THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN Reviewed

THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964, 86m 36s; Scream Factory): Of the Hammer's half-dozen Frankenstein films starring Peter Cushing, this one has always been the bone of contention among its devotées. It is the only one not directed by Terence Fisher, and Freddie Francis' brief assumption of that chair (as Fisher was making THE HORROR OF IT ALL and THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING for Lippert) is a fascinating look at contrasting techniques in action.

Fisher worked his way up to director as an editor, Francis as an Academy Award-winning cameraman, and here there is a far greater assertion on the power of visuals, so much so that Francis indulges in a memorable six-minute flashback played entirely without dialogue. In contrast to Fisher's wry but never humorous work, which maintained a conservative presentation to all the better make the subversive subject matter pop, the visuals here sometimes err on the vulgar (see any scene involving David Hutcheson's burgomaster and his busty wife, Caron Gardner) and Francis' interests stray too far from Cushing's Baron to Peter Woodthorpe's barnstorming portrayal of the hypnotist Zoltan, whom the Baron recruits to make controlling contact with the damaged brain of the Monster (New Zealand wrestler Kiwi Kingston). While there are disappointing aspects, time has treated the film well; it's attractively produced, the ragged and poorly-designed Monster has become iconic despite itself, and the dynamic score by Don Banks is a refreshing "en garde" change of pace from James Bernard onomatopoeic scoring.


The extras are more than entertaining; the packaging literally cannot list them all. They amount to a multi-authored audio-book monograph on the film and are thus necessary to any serious Hammer enthusiast. Once again, Constantine Nasr's audio commentary provides a wonderfully detailed overview of the film as well as an enlightening production account that helps to explain (and sometimes forgive) its various flaws. Some of the other extras are ported over from a 2003 release, including a "making of" featuring Hammer authority Wayne Kinsey, while the new material includes a warm 30m reminiscence of Francis by his co-biographer Tony Walton and illuminating visits with assistant director Bill Cartlidge and actress Katy Wild, who plays the deaf-mute beggar girl. Cartlidge remembers Francis as being still a bit insecure at the time of filming, and Wild recalls him and producer Anthony Hinds confessing to her on the last day of filming that they had made her character deaf-mute to save themselves the trouble of developing an actual character! It shows just how much an actor stands to bring to a "nothing" role on their own watch; at the same time, the absence of an obviously missing account of the girl's sympathetic relationship with the Monster shows that Francis was frankly unaware of the elements most important to this material - the centrality of Cushing's Baron, and its subtle metaphor of his audience's attraction to monster movies.

As an extra, the similar TALES OF FRANKENSTEIN TV pilot (1960) is included, as is the padded 97m NBC-TV version (which premiered on January 1980), regrettably source from a "best available" 16mm print, which has turned all red and yellow. Had I known they needed it, I could have provided correct color copies of all the scenes exclusive to the TV version, which I recorded from a local station on Betamax in the early 1980s.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Groton and Grazbo Go Boating

From Bob Labar's terrific main titles sequence for DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN.

DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN (1971, 90m 47s) is the film for which Al Adamson will always be best-known, which is a shame; as the original cuts of his films in Severin Films' AL ADAMSON MASTERPIECE COLLECTION show, he was capable of doing much better when working in the genres that most engaged him. Horror, alas, was not one of them - and DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN is yet another film that sprang out of initial detritus. It was originally filmed as THE BLOOD SEEKERS, initiated as SATAN'S BLOODY DEVILS, which followed upon the success of SATAN'S SADISTS as another biker picture with Charles Manson-like associations starring Russ Tamblyn. When this version (no longer extant) was screened, it was decided it didn't work, so Adamson and producer Samuel M. Sherman embarked on a two-year schedule of reparations.

Lon Chaney Jr. as Groton, before and after his injection.

What ultimately prevailed was a typically schizophrenic film with biker elements and hatchet murder elements struggling to incorporate biker elements. The new storyline posits the former Dr. Frankenstein (J. Carrol Naish) as hiding behind a carnival haunted house of illusions, with his pet moron Groton (Lon Chaney Jr.), whom he periodically injects with a formula that transforms the puppy-petting simpleton into an axe-swinging killer (dubbed with the heavy breathing of Brother Theodore from his MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND trailer session) along the Venice beachfront. The wheelchair-bound doctor then drains the victims of their terror-heightened blood to reshoot into Groton. If it sounds like Dr. Frankenstein is slumming, "Lord of the Manor of Carpathia" Count Dracula ("Zandor Vorkov" aka Roger Engel) materializes and blackmails the doctor, forcing him to resurrect the inert body of his monster (John Bloom) and thus ramp up the terror factor to yield some truly trippy blood for Dracula to drink. The doctor also uses the Monster as an agent of vengeance against his old colleague (actually considerably younger) Dr. Beaumont, quickly crushed to death and played by FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND editor Forrest J Ackerman. 

Angelo Rossitto, whose film career dated back to FREAKS and earlier.

The carnival boardwalk is patrolled by the dwarf Grazbo (Angelo Rossitto), who has lines like "You see? You must open your eyes to see things!" while taunting a young hippie couple who, for some unexplained reason, have to walk through the haunted house "ride." 

Judith Fountain (Regina Carrol) and her Vegas stage act.

Tacked onto all this mayhem is a subplot carried over from THE BLOOD SEEKERS, in which Las Vegas performer Judith Fontain (Adamson's wife Regina Carrol, we see her singing to a thin crowd about overpacking her bags for a trip to the Hilton Mau Mau) comes to Venice in search of her missing sister Joanie (Joe Sarno veteran Maria Lease), who has actually been decapitated and then nonsensically recapitated before becoming repurposed as a blood donor for Groton. Crusty police detective Sgt. Martin (Jim Davis) isn't much help (though he does get the terrific line "Nobody but nobody understands the subconscious, not even ourselves"), and after Tamblyn's biker gang doses Judith with LSD, she gets the help she needs from Mike (Anthony Eisley), the straightest looking hippie you ever saw. (We know he's a hippie because he wears a turtleneck, a toothed necklace, and has a "pad.") As with the romance between John Gabriel and Erin O'Donnell in THE FAKERS, Mike and Judith's fall into limerence plays a lot like a Salem cigarettes commercial of the period. For a love story that takes so long to set up, it's over hilariously fast due to some laughable circumstances. 

"Let's not get involved": Regina Carrol and Anthony Eisley.

Apparently the climax of the original cut - titled THE BLOOD OF FRANKENSTEIN (not preserved) - didn't play too well, so Sherman conceived the new title and had Adamson shoot a hastily concocted battle royale between the two living dead icons in a dilapidated church location. Apparently the crew arrived under ideal Dracula conditions (they were "losing the light") because Zandor Vorkov's makeup had to be brightened to Kabuki white-faced proportions to show up onscreen. Under the heavily blue-tinted murkiness you can barely see what's going on - and believe me, you see more of the battle on Blu-ray than you ever could in the pre-digital days of drive-ins, early television broadcasts, VHS and even laserdiscs.

Dracula (Zandor Vorkov) revives the Frankenstein Monster (John Bloom).

Photographed by three different cameramen (Paul Glickman, Gary Graver, and an uncredited Sam Sherman), the patchwork film is not without interest but it's never as rewarding as one hopes. Adamson really knew nothing about creating or sustaining a horror atmosphere; he's all about cute, ironic cutting; when Jim Davis ends a scene by saying "It's a dark, dark world," we cut to him turning off an overhead light that wasn't turned on earlier in the scene, and when Beaumont is fastidiously crushed in the arms of the Monster, he takes the cue to cut to the slogan on the back of a 1969 bottle of Mountain Dew ("It'll Tickle Your Innards!"). Tony Tierney's makeup for the Frankenstein monster is actually one of the better post-Universal designs and John Bloom embodies the role acceptably well. Likewise, Naish, Chaney, and Rossitto all strike macabre characterizations and the film is also given a nostalgic charge with the library music of William Lava, which extends to some CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON cues later in the picture, and the use of Kenneth Strickfaden's mad laboratory equipment used in the original FRANKENSTEIN (1931). I also must admit that the promised confrontation between the two monsters gives us somewhat more than Universal did when Frankenstein met the Wolf Man, or when HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HOUSE OF DRACULA pulled all the great monsters into one story and then disappointingly kept them largely apart - but even so, more amounts to less. The major disappointment is "Zandor Vorkov" as Dracula, a role that requires innate authority - which is not the same as treating all of his dialogue with reverb. Not only is Vorkov more Doctor Strange than Dracula (firing animated beams from his magic ring, no less), he's basically too young and lacking in presence. Giving credit where credit is due, his disintegration scene is not bad, though Roger Engel's explanation in the featurette of how hastily and crudely it was accomplished is hilarious. 

J. Carrol Naish as the enfeebled Dr. Frankenstein. Oops, spoiler!

The disc includes a Samuel M. Sherman commentary - Sam is very well-spoken and is a highly responsible film historian who shares his experiences with clarity and a bit of humor - as well as a featurette of interviews with cast and crew members. Most engaging, however, is a visual essay called "Feed Your Head! Lose Your Head!" by the Flying Maciste Brothers (Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr), narrated by smooth talker Berger. It is their view that DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN is something of a misunderstood masterpiece, that beneath its misbegotten surface resides a multi-tiered investigation into the schism of illusion and reality, especially as manifest in the pleasure we take in our darker forms of entertainment.

Judith's uncredited stage show partners in the "Travelin' Light" number.

Berger's narration identifies the film as being made in the spirit of the 1940s "monster rallies" like Erle C. Kenton's HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), in which both Naish and Chaney were prominently featured, which is of course readily evident - and so it goes. Though the points he and Marr make help to underscore some aspects of the patchwork narrative that Adamson's direction (and the film's disjoined origins) left muddled, there's a fundamental difference between pointing out connections and bringing them together in actual chords of enlarged comprehension. Rather than arriving at answers or a bigger picture, the narration is more inclined to pursue the duo's notes to a series of ironic, self-reflective, zen-like questions. For example: it's true there is a similarity between Dr. Frankenstein's self-proclaimed status as one who lives "beyond fear" in a threadbare palace of illusions and the subplot about Judith (herself a stage performer) and her quest to find her lost sister, which takes her through a kind of looking glass into psychedelics and a different kind of life/lifestyle than she has been exposed to before. These details are certainly there but I would argue that what the essay savors as subtext is most often text; these elements are up front and don't exactly galvanize one another so much as merely coincide. The essay also credits Adamson and Sherman with providing all of these subterranean connections with knowing, masterful deliberation, while never mentioning or questioning screenwriter William Pugsley's role in all this, nor that of the cameramen or art director when pointing out revelatory details in composition and backgrounds. Though certainly diverting in its own right as entertainment, what this literate if not entirely persuasive essay ultimately proves is that some folks like this movie a lot more than others, and some - God bless 'em - have worked really hard at it.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.        
  

Nazis, Spies and Bikers - Adamson Style

Kent Taylor as New Nazi Party leader Count von Delberg in THE FAKERS.

Severin Films' AL ADAMSON MASTERPIECE COLLECTION permits an engrossing comparison between their choppy and discombobulated 1970 release HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS and the more organically pleasing picture it grew out of, a pleasantly engaging little spy picture called THE FAKERS (1967, 94m 49s). Filmed under the title OPERATION M, it opens with an immediately engaging animated title sequence, the first Bob Lebar created for Independent-International, bearing the reconsidered title SMASHING THE CRIME SYNDICATE and a copyright date of 1973. Further upping the ante is Adamson's first proper film score, suggesting that he (or perhaps production consultant Sam Sherman) had recognized that their previous use of library music had worked against the commercial viability of their product. A flashy montage of rotoscoped nude models in high contrast and psychedelic colors, animated USA flags, swastikas, hammer and sickles, Stars of David, inky handprints, and $20 bills, this stylish surge of creativity is given additional verve by the opening theme, "Faker," sung by Debbie Stuart (à la Shirley Bassey), which is credited to Nelson Riddle though the musical score, per se, was more economically provided by Don McGinnis, who made free use of Riddle's catchy motifs. 

John Gabriel eyes a counterfeit bill with mob boss Keith Andes.

The film opens, in a manner now evoking RESERVOIR DOGS, with our protagonist waking up in the back seat of a moving car with the heated story already in progress. We won't know this for awhile, but this is danger-man-for-hire Mark Adams, played by John Gabriel (credited as the lyricist of "Faker") - he arranges his escape from the car, upsetting the driver, who proceeds to spill over the side of a cliff, delivering immediate action and fatality. The unconscious Adams is picked up by a passing truck driver and taken to hospital, where the film embarks on a more-or-less feature-length flashback, complete with handy self-introduction. While comatose, he recounts the story of how he was hired by his boss Joe, "a very big man in the syndicate," who has been contacted by a Las Vegas branch of the New Nazi Party who need funding to put into action "an idea so big, only the syndicate could handle it." Joe wants Adams to meet with the man behind the New Reich, a Count von Delberg (Kent Taylor), who owns stolen money plates dating back to WWII capable of making fool-proof counterfeit currency, which he plans to circulate to refinance his army of goose-steppers. Joe wants those plates - probably more for his own gain than for any patriotic reason. 

Guest stars Broderick Crawford and John Carradine.

What's wrong with the film from the beginning is that Adams and his boss are so cordial and likable that we are left wondering why our putative hero wasn't conceived as a secret agent working on behalf of our government, rather than a charismatic hood working on behalf of a warm and friendly mob boss. As it happens, he actually is; this is just another curve thrown at us to make the story more "interesting." Adams has been working undercover for the past five years; his actual bosses are Gavin (Broderick Crawford, an implied FBI man, giving the same performance he always gives, but he's solid and ideal for the role) and his next-in-line Brand (Scott Brady, ditto). When one of "Why did they send you?" Gavin asks female agent Jill Harmon (Emily Banks), when Brand drags her into his office. "I don't like sending out female agents, especially when they're pretty." "Thanks for the left-handed compliment!" she fires back perkily. Gavin also "has a feeling the communists are in on this" - well, okay, why not? 

Vicki Volante hides from her pursuers at Marineland - a surprisingly Hitchcockian scene.

"Everything simple so far?" the suave Adams asks us from the depths of his coma, while neatly pocketing his gun in a shoulder holster onscreen. And so it goes, with our comatose hero supposedly reminiscing about how he got into this position, while also telling us about scenes and situations to which he was not privy. Adams also encounters more than his share of female trouble, courtesy of a jailbait femme fatale (Anne Randall), the competitive agent Harmon, the icy blonde Leni Marvenga (Jacklyn O'Donnell) and also the Count's apparently Nazi-friendly attaché Carol Bechtol (Vicki Volante), the Count's unknowing attaché and mistress, who becomes a target for the Communists whose bid for the plates was snubbed. The film reaches its genuinely engrossing high point as Carol flees her would-be assassins into the midst of a packed afternoon at Marineland, where Adamson, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, and editor John Winfield create a seriously good sequence, almost ten minutes in length, that proceeds without much dialogue and is inventively storyboarded on multiple levels of single compositions. Adams saves Carol, only to discover that she's assumed her position in the Count's employ because she wants to destroy him, actually a surviving Nazi war criminal who was responsible for her parents' death at Auschwitz.

Before he worked for Herschell Gordon Lewis, Col. Harlan Sanders made an Al Adamson cameo!

Adams' coma finally comes full circle around 74m into the picture, making us realize it was only a ploy to underline the fine points of an overcomplicated plot, which only served to make them more complicated in the process - but there is terrific stuff along the way, some of it quite quirkily funny, including a delightfully perverse encounter with a fellow undercover man posing as a pet shop dealer (John Carradine) bedeviled by a pair of ditzy twins (Alyce and Rhae Andrece) whose lovebirds aren't being very amorous, a bit of judo oneupmanship with Agent Harmon, and a romantic sidebar as Adams and Ms. Marvenga take a stroll through the park and meet Col. Harlan Sanders himself while having lunch at KFC.

Agent Harmon (Emily Banks) throws Adams for a loop.

In its original form, THE FAKERS is an engaging, neat little spy picture whose quirks are ultimately forgivable, even embraceable, but the story behind it is a tragic one. When it was still OPERATION M, it ran out of money mid-way through production, and other producers came into the project like Rex Carlton, who - when the film finally proved unsaleable - committed suicide, dropping roughly $40,000 of debt on Adamson's shoulders. To make a long story short, Adamson subsequently formed Independent-International with Sam Sherman as a means of repaying that debt to his investors, a scheme that was ultimately successful - and which explains why his shelf of work at that time became the raw material for drastic re-evaluation and reinvention.

Robert Dix at the head of HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS.

HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS (90m 11s) may be the crudest of the various reworkings, which takes the original's New Nazi Party plot and ties it to the swastikas paraded by a motorcycle gang led by the fairly straight-looking Cunk (Robert Dix). The movie - which cuts THE FAKERS down quite a bit and adds roughly 15 minutes of additional footage shot in Utah - opens with the Bloody Devils (played by an actual biker gang, the Hessians), who are in league with the Count's Master Race philosophy and on his payroll, tracking down a pair of commie hit men and treating them to a chain-beating until they are covered in blood ("Now everyone will know you're a red, ha ha ha," one observes.) The Bob Lebar titles are slightly reworked to incorporate biker graphics, and the original theme song is kept. 

Pick-up cameraman Frank Ruttencutter goes for the symbolism during a biker's love scene.

Whereas THE FAKERS looks beautiful, having been scanned and restored from its original 35mm negative, HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS was not so carefully preserved. The version presented makes extensive use of the FAKERS negative but the material unique to the revision is culled from various surviving 35mm prints, which are faded and scratchy as they looked the last time they played under the stars at various drive-in theaters.

The extras include a trailer and TV spot for HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS, as well as a feature-length commentary by Sam Sherman (incorporating a brief phoned-in addenda by John Gabriel), and an  hilarious featurette called "Sam Sherman Interviews Actor John Gabriel," in which the poor, smiling, dressed-up-to-be-interviewed-on-camera, and clearly suffering actor finds it all but impossible to get a word in. All in all, another entertaining, eye-opening, and educational evening with the AL ADAMSON MASTERPIECE COLLECTION.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

RIP Ennio Morricone: He Left Us Multitudes

Maestro Ennio Morricone has passed away at the age of 91, leaving behind some 400 feature film scores, miscellaneous experimental recordings and pop music arrangements, and more albums, retrospectives and compilations than anyone could count, much less own. It is a popular opinion that such prolificacy is its own worst enemy, that it spreads talent thin and wastes more time and ability in expenditure than in incubating - but if anyone could put the lie to this homespun wisdom, it was Morricone. There's a song on Bob Dylan's new album called "I Contain Multitudes," which derives its title and concept from a poem by Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself." Certainly Dylan has worn a variety of masks during his long career and used them to express a great variety of popular music and (sometimes unpopular) voices, but Morricone could have laid an even more valid claim to the title. It's interesting that both stories begin, more or less, from the same seed: Woody Guthrie. 

Bear with me. Woody Guthrie was Bob Dylan's hero; it's said that he - two generations away from Russian Jewish immigrants - left his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota to travel east and sing to the hospitalized Guthrie. He did his best to look, sound, walk, and talk like him; and because Guthrie's brain was dying in the throes of Huntington's Disease, Dylan carried his voice and his message forward like a torch. He called himself Woody's "disciple," but soon enough he had become more analogous to the voice of Christ for thousands of young folk. You could hear a pin drop in Carnegie Hall as he wove his spell, just one man and an old, beaten-up guitar. After his fabled motorcycle accident saved him from a self-destructive spiral on the road, he came back somewhat reborn in the image of American traditional music with the Band, then country music under the wing of Johnny Cash, and a whole procession of images from the clown-faced bandleader of the Rolling Thunder Revue, the sanctimonious front man of the GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY tour, stints with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, the drunken-sounding uncle singing Christmas songs, the Sinatra-like crooner mooning over old lost loves, and most currently the songwriter whose sprawling cast of characters from the Marquis de Sade to the Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands have become synonymous with some kind of forsaken Americana, somehow synonymous with JFK's sadly exploding head. You might say he's a myth-maker as much as a writer of song; his first Number One was 17 minutes long. 

Morricone's Woody Guthrie connection, of course, was the 1941 song "Pastures of Plenty", which he - in his original status as an orchestral arranger of Italian pop music recordings - gave a special arrangement for a 1962 single by the expatriate American folk singer Peter Tevis. At this time, Morricone had already composed a couple of Italian Western scores in a more traditional vein, GUNFIGHT AT RED SANDS and and Tevis had sung themes for thebut had previously sung the title themes of Morricone's two previous Westerns, GUNFIGHT AT RED SANDS ("A Gringo Like Me") and BULLETS DON'T ARGUE ("Lonesome Billy"). So it was natural for Morricone to suggest a reprise of this successful template to Sergio Leone when he was approached to score FISTFUL OF DOLLARS - but Leone didn't want the Tevis voice - he wanted that Guthrie/Tevis sound, which somehow gathered the galloping of ghostly horses in a guitar's sultry strum, whip cracks, flute trills, the caws of men attempting to marshal an unruly nature, and the gentleness that was just a heartbeat away from cataclysmic violence. Morricone would later refer to FISTFUL, repeatedly, as the worst score he ever wrote, but it redefined the musical genre laid down by Aaron Copeland in his 1940s compositions like "Billy the Kid", "Hoedown", and "Appalachian Spring." 

The music that Morricone wrote for Italian Westerns of the 1960s was as defining of them as their look, their stars, their direction. It was lusty, sweaty, humorous, even spiritual music with a hair-trigger temper. His sixteen-year membership in the ensemble Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, which explored improvised experimental music, kept him vigilant on the edge of musical frontiers. It was with his scores for THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST that his movie music became too brilliant to ignore; Sergio Leone himself saw to that, using his brooding, roiling, suspenseful, harrowing, even mournful music to embrace long silences, as the cinema he created returned periodically to the purity of the silent era. One critic noted about the latter film that it was like an opera in which the arias were stared. 

But we mustn't forget that Morricone's music also paraded itself in a series of masks. There are not only compilations of Morricone's music, but compilations of distinct genres of his music. He contained it all. There are collections of his love themes, his themes of violence, his work as a pop music composer and arranger (topped by Mina's astonishing and much-covered "Se telefonando"); there are three volumes of MONDO MORRICONE containing his masterful and elegant pop and shake instrumentals for "Continental Op" pictures; there is MORRICONE GIALLO, CRIME AND DISSONANCE, MORRICONE BOSSA, PSICODELICO JAZZISTICO, even a 24-disc ULTIMATE COLLECTION that doesn't begin to cover even a quarter of it. He left us any number of worlds to get lost in, not least of all the world of collecting his vast archive of recorded works.

If the work had been unsigned, it would take an ear far more skilled than mine to identify the common author of the scores for Elio Petri's A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY, Edouard Molinaro's LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, John Carpenter's THE THING, and Wolfgang Petersen's IN THE LINE OF FIRE. In these and other scores, we find Morricone stepping not only outside his usual perimeters but his unique personality as well, always with bold distinction, and he managed to do so at the same time he was writing the more readily identifiable scores of such films as Mario Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK, Luciano Ercoli's FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION (with its killer track, "Amore come dolore", Franco Rossi's MOSES THE LAWGIVER, Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, Roland Joffe's THE MISSION, Giuseppe Tornatore's CINEMA PARADISO, and Quentin Tarantino's THE HATEFUL EIGHT. Readily identifiable, yes, but at the same time wholly original and another step in his evolution as an artist. One might reasonably call him a music factory, but the phrase gives a false impression of faceless, impersonal work. The base materials that passed through Morricone's loom were never less than serviceable and almost invariably came out as woven gold.

Time will tell, but when the definitive history of contemporary music is written, Ennio Morricone may well be cited as the most significant classical composer of his lifetime. I can think of no other composer who was more capable of galvanizing and raising orchestras to a higher calling, unleashing tides of profound emotion wherever he conducted. But even this heroic accomplishment is just one of the many faces he wore. In a world of heroes, Ennio Morricone was the rarest of the rare - a Titan - and the odds are seriously against our seeing his like again.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.    

50 Years Ago This Weekend... in Cincinnati

Tim Lucas Guests on THE FILM CULT PODCAST

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour or so of conversation with Robert Lalonde for his FILM CULT PODCAST. It can be found at this link or at this directory, or it can be found on Spotify, Google Play and PodBean. It went live today, so set aside some time and give it a listen!

50 Years Ago: Now Playing in Cincinnati

For a couple of years now, I've been faithfully posting on my Facebook page each week's new openings in Cincinnati theaters as they took place... 50 years ago. This is what was on offer to local movie goers half a century ago tonight.

1968 to 1975 was a very important period in my own development as a movie-goer, the years that led up to JAWS really (which changed the industry completely and the way it made films), and it's often astonishing to be reminded how fertile and open to experimentation this period really was, before it all became about spending and making enormous sums of money. At the time, Friday was just beginning to become the day when new movies hit our local screens, but some were still opening on Wednesday. We had only two Adults Only screens - the Royal and the Imperial Follies - and, as you will see in weeks to come - the rules of our local paper THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER often censored their titles for print.  

I'm going to start sharing these posts here at Video WatchBlog (as I really always should have done), because it's instructive not only to see which films are hitting the half-century mark but also the films with which these movies competed for the biggest share of the weekend box office.


(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.  

FIVE BLOODY GRAVES - A Desecrated Western Masterpiece?

Shreveport, LA ad 14 August 1970.

What I was hoping might happen at some point during my journey through Severin Films' AL ADAMSON - THE MASTERPIECE COLLECTION box set (32 films across 14 different Blu-ray discs) happened with Disc Three, where HALFWAY TO HELL (a 1958 Western directed by Adamson's father, Denver Dixon, and starring Adamson as "Rick Adams") shares the bill with Adamson's Western FIVE BLOODY GRAVES. Filmed in 1966 as THE LONELY MAN and subsequently retitled 5 BLOODY DAYS TO TOMBSTONE, there is no real exposition about how Adamson's original film went on to become FIVE BLOODY GRAVES but, by this point in the ongoing story, it's easy to surmise the probable truth. 

As with ECHO OF TERROR, a competent heist thriller that went on to become a mostly incompetent sci-fi zombie mess called BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR, the elements of THE LONELY MAN likely shaped up into a beautifully photographed, albeit unavoidably minor, Western. For a director like Adamson, this was no mean accomplishment though his considerable accomplishment certainly turned meaner at it was subsequently finessed into something releasable. The film was made in partnership with its screenwriter Robert Dix (the son of actor Richard Dix), who likely insisted on playing the historically authentic lead role of Ben Thompson himself; this was the first of the production's missteps as Dix was not quite a name actor and doesn't really have the screen presence to stand out amidst the other players. The money set aside for music and had to be assembled from library tracks, some of which are identifiable from cartoons and most of which simply detracts from what's onscreen.

Put together before Independent-International Pictures properly existed, the film nevertheless had the benefit of Samuel M. Sherman's casting input, which brought Adamson together for the first time with numerous members of his subsequent repertory company - John Carradine, Paula Raymond, jack-of-all-trades John "Bud" Cardos, and Vicki Volante (all of whom would appear, along with Dix, in the subsequently filmed BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE, 1967) as well as established character actor Jim Davis (who would subsequently co-star in DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, 1971). The real ace in the deck, however, is returning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who - I never would have believed it - makes nearly the entire film a captivating treat for the eye in its judicious use of Utah locations spread across a wide Techniscope screen in Technicolor. Furthermore, the stunts supervised by production manager Cardos are excellent.

The story is fairly basic: Ben Thompson, a man who considers himself half-dead since the love of his life was felled by a bullet intended for him, is awakened to his sense of responsibility and also romance when he is placed to become the only possible rescue of a coach load of working girls and other travelers attacked by a bloodthirsty Yaqui tribe. (You remember that story about how Roger Corman cast Dick Miller, in APACHE WOMAN back in 1955, as both an Indian and a cowboy and gave him the privilege of shooting himself? John "Bud" Cardos is given the very same opportunity here.) Carradine is a dissolute Bible thumper in Gothic threads, Raymond is the Madam of the brothel-in-transit, and Brady is the entrepreneur anticipating wealth from this new enterprise. An interesting, if overdone, unifying touch is the narration by Death itself, as personified by the voice of Gene Raymond, which articulates his particular bond with Thompson in a way that looks forward to the notion of spectral gunfighters that came along later.

Al Adamson steps in to play a bloodthirsty Yaqui warrior who gets his mitts on Vicki Volante.

Available here for the first time in its original 2.35:1 Techniscope ratio and its full-strength Technicolor intensity, the movie is a modest but still impressive revelation. It might have found a market in 1964 or 1965, but it was instantly out-of-date once the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone Westerns hit American screens. Nothing Sam Sherman could have suggested as commercial augmentations would have helped. Right off the bat, the version known as FIVE BLOODY GRAVES stumbles with a lengthy pre-credits sequence (apparently shot circa early to mid 1969 by someone other than Vilmos Zsigmond) showing Dix and starlet Jill Woelfel naked in bed, making love as a grinding acid rock guitar freaks out in such a way as to anchor the scene in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Especially with the music shoved down our ears this way, their post-coital dialogue about Thompson's return from "the war" we assume to mean Vietnam; there is literally nothing about this opening scene to establish anything except a contemporary time frame. Then, after the main titles (which retain the 5 BLOODY DAYS TO TOMBSTONE title), the film and its lead character seem to fall back in time by about a century, with references to "the war" now meaning the Civil one. I listened to Samuel M. Sherman's "partial" audio commentary, which is partly shared with telephone input from Dix and runs about an hour, and it's dead quiet during the entire intro and no explanation is ever given. It should be noted that no previous US video release of this title has ever included this introductory footage.

Jill Woelfel and Robert Dix in FIVE BLOODY GRAVES' opening sequence - clearly not Zsigmond's work.

It's my suspicion that it was decided the film needed some nudity and anything else it might incorporate to appeal to more contemporary viewers. It would have been least challenging to add a sequence like this to the opening - and there are also signs that gore and minimal nudity were added to subsequent scenes; a fairly coy rape scene involving an Indian woman (Maria Polo) spread-eagled on the ground shows a glimpse of nipple in the medium close-up while her torso remains covered in the long shots.  There is also a section of the film that doesn't quite feel organic to the rest, in which Thompson returns from the "war" to reunite with a former love, Nora (Volante), who married the cruel Dave Miller (Ken Osborne) in his absence. Is this sequence intended to illustrate Thompson's lost love? If so, two problems: It is already discussed as something that's happened in the past in the pre-credits sequence, and there is nothing about this sequence to suggest that we have transitioned to telling a story from Thompson's past. Consequently, he's given two lost loves and the second one (if indeed it is a second one) he never finds out about! In her brief appearance, Vicki Volante gives a spirited performance reminiscent of Julie Adams' work in Anthony Mann's BEND OF THE RIVER (1952), and when Thompson finds another short-lived love in Althea, brunette Darlene Lucht (former blonde AIP starlet and future Mrs. Robert Dix) also does a fine job.

I wish the box set contained more rigorous contextualizing for this picture; once again, a recreated version of THE LONELY MAN would have been useful, or even a proper history of how and when the initially old-fashioned Western was tampered with. The IMDb mentions an initial November 1969 playdate in New Orleans, while newspapers.com shows that it had its earliest theatrical playdates come May 1970, at which time it mostly played as a second- or even third-run feature to other movies, such as HELL ON WHEELS (1967), SATAN'S CYCLES (an early release title for Adamson's SATAN'S SADISTS), and HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS (originally THE FAKERS, made by Adamson in 1967 and subsequently retrofitted with material advised by Sam Sherman). FIVE BLOODY GRAVES played some theaters as a lead title during "Free In-Car Heater" season - late January 1971 - with Antonio Margheriti's CASTLE OF BLOOD (1964) and William Grefé's STING OF DEATH (1966) playing in cheap support. When it reappeared around the country as early as March through September '71, it was once again the support feature, playing under Independent-Internation releases HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS and FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR. Therefore, despite its inherent and unusual production quality, possibly the finest technical work Adamson ever achieved, it missed its window of opportunity and was never exhibited with any commercial confidence. That said, it was exhibited and exploited over the years in drive-in theme packages that earned back millions of dollars, which leaves little room to accommodate a valid Art vs. Commerce debate.

Am I saying FIVE BLOODY GRAVES is a desecrated Western masterpiece? Not quite; what was desecrated was a B- or C-grade Western that transcended its modest origins. It's heavily anchored in the familiar but raised above its station by a few engaging performances and, especially, remarkable location photography that sometimes rivals the cinematography of such established Western classics of its time period as Monte Hellmann's THE SHOOTING or RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND. As restored here by Severin Films, it's a must for large screen viewing and - in the context in which it's presented - a most pleasant surprise.

Feedback from reader Chris Koenig: "In regards to the 5-minute opening that was not present in previous home video releases of FIVE BLOODY GRAVES, I'm willing to bet the reason for that is the early home video releases utilized an edited TV print panned-scanned and that scene was edited out (that would also explain why Sam Sherman's audio commentary starts exactly during the title sequence; his commentary was from an old Brentwood DVD release. Considering that actress Jill Woelfel is credited in the animated title sequence by Bob LeBar, it confirms that opening scene was present in its original 1969-1970 theatrical release. Also, what's interesting about the 5 BLOODY DAYS TO TOMBSTONE credit sequence (presented as an extra and carrying a 1968 copyright date) is that some of the credits are slightly bogus: Vilmos Zsigmond is credited as 'Magic Photography' (WHAT?!?!), Robert W. Brimmer is credited as writing the screenplay and not Robert Dix, Alfred J. Ferrara and Ernest J. Caringi are credited as 'producers,' and Jill Woelfel's name is not present indicating this was the original title sequence before Sherman and Adamson added that 5-minute opening and the 'new' Bob LeBar animated credits. I believe when FIVE BLOODY GRAVES was re-released on DVD from Subversive Cinema, that 5-minute sequence was presented as a 'deleted scene'."

Much appreciated insights, Chris! I can add this much, that Robert W. Brimmer was in fact the birth name of writer-actor Robert Dix.

Feedback from reader Mark Young: "You might be interested to know that the pre credit sequence was included in the 2008 German Eyecatcher widescreen DVD but with German audio only (English subtitles provided), before leading into a German title sequence that then cuts abruptly to the US print at the DOP credit. The end credit sequence is not the animated one but a lengthy printed crawl which cuts out during the cast list. Lewis Guinn is credited with Additional Photography here. There are various cuts to the film included as cropped extended/deleted scenes. It also includes an alternate title sequence (GUN RIDERS) which I believe was the TV title..?"

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.



    

Dipping Into Al Adamson's Masterpiece Collection

Truth be told, I've never been a particular fan of Al Adamson's movies; however, from the moment Severin Films announced their MASTERPIECE COLLECTION box set - encompassing 32 films over 14 discs, along with extras and a detailed 126-page paperback guide by Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes - I knew I had to have it. Such a thing is more object than product and mysteriously more than the considerable sum of its parts; it is a cart before the horse, a fetish that embodies one's love of all that is scraggly and strange about our favorite genre. For those of us who carry that additional OC gene (which, let's face it, is much too fanatical about order to be called a "disorder"), such an object becomes at least twice as attractive. It embodies a curative interest given full reign, tied up in a neat little bow. What's not to love? 

I can hear the wittier among you grumbling "the movies themselves," and on some days I might be inclined to agree with you. However, one thing I am learning from the MASTERPIECE COLLECTION already is that a love for Al Adamson's films doesn't have a whole lot to do with the movies themselves. In some ways, Adamson was the last real drive-in movie director; I've checked some old newspaper archives and was surprised to discover that Independent-International's double feature of HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS and BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR was booked into drive-ins in the early months of 1974 - when THE EXORCIST had already redefined the horror film for audiences world-wide. On the second of our two visits to Chicago, in the late 1970s, Donna and I decided to spend an afternoon at the movies and happened to catch a double bill of a very faded print of Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977) and Adamson's DEATH DIMENSION (1978) - and with the former disavailed of its original Technicolor palette, the Adamson picture was plainly the one that won over our inner city audience, especially when the lady tied to her chair was threatened by the OMFG production of a gigantic snapping turtle held suspended over her by its tail. The place went crazy, and it's shared memories like this that bind certain movies to us forever. 

The cold-blooded jewel thieves of PSYCHO A GO GO, with Al Adamson in the middle and lead psycho Ray Morton at right.

Before proceeding any further, I must mention that this limited edition box set is already officially out-of-print, so your best bet to find it is probably on eBay, where I have already seen Buy It Now prices topping $300. That's the going price for the unlimited edition that CBS Video just released of GUNSMOKE: THE COMPLETE SERIES, which is 143 DVDs... not 14 Blu-rays.

As Adamson's frequent producer and collaborator Samuel M. Sherman remembers it, Al Adamson came into his life one day after driving the first 35mm print of his directorial debut, a heist thriller called ECHO OF TERROR, cross-country to screen for him in New York. Why Adamson went straight to Sherman, in the unfamiliar east coast side of the film business, rather than drive his movie across town to show to Roger Corman or Sam Arkoff, I don't know - but it changed his career in incalculable ways. In Sherman's hands, or at least under his direction, ECHO OF TERROR - a surprisingly competent B-picture (thanks in no small part to being photographed by the great Vilmos Zsigmond prior to his proper discovery in Hollywood), though it had no stars and no specific genre alliance to make it easily exploitable - underwent a series of fine (de)tunings that lasted from 1965 through 1971 as it was serially tweaked and retweaked into PSYCHO A GO GO, THE FIEND WITH THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN, MAN WITH THE SYNTHETIC BRAIN, and BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR. Sherman's slowly dawning eureka about the picture was to make it more commercial by bringing it down to the lowest common denominator of taste; he advised Adamson to turn it into a psycho thriller, then a mad science thriller "featuring" John Carradine, and finally a kind of "Mad Doctor of Long Island" picture adding Kent Taylor and Tommy Kirk (both sweating like mad on cardboard sets that make PRC labs from the 1940s look like rooms in Jay Gatsby's summer house), a zombie that set the style for those we see in ZOMBIE LAKE, and Adamson's poor wife Regina Carrol turned into what the trailer called a "1,000 year-old mummy." I can't help but think that either Corman or Arkoff would have agreed to hiring Carradine or Taylor for reshoots, but toward the end of making it a better, more playable picture. This was not the advice Adamson received and I don't think he should be blamed for wanting to do whatever was being offered him to help repay his original investors. And speaking of Regina Carrol, though I have no idea what Adamson saw in her, she gives the only halfway decent performance in this mish-mosh of a picture.

Green-faced zombie Richard Smedley probes helpless Regina Carrol in BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR. 

For all the troubles taken, ECHO, PSYCHO A GO GO, and FIEND WITH THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN never did see the light of day, and the TV version of BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR (entitled MAN WITH THE SYNTHETIC BRAIN) got shown before GHASTLY HORROR ever turned up in theaters, which as I've said didn't happen till years after its completion. It was never the A-picture on a double bill (at least not until random dusk-till-dawn packages in 1978!) and, in looking through the newspaper archives, I can't find a single ad for it that shows more than a printed title for it, though a Gray Morrow-illustrated campaign was designed for its press book. In his rambling audio commentary for the film's final and messiest draft, Sherman goes into some detail about the costly punishment that he and Adamson ended up taking over Al's early decision to shoot in Technicolor and two-perf Techniscope, which was a retired format by the time the zombies came into their rewrite. Even with three version of the film included in this set, it's a shame that the cut Sherman originally saw as ECHO OF TERROR was not reconstructed, as changes based on his advice were made even well before the decision to turn it into PSYCHO A GO GO.  The commentary was originally recorded for an early Troma DVD release of BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR and much of what Sherman envisions as a future possibility for releasing the picture in a fully restored and properly contextualized format comes true, thanks to Severin's dedication to the cause.

All of this is included on the second disc in the set. The first disc pairs David Gregory's Adamson documentary BLOOD AND FLESH (which I reviewed for THE CHISLER over here) with another Adamson feature, THE FEMALE BUNCH (1971). Shot under the title TWO TICKETS TO TERROR, the latter film shoehorns Russ Tamblyn and Lon Chaney into a story about a group of Las Vegas showgirls who form a guerrilla girl gang to run roughshod over men from a headquarters out in the desert. Made in a modern Western format, with lots of sloppy, fumbly sex scenes and "cantina" fights and frightening scenes of empowered women "taking control," the movie is pretty much a working class male's fantasy of this time period, as well as a catalogue of his worst fears about women - all of them comfortably overcome by the finale. The movie has an almost feature-length, odd (and oddly unnecessary) flashback structure that encompasses story elements not involving the character telling the story, and in a bonus visit with surviving BUNCH members, Jenifer Bishop recalls her surprise when, attending a New Beverly screening with her son, she suddenly saw a body double adding nudity to her love scenes - so it would appear Mr. Sherman had some notes for Al on this one, as well.

I was surprised by the sex scenes as well, because their content somewhat surpasses what the MPAA would reward with an R rating in those days, venturing into territory shared with soft-X movies like THE SCAVENGERS, FANDANGO or HOT SPUR. It's possible that, in their reconstruction of a most complete copy from a number of choppy surviving 35mm prints, that Severin ended up putting back some material that was cut from the print screened for the MPAA. As a frequent drive-in attendee of this period, I can attest that even the newest R-rated movies being shown in those days would be fraught with once-spicy, now-splicy passages, either because projectionists kept collections of such stuff or because the law was cracking down on drive-in screens that faced the open road. While I can't say THE FEMALE BUNCH is a good film, watching it definitely gave me the feeling of sitting out under the stars with a concession stand nearby - and what it inadvertently tells us about the secret hopes and fears of the average 1971 man gives us something to chew on for days thereafter.

With two discs down and a dozen left to go, I can already feel my feelings and assumptions about this filmmaker changing - not really becoming more enthusiastic, but certainly more appreciative and sympathetic. As I continue to make my way through Severin's AL ADAMSON - THE MASTERPIECE COLLECTION, I'll be sharing notes here with you. Stay tuned.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.