Columnists
Entries from December 2022
By Todd Garbarini
Bigfoot
was all the rage in the 1970s and it seemed as though you could not look
anywhere without hearing about it. Alternately known as “Sasquatch”, Bigfoot is
the description given to a large, man-sized hirsute creature reputed to live in
the woods in the Pacific Northwest section of the United States. There have
been many “sightings” over the years of this creature, with many people
claiming they have photographed and even encountered it. The Loch Ness Monster
off the coast of Scotland was yet another subject of mystification and intrigue which rebounded in popularity
during the 1970s.
As
a youngster, I recall not fully giving credence to the notion that this
“monster” really existed but also being unnerved by the myriad docudramas that
attempted to explain or hint at some sense of veracity when it came to
discussing the subject. My favorite show at the time, The Six Million Dollar
Man, pitted the titular hero Steve Austin (Lee Majors) against Bigfoot (an
unrecognizable André René Roussimoff, better known as André the Giant) in early
1976, with its less successfully sister show, The Bionic Woman, continuing
the storyline later that year, with Ted Cassidy now all dolled up for a fight. Leonard
Nimoy’s episode of In Search Of…, which aired in New York on Monday, January
31, 1977, explored the possibility of the creature’s existence. Three months
later we were subjected to the TV-movie Snowbeast, a fun film about patrons
at a ski resort being terrorized by a rampaging killer beast, essentially Jaws
set in the snow. Bigfoot even became a humorous throwaway line by Roberts
Blossom in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, also
from 1977.
In
addition to docudramas, there have also been a good number of films about
Bigfoot coming into contact with humans, but the results are never pretty. Joy
N. Houck Jr.’s Creature from Black Lake (1976) is one of those
low-budget, independently lensed thrillers that made the rounds throughout the
Midwest but never seemed to make it to larger markets such as Los Angeles,
Chicago or New York. Filmed during September and October of 1975 and released regionally
on Friday, March 12, 1976, Creature begins with an image that could have
just as easily been pulled from the ending of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare
Jessica to Death (1971) but gives way to two fishermen (one of whom is
character actor Jack Elam) in a motorboat in the Louisiana swamps. The younger
of the two gets pulled into the water by a creature that is mostly heard rather
than actually seen. Meanwhile, two graduate students, Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) and
Rives (John David Carson) head to Louisiana to look into the existence of this
mysterious creature in the hopes of getting townspeople to talk. Joe Canton
(Jack Elam, who I first saw in the ill-fated TV show Struck by Lightning,
which co-starred Jeffrey Kramer, in September 1979) opens up about it in his
own crazed way. However, Sheriff Billy Carter (Bill Thurman) not only refuses
to speak about the subject but admonishes the students to leave.
Grandpa
Bridges (lovable Dub Taylor) is another community member who is initially
reticent about the creature since it terrified his wife. However, when money is
waved in front of his face, he has a change of heart and permits the students
to break bread with his family. All is well until Pahoo’s parapraxis sends Mrs.
Bridges into a frenzy, incurring Grandpa’s wrath and sending them on their way
to investigate on their own.
Dismissed
by most critics at the time, Creature is an entertaining film that
benefits immensely from stellar camerawork by future John Carpenter alumni Dean
Cundey. The film has never been properly represented outside of a theater
before having been shot anamorphically but cropped for its New York television
premiere on CBS after midnight on Friday, November 30, 1979, while later finding
its way into syndication on channel 9 in New York in the early 1980s. Unless
you were one of the folks who caught up with the film under these circumstances
or through one of its several DVD releases, the best way to see it now is on
the excellent Blu-ray from Synapse Films which is mastered from a 4K scan of
the original camera negative, a vast improvement over all previous airings and
releases.
There
is a feature-length audio commentary with writer Michael Gingold and film
historian Chris Poggiali. They expound upon the film’s merits and detriments and
speak enthusiastically about both the movie and the Bigfoot subgenre. Both men
are erudite and articulate and it makes for an entertaining and informative
listen.
There
is also a 19-minute extra called Swamp Stories with Director of Photography
Dean Cundey which is exactly what it says it is. If you are interested in
Mr. Cundey’s background and a discussion of the technical aspects of the production,
this piece is very interesting.
Lastly,
we have the theatrical trailer and the radio spot!
Oh,
how the radio spots for horror films freaked me out when I was a kid!
A
very cool package indeed, topped off with reallynice cover art by the late
great Star Wars alumni Ralph McQuarrie.
Click here to order from Amazon
By Todd Garbarini
My
introduction to science fiction came in the form of George Lucas’s Star Wars
(1977), though many would argue that this initial film in the first trilogy is
a glorified western set in outer space. This was a point of view I would not
have remotely considered the following summer when my father bought me a copy
of the June 1978 issue of Space Encounters magazine featuring an article
on and, best of all, photos of this glorious space opera. Among the other films
showcased in this magazine that were new to me were Destination Moon
(1950) and The War of the Worlds (1953), the latter of which was depicted
in beautiful color, filling me with intrigue. When I think of science fiction
now, the images of Douglas Trumbull’s slow-moving spaceships gliding through
space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the
mothership landing near Devil’s Tower in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters
of the Third Kind (1977), or the dystopian landscape of Los Angeles in
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), come to mind. Back then, however, the
effects were a lot more primitive but no less effective to a child’s eyes: something
about the way these creepy-looking, Manta-shaped Martian ships with cobra-like
heads that fire a deadly heat ray capable of incinerating just about anything
in its path unnerved me. It is this film that is now available from Paramount
Home Video in a gorgeous new 4K UHD Blu-ray, in a double feature set of two
discs that also includes a standard Blu-ray of 1951’s When Worlds Collide,
clearly the lesser of the two films.
Dr.
Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is an atomic scientist who gets more than he
bargains for when he stumbles upon a heated object that has crash-landed
nearby. At the impact site, he meets Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and her
pastor uncle, all confused by the scene before them. Later, Martian ships
emerge from the site, and it is reported that similar scenarios are playing out
in other parts of the country. The United States military finds their weapons (even
atomic bombs!) to be of no use against the Martian invaders who employ the use
of the heat rays. Clayton and Sylvia make their way to a farmhouse and
encounter a strange looking electronic eye that the Martians use to investigate
the premises, but Clayton hacks off the electronic eye and manages to collect a
blood sample from the arm of a wounded Martian that we only see briefly. Their
blood proves to be the key to understanding them, as well as their undoing: Earth’s
bacteria is too much for the Martians and their supposed invincibility no
longer is an issue when then germs bring about their demise.
The
War of the Worlds has
been around for over one hundred years in various forms, beginning life in the
late 1890’s as a multi-part story published in Cosmopolitan if you can
believe it, then as a novel and, most famously, as a notorious radio broadcast emceed
by Orson Welles on the night before Halloween in 1938 that led to mass panic by
those listeners unfortunate enough to miss not only the program’s beginning
disclaimer, but the three mid-broadcast announcements emphasizing the play’s
fictional nature. Listeners actually believed it to be a real news broadcast!
The film opened in New York on Thursday, August 13, 1953 at the Mayfair on 7th
and Broadway on a panoramic screen with stereophonic sound. It was nominated
for three Academy Awards: Film Editing, Sound Recording, and won by default for
Special Effects on Thursday, March 25, 1954 because no other film was in the
category. Steven Spielberg directed a
very effective interpretation of this material following the 9/11 attacks; that
version was released in the summer of 2005 and featured Gene Barry and Ann
Robinson as Tom Cruise’s in-laws at the film’s end (love it!).
The
new 4K Ultra High-Definition release contains the following extras that have
been ported over from the 2005 Paramount DVD of the film:
There
is a wonderful, feature-length audio commentary with Gene Barry and Ann Robinson.
There
is a secondary audio commentary with Joe Dante, Bob Burns, and Bill Warren
which is very funny, anecdotal and engaging.
The
Sky is Falling: Making The War of the Worlds (SD – 29:59)
H.G.
Wells: The Father of Science Fiction
(SD – 10:29)
The
Mercury Theater on the Air Presets: The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from
1938 (HD – 59:30)
Original
Theatrical Trailer (HD – 2:20)
When
Worlds Collide (1951),
released in New York on Wednesday, February 6, 1952 at the Globe on 46th
and Broadway, depicts the effects of a mob mentality when word gets out that
scientists have accurately predicted the end of the world but are shrugged off
as crackpot theorists. Dr. Cole Hendron (Larry Keating) is given photographs
from a pilot, David Randall (Richard Derr), who has taken them on the sly.
Along with his daughter Joyce Hendron (Barbara Rush), Dr. Hendron’s fears
become a reality. A star by the name of Bellus is on a collision course with
Earth and disaster is only eight months away, proving that aside from one’s own
personal health the most important asset a human can possess is time. Young,
healthy, and attractive people are singled out to make a future trip to a
planet, Zyra, that is travelling in Bellus’s orbit for purposes of continuing
the Human Race. First, however, a spaceship needs to be constructed to do this.
Along the way, Joyce has to choose between her boyfriend Dr. Tony Drake (Peter
Hansen) and her attraction to Randall while a wheelchair-bound wealthy
businessman, Sidney Stanton (John Hoyt), demands to be saved in exchange for
money and also wants the right to choose who goes on the ship. A mad dash is
made to build the ship (other countries around the world follow suit) and
miraculously the feat is pulled off in record time. Just as August 12th
arrives, the doubting Stanton berates the doomsday predictors until the world
begins crumbling around them. He tries fruitlessly to make it to the ship until
the door closes and it leaves Earth’s atmosphere, rocketing itself to Zyra,
where the passengers make a smooth landing and are greeted with the prospect of
a new life.
Both
of these films are the brainchild of György Pál Marczincsak, better known as
George Pal, who is also known to American audiences for his earlier colorful Puppetoons
films, and the charming 1950 Jimmy Durante-Terry Moore outing The Great
Rupert (1950). He would go on to direct Russ Tamblyn in both Tom Thumb
(1958) and The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm (1962), the latter
in Cinemarama.
The
War of the Worlds was
released on standard Blu-ray in 2020 on the Criterion Collection which had features different from the one provided here.
Likewise, When Worlds Collide was released in a now out-of-print special
edition from Imprint that included a handful of extras, although the sole extra
on this Blu-ray is the film’s trailer.
Recommended
for died-hard Pal fans!
Click here to order the limited edition release from Amazon
Berghahn Books
Hardback
262 pages
22 illustrations
ISBN 978-1-80073-477-7
RRP: $135.00 /£99.00
Published: May 2022
Review by Adrian Smith
Back in the early 1990s, when I was around seventeen
years-old, a friend and I took a train down to London to see a musical on
Shaftesbury Avenue. It was our first time in the big city. We got there early, so we decided to go for a
walk around the area. This meant that within minutes we found ourselves
wandering the streets of Soho. It was about 10 AM, and we walked down its
streets and alleys slightly goggle-eyed at the sex shops and clubs. As we
walked past one venue a man asked us, “Do you want to see some girls?”, and we
panicked and ran back to the relative safety of Shaftesbury Avenue, deciding we
would get into less trouble whiling away the time in McDonalds.
Soho seems to have always had a reputation for sex and
vice. From the Windmill Theatre to the Raymond Revue Bar, and from private
members cinemas to the phone boxes plastered with calling cards offering
personal services, entering the alleyways of Soho was like stepping into another
world free from the moralising judgment of conventional society. But it wasn’t
just about sex. The film industry had also set up shop, with all the major, and
many minor, film companies establishing their UK base in offices around Soho
Square and on Wardour Street. Even the British Board of Film Classification
(originally the British Board of Film Censors) can be found there. Soho’s pubs,
clubs and restaurants attracted artists, musicians, politicians, journalists
and celebrities, as well as prostitutes, gangsters and corrupt cops. It’s no
wonder that this vibrant, Bohemian and occasionally dangerous atmosphere became
the source of so many stories. The film producers of Soho only had to look out
of their windows for inspiration.
In Soho on Screen, screenwriter and journalist
Jingan Young delves into the origins of Soho and its function as a refuge for
migrants. After the Second World War additional migration saw the rise of coffee
bars and restaurants offering food from a dazzling array of countries,
cementing this notion of a cosmopolitan oasis in the centre of London. There is
interesting discussion on a number of films set in Soho during this designated
time period of 1948-1963, perhaps the golden age before the shine started to
wear off towards the end of the 1960s. Many British films were set in Soho,
from the Val Guest mystery Murder at the Windmill (1949) through to the
new youth-oriented films like Expresso Bongo (1960, also by Val Guest
and starring a young Cliff Richard) and Beat Girl (1960). Sometimes the
streets of Soho themselves were used as locations, but often parts of Soho were
completely recreated in studios, such as the lavish Miracle in Soho
(1957). On the latter film Young explores the way the movie attempted to
reflect the migrant experience in Soho, sadly to a poor box office performance.
Films that played on Soho’s more notorious reputation for sleaze and glamour
tended to be more successful, such as the strip club settings of the Jayne
Mansfield-starring Too Hot to Handle (1960) or The Small World of
Sammy Lee (1963).
Young’s writing is engaging and well-researched, and, as
with many of these types of books, will leave the reader seeking out many of
the films analysed. It’s a fascinating period in British cinema history, and
focusing on films connected to this one square mile of London is a great way to
really dig into that history. Soho on Screen is highly recommended.
During the writing process Jingan Young also started a
podcast called Soho Bites, which is still going (now with a different
presenter) and has a great back catalogue of discussions on all sorts of
interesting films and topics. It can be found here: https://www.sohobitespodcast.com/
Soho on Screen: Cinematic Spaces of Bohemia and Cosmopolitanism,
1948-1963
can be ordered here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/youngsoho
Headpress Publishing
2019
249 pages
b&w illustrations
Available in
paperback and hardback
ISBN: 9781909394667
RRP: £17.99
(Paperback) & £25 (Hardback)
Review by Adrian
Smith
Before you roll your
eyes at the thought of yet another film review book, hear me out: Nick Cato,
author, podcaster and columnist, is not simply offering us his opinion on
dozens of forgotten 1970s and 1980s exploitation films including Hitch Hike
to Hell, Goin’ All the Way, Horror Planet (aka Inseminoid),
Lunch Wagon Girls, The Loch Ness Horror and Psychos in Love,
but he is also recalling the experience of watching those films in cinemas in
and around the New York area. This is a series of flashbacks to a time in the
early 1980s when, as a teenage boy, he and his friends were interested primarily
in two things; horror and nudity, and the lengths that they would go to in
order to gain admission to the cinemas where these films were showing. He
discusses the enticing ad campaigns, clearly aimed at him and people like him,
and how frequently they were disappointed by the films themselves. He also
recalls the viewing experience, where often the worse the film got, the louder
and more entertaining the audience became. There was even a time a friend’s
ex-girlfriend dumped a milkshake all over them. These digressions and
descriptions of noisy, howling audiences really paint a vivid picture of that
grindhouse experience that has become so mythologised of late thanks to the
likes of Tarantino. For those of us who never attended such a venue,
recollections like these here are akin to a dispatch from the front line.
Originating as a
column on the Cinema Knife Fight site, Cato wrote about dozens of films
and cinema-going experiences, and he also took the opportunity to occasionally
discuss more recent films and speak to filmmakers and actors. Interviewed in
this book is, amongst others, Peaches Christ, the director of 2010’s All
About Evil, and grindhouse royalty in the form of director Frank
Henenlotter.
Suburban
Grindhouse is a nostalgic and entertaining look back at
the cinema experience in the early 1980s, when a thirteen-year-old boy with a
moustache could gain entrance to R-rated films and be either titillated or
terrified, sometimes by the films and at other times by the audience.
Click here to order from Amazon USA
Click here to order from Amazon UK
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