Isle of the Snake People (1971) & Alien Terror (1971) & Blind Man's Bluff (1971)

          In a perfect world, horror-movie legend Boris Karloff would have concluded his epic screen career with Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968), which features an excellent Karloff performance and many sly references to the actor’s dubious status as an aging horror-movie icon. In the real world, the final gasps of Karloff’s career included some of the worst films he ever made, because a trio of awful projects he completed near the end of his life crept into the marketplace two years after Karloff's death in 1969. Two of these pictures, Isle of the Snake People and Alien Terror, were made in Mexico as part of a package deal. The behind-the-scenes story goes that Karloff initially nixed the package deal, only to say yes once producers hired up-and-coming B-movie guy Jack Hill to “improve” the material. One can only imagine what this junk was like before Hill lent a hand.

          Isle of the Snake People is confusing and tedious and weird, but it has something to do with Carl van Molder (Karloff) overseeing a cult of supernatural natives on a remote island in the Pacific. Most of the picture concerns the natives performing gruesome rituals, and there’s a dreary romantic subplot involving van Molder’s niece and a dashing young military officer. Karloff has a bit more screen time in this one and seems moderately livelier than he does in Alien Terror, but with his diminished physicality and silly-looking Colonel Sanders outfit, he’s hardly intimidating; moreover, he’s unconvincingly doubled in some scenes by an actor wearing a black veil and dark sunglasses. Although Hill did some writing on the project, one hopes he’s not to blame for the rotten dialogue. Consider this sweet nothing the officer coos to van Molder’s niece: “The fire of the sunset in your eyes is consuming my heart!” Still, Isle of the Snake People is nearly tolerable thanks to the intense ritual scenes. The movie opens with natives including a weirdly dressed little person dancing around the gauze-wrapped corpse of a sexy woman until the corpse revives, strips off some of her gauze, grabs a dude, and starts making out with him. While this happens, the little person throttles the live poultry in his hands. Yes, he chokes the chicken. Who knows if the naughty visual joke was intentional, but we take our minor pleasures where we can find them.

          For Alien Terror, Hill rewrote at least part of the script and also directed the handful of scenes featuring Karloff—but once again, it doesn’t seem as if hiring a ringer made much difference. Alien Terror, also known as The Incredible Invasion, is so rotten it’s hard to imagine a version of the film that’s any worse. Set in 19th-century Europe, the story begins when altruistic scientist Professor John Mayer (Karloff) invents some sort of radioactive ray beam. The invention alerts aliens, who send an emissary in a flying saucer to destroy the ray beam. With his shaggy hair and tin-foil space suit, the emissary looks like a refugee from a glam-rock band. Amid various turgid subplots, the emissary takes the least efficient path imaginable toward accomplishing his goal. He inhabits the body of a Jack the Ripper-type killer, hangs out while the killer commits murders and whines about psychological torment, then eventually jumps into the professor’s mind. It’s all very boring and discombobulated, though the climax does feature Karloff exclaiming, “Did you really think I’d sit quietly in a corner of my brain while you did exactly what you like?” Karloff looks and sounds weak, sitting during many scenes and breathing with considerable difficulty between lines. Compounding the indignity is the way some of his dialogue, again delivered by a double wearing a mask, is dubbed in a voice that sounds nothing like Karloff’s.

          Rounding out this ignominious trio is Blind Man’s Bluff, also known as Cauldron of Blood (and The Corpse Collectors and Death Comes from the Dark and The Shrinking Corpse). Featuring a recognizable leading man (Gallic heartthrob Jean-Pierre Aumont) and a relatively coherent story, Blind Man’s Bluff also benefits from a bit of kinkiness. It’s a bad movie, but it’s less insultingly terrible than its predecessors. Set in Spain, the flick follows reporter Claude Marchant (Aumont) as he pursues an audience with elusive sculptor Franz Badulescu (Karloff). The artist lives in a remote villa with his decades-younger wife, Tania (Viveca Lindfors), who controls his world because Franz is blind and confined to a wheelchair. Karloff gets some colorful dialogue (he describes an art installation by saying “the work consisted of a group of small goats in repose”), and there’s a tragic quality to his characterization. Alas, he’s not onscreen that often, so the filmmakers compensate with boring subplots. Episodes of pretty girls modeling and moping are pointless, the recurring trope of a sex maniac killing women is handled clumsily, and the thread concerning Claude’s scheme to develop a tourist attraction is befuddling. Better are the campy scenes with Lindfors as a whip-cracking fetishist. All of this leads down the usual Mystery at the Wax Museum route of a crazed artist using human remains in his creations. Karloff deserved better.

Isle of the Snake People: LAME

Alien Terror: SQUARE

Blind Man's Bluff: LAME

The Tenth Level (1976)

          Based on controversial experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale in the early ‘60s, The Tenth Level explores the troubling question of why otherwise good and rational people follow orders they know to be morally wrong, simply because the inclination to comply with directions from authority figures is so ingrained into human behavior. Specifically, Milgram created an elaborate scenario involving three participants. Two volunteers flipped coins, with one becoming the teacher and the other becoming the learner. The learner sat in a separate room, out of sight, with electrodes wired to his or her body. The teacher communicated by microphone, reciting a series of phrases and quizzing the learner about the phrases. Each time the learner got an answer wrong, the teacher hit a switch on a control board. The first switch triggered a tiny electric shock. Progressing through 25 levels, each switch zapped the learner with more electricity than the last. All the while, a scientist functioned as the experimenter, sternly urging the teacher to follow the experiment to its conclusion even as the teacher inevitably balked at inflicting pain on the learner.

          The ethics of Milgram’s work were widely debated, even though his findings, which suggested that blind obedience is a common trait, sparked disturbed reactions from a populace still trying to understand, like Milgram, why so many Germans during World War II participated in genocide.

          Shot on video and broadcast on Playhouse 90, The Tenth Level stars William Shatner as Stephen Turner, a stand-in for Milgram. In addition to navigating trite melodramas during scenes outside the laboratory, he struggles to keep his work secret from college officials, lest they shut down him down. Later, he defends himself once a school committee responds to accusations that Turner manipulated test subjects. Predictably, the best scenes involve re-creations and/or re-imaginings of experiment sessions. (The real Milgram consulted on the project.) Fine actors including Mike Kellin and Viveca Lindfors imbue their runs through Turner’s moral obstacle course with palpable anguish. Somewhat less effective is the picture’s second lead, Stephen Macht, who plays an important test subject. (Explaining his relevance would reveal too much of the plot.) Handsome and sincere, Macht gives the sort of one-dimensional performance one might encounter in a soap opera, an effect that’s exaggerated by the movie’s clunky video imagery. Unfortunately, Macht shoulders most of the film’s emotional weight, with Shatner largely relegated to speechifying until the final scene. Also working against the film’s efficacy is the way excellent supporting players including Roscoe Lee Browne and Lindsay Crouse are underused. In sum, The Tenth Level is intense and thought-provoking, but it’s also preachy and wooden.

          FYI, the real-life science explored in this movie has appeared elsewhere in popular culture. Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So features a song called “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” and the 2015 film Experimenter stars Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram.

The Tenth Level: FUNKY

Natural Enemies (1979)

          Natural Enemies is a character study of a man contemplating the annihilation of his own family, and writer-director Jeff Kanew never allows the tiniest sliver of hope to brighten the screen. Working from a novel by Julius Horwitz, Kanew takes viewers deep into the turbulent mind of magazine editor Paul Steward (Hal Holbrook), a man so bludgeoned by the disappointments of everyday life that he views oblivion as the only gift he can bestow upon his loved ones. Had Kanew surmounted this material’s inherent narrative problems, and had he adopted a more kinetic storytelling style, Natural Enemies could have become one of the great cinematic provocations of its day, especially because leading man Holbrook commits so fully to his nihilistic characterization. Alas, those narrative problems create speed bumps at regular intervals, and Kanew’s style is far too minimalistic and static. Some scenes are so flat as to narcotize the viewer. That said, Natural Enemies is a fascinating misfire.

          The picture begins on a fateful morning in suburban Connecticut, where Paul lives with his wife, Miriam (Louise Fletcher), and their three children. Thanks to several minutes of wall-to-wall voiceover, we learn that Paul is contemplating using a gun to kill his family and them himself upon returning home from work that evening. Traveling into New York, where he runs a small magazine catering to intellectuals, Paul speaks with two cerebral friends—a diplomat (José Ferrer) and a therapist (Viveca Lindfors)—and he tells both of them what he’s planning. Each expresses concern, but neither contacts authorities. Additionally, Paul realizes his final sexual fantasy by hiring five prostitutes for group sex, which leads to perhaps the strangest scene in the movie. As the prostitutes recline nude, Paul gives a monologue about the history of his marriage, up to and including descriptions of Miriam’s hospitalization for mental illness, before again revealing—this time, to five strangers—that the death of his family is imminent. The prostitutes engage in talking-and-listening therapy, offering Paul marital and sexual advice, but they, too, avoid notifying authorities. And then, once Paul gets home, Miriam says she knows what he’s going to do, which occasions a numbingly long dialogue scene that Kanew films in the least dynamic fashion possible.

          By the end of Natural Enemies, some viewers might share Paul’s homicidal impulses simply because Kanew has made Paul’s life seem so dreary that escape sounds appealing. Cheap digs about Kanew’s directorial limitations aside, Natural Enemies represents a sincere attempt at digging beneath the surface of an existential malaise that afflicted millions of people during the ’70s. Furthermore, the picture makes the troubling—if not altogether persuasive—argument that a killer lurks inside each of us. Yet dismissing Natural Enemies because Kanew didn’t argue his case well is too easy. Somewhat like Peter Bogdonavich’s Targets (1968), Natural Enemies asks why America is such fertile ground for growing monsters. Incidentally, Kanew’s career took some peculiar turns after this picture. His next project was helming the low-rent actioner Eddie Macon’s Run (1983), and then he scored big with Revenge of the Nerds (1984).

Natural Enemies: FUNKY

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970)

          Based on its pedigree alone, the obscure drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child merits investigation by any fan of serious-minded ’70s cinema. The picture stars Faye Dunaway, it was directed by photographer-turned-filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg (whose other films include 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park and 1973’s Scarecrow), and Schatzberg co-wrote the script with Carole Eastman, whose other release in 1970 was the iconic Jack Nicholson drama Five Easy Pieces. (Eastman wrote Puzzle under the pseudonym “Adrien Joyce.”) Beyond the big names involved in the project, Puzzle of a Downfall Child is noteworthy because of its heavy themes—abusive relationships, fame, drug addiction, mental illness. For those who like their ’70s movies anguished and artistic, this is quintessential stuff on many levels.

          Unfortunately, the storytelling of Puzzle of a Downfall Child is pretentious and vague. The narrative is presented in dreamlike fragments, often with psychobabble voiceover played over dissociated imagery, and the heart of the picture—as the overly precious title suggests—is a slow revelation of one disturbed woman’s psyche. Only the most masterful actors and filmmakers can make this sort of thing work, and neither Dunaway nor Schatzberg demonstrates that level of supreme artistic control. So, while Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a noble effort, it fails to generate much in the way of real emotion. Plus, quite frankly, at times it barely sustains interest.

          The film begins at an isolated beach house, where Lou (Dunaway) is sequestered while recovering from some mysterious personal crisis. Her only companion is a longtime friend, fashion photographer Aaron (Barry Primus), who interviews her because he’s planning to make a movie about Lou’s life. In flashbacks, we see Lou’s ascendance from the lowest ranks of modeling to the upper echelon; along the way, she gets involved with a series of inappropriate men, including the abusive Mark (Roy Scheider). Dunaway is in nearly every frame of this film, so there was an opportunity for her to give a tour-de-force performance. Alas, she plays the exterior of her role well, but that’s about it. In her defense, she’s burdened with an insufferably narcissistic characterization—Lou is one of those navel-gazing ’70s-cinema egotists whose every utterance explains why she’s dissatisfied with this or unhappy about that. Yet it’s clear why many people suffer her whining, because she’s an exquisite beauty who photographs extraordinarily well.

          In fact, one can’t help but get the impression Schatzberg fell under Dunaway’s spell the same way the film’s characters are bewitched by Lou. Schatzberg photographs Dunaway with delicate artistry, which hurts her performance by making the actress seem like she’s preening even when she’s supposed to be unglamorous. (Dunaway and Schatzberg were engaged around the time they made this picture, though they never married.)

          Puzzle of a Downfall Child also suffers for a lack of closure, since the “puzzle” of the title is never solved in a satisfactory way—viewers eventually learn that Lou fell into narcotics and suffered a nervous breakdown, but even after listening to the character prattle on about herself for 105 minutes, she remains an enigma. Nonetheless, Schatzberg’s pictorial style is elegant, and supporting actors lend varied colors. Viveca Lindfords flounces through the film as a grandiose photographer, while Primus channels the anguish of unrequited love and Scheider provides the movie’s irredeemable-asshole quotient.

Puzzle of a Downfall Child: FUNKY

Welcome to L.A. (1976)

          After making a pair of schlocky horror flicks, writer-director Alan Rudolph finally got to make a proper film with the help of A-list auteur Robert Altman, who served as Rudolph’s producer for Welcome to L.A. Given the “Robert Altman presents” imprimatur, however, it’s hard not to perceive Welcome to L.A. as Altman Lite, especially since Rudolph emulates his producer’s filmmaking style by presenting a loosely intertwined mosaic of cynical stories. Yet while Altman’s best ensemble movies sparkle with idiosyncratic humor, Welcome to L.A. is monotonous, a downbeat slog comprising vapid Los Angelenos doing rotten things for unknowable reasons.

          The character holding everything together is Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine), a self-absorbed rich kid who fancies himself a songwriter and who spends the movie accruing sexual conquests. Some of the uninteresting people orbiting Carroll are Ann (Sally Kellerman), a pathetic real-estate agent given to humiliating displays of unrequited affection; Karen (Geraldine Chaplin), a spacey housewife who spends her days riding around the city in taxis; Linda (Sissy Spacek), a ditzy housekeeper who works topless; Nona (Lauren Hutton), a kept woman who takes arty photographs; and Susan (Viveca Lindfors), an insufferably pretentious talent representative in love with a much-younger man. Harvey Keitel and Denver Pyle appear as well, though Rudolph is clearly much more interested in the feminine mystique than the inner lives of men.

          Rudolph structures the film like a concept album, using music to bridge vignettes, and this arty contrivance doesn’t work. Part of the problem is that singer-songwriter Richard Baskin, who provides the song score and also performs several numbers onscreen, prefers the song form of the shapeless dirge. Which, come to think of it, is not a bad way to describe Welcome to L.A. While Rudolph obviously envisioned some sort of Grand Statement about the ennui of modern city dwellers, he instead crafted an interminable recitation of trite themes. Worse, Rudolph employs juvenile flourishes such as having characters stare at the camera, as if viewers will somehow see into the characters’ souls. Sorry, but isn’t providing insight the filmmaker’s job? (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Welcome to L.A.: LAME

Voices (1979)

          Had it received the benefits of a careful script rewrite and a more germane selection of musical elements, Voices might have worked, because its simple premise could have been the seed for a sweet romance. Instead, Voices is a well-intentioned but forgettable misfire that, in its worst moments, becomes nearly laughable. Michael Ontkean stars as Drew Rothman, a struggling singer who makes ends meet running deliveries for his grandfather’s dry-cleaning business. While out and about one day, he spots a pretty girl, Rosemarie (Amy Irving), then longs for the day he’ll run into her again. Meanwhile, he wrestles with family dramas—Drew’s dad, Frank (Alex Rocco), is a compulsive gambler, and Drew’s little brother, Raymond (Barry Miller), is getting hassled by school bullies. Then, when Drew finally finds Rosemarie again, he discovers that the dreamgirl he’s been admiring from afar is actually deaf. To the picture’s credit, writer John Herzfeld and director Robert Markowitz aren’t out to make the cheap tearjerker implied by the set-up of a musician falling for a woman who can’t hear. Instead, they’re more interested in the heartening love-conquers-all story of Drew leaving the safety of the hearing world in order to understand Rosemarie’s challenges.

          In the picture’s best scenes, the filmmakers address those challenges through sharp exchanges between Rosemarie and her concerned mother (Viveca Lindfors), who advises Rosemarie to embrace a marginalized lifestyle rather than risk emotional pain in the big, bad outside world. Unfortunately, this sort of interesting material is smothered by promising subplots that aren’t resolved in a satisfying manner; it’s as if the filmmakers can’t decide which path to follow. Furthermore, the arc involving Rosemarie’s dream of becoming a dancer pirouettes too far into the realm of contrived irony. And, much as it pains me to say this since I’m a fan of both men, the music composed by Jimmy Webb (the songwriter of “MacArthur Park”) and sung by Burton Cummings (of the Guess Who) doesn’t work. These two collectively give Ontkean’s character his voice, and their colorations are far too precious to spring forth from a Hoboken street kid trying to make it in grimy nightclubs. So while Voices isn’t a total wash by a long shot—it’s brisk and filled with sincere performances—the movie comes off like a sloppy rough draft. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Voices: FUNKY