin. In the goofy opening sequence, a green-faced but otherwise humanoid alien wearing a Star Trek-style uniform runs through a desert somewhere in the American southwest, carrying a giant hand-mounted laser gun. He gets into a space-age shootout with a pair of reptilian aliens, who are presented in cheap-looking stop-motion animation, and the humanoid alien dies, leaving his laser gun behind. Soon afterward, a slacker-dude teenager (Kim Milford) discovers the weapon and begins experimenting with it, unaware that every time he uses the gun, he transforms into a bug-eyed monster. What follows is the usual drill, with the lizard aliens returning to reclaim the gun while a nefarious government agent tries to find the weapon first. Yawn. Milford is an awful actor whose career went nowhere, and leading lady Cheryl Smith, who starred in the 1973 cult film Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, is equally bad. Supporting player Eddie Deezen, in his screen debut, will be familiar to many viewers because he later forged a solid career as one of Hollywood’s go-to character players for geek roles.

Laserblast: SQUARE

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

          It’s plain that the folks at Walt Disney Productions were trying to re-create the magic of their ’60s megahit Mary Poppins when they made Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but the latter film has enough charm and imagination to feel like more than just a retread. As was Poppins, this picture is an epic-length musical adventure about a magical woman assuming guardianship of a group of children, and it features an extended sequence blending animation and live action. However, the similarities don’t end there: David Tomlinson, who played the father in Mary Poppins, gets promoted to the male lead in Bedknobs, and the sibling songwriting team of Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman composed tunes for both movies.

          Bedknobs is set in England during World War II, when singleton Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) becomes the temporary caretaker for a trio of displaced London orphans. The kids try to escape during their first night in the Price family castle, of which Eglantine is the only resident, then decide to stay when they spy her flying on a broomstick—it turns out she’s an apprentice witch, so the kids strong-arm her into providing cushy treatment by threatening to expose her secret. Soon enough, the whole gang is off on an adventure because Eglantine’s supernatural correspondence course abruptly ends before the final lesson, and she’s determined to get the final spell she needs to become a full-fledged witch.

          The crew hops onto an enchanted transporting bed (the titular knob is the key that starts the bed’s magic working) and treks to London. There, they find Eglantine’s erstwhile educator, con man Emelius Browne (Tomlinson). Amazed that one of his students has real magical ability, Browne reveals that he copied the spells out of an old book but never believed they would work, so the crew’s next adventure is looking for the pages missing from Browne’s copy of the book. This leads to a run-in with a shady book collector, plus a long interlude in the (animated) realm of Naboombu, a land of talking animals ruled by a blowhard lion king. After these amusing cartoon high jinks, the gang returns to Eglantine’s castle, with the elusive spell in their possession, just in time to foil an invasion by an advance squadron of Nazis.

          All of the usual Disney tropes are in evidence, from clever children to silly adults, and from goofy slapstick to sweet songs. So, while Bedknobs doesn’t break any new ground, it boasts playful wit. Lansbury is endearing (and far less sickly-sweet than Mary Poppins star Julie Andrews); Tomlinson is an enjoyably blustery boob; the kids aren’t egregiously cutesy; and the showdown with the Nazis is a special-effects delight—Eglantine animates museum artifacts, creating a legion of hollow uniforms and suits of armor. These strengths make Bedknobs palatable for both adults and the film’s intended audience.

        FYI, the picture hit some speed bumps on the way to theaters. After premiering at a length of nearly three hours, it was cut to two hours for its initial U.S. release, then trimmed further for a 1979 reissue. (Costar Roddy McDowall was the biggest victim of the edits, disappearing almost completely from the shortened versions.) In the 1990s, a 139-minute version approximating the original cut was assembled for DVD. As a result of all of this backing-and-forthing, the movie is now widely available as a two-hour feature and as a two-and-a-half hour epic.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks: GROOVY

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

          Screenwriter John Milius crafted this outlandish narrative from the real-life exploits of Old West eccentric Judge Roy Bean, integrating a series of impossibly colorful episodes featuring an albino gunslinger, a lascivious priest, a beer-drinking bear, a legendary stage actress, and frontiersman Grizzly Adams. As directed by the venerable John Huston, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean isn’t remotely believable, but rather so enthusiastically weird that it’s fascinating to realize the movie was released by a major studio.

          Paul Newman stars as Bean, a fanciful drifter who wanders into a bar in the wilds of Texas only to get bushwhacked by unsavory locals. After being nursed back to health by a sweet senorita (Victoria Principal), he returns to the bar and slaughters everyone inside, then establishes the bar as the headquarters of his Wild West fiefdom. Bean declares himself a judge (literally draping himself in the U.S. flag at one point), and makes it a hanging offence for those under his “jurisdiction” to do things like besmirch the good name of Lily Langtry, the actress whom Bean worships from afar. He also attracts a cadre of loyal followers, including pistol-packing “marshals” who enrich themselves by stealing loot from the myriad unlucky souls Bean executes.

          The story eventually becomes a battle of wills between Bean and an ambitious lawyer (Roddy McDowall) who wants to seize the judge’s holdings, but the film mostly comprises a string of strange vignettes. Stacy Keach plays the aforementioned albino gunslinger, strutting around in pasty makeup, an Edgar Winter fright wig, and a spangled cowboy outfit worthy of the Village People. Appearing onscreen as well as directing, Huston plays Adams as a grumpy wanderer who complains the law won’t allow him to die wherever he wants. And so it goes. Huston lets actors run amok with the absurd material, and they look like they’re having a blast; Newman in particular seems thrilled to play a grizzled old coot with a silver tongue and a colossally bad attitude.

          The cast is filled with interesting people, from assorted varmint types (Ned Beatty, Bill McKinney) to those playing random small roles (Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Zerbe). But the real star of this unique show is Milius’ outrageous dialogue, like this rant from Bean after he insults a group of fallen women: “I understand you have taken exception to my calling you whores. I'm sorry. I apologize. I ask you to note that I did not call you callous-ass strumpets, fornicatresses, or low-born gutter sluts. But I did say ‘whores.’ No escaping that. And for that slip of the tongue, I apologize.”

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean: GROOVY

Pretty Maids all in a Row (1971)

          A quick description of Pretty Maids all in a Row explains not only why the movie’s disparate elements couldn’t possibly have merged into a coherent whole, but also why the picture is a genuine cinematic oddity. Gene Roddenberry, the idealistic ex-cop who created Star Trek, wrote and produced the story, from a novel by Francis Pollini, about a high-school guidance counselor/football coach (Rock Hudson) who’s sleeping with half the girls in his school. Demonstrating a shocking lack of creative vision, Roddenberry’s script is an all-over-the-map mélange of murder mystery, psychodrama, romantic comedy, and sex farce. Directing this enterprise is Roger Vadim, the leering Frenchman best known for the exploitative ’60s movies he made starring two of his wives, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda. With these men pulling the story in a hundred directions at once, Pretty Maids seems like a different film in each scene.

          When it begins, it’s the tacky story of horny teenager Ponce (John David Carson), who’s flummoxed by his constant erections, though it should be noted that in Vadim’s lurid fantasy world, Ponce’s high school is populated by gorgeous college-age women who walk around in body-hugging sweaters and micro-miniskirts; it’s difficult to imagine any straight boy keeping his wits about him in this sexualized environment. Ponce loses his mind when he literally gets an eyeful of his hot substitute teacher, Miss Smith (Angie Dickinson), because she leans over and presses her breasts into his face. He excuses himself to the restroom (presumably to take matters in hand), and discovers a seemingly unconscious girl in the next stall. When he reaches over to cop a feel, however, he discovers she’s actually dead. Classy!

          Once it becomes clear the girl was murdered, the school’s prissy principal (Roddy McDowall) and the local-yokel sheriff (Keenan Wynn) prove useless, so suave state cop Sam Surcher (Telly Savalas) takes the case. Then, when the bodies of young women keep piling up around the school, Ponce’s mentor, Michael “Tiger” McDrew (Hudson), emerges as a suspect. Somewhere in this mess of a story, Tiger finds time to push Ponce and Miss Smith together, apparently eager to get his young apprentice laid; this leads to cringe-worthy seduction scenes between Carson and Dickinson. Adding to the almost surreal quality of the storyline, most of the characters in the movie seem more concerned with whether Tiger’s team will win the big upcoming game than with finding the serial killer in their midst.

          One fears that satire might have been the intention.

          Pretty Maids all in a Row is a narrative disaster from any rational viewpoint, but the movie delivers a lot of vivid texture. Vadim fills the screen with beautiful women, often in some state of undress, and the leading players are entertaining even if they don’t have real roles to play. Hudson’s mildly creepy as a power-hungry nut who transitions from sexual conquests to getting away with murder; Dickinson is cartoonishly sexy in a performance that borders on camp; and Savalas is so bitchy and urbane that he’s one evening gown away from coming across like a drag queen. Strange stuff. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Pretty Maids all in a Row: FUNKY

The Black Hole (1979)

          By the late ’70s, a decade after Walt Disney’s death, the movie company bearing his name had lost the marketplace dominance it enjoyed during Walt’s heyday. Although the animation division remained adrift until 1989, Disney’s live-action unit began a brief but daring creative renaissance in 1979. That’s when the studio jumped onto the Star Wars bandwagon with The Black Hole, a dark sci-fi adventure story boasting opulent special effects and a memorably brooding music score by the great John Barry. The story involves a wonderfully absurd contrivance: In the year 2130, a deep-space exploration ship encounters a black hole and discovers that a long-lost spaceship, the Cygnus, is somehow locked in a permanent orbit over the mouth of the black hole. Our intrepid heroes enter the Cygnus and discover that megalomaniacal scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) controls the ship with an army of robots. When Reinhardt tries to shanghai the heroes into participating in a mad scheme, they rebel and trigger a chain of events that sends all of the movie’s main characters plunging into the black hole.

          The story is goofy and turgid, and the clumsiest fingerprint of the Disney brand is the presence of cutesy robots including the wide-eyed V.I.N.CENT (voiced by Roddy McDowall). Furthermore, the acting and dialogue are laughably wooden, with unfortunate leading players Joseph Bottoms, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux, and Anthony Perkins effortlessly upstaged by Schell, who works a florid Bond-villain groove. (Flattening the overwrought performance styles of both Borgnine and Perkins is a dubious sort of accomplishment.) As a piece of dramatic art, The Black Hole is, well, a black hole. As a compendium of vivid sensations, however, the picture is memorable. Barry’s music is grandiose and malevolent, expressing the vastness of space in such a powerful way that many scenes are genuinely unnerving. Some of the old-school optical effects are breathtaking, with exquisitely detailed spaceship models faring better than inconsistent greenscreen work.
          The Black Hole also boasts one of the weirdest climaxes in mainstream sci-fi cinema—a grim, phantasmagorical sequence illustrating the trippy horrors hidden inside the titular phenomenon. To say there’s disharmony between cutesy robots and a 2001-style head trip is an understatement, but if you’re an imaginative viewer willing to pick and choose which parts of this movie to enjoy, you’ll discover many superficial pleasures, as well as a few surreal ones.

The Black Hole: FUNKY

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

          Although he spent most of the ’70s writing for TV, sci-fi legend Richard Matheson acquitted himself nicely with the big-screen endeavor The Legend of Hell House, a smart blend of “old dark house” hokum and then-modern concepts about using scientific gadgets to record paranormal phenomena. The plot is standard nonsense about a team of experts confined in a haunted house for a set period of time, but that’s inconsequential because as with any proper scary movie, the main appeal is the vibe of the thing.

          The movie kicks off when an eccentric millionaire hires a respected scientist, Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), to debunk or prove claims that a gloomy British mansion is haunted. The mansion, known as the Belasco House, was the site of assorted grisly murders and torture scenes, so rumor has it the spirits of victims still roam the halls. Barrett agrees to move into Belasco House and run assorted scientific and non-scientific tests, with the aid of his wife, Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), and two psychics, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall) and Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin).

          Things get weird quickly, as the various investigators start feeling the effects of malevolent spirits, and the film presents a wide variety of phenomena: In addition to the usual bits like characters falling into reveries of otherworldly possession and objects moving seemingly of their own volition, there are kinky scenes of the female characters giving themselves over to unexpected sexual urges apparently triggered by the power of the house. Particularly when the investigators start discovering hard evidence of the horrible things that once happened in the mansion, The Legend of Hell House gets creepier still because it mixes the plausible and the supernatural to create an anything’s-possible mystique.

          Matheson, scripting from his own novel, and director John Hough break the picture into tidy chapters (it’s the sort of movie where every few minutes there’s a hard cut to an establishing shot with “Tuesday” or “Thursday” superimposed onto the frame), and the storytellers leave many creepy events unexplained so the characters (and the audience) get roped into the idea that something freaky is happening.

          McDowall gives an effectively twitchy performance as the most colorful of the paranormal investigators, his jangled nerves surfacing as a sort of tweaked charm, and the picture’s focus on modern trappings makes it feel different from standard haunted-house fare. Of special note among those modern trappings is the disturbing electronic score, created by the wonderfully named “Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of Electrophon Ltd.” And while it’s true that the plot crumbles under scrutiny—if the house is so damn haunted, leave!—criticizing an enjoyable creepshow for logical gaps seems unsportsmanlike.

The Legend of Hell House: GROOVY

The Poseidon Adventure (1971) & Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)

          For some reason, I’ve always remembered a remark that Will Smith made around the time he broke through as a big-screen star with 1994’s Independence Day: When asked how he got so much mileage out of so little screen time, Smith explained that he studied Ernest Borgnine’s performance in The Poseidon Adventure because of how vigorously Borgnine attacked every scene. Smith was onto something, because even though Irwin Allen’s production of The Poseidon Adventure deserves its reputation as one of the cheesiest movies of the ’70s, it’s undeniably compelling for the same reason that Borgnine’s supporting performance is effective—the picture will do anything to get a reaction. Based on a novel by Paul Gallico, the story about a luxury liner turned upside down by a giant rogue wave is silly, because it presumes that the liner can stay afloat long enough for survivors to seek rescue through a hole in the bottom of the hull, but the movie is jam-packed with action, melodrama, romance, schmaltz, and spectacle. What’s not to like about unpretentious hokum that intercuts shots of gussied-up New Year’s Eve revelers singing “Auld Lang Syne” with vignettes of the ship’s stoic captain (Leslie Nielsen!) watching watery doom approach a few decks above their heads? Perfecting the disaster-movie template established by Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure offers a slapdash ensemble of familiar faces romping through one overwrought crisis after another. In sheer paycheck-cashing mode, Gene Hackman plays the hero of the piece, a swaggering priest who rediscovers his purpose in life by leading a band of hearty survivors to possible salvation; his performance is so faux-intense that it’s embarrassing and thrilling at the same time. Lending campy gravitas are Borgnine and other showbiz veterans, including Jack Albertson, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, and the flamboyantly buoyant Shelley Winters (“In the water, I’m a very skinny lady!”). Meanwhile, Carol Lynley, Pamela Sue Martin, and Stella Stevens shriek their lungs out in various states of soggy undress.
          The soap-opera storylines are drab, like the one about marital strife between a crass cop (Borgnine) and an ex-hooker (Stevens), but the fun of the picture is watching broadly sketched caricatures clash with each other against a backdrop of death and devastation. Allen spent a bundle on massive sets that could be flipped upside down and flooded, so what’s happening onscreen feels real because the actors actually got soaked, and drowning is such a universal phobia that it’s impossible not to sympathize with the characters’ anxiety. On top of everything, there’s a sky-high kitsch factor, especially when Lynley lip-syncs the movie’s atrocious but Oscar-winning theme song “The Morning After”—so whether you embrace the flick for its legit thrills or its unintentional humor, The Poseidon Adventure is a great ride.
          Allen reprised the story several years later, when his career was faltering; the sleep-inducing Beyond the Poseidon Adventure stars a bored Michael Caine as a sea captain who tries to salvage loot from wreck of the Poseidon shortly after the last moments of the original movie. Peter Boyle, Sally Field, and Jack Warden join the festivities, with Karl Malden playing Caine’s salty sidekick and Telly Savalas portraying the main villain. Unfortunately, the direction and script are so lifeless that even the colorful cast isn’t enough to keep the sequel afloat—Beyond the Poseidon Adventure is a grade-Z heist picture that merely happens to take place on an abandoned boat.

The Poseidon Adventure: GROOVY

Beyond the Poseidon Adventure: LAME

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) & Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) & Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) & Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

          When Chuck Heston screamed at the half-buried Statue of Liberty during the conclusion of Planet of the Apes (1968), what seemed like one of the great twist endings in sci-fi history was actually the launching pad for an interesting but short-lived movie series, probably because producer Arthur P. Jacobs was eager to milk a hit after taking a bath on the notorious turkey Doctor Dolittle (1967). Demonstrating that a sequel was neither organic nor planned, Heston is a minor presence in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which strangely pushes the titular primates to the sidelines in favor of a cult of underground mutants worshipping an unexploded nuclear bomb; even more egregiously, Beneath is the only picture in the series that doesn’t feature Roddy McDowall in the cast. Nonetheless, Beneath has some memorable loose-nuke paranoia, and Chuck brightens the third act by showing up to flex his pecs and grit his teeth. If you go Beneath, by the way, stick through to the ending, which is spectacularly cynical.
          Jacobs more or less rebooted the series with Escape from the Planet of the Apes, which kinda ignores the previous film by reprising beloved ape characters Cornelius (McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) from the original picture. The duo travels back in time from their ape-dominated future Earth to present-day 1970s Earth, where they’re perceived as a threat to man’s dominance of the planet. Escape is flat and talky compared to the rest of the series, but it introduces the entertaining human character Armando (Ricardo Montalban) and features a denouement that’s both exciting and depressing.
          The jewel in the crown of the ’70s Apes pictures is unquestionably Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which boasts a taut script about slavery and rebellion, zesty performances by McDowall and Montalban, and genuinely scary sequences of civil unrest that director J. Lee Thompson reportedly modeled after news footage of the 1965 Watts riots. McDowall actually plays the son of his character in the previous Apes pictures, and he brings previously unseen grit and rage to his portrayal of an, ahem, guerilla leader; he also benefits from a methodical story that believably evolves him from pacifist to revolutionary. Adding even more flava is the ingenious use of a then-new office plaza in what’s now known as Century City, California, for the primary location, because Fox audaciously transforms its corporate backyard into a futuristic battleground. Yet another virtue of the movie is a charismatic performance by journeyman African-American actor Hari Rhodes, of Daktari fame—he’s commanding and intense as the only human besides Armando to evade the apes’ wrath. FYI, the highly recommended extended cut of Conquest that debuted on Blu-Ray (and the Fox Movie Channel) in 2008 ups the violence quotient and deepens the movie’s theme of racial friction.
          Predictably, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is an anticlimax, mostly because it should have picked up exactly where Conquest ended. Instead, it takes place years later and features a long, slow buildup to a poorly staged fight between a nasty human armada and a fractious ape community. Seeing John Huston in primate drag at the beginning and end of the picture is a hoot, though (he speaks to the camera in wraparound bits). Oh, and don’t be fooled if you come across listings for Back to the Planet of the Apes or Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes (both 1974); they’re slapdash re-edits of scenes from the disposable Apes TV series that ran for one season.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes: FUNKY

Escape from the Planet of the Apes: FUNKY

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes: GROOVY

Battle for the Planet of the Apes: LAME