The World's Greatest Sinner

Without a doubt, Timothy Agoglia Carey is one of the most eccentric character actors in American cinema. This is a man that was fired from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) for faking his own kidnapping. One only must see his scene-stealing performances in the likes of the aforementioned film where he breaks down and cries hysterically before a firing squad or in The Killing (1956) where he speaks most of his dialogue while flashing his clenched teeth to witness the wonderful off-kilter choices he made that enhanced the films he was in. Unfortunately, he rarely got to headline a film with The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), which he starred in, wrote, directed and produced, being one of the rare exceptions. Freed from the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, he created a crudely made, yet fascinating look at the cult of personality.
 
The film begins, appropriately, in bizarre fashion with the title song playing over a black screen and the sound of an explosion segues into the opening credits with classical music playing over the soundtrack inducing wicked tonal whiplash. In a gleefully audacious move, the story is narrated by none other than God (and then, bafflingly, abandons it for the rest of the movie) who introduces us to Clarence Hilliard (Carey) by describing him as “just like any other male the only difference is he wants to be God. And that’s coming right out of the horse’s mouth.”
 
He lives in domestic bliss with his wife Edna (Betty Rowland) and his two children, working as the head of the department of an insurance company. One day, he decides to give everyone the day off which doesn’t sit too well with his boss (Victor Floming). It doesn’t help that Clarence has also been telling potential clients not to get insurance, telling one person not get a funeral policy because, “When you die, your body starts to stink.” Not surprisingly, he gets fired from his job, comes home and tells his wife that he wants to write a book and get into politics (?!).

While he earnestly tells her about his aspirations she falls asleep so he tells his pet horse Rex about a dream he had: “I’m gonna make people live long. I wanna put something into life. I wanna make life be eternal.” These are the seeds for a cult that he plans to start but how will he get people to follow him? One night, he goes to a rock ‘n’ roll concert and observes teenage girls screaming in excitement at and worshipping the lead singer. The next day, Clarence hits the streets, literally, preaching eternal life to anyone who will listen. He wants to make people super human beings, promising, “age won’t exist anymore.”
 
Clarence transforms himself into a rock ‘n’ roll preacher in a show-stopping sequence that evokes Elvis Presley and James Brown in raw energy and showmanship as he sweats, yells and dances with wild abandon. It is a truly astonishing performance to behold. He eventually changes his name to God Hilliard and becomes drunk on power, alienating his earlier followers and even his family. He meets a shady, political fixer whose credentials are that he worked for one of the leading political parties but fell out of favor thanks to “a few jealous underlings” and “got into a few difficulties.” He dazzles Clarence with political doublespeak and tells him, “If you can stir the people’s emotions, you can win.” The first thing he does is get Clarence to drop the rock ‘n’ roll preacher shtick, which he agrees to do by dramatically smashing his guitar over a desk.
 
He is soon running for President of the United States on his eternal life platform. Eventually, his rhetoric changes to that of a fanatical dictator: “We must gird ourselves with an armor of inspiration. We’ll reach them in the big cities! In the small towns! And the crossroads! We’ll weed them out! Any place where there’s people, we’ll get our message to them!” Carey lays on the fascist imagery as Clarence’s followers wear armbands of their party and have their own book documenting Clarence’s manifesto. Soon, he is speaking at larger and larger rallies until he has a crisis of confidence and of faith at the film’s climax.

The making of The World’s Greatest Sinner was almost as wild and unpredictable as the film itself with the inspiration coming from Carey’s desire to shake things up in Hollywood: “I was tired of seeing movies that were supposedly controversial. So I wanted to do something that was really controversial.” He began filming in 1956 in El Monte, California, where he lived, at his home and on the city streets, using locals as extras. This continued sporadically until 1961 on a budget of $100,000 under its original title, Frenzy. While making The Second Time Around (1961), Carey was approached by a young musician by the name of Frank Zappa who complimented his acting. Carey told him, “We have no music for The World’s Greatest Sinner. If you can supply the orchestra and a place to tape it, you have the job.” The aspiring musician composed the score and then went on The Steve Allen Show and said it was “the world’s worst film and all the actors were from skid row.”
 
Filmmaker Dennis Ray Steckler (Incredibly Strange Creatures) also got his start on the film. After several cameramen had been fired during filming, Carey brought Steckler out to Long Beach to shoot scenes of extras watching Carey on stage and then rioting. Steckler later claimed that at while was in a closet loading film, Carey threw a boa constrictor in with him. To top it all off, at the film’s premiere, Carey fired a .38 pistol above the heads of the audience, causing a riot.
 
The World’s Greatest Sinner warns about the dangers of demagogues like Clarence by showing how he whips a large crowd into a blind frenzy showing how they are swept up by his fiery rhetoric. Carey shows how this can be dangerous as his followers riot, destroying property in his name with the camera lingering on a mob of people trashing and turning over a car. He has affairs with multiple women, including a 14-year-old girl. This kind of behavior and these kinds of tactics anticipate T.V. evangelists that became popular in the 1980s and in recent years people with little to no political experience or knowledge getting into office based mostly on their cult of personality and ability to appeal to people’s basest instincts.

What is so incredibly inspiring about The World’s Greatest Sinner is how Carey commits 100% to the wonderfully insane narrative. Imagine if Brad Garrett and Nicolas Cage had a baby and you get Carey. He has the former’s hulking frame with the latter’s bedroom eyes and fearlessness as an actor, not afraid to look ridiculous all in the name of art. The film is shot and edited roughly, almost haphazardly in a non-traditional way with awkward transitions and shifts in tone that is also part of its charm. Carey is not only flaunting Hollywood conventions he is throwing out the rule book as he makes all kinds of odd choices throughout the film, like when Clarence’s boss takes him to his office to reprimand him and it plays over a cacophony of noises so that we can’t hear the dialogue. The screenplay, at times, is truly inspired with such blatantly provocative lines, such as “The biggest liar of mankind is Christ!” This is truly an auteur film – Carey’s magnum opus, a weird and wild film he was somehow able to be unleashed on the world seemingly through sheer force of Carey’s will.
 
 
SOURCES
 
McAbee, Sam. “Carey: Saint of the Underground.” Cashiers du Cinemart. #12. 2001.
 
Murphy, Mike. “Timothy Carey.” Psychotronic. #6. 1990.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

“Ladies and Gentlemen – Welcome to violence,” are the words heard via voiceover narration as the narrator links the act of violence with sex. He then goes on to espouse the virtues of women before offering a warning:

“Handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, anytime, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist, or a dancer in a go-go club!”

Smash cut to the movie’s three protagonists strutting their stuff to a bunch of desperate-looking slobs urging them on while the catchy theme song by the Bostweeds plays over the soundtrack. Welcome to the wild world of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Welcome to the world of Russ Meyer.

Meyer was a filmmaker that made a name for himself in the 1960s by directing a series of modestly budgeted, financially successful sexploitation movies rife with campy humor, satire of traditional American values, and featuring his number one obsession: big-breasted women. The last motif was featured prominently in every movie with at least one if not several voluptuous women. His most well-known movie remains Faster, Pussycat!, a pulpy tale of three go-go dancers that partake in a deadly crime spree in the California desert. It was not a financial success at the time but went on to develop a sizable cult following and proved to be a significant influence on popular culture, from music (White Zombie) to comic books (Daniel Clowes) to cinema (Quentin Tarantino).

We’re only two minutes into the movie and already Meyer has given us a lot to think about with the voiceover narration that is sexist and yet intentionally melodramatic in tone as the filmmaker slyly pokes fun at the attitudes of the times where men were expected to work while their wives stayed at home and raised the children. Meyer skewers the notion of male panic where they might feel threatened if women actually had some power thereby setting up the battle of the sexes struggle that dominates the movie. The three go-go dancers are shot from a low angle so that they appear larger than life while the men that slobber over them are shot from a high angle so that we are looking down on them, which only reinforces how pathetic they are – pretty heady stuff for an exploitation movie.

Varla (Tura Satana), Rosie (Haji) and Billie (Lori Williams) are the aforementioned go-go dancers that head out on the open road in their speedy sports cars. Billie races off on her own much to Varla’s chagrin. It doesn’t take long to figure out that Varla is the leader, ordering Rosie to get Billie out of the lake she found and jumped in. This gives Meyer the opportunity to stage a fight between two soaking wet women, first in the water and then in the sand until Varla breaks it up. She settles the beef by playing a game of chicken with Rosie and Billie, which she, of course, wins. Varla has nerves of steel and the confidence to back it up.

The three women cross paths with a man named Tommy (Ray Barlow) and his girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard). He also has a sports car and enjoys racing it in time trials. Billie challenges Tommy to race her, Varla and Rosie. He manages to beat them all until Varla cheats and nearly causes him to crash. She then proceeds to bully Linda and challenges Tommy to a fight. It’s a drag down, nasty brawl with Varla killing him with her bare hands. Varla kidnaps Linda, who has passed out from shock, and they all hightail it out of there.

While getting gas for their cars, the women hear about a local wheelchair-bound recluse known as the Old Man (Stuart Lancaster) that’s sitting on a bunch of money. Varla decides to check it out and see if she can get her hands on the money but she’ll have to get past his two sons – a simple-minded muscle-bound hulk referred to as the Vegetable (Dennis Busch), whom Billie works her charms on, and Kirk (Paul Trinka), a much smarter, savvier person whom Varla targets, using her considerable assets to captivate. The rest of the movie plays out a battle of wills between Varla and the Old Man.

There is an interesting dynamic between the three women. They aren’t friends per se and whatever their relationship is becomes strained after Varla kills Tommy and only gets worse when they arrive at the ranch, their uneasy alliance put to the test with Varla’s latest criminal scheme.

Varla is a cocky bully as evident in the way she relentlessly taunts Tommy and Linda, provoking him into a fight, and, a little later, making fun of a not-too bright gas station attendant. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, especially men. In her all-black outfit and leather gloves, Varla is quite a sight to behold and Tura Satana goes for it, diving into the role with gusto.

Billie is the sex kitten always looking for a good time. She is the rebellious one that sometimes doesn’t do what she’s told. Rosie is Varla’s enforcer and lover. She doesn’t have much in the way of a personality, basically doing whatever she’s told to do while also worrying about Varla’s schemes.

The Old Man is an odd duck gone crazy with a skewed view of women; bringing them up to his remote ranch only for the Vegetable to get too rough with them. “What they know about hurtin’ and pain?” he says at one point. “We’re paying them back, boy. Each woman a payment.” He’s a sexist pig that hates Hippies and Democrats, clashing with the liberated Varla.

The movie is riddled with fantastic, memorable pulpy dialogue, like when Varla tells Tommy, “I never try anything. I just do it. Like I don’t beat clocks just people.” There are also some hilarious exchanges between characters, like when Linda offers Rosie a soft drink and the replies, “Honey, we don’t like nothing soft. Everything we touch is hard!”

For an exploitation movie, Faster, Pussycat! is beautifully shot by Walter Schenk in richly textured black and white. For example, there is a scene where Billie seduces the Vegetable and Meyer’s camera lingers over his naked, muscular upper torso, objectifying him in a way that is normally done to women. The movie also features crackerjack editing by Meyer himself, especially during the action sequences. The editing adds to the kinetic nature of the chase sequences and fight scenes, each with their own specific rhythm.

The impetus for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was pretty simple for Russ Meyer: “I had men kicking the shit out of the women, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we do one where the women kick the shit out of the men?’” To bring this vision to life, he enlisted ex-child actor John E. “Jack” Moran, who had appeared in Gone With the Wind (1939) and others but had wasted away his money on alcohol. The two men met through a mutual army buddy and Moran told Meyer that in return for the screenplay he wanted Writers Guild minimum pay (paid in cash), a cheap motel room, and a bottle of booze. Four days later, he had completed a script entitled, The Leather Girls, but it wasn’t easy because of Moran’s alcoholism. Meyer would lock him in the room and not let him out until the end of the day where he’d be rewarded with a jug of alcohol.

When it came to casting, Meyer picked Lori Williams to play Billie, the sexpot go-go dancer. She was from Pittsburgh and at 18 had already been in beach-party and Elvis movies. Meyer initially didn’t want to hire her as he didn’t think her breasts were big enough, but told her, “we’ll pad you up and that’s how I got it.” She was also responsible for her character’s outfit. Haji was cast as Rosie, Varla’s lover, but Meyer didn’t tell her or Tura Satana that their characters were lesbians until deep into filming as it was a taboo topic back then.

Satana had already been in Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963) and wasn’t crazy about auditioning for Meyer as she knew his reputation. She also didn’t want to do any nudity. Satana read the script and told Meyer that Varla needed to “have a little more balls,” and it was then he knew he had found his Varla. The two clashed during filming, most notably when he told her about his no sex rule for cast and crew during filming. She balked at this, telling him, “I need it every day, and if I don’t get it I get very cranky. If you want me to give you a good performance, I need to be relaxed. And that relaxes me.” The director relented but demanded that the actress not tell anyone else. She picked the assistant cameraman to hook up with during the shoot.

The bulk of Faster, Pussycat! was shot around Lake Isabella, Randsburg, and Johannesburg with the latter two being mining ghost towns near the Mojave Desert. The Old Man’s ranch was located just out of the town of Mojave. Filming out in the desert wasn’t easy as Satana recalled that on the first day it was 110 degrees in the shade. After three hours of filming she had a sunburn. This didn’t stop her from being involved in various aspects of the production. She helped choreograph Varla’s fight scene with Tommy and was less than thrilled with Ray Barlow, the actor that played him: “Oh God, was he a chickenshit. I had to literally carry him through all those fight scenes.”

Susan Bernard’s overprotective stage mother got on the cast and crew’s nerves, demanding that her daughter get more dialogue and screen-time. Satana finally lost it when the mother referred to the Pussycats as a “bunch of whores,” and demanded she leave the location or she’d quit. Meyer wasn’t impressed with Bernard’s acting skills and enlisted Satana to provoke a reaction out of her for a given scene, which she was only willing to oblige.

After these initial speed bumps, the rest of the shoot went fairly smoothly except for the scene where Varla tries to crush the Vegetable with her car, which Satana felt should have a close-up of the tires spinning. Meyer disagreed and Satana punched a wall in frustration, breaking her hand. She went to the hospital, got it looked at, and returned to filming without telling anyone. Meyer wasn’t happy with the shot he got and tried Satana’s suggestion, grudgingly agreeing that she was right.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a fascinating B-movie where its villain is also its protagonist, played charismatically by Satana who clearly relishes her role as a larger than life character. No one or nothing seems to satisfy Varla. She wants more, leaving a destructive wake in her path. She and the Old Man are monsters that can’t be allowed to roam the countryside as they are too twisted to exist in our world and must be destroyed. It is not surprising, then, that the two most “normal” and moral characters survive. Ultimately, Faster, Pussycat! is a morality tale featuring a battle of good vs. evil told in an entertaining way by skilled showman Meyer.

SOURCES

McDonough, Jimmy. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. Crown Publishers. 2005.

The Astro-Zombies

With the recent passing of Ted V. Mikels and Herschell Gordon Lewis a few days within each other, the last of a generation of exploitation filmmakers that thrived in the 1960s are finally gone. Along with Russ Meyer, Mikels and Lewis made low-budget genre movies that were done outside of the Hollywood system and were usually shown at drive-in movie theaters. Their influence would later be apparent with filmmakers like John Waters and Quentin Tarantino, but for the most part they each had their own dedicated cult following.

I read about Mikels’ movies before I ever saw them thanks to Re/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films book, which was one of my most treasured cinematic tomes as a teenager. I would look at the stills from his movies and try imagine what they were like. Flash-forward many years later and for Halloween one year my wife got me a copy of The Astro-Zombies (1968) – my favorite Mikels movie – from his website. In addition to the DVD, which he signed, he also included an Astro-Zombies bobblehead, promotional postcards and a copy of the press book from his own collection, all for free and unsolicited. That was the kind of guy he was.

The Astro-Zombies begins with a woman arriving home only to be brutally murdered in her garage after getting out of her car by a superhuman monster, her blood splattering dramatically on the door. Cut to the opening credits playing over a cheeky montage of toy robots fighting toy tanks.

After being dismissed from a government space agency for experimenting on cadavers, scientist Dr. DeMarco (John Carradine) has gone rogue. He had been working on a system that transferred information from a computer to a human brain via a thought wave transmission system. He has created a zombie that runs on batteries from the organs of victims that have been murdered. It ends up going on a killing spree, which gets the attention of a couple of police detectives and a spy gang led by Satana (Tura Satana) who want to use DeMarco’s innovations to create their own astro-zombies and take over the world.

Early on, the movie is heavy on exposition dialogue as we not only learn about what DeMarco is up to but also see him in action as he works on another astro-zombie. These scenes feel like something out of a 1950s mad scientist science fiction movie. John Carradine is certainly committed to his role and makes for a believable scientist (at least within the context of this movie) but he is upstaged somewhat by William Bagdad playing his leering, hunchbacked assistant Franchot (love that name) who doesn’t appear to have any dialogue but makes the most of his expressive body language.

The legendary Tura Satana looks fabulous as always and gets to play another ruthless ballbuster. At one point, after torturing a cop by burning his face with a lit cigarette, she orders an underling to kill him and when he fails to comply does the job herself! In another scene, she even continues shooting a cop ever after he’s been killed. You have to admire that kind of commitment to a role.

Mikels certainly knows how to create a show-stopping set piece, like one where the police detectives go see a nude dance routine in a nightclub by a woman covered entirely in psychedelic paint – far out, man! I don’t know what that has to do with the story but it does get your attention. Seemingly unconcerned with the urgency of their investigation (people are dying, remember?), one of the cops even entertains his cohorts with a party trick, which has a nice touch of the absurd.

Ted V. Mikels came up with idea of heart transplants years before they were actually performed and decided to incorporate it into a horror movie: “I’m usually accused of being a few years ahead of whatever’s going on,” he said in an interview, “but many times I don’t find the money until it’s too late.”

Mikels co-wrote the movie with Wayne Rogers, who would go on to play Trapper John on the popular television sitcom M*A*S*H. It was the third movie they collaborated on. He had seen and liked Mikels’ first movie, Strike Me Deadly (1963) and wanted to put the filmmaker under contract. Mikels refused and they ended up working together anyway.

He was about to make The Astro-Zombies when an agent mentioned casting Tura Satana. He had seen her performing as an exotic dancer in Las Vegas in 1959 and never forgot her. She came in to read for him and Mikels ended up rewriting her character especially for Satana, “to make her a ‘Dragon Lady.’” They became good friends and he cast her in future movies.

Mikels made the movie for very little money – only $37,000: “When you realize we had people like Wendell Corey and John Carradine in the studio, I’m almost aghast when I think what tiny, tiny pennies we made the picture for.” It was very profitable, making $3 million.

The Astro-Zombies is vintage exploitation fare, complete with beautiful, scantily-clad women in peril, bloody violence, ruthless baddies, and a mad scientist run amok. For a movie shot on a very small budget, it looks pretty good and is ably directed by Mikels whose passion for filmmaking is evident in every frame. It shouldn’t be taken too seriously and appreciated for what it is – a fun romp that revolves around a ridiculous premise and goes for it unabashedly.

Mikels’ passing sadly marks the end of an era and a particular kind of exploitation filmmaking that is no more. There was something pure and unfiltered about his movies and that of his contemporaries for they were not bound by the constraints of classic Hollywood filmmaking because they existed outside of that system. This allowed them to pursue their passions no matter how strange or unusual and that is something sadly lacking these days.

SOURCES

Grimes, William. “Ted V. Mikels, Master of Low-Budget Cult Favorites, Dies at 87.” The New York Times. October 18, 2016.

Rice, Boyd. “Ted V. Mikels.” RE/Search #10: Incredibly Strange Films. Edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. Re/Search Publications. 1986.

Tucker, Ed. “Velveeta Las Vegas! Ed Tucker Interviews Cult-movie Legend Ted Mikels.” Crazed Fanboy.

Bad Taste

Watching Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987) again was a potent reminder of how much fun his early films were before he made the transition to respectable Hollywood filmmaker after the critically-acclaimed art house hit Heavenly Creatures (1994). His early efforts playfully give the finger to respectable cinema as they revel in cheesy gore and silly humor. Bad Taste is a 90-minute "splatstick" spoof of alien invasion movies as Jackson became New Zealand's answer to Sam Raimi. Shot on weekends over three years for only $11,000, Jackson's film utilized a small, but dedicated cast and crew with all the rough-around-the-edges charm of a low budget horror movie.

Jackson’s tongue is firmly embedded in cheek right from the get-go as the opening scene, with its shadowy government operative, takes the piss out of the James Bond movies. A small-town has been overrun by a nasty bunch of "astro bastards," alien beings bent on harvesting the Earth's population for their own greedy consumption. Fearing that they're being visited by, as Derek (Peter Jackson) puts it, "a planet full of Charlie Mansons," it's up to the brave men of the Astro Investigation and Defense Service (or AIDS for short - as one character says, "I wish we'd change that name.") to stop these "intergalactic wankers" from taking over the world.

We meet Barry (Pete O’Herne) as he encounters a shambling man with an ax. He says to Derek over the radio, “Geez, he could be Ministry of Works or something,” to which his buddy replies, “Nah, he’s moving too fast.” Barry pulls out a gun and blasts away, blowing the top of the man’s head off. Jackson makes sure to show a close-up of the brain matter complete with squishy sounds. The ongoing exchange between Barry and Derek is quite funny as the former laments, “Why can’t aliens be friendly?” while the latter replies, “There’s no glowing fingers on these bastards.” Barry and Derek are hilariously inept in dispatching the aliens while their cohorts, Frank (Mike Minett) and Ozzy (Terry Potter) drive in a muscle car and are rather adept at killing these otherworldly invaders.

Derek is the most hapless of the bunch, surviving on a seemingly endless supply of dumb luck as he spills all kinds of alien blood that splashes all over him before suffering a nasty injury of his own. Jackson gets a lot of mileage out of his very expressive face whether it is the goofy looks he gives as Derek of the even goofier ones as Robert (an alien also played by Jackson) and yet still finds amusing variations on each character.

Bad Taste is one of those movies that has a ridiculous, irrepressible charm all its own. The amateurish acting, the non-existent production values, and crude, yet effective special effects actually work in favor of the film much in the same way as Raimi's first two Evil Dead movies. There is some pretty inventive gore, like one alien getting a hammer in his head when another alien is shot by Derek who then proceeds to shoot its arm off. We then get an image of an alien with a hammer in his head and the arm still attached to it! What Jackson and company lack in budget and flashy special effects they more than make up for with hilariously memorable dialogue ("I’m a Derek and Dereks don’t run!") and plenty of local humor, complete with regional slang and references to Kiwi culture.

For such a low budget feature it is impressive just how stylish it is with Jackson’s creative camerawork that swoops by aliens and tracks along with our heroes. At one point, he pays homage to and manages to surpass the lunacy of Bruce Campbell fighting himself in Evil Dead 2 (1987) by playing two different roles, Derek and an alien named Robert, with the former torturing the latter. Through some clever editing, Jackson ends up fighting himself in an exciting battle atop a cliff.

In 1983, Peter Jackson planned to shoot a 10-15 minute film for the Wellington Film Festival. Originally entitled, Roast of the Day, it would eventually evolve into Bad Taste. Childhood friend Ken Hammon was enlisted to co-write the screenplay with Jackson and said, “The original idea was a guy who was collecting for a charity to fight starvation. He goes to a small town where these strange hillbilly people eat him.” At some point, they decided that the hillbillies were aliens in disguise. Jackson funded the entire production with $17,000 from working as a photo engraver at The Evening Post, Wellington’s largest newspaper. His parents loaned him $2,500 to buy a 16mm bolex camera with a sync speed motor and built all the other equipment himself, including dolly tracks, a crane and a steadicam. His crew consisted of himself and Hammon who spent hours shooting and carrying Jackson’s equipment over several locations on cold, sometimes wet Sundays for months. For the cast, he enlisted work colleagues who ended up spending years shooting the film on that particular day because everyone worked six-day weeks.

After a year, Jackson took a week off to edit the footage he had shot and assembled a 60-minute rough cut but realized that he didn’t have an ending.  He wrote one and started shooting again, deciding to make it gorier when he felt that the rough cut was boring: “The film was vastly improved at this point, and much more entertaining.” Eventually, Jackson ran out of money and screened the footage for the New Zealand Film Commission’s executive director Jim Booth who liked it and had the ability to approve small amounts of money for script development. Booth gave him $30,000 in $5,000 checks over time, which allowed Jackson to quit his day job and buy costumes and sets. The Commission gave him $200,000 to finish post-production, which included blowing it up to 35mm, hiring a composer, doing a sound mix, and color timing among other things. Bad Taste had its world premiere at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival where Jackson sold it for a tidy sum of money and the film went onto have its New Zealand debut at the Wellington Film Festival.

Bad Taste not only skewers staples of the science fiction and horror genre, like E.T. (1982) and The Shining (1980), but isn't afraid to poke fun at itself with numerous in-jokes about New Zealand. This is a wonderful introduction into Peter Jackson's low budget roots, especially for people who only know him as the director of The Lord of the Rings films. This cult film gleefully trashes many of the sacred cows of the horror and science fiction genre while celebrating the low budget, no-holds-barred aesthetic of classics like Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

SOURCES

Botes, Costa. “Peter Jackson: Made in New Zealand.” NZEDGE.com. May 30, 2002.

De Semlyen, Nick. “The Making of Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste.” Empire. January 2015.

Ihaka, James. “From Splatterfest to Epic Tale: The Price of Building an Empire.” The New Zealand Herald. November 26, 2012.

“Lord of the Cinema: Sir Peter Jackson Interview.” Academy of Achievement. June 3, 2006.

Williams, David E. “Braindead: An Interview with Peter Jackson.” Film Threat. February 17, 1992.

The Street Fighter

Like many people of my generation in North America, the first exposure to The Street Fighter (1974), starring Sonny Chiba, was probably the brief clip shown in Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993), which was written by Quentin Tarantino, a big fan of Chiba, an actor who got his start appearing in science fiction and crime thrillers but is best known for his martial arts movies, chief among them The Street Fighter series. True Romance’s main character celebrates his birthday by going to see a Sonny Chiba triple feature at a local theater and there he meets the girl of his dreams. In explaining the allure of Terry Tsurgui – Chiba’s character in the film – he sums it up best by telling her, “Well, he ain’t so much a good guy as he is just one bad motherfucker. I mean, he gets paid by people to fuck guys up.” Based on the worldwide success of Enter the Dragon (1973), the Toei Company decided to release its own martial arts action films and the result was The Street Fighter. It would be this film that would make Chiba an international movie star. The film went on to garner a notorious reputation for its bone-crunching violence, which earned it an unprecedented X rating in North America – the first film to do so based solely on violence.

Terry Tsurgui (Chiba) is a mercenary hired by the Yakuza to free a convicted killer named Junjo (Masashi Ishibashi) from prison who is about to be executed. The man killed seven people with his fighting skills, which one prison guard says sarcastically, “He must think he’s Bruce Lee.” Terry enters the prison under the guise of a Buddhist priest (?!) and engineers quite a clever breakout by zapping Junjo with a move that induces paralysis thereby making him unfit for execution. It takes less than four minutes into the film and we get a pretty cool fight sequence in slow motion complete with funky sound effects that were the hallmark of 1970s era martial arts films. If that weren’t enough, a fantastic spaghetti western-esque theme song by way of Shaft-era Isaac Hayes plays over the opening credits sequence and off we go.

With his sidekick and comic relief Ratnose (Goichi Yamada), Terry hijacks the ambulance carrying Junjo en route to the hospital. When the man’s brother and sister are unable to pay up, Terry proceeds to mess them up, including sending the brother out a window to his death and selling the sister into prostitution. When Terry dares to ask for more money to kidnap a rich Japanese heiress in order to control her fortune, his employers decide to kill him because Terry knows too much. As we all know from these kinds of films that that is a fatal mistake and boy, does he make them pay.

Terry only really cares about money and asks a lot for his services. He is a gruff, no-nonsense kind of guy. The film wastes no time in establishing Terry’s badass credentials as he takes on more than six guys that stupidly try to ambush him in his apartment. There’s a wild-eyed intensity that is quite unnerving to his opponents. What Terry lacks in finesse, he more than makes up for in ferocity. Subtlety is certainly not his forte. For example, he attempts to tail his target in a car without caring about or knowing to follow from a discreet distance. For his troubles, the car he and Ratnose are in is grabbed by a construction vehicle and dropped off a bridge! However, Terry’s not invincible and gets his ass handed to him when he takes on the head of a karate school who knew his father. There’s no denying that Sonny Chiba has a unique screen presence and an intense stare that puts guys like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal to shame.

Goichi Yamada’s Ratnose is a character whose only purpose appears to be as comic relief (“Who do you think you’re talking to, Madame Butterfly?” he says to Terry at one point in reference to his lousy cooking skills), groveling and being endlessly insulted by Terry. However, he does get his self-sacrificing heroic moment in the sun and this selfless act draws a rare tear of emotion from Terry, which in a weird sort of way humanizes the film’s brutal protagonist.

The Street Fighter is chock full of great, cheesy B-movie dialogue intoned by a guy dubbing Terry’s voice trying to affect a gravely Clint Eastwood-esque vibe. One choice gem has Terry tell some assailants, “So I’m to die because I know who it is that controls the Yakuza here? Isn’t that mean and nasty?” Another gem comes when Junjo goes into an oxygen coma, collapses right before being executed and a prison official asks someone nearby, “You’re a lawyer – what must I do?” It is how this line is said – in stilted, badly done dubbing – that makes it funny. However, there are also some pretty cool lines, too, like when Junjo confronts Terry and tells him, “I’ve waited a long time to settle the score.” Terry replies dismissively, “Sorry, I’ve more urgent things right now.” How cool is that? Yeah, I’m not too busy completing a job to kick your ass right now… maybe later.

In The Street Fighter, Terry punches, kicks and viciously gouges his way through a series of brutal encounters. Among the scenes that earned the film an X rating are one in which Terry castrates a would-be rapist with his bare hands, which still manages to shock with its intensity and graphic nature even by today’s standards. Guys are punched so hard they spit out mouthful of teeth and spew judicious amounts of blood. But the film saves the best (and nastiest) move for the final showdown, an impressive battle as Terry proceeds to single-handedly decimate a tanker boat full of henchmen with a climactic fight on deck in the pouring rain.

Shigehiro Ozawa’s direction is appropriately dynamic with plenty of skewed camera angles, slow motion, black and white flashbacks and even an X-ray shot of Terry crushing a guy’s skull with his fist. How badass is that? He makes excellent use of the widescreen frame, especially during the fight scenes, letting them play out along the entire length of the frame. When New Line Cinema picked up the film in North America, it was renamed The Street Fighter from its original title, which translated into the infinitely cooler sounding, Clash, Killer Fist! It earned an X rating for the gory violence and the studio re-edited the film significantly, cutting out 16 minutes in order to get an R rating. The Street Fighter was an international hit spawning two sequels, Return of The Street Fighter (1974) and The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge (1974) as well as a spin-off film, Sister Street Fighter (1974). None of them hold a candle to the one that started it all – a cult film that dispenses with niceties like political correctness and restraint for an unbridled romp through the criminal underworld led by Chiba’s unrepentant mercenary. For fans of down ‘n’ dirty martial arts movies, this one is pure catnip and a potent reminder of how good a decade the ‘70s was for the genre where you could have a mainstream masterpiece like Enter the Dragon along with no-holds barred carnage on display in The Street Fighter.

The Warriors

When The Warriors came out in 1979 it was a modestly budgeted film made by an up-and-coming director named Walter Hill and featured a then-unknown cast. With its nightmarish vision of New York City, the film certainly wasn’t going to be used in any of the city’s tourism ads extolling the virtues of the metropolis. Like many films from the 1970s, New York is presented as a dirty, dangerous place filled with jaded, cynical people (see Taxi Driver and The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three). The Warriors performed decently at the box office but reports of gang-related violence at a few screenings caused the studio to panic and downplay promotional advertisements. But the film had left its mark and over the years it has quietly cultivated a loyal following thanks mainly to regular screenings on television and the occasional midnight showing at repertory theaters.

The film’s premise is pure B-movie hokum. New York City is dominated by gangs that hail from the various boroughs. One man named Cyrus (Roger Hill) dreams of uniting all of these different groups into a 60,000-strong army that will run the city and answer to no one, not the police and not organized crime. To this end, he convinces representatives from 100 gangs to gather in Van Cortlandt Park. However, much like Malcolm X before him, Cyrus’ call for revolution is shattered when he is killed by an assassin, a grinning maniac named Luther (David Patrick Kelly) from the Rogues. With their leader missing in action thanks to the ensuing chaos, Swan (Michael Beck) takes over a gang known as the Warriors. They find themselves trapped in Manhattan, framed for Cyrus’ death. They must fight their way back to their turf on Coney Island and go through several territories of other gangs out for their blood. It’s a chase movie broken up by several exciting fight scenes and commented on by a late night disc jockey (Lynne Thigpen) like a Greek chorus as she spins tunes that offer clues for what awaits the Warriors next. It is this simple yet effective set-up that makes the film work so well.

The tension between the Warriors’ stoic war chief Swan and cocky gang member Ajax (James Remar) is nicely done and gives an edgy quality to their group dynamic. Swan is the archetypal Hill protagonist: a laconic man of action and of few words, much like Ryan O’Neal’s no-nonsense wheelman in The Driver (1978) and Michael Pare’s soldier of fortune in Streets of Fire (1984). With a few notable exceptions, the Warriors are a pretty indistinguishable lot. You’ve got the inexperienced guy, the not-so smart guy, the tough guy, etc. Only Michael Beck and James Remar really stand out and it’s no surprise that they were the two actors that went on to illustrious careers, especially Remar who has had a diverse career that includes Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and Sex and the City. That being said, the actors playing the rest of the Warriors do just enough to invest you in their plight so that you care about what happens to them.

Deborah Van Valkenburgh plays Mercy, a woman the Warriors cross paths with during their run-in with the Orphans. She is tough and oozes attitude and sexual appeal. She’s one of Hill’s quintessential smart, tough-talking women, like Amy Madigan’s soldier in Streets of Fire and Annette O’Toole’s long-suffering girlfriend to Nick Nolte’s cop in 48 Hrs (1982). There’s a telling scene near the end of the film where two couples get on the subway and sit across from a tired, disheveled and bruised Swan and Mercy. They are all roughly the same age but they couldn’t be more different. The two couples have just come from a prom and are a laughing and smiling while our badass heroes look exhausted but defiant having survived a tumultuous night.

The push and pull dynamic between Swan and Ajax enhances the relentless urgency that kicks in once the Warriors are on the run, fighting their way back home. Hill is only interested in constantly propelling the narrative forward as our heroes run the gauntlet of gangs. The closer they get, the tougher the gangs are that they have to face. And they are a colorful assortment, some are rather lame, like the Orphans whose uniform consists of nothing more than a plain t-shirt and blue jeans, and some look really cool, like the Baseball Furies, a bizarre-looking gang dressed up in Yankee pinstripes and oddly-colored face-paint. You would think that they would look ridiculous but there is something about them, maybe it’s their lack of speaking, that is creepy.

Hill directs the action sequences in a clean, straight-forward style so that there is never any confusion about who’s fighting who and where. He uses editing to help convey the kinetic action in these scenes so that they’re always exciting to watch. The film’s score features ominous electronic rock music comparable to what John Carpenter was also doing at the time (see Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween). The pulsating score matches the rhythm of the editing. The music also enhances the tough, street vibe as it chugs along much like the subway that runs through the city delivering our heroes to safety.

The genesis for The Warriors came about when producer Lawrence Gordon sent director Walter Hill the screenplay along with a copy of Sol Yurick’s novel. Hill was drawn to the “extreme narrative simplicity and stripped down quality of the script.” As written, it was a realistic take on street gangs but Hill was obsessed with comic books and wanted to divide the film into chapters and then have each chapter “come to life starting with a splash panel.” Gordon and Hill were originally planning to make a western but when the financing on the project fell through, they took The Warriors to Paramount Pictures because the studio was interested in making youth films at the time.

Gordon and Hill did extensive casting in New York City. Originally, in Yurick’s book there are no white characters but, according to the director, the studio did not want an all-black cast for “commercial reasons.” Hill had screened an independent film called Madman (1978) for Sigourney Weaver whom he ended up casting in Alien (1979). The film also featured Michael Beck as the male lead. Hill was so impressed by his performance in Madman that he cast Beck in The Warriors. In order to depict the many fights in the film realistically, Hill had stunt coordinator Craig R. Baxley put the cast through stunt school.

Hill shot the entire film in New York City with some interiors done at Astoria Studios. The shooting schedule consisted of shooting from sun down to sun up. It wasn’t the easiest shoot. For example, while shooting in the Bronx, bricks were tossed at the crew. One of the cast members remembered filming a scene on Avenue A being canceled because there was a double homicide nearby. For the big gang summit at the beginning of the film, Hill wanted real gang members in the scene and they also had off-duty police officers in the crowd so that there would be no trouble. Actual gang members wanted to challenge some of the cast members but were dealt with by production security. The production fell behind schedule and went over budget.

Originally, at the climactic Coney Island confrontation at the end of the film, David Patrick Kelly wanted to use two dead pigeons for his now famous line but Hill did not think they would work. Instead, Kelly used bottles and improvised his famous line, “Waaaaarriors, come out to plaaaaaay!” This came from a man the actor knew in downtown New York that would make fun of him.

Hill was unable to realize his comic book look due to the low budget and tight post-production schedule because of a fixed release date in order to get it out in theaters before a rival gang picture called The Wanderers (1979). It opened on February 9, 1979 without advance screenings or a decent promotional campaign. People tend to forget the notorious reputation the film had back in the day. The next weekend it was linked to accounts of vandalism and three killings – two in Southern California and one in Boston. As a result, Paramount removed ads from radio and television entirely and display ads in newspapers were reduced to the film's title, rating and participating theaters. In reaction, 200 theaters in the United States added security people to curb any potential trouble. In addition, theater owners were relieved of their contractual obligations if they did not want to show the film, and amazingly Paramount offered to pay costs for additional security and damages due to vandalism.

After things calmed down somewhat, the studio expanded the display ads to take advantage of reviews from reputable critics like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who gave it a rave review. She wrote, “The Warriors is a real moviemaker’s movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that ’Rock Around the Clock’ did behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. The Warriors is like visual rock.” However, the film was panned by many critics. The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold felt that, "none of Hill's dynamism will save The Warriors from impressing most neutral observers as a ghastly folly.” In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, “another problem arises when the gang members open their mouths: their banal dialogue is jarringly at odds with Hill's hyperbolic visual scheme.” Time magazine’s Frank Rich wrote, “Unfortunately, sheer visual zip is not enough to carry the film; it drags from one scuffle to the next ... But The Warriors is not lively enough to be cheap fun or thoughtful enough to be serious". Yurick expressed his disappointment in the film version and speculated that it scared some people because "it appeals to the fear of a demonic uprising by lumpen youth", and appealed to many teenagers because it "hits a series of collective fantasies.”

I’m still on the fence about the comic book panel framing device imposed by Hill for the Ultimate Director’s Cut DVD. The new tweaks to the film are obvious right from the get-go as the director narrates an opening scrawl featuring parallels to some nonsense about what we are about to see with Greek mythology. Some of the scene transitions are now done in a more overt, comic book style a la panels featuring stylized frames from the film. I understand that this was Hill’s intention all along, acting as a homage to his love of comic books as a kid but it undercuts the nightmarish vibe of The Warriors that made it so powerful in the first place. This is glaringly apparent at the end when the triumphant Warriors stand on the beach at Coney Island as Joe Walsh’s “In the City” plays and the stylized comic book panel motif ruins the poignancy of the moment.

The Warriors is set almost entirely at night and presents the city as a dark, foreboding labyrinth fraught with danger that lurks around every corner and in every alley as the Warriors not only evade the cops but also rival gangs that hold them responsible for killing Cyrus. John Carpenter would take this dystopic vision to the next logical level with Escape from New York (1981) by re-imagining the city as a walled-in prison guarded by an army. Even though Hill claims this to be a comic book-like film, it really doesn’t feel or look like one despite his recent tinkering. The gritty setting, the ominous music and the constant danger that our heroes are in doesn’t evoke a comic book vibe at all. And this is what fans of The Warriors like about it.

SOURCES

Barra, Allen. “The Warriors Fights On.” Salon. November 28, 2005.

Ducker, Eric. “New York Mythology.” Fader. October 3, 2005.