Death and Dust

You might say the  ’good guys and bad guys’ motif went to Hollywood hell in the late 1960s. Up-close cathode coverage of horrors like Vietnam had suddenly sent the ‘A’ picture scene spiraling into a movement that preached realism.

As the Hays Code began its slow dissolve in 1967, the censors had no choice but to loosen their grip on Hollywood films. Simultaneously, due to a plague of financial slumps at many major studios, producers began green-lighting projects for inexperienced directors who agreed to work quick and on the cheap. This spawned films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976), hailing society’s lowlife underdogs and trigger-happy antiheroes. Soon, surges of brutal onscreen violence and morally ambiguous protagonists became trademarks of this bold and tumultuous era.

But before Travis Bickle was giving NYC his cosmically cathartic clean-up, another kind of antihero had been emerging from a dark movement of genre films in Europe for more than a decade. The spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s were penetrating the American market with galloping conviction in the form of bullets, blood and revenge.

It all started with the imagination of Michael Carreras, a horror heavyweight for Hammer Films who was first to birth the idea of a Euro-Western. In 1961, Carreras directed the English-produced but American-funded Tierra Brutal, (a.k.a. The Savage Guns). With its mean-mugging bandits, low angle shots and archetypical drifter who unwittingly gets caught up between two quarreling parties, Tierra Brutal is a seminal genre entry despite its lack of Italian studio involvement like the “spaghetti” moniker might suggest.

Three years later, Italian director Sergio Leone directed a remake of Kurosawa‘s Yojimbo starring Rawhide‘s Clint Eastwood in his first starring role in a motion picture. The film was titled A Fistful of Dollars and its worldwide success in American movie houses triggered a trend of rough, tough and nihilistic Westerns produced in Italy for the next several years.

Leone’s masterpiece was followed by an equally ass-kicking sequel For a Few Dollars More in 1965, featuring the slick and sneering Lee Van Cleef  (Kansas City Confidential, Escape from New York) in his western movie debut as a gruff hero type. After garnering global success with his violent follow-up, Leone shot the third and most epic installment titled The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in 1966 which would go on to become, arguably, the most recognizable western title of all time. Van Cleef was cast this time as a cold-blooded killer instead, an abstract but stiff reminder to audiences that a man is never who he seems.

Italy’s Euro-Westerns respectfully fall somewhere between the bleak, paranoid lurch of a classic film noir and the mammoth wide-angle scope of a Samurai picture. Like many of the best noirs, spaghetti Westerns have a reputation for their shady-souled main characters who are haphazardly catapulted from their lusty, greed-driven lifestyles into a doomy and disorienting plane of primal law. Coupled with Ennio Morricone‘s bombastic surf guitar-tinged scores, Leone’s obvious Kurosawa influence helped elevate his hard-assed outlaw tales to legendary heights with operatic execution.

These filmmakers helped erase the American notion that adventure films should end sweetly or with heroic closure. After all, it’s a dark world out there, and we all know what happens to good guys in the end. The smart ones are chicken, and the brave ones end up worm meat.

Slice of Life

It’s no secret that Roger Corman has a nose for talent. From the humblest B-movie beginnings, literally thousands of careers over the years have been launched thanks to the man’s showbiz knowhow.

More importantly though, Corman knows ambition when he sees it. The legendary genre practitioner has slapped the training wheels on a slew of Hollywood auteurs, from household names such as Scorsese, Coppola, Cameron and  Sayles to cult maestros like Hellman and Dante.

One of Corman’s earliest proteges was writer/director/actor/film critic and two-time Oscar nominee Peter Bogdanovich. He began his career beneath Corman as both actor and director on such ten-cent gems as The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967) and Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women (1968), the latter of which he directed under the name Derek Thomas.

Corman was the kind of mentor that aspiring filmmakers like Bogdanovich dreamed of. He believes in his apprentices. He proved it when he contracted the young Bogdanovich to make a movie on two conditions: it had to include stock footage from Corman’s own The Terror (1963), and he had to hire an elderly Boris Karloff for at least two days (Karloff still had five days on contract left with Corman’s studio). Bogdanovich agreed and delivered one of the boldest films of the year as well as the role of Karloff’s career.

The movie is 1968′s Targets. Bogdanovich stars in the picture himself as Sammy Michaels, named in tribute to Sam Fuller who helped with the script. For the plot, Bogdanovich simply looked inward, penning young Sammy as a burgeoning filmmaker commissioned to write and direct a movie for an elderly horror actor named Byron Orlock, who is reluctantly starring in one more B-picture before throwing in the towel. For the story, Bogdanovich was simply putting an obvious spin on his own actual situation. Talk about art imitating life. Good thing Corman has a fantastic sense of humor.

Inspiringly enough, Bogdanovich pulled it off with a compelling dynamic, a second narrative following a Vietnam veteran Bobby (Tim O’Kelly in a chilling role) and his domestic struggle to cope with life. Bobby is loosely based on Charles Whitman, the ex-Marine who killed his family and sixteen others atop the University of Texas clock tower. This plotline is approached with an astonishingly realistic tone, disturbing and manic as it inevitably spirals into darkness.

Intelligent as it is shocking, Targets proves itself a thought-provoking dual character study. As Karloff’s Orlock must gracefully accept his old age and mediocre place in the spotlight, so must Bobby deal with his feminized place in the world, unemployed and living beneath his father-in-law’s roof with his wife who works. As Bobby’s conscience begins to teeter, Bogdonavich uses the dual plotline as a clever commentary on the state of the horror genre at the time.

Contrasting yesteryear ‘s spook flicks like Orlock’s with the kinds of real-life horror relevant in a post-Vietnam America, Bogdanovich’s political statement is also a challenge to horror filmmakers everywhere to up their game. He was calling an end to horror like vampires, witches and werewolves, and an awakening to what’s really scary these days. Amidst the succulent subtext, however, Targets is such a genuine joy because of the unforgettable job by Boris Karloff, in what is probably his finest performance. Basically playing himself in the film, Karloff’s emotional performance as a retiring horror film actor gives affirmation to one of my major cinematic yearnings: genre films as a whole suffer from a severe lack of elderly protagonists!

The dual plots begin their collision course once Bobby finally loses his marbles. After murdering his family, Bobby goes on a shooting rampage in Los Angeles, which coincidentally finds its way to Orlock’s final film premier at a drive-in theater. I won’t give away the ending but I can promise you the twist is poetic justice at its most gratifying. There simply aren’t many films out there with as much proof of how risk-taking can pay off.

In the end, Bogdanovich’s Targets is a work of love. As moving as an homage to classic horror and its icons as it is, it is also a love letter from Bogdanovich to Corman. The Terror footage, featuring a very young Jack Nicholson, is thoughtfully utilized as Orlok’s final masterpiece. And why not? Corman is responsible for a laundry list of brilliant movie minds, after all. How many masterpieces is that?

Corman, the drive-in picture wizard, now and then.

Stranger in the House

1962 was an absolutely killer year for suspense films. Polanksi made Knife in the Water, Thompson made Cape Fear and Aldrich unleashed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. In a post-Psycho Hollywood, thrillers were swifter, more brutal and boasted bigger teeth than ever before.

‘What sparked this trend?’ you might ask. The answer is simply this: movie genres are organisms, and they too evolve. Whenever a movement in motion pictures starts to become self-aware, that movement undergoes a mutation, sometimes charging it up for the better with a batch of truly fearless films. One such picture is Blake Edwards’ ’62 “woman in peril” thriller Experiment in Terror. It’s fast, tough and gloomy with a bitterness to it as bleak as it is brawny. A detective procedural, a heist film, a blackmail thriller and a noir all rolled into one, Experiment in Terror is a nail-biting hurricane of a genre movie.

Lee Remick (The Omen, Telefon, The Detective) stars as the beautiful Kelly Sherwood. Late one night, arriving home after a party, Kelly is grabbed and cupped around the mouth by a man in her garage. His asthmatic rasp molests her eardrum with threats to kill Kelly’s sister if she doesn’t obey his orders to steal $100,000 from the bank where she works.

Panicked, Kelly elects the heroics of Detective John ‘Rip’ Ripley, played by American noir vet Glenn Ford (Gilda, Framed, The Big Heat). Uniquely, what makes the detective/victim dynamic so fascinating in Experiment in Terror is that the detective’s presence onscreen never instills the comfort for the victim (or the audience) as it should. The killer is unknown, rendering him omnipresent and exponentially more fearsome in crowded places. The film’s tension is endless as Detective ‘Rip’ struggles for the upper hand against a disturbingly anonymous male force.

Of all the genre exercises rolling through Edwards’ film, noir seems to be the strongest pin holding it all together. Introduced with a drippy nocturne in the film’s opening credits, the film’s music was composed by Henry Mancini (The Pink Panther, Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula). Swanky, sordid and often bordering on exotica jazz, the soundtrack evokes super cool vibes that slink with doom at every key change.

Along with the darkly lounge-laden score, the movie’s subversive tone is magnificently heightened with the help by Philip H. Lathrop‘s stark B&W photography. Shot on location, the broad San Francisco cityscapes add an urban enclosure to the narrative, fencing in our characters to stew in their dilemmas. Paranoid space is huge here, namely in one scene occurring in a mannequin factory, a clear nod to the climax of Kubrick‘s ’55 noir Killer’s Kiss.

It’s a pressure-cooker of a plot crafted by husband and wife team Gordon Gordon and his wife Mildred. Edwards’ film is adapted from the couple’s book Operation Terror, published in ’61. The plot is consistently brisk and surprising in its savageness.

It chugs with the kind of rough attitude of late noirs like Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Kubrick’s The Killing, but achieves a threat of violence that is alarmingly suggestive for even the grittiest thrillers of the period. I’m talkin’ racy. Audiences most likely have no idea the number of times filmmaker David Lynch has referenced this movie in his own works. The answer is higher than you think, and appropriately complimentary to how modern the movie’s themes remain to ring in comparison with today’s no-holds-barred genre experimentation.

Experiment in Terror may be a monster stitched together from many a movie sub-genre, but it never lets its seams show for a second. The acting, editing, camerawork and soundtrack work harmoniously and succinctly, with sophisticated plot surprises designed to frighten and invigorate. Crime buffs need look no further for a palette-pleasing B-genre buffet. If you’ve yet to digest this delectable treasure, don’t waste another minute. Get in line and go wolf it down!

Satanic Panic on Wheels

Following the infamously grisly Manson murders in 1969, the United States underwent something akin to the phenomenon of mass hysteria. Perpetuated by media scare tactics and homespun hearsay, the culture fearfully devolved into a climate of paranoia throughout the 70s and 80s — cult paranoia.

The then recently founded Church of Satan received gobs of newfound media attention, as did occult-tied disasters such as the Jonestown massacre and the McMartin preschool trial which only jolted the nation’s anxiety on the subject. Just about every middle American town at this point in history had their own road that led to hell or perhaps a coven of weirdos up the street who sacrificed nubile blonde virgins at every full moon. Imagine…

Luckily for horror buffs, this led to an ample injection of occult hijinks into the genre that not only put a relevant spin on a typically Gothic theme, but also succeeded in exploiting the nation’s fear of devilish dabbling with a little wit. The incredible success of such films as I Drink Your Blood (1971), The Exorcist (1973) and The Devil’s Rain (1975) respectively bounced Beelzebub back into the box office, but it wasn’t until 1975′s Race with the Devil that the prince of darkness hit the road and upped the octane.

Orgies, motorcycles, rattlesnakes, human sacrifice and a positively wicked car chase at the film’s climax make this edge-of-your-seat occult thriller a one of a kind. Starring Peter Fonda and the late Warren Oates, who had both worked together previously on dread-heavy New Wave western Welcome to Hard Times (1967), Race with the Devil centers on a couple of biker buds who whisk their gals away for a little R&R in their recreational vehicle. Their vacation takes a deadly turn when they accidentally witness a black mass being carried out near their camper and the heathens take notice with a vengeance.

This tensely plotted picture directed by Jack Starrett (Cleopatra Jones, Slaughter, The Gravy Train) is tightly wound with taut suspense and enough high-speed mayhem to turn Spielberg‘s Duel on its axel. Writing team Wes Bishop and Lee Frost were already well established in exploitation with classics like moody sleaze-noir The Pick-Up (1968) and creature romp The Thing with Two Heads (1972) by the time they penned Race With the Devil, allowing Starrett and company to produce one of the doomiest drive-in classics of the golden era.

Unfortunately, lesser known masterworks like this one have a tendency to wind up in the recycling bin for a second go-around in the guise of a remake. Thus is the case of Race With the Devil. The 2011 redo is already in the pipeline. That is not to say, of course, that I’ll be knocking it before I try it. Personally, I’m over bashing remakes before I give them a chance. I can never help having my doubts about these things, but I try and walk into every theater offering a film a clean slate.

On the bright side, the 2011 remake will be written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan, the pair who provided the teleplays for both of John Carpenter‘s episodes of Masters of Horror. Let’s just hope that rumored director Chris Moore of Project Greenlight fame doesn’t flip the suck switch on this one like he did on his first/last feature, the embarrassing After Dark production Kill Theory (2009). Maybe this time he’ll get the help he needs to pull it off; a deal with the devil wouldn’t hurt.

The Unsung Voyeur

Lynch knows it. Cronenberg knows it. A lot of folks think Hitchcock knew it first. He showed the world he knew it when he cast Anthony Perkins as a cross-dressing slasher in Psycho. It was there that the master of suspense exploited an immutable fact of the human condition: people like to watch.

However, only months before Hitchcock led audiences down a path of self-loathing serial sadism in 1960, Michael Powell directed a film in 1959 that rattled UK critics and audiences so deeply, it completely nuked his career. The film is Peeping Tom, and its depravity knows no bounds.

If a film’s strength lies in its capacity to violate, then Peeping Tom is a pervy thunder god of Olympian proportions. Starring German-born Karlheinz Bohm as a psychopathic cameraman, Peeping Tom is a uniquely unsettling character study that couples the erotic thrills of voyeurism with the merciless tone of a horror flick to create an effect that is double disturbing.

The movie explores the fear-addled mind of Mark Lewis (Bohm), a young man who scouts female models for use as photo subjects. Much like Psycho‘s Norman Bates, Mark is stealthy and introverted, easily able to peak the interest of women attracted to male fragility. Little do the gals know that the meek photo geek is deeply wounded from a childhood of fear experiments conducted by his psychologist father. Mark helplessly plays out his psychosis, wrangling up the models to satiate his own sexually violent appetite for experimentation, exacting his bloodlust whilst gazing through the phallic lens of his camera.

Unfortunately, due to the unsettling chord it struck among various political and religious entities, the film was immediately shunned, banned in many cities and also became the subject of a notorious court hearing. As for director Powell’s career, it was ruined. It was almost as if the minds of moviegoers had been wiped clean with no memory of his previous critically-acclaimed efforts such as Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and his Academy Award-winning Thief of Baghdad. Peeping Tom would rot in obscurity for twenty years until 1979, when Martin Scorsese exhumed a print for a screening at the New York Film Festival.

As the early 80s were a time of Video Nasties and horror buff witch hunts in the UK, the picture still didn’t catch on globally for some time, though it continued its art-house circuits in the US as critics’ reviews finally began shedding light on the film’s complex craftsmanship. Sadly, Powell never seemed to flex his movie muscles in the same way ever again. In the thirty years following Peeping Tom‘s release, he made three more films until his eventual death in 1990.

Though birthed at a time of persecution and censorship in the British film arena, Peeping Tom remains infinitely more disturbing than anything Hitchcock could have cooked up on the Hollywood backlot in 1960 under the Hays Code (which wasn’t lifted until ’68). Sympathy for sexual deviants in cinema is commonplace now of course, but once upon a time men like Powell were outlaws in their craft. Fortunately for those of us born on the other end of the century, The Criterion Collection has put out a brand new release of Peeping Tom on DVD complete with a documentary on the film and its screenwriter, Leo Marks. But you might wanna watch it when no one’s looking…

Boiling Over

Nobody trolling the dregs of the male psyche can dig up darker dirt than Paul Schrader. With a career spanning almost four decades, Schrader’s noir-infused character pieces have consistently injected the mainstream with a violent brand of desperation. Particularly in his mid-70s work, the philosophy is clear: every man has his breaking point.

In fact, the man’s first four films he put to paper were all explosive and bloody exercises in exploitation. After penning The Yakuza along with Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Parallax View), Schrader went right to work inventing the angriest anti-hero ever written for the screen. While the screenwriter was only twenty-six years old, Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver introduced the planet to Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a man who could not take it anymore.

Bickle is a battle-warped soul in search of salvation. After returning home from a tour in ‘Nam, Bickle takes up a graveyard shift as a cabbie in New York City York City. For the first time in his life he glimpses the violence, drugs and prostitution that ooze from the cracks of after hours in the big city. As his disgust with the world finally reaches intolerable levels, Travis teeters into madness, becoming hellbent with purpose and the thought of exacting righteous malice.

Martin Scorsese turns Schrader’s script into a noir fairytale of 1970s New York, whose principal knight in shining denim is purely a misunderstood victim of post-war stress syndrome. De Niro’s cutting voice-over gives a lonesome edge to Bickle, one that heightens the characters alienation to the explosion point.

Lucky for us, Schrader revisited the man-on-the-brink philosophy two years later in 1977′s Rolling Thunder. Co-written with Heywood Gould (The Boys from Brazil), the picture was optioned to Director John Flynn (The Outfit, The Defiance) who turned Schrader’s powerful script into a primal display of post-war tension turned brutal cinematic catharsis.

The picture was originally to star Kris Kristofferson (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) who dropped out at the last minute. The role of Major Charles Rane instead went to Kennedy-esque character actor William Devane. In the film, upon returning home from eight years in a Vietnam P.O.W. camp, Major Rane anticipates spending the rest of his days in the close comfort of family and old friends in his tiny Texas hometown. His dreams are rousted when he gets home and his kid can’t remember him and his wife is in love with another man.

His hometown awards him with silver dollars for his war efforts and he subsequently becomes the victim of a savage home invasion where his wife and child are murdered before his very eyes. After mutilating his hand in the garbage disposal, the assailants make off with his silver dough.

Schrader writes his combat-tainted characters with immense strength to reach deep into the place where their innocence was purged and utilize the darkness within. After riding out their equally downward spirals, both men inevitably reach their red zones, breaching the cusp of libido-charged explosion. At the climaxes of both films, Schrader’s work pulsates with brutally masculine fervor as bloodthirsty as it is masochistic. There is no hope for the wicked when vengeance takes the wheel and morality has evaporated.

Good thing I flushed morality down the commode when I started wolfing down exploitation flicks.

Death Be Not Proud…

It started with a book. The book became a screenplay and author William Peter Blatty went home with the 1973 Oscar for adapting his own work. Soon The Exorcist became the biggest movie on the planet and the first horror film ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award.

Fast forward to seventeen years and one messy sequel later. Blatty whipped up another script dabbling in Christian darkness, this time adapted from his 1983 novel Legion. He offered the picture to genre wizard John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape From New York) who respectfully turned him down. Blatty decided to direct the movie himself and it’s time we prostrate ourselves in thanks that he did. 1990′s The Exorcist III is an authentically horrifying masterpiece.

The Exorcist III‘s tragically underrated status in the world of horror is genuinely puzzling. Blatty somehow was able to zero in on the bleak and harrowing sensation of horror in reality, almost uniform to the quiet brand of dread tailored by director William Friedkin in the first Exorcist. John Boorman took his crack at the franchise in 1977 with the scattered Exorcist II: The Heretic. As I see it, Exorcist II is simply the Godfather III of the series. It’s not unwatchable, but the movie’s seams show right through as it hopelessly claws for Friedkin’s ice cold tone.

To a greater extent than the first movie, The Exorcist III is a police procedural that nails what few like it can. George C. Scott makes his second career reprisal of a role made famous by Lee J. Kobb (the other was TV’s 12 Twelve Angry Men), here playing Lt. Kinderman. He acts with such sadness and strength that the film’s detective story not only balances airtight plotting, but works on an emotional level as well.

However, I’m afraid Scott’s explosive portrayal of the film’s white knight can’t hold a candle to the movie’s dark lord, Brad Dourif. In the film, he plays the Gemini Killer, based on the real-life Zodiac Killer who knifed up five Californians in the 60s and 70s. Dourif’s portrayal of a sadistic serial sociopath is played with calculated menace, equally elegant as it is chilling. Plus, the legendary character actor knows a thing or two about restraint. The Milton-spouting Gemini Killer is anything but rude as a servant for the one whom he refers to as “the master”.

Another reason I never understood why this film is so often overlooked is because of the peculiarly high number of cameos. Don’t be surprised to see many familiar faces in the film such as a dubbed Samuel L. Jackson playing a blind man and Larry King playing himself ordering lunch at a restaurant. Also, look out for cameos by Fabio and the NBA’s Patrick Ewing. Don’t worry, they fit Blatty’s mold, and they’re a lot spookier than usual. Well, maybe not Larry King. He’s an owl-face.

Speaking of celebrities, did I mention The Exorcist III was Jeffrey Dahmer‘s favorite movie? Food for thought…