I've spoken before about my inexplicable interest in cheap, trashy movies about motorcycle gangs. Two more films in this genre arrived this month. Hop on the back of my chopper and let's take a ride into the wild world of weirdos on wheels.
The Sidehackers
The opening credits are odd. The image is reduced to a tiny part of the screen, surrounded by black.
So is it The Sidehackers or The Side Hackers?
My sources in the movie biz tell me that this thing was originally called Five the Hard Way, which is also the name of the song we hear during the credits. My guess is that they had to chop up the opening to squeeze in the new title.
Anyway, we soon meet a pair of young lovers as they frolic in the woods and fields. Boy pushing girl in a swing, both of them running through flowers in slow motion, etc. Corny stuff.
Diane McBain as Rita. She was in The Mini-skirt Mob, too.
Ross Hagen as Rommell. He was in The Hellcats AND The Mini-Skirt Mob!
We meet Rommell's married buddy, who tells him all about the wonders of matrimonial bliss. This romantic domestic drama is interrupted by the arrival of a guy who makes a living by performing stunts on a motorcycle. (We never actually see this.) He's accompanied by his girlfriend and his gang.
Claire Polan as Paisley and Michael Pataki as J. C.
Fans of Star Trek may recognize Pataki. (Hint: It should be hauled away AS garbage!)
Then we get some sidehacking. Oh, you don't what that is? Well, it's a sort of motorcycle racing in which a guy is hanging off the side of the bike on something like an open metal cage. Don't worry, this has nothing at all to do with the plot, and we'll never see it again.
Sidehacking!
The plot gets going when the sadistic J. C. beats up Paisley, who then tries to seduce Rommell. He's a one-woman kind of guy, so he rebuffs her. In retaliation, she tears her clothes and tells J. C. that Rommell attacked her.
This sudden change in mood from romance and racing to violence is jarring. Believe me, it gets worse.
J. C. and his goons beat Rommell savagely. Much more shocking, they rape and kill Rita. After some time goes by, Rommell assembles a crew and sets out for revenge. Don't expect a happy ending.
Fans of action movies will be disappointed by how the film slows down to a crawl until we get to the final battle. Pataki chews the scenery as the psychotic J. C., and everybody else is pretty bland. (One of Rommell's army — that's probably why he's named for an infamous Nazi general, even though he's supposed to be, more or less, the good guy — is named Crapout. He's our wildly inappropriate comedy relief, has a thick Southern accent, and is really annoying.)
One star for an odd combination of boredom and nastiness. Cut out the most disturbing scenes and you might have something worth mocking with some buddies.
Satan's Sadists
This one jumps right into the vile stuff. Before the opening credits, a motorcycle gang comes across a man and woman. They rape the woman, then kill both of them. This is just a hint of what's to follow.
The opening credits feature some interesting abstract animation, and may be the best thing in the film.
A married couple picks up a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere. He just got out of the Marine Corps after serving in Vietnam. They wind up at a little restaurant/gas station in the desert.
From left to right, the waitress who is our heroine; the ex-Marine who is our hero; and the married couple. Not shown is the owner of the place.
The motorcycle gang shows up and immediately starts making trouble. The leader is a guy named Anchor. His girlfriend (whom he abuses as much as J. C. did Paisley) is Gina.
The other hoodlums each have some kind of gimmick. One wears a hearing aid, one takes LSD all the time, one has only one eye, one is big and strong, and one is an Indian. (The last is nicknamed Firewater, and is probably the least evil of the gang. Naturally, he's played by a non-Indian, John "Bud" Cardos, a pretty well-known stuntman of Greek ancestry.)
Russ Tamblyn as Anchor. You may remember him from lots of movies, such as West Side Story and The Haunting.
[Are you sure that's not Arte Johnson? He looks 'very interesting'. (Ed.)]
Regina Carrol as Gina. She's married to Al Adamson, the director. He also recently gave us Blood of Dracula's Castle.
The gang takes everybody prisoner. All but two of them haul the married couple and the guy who owns the diner outside. They rape the woman then kill all three of them.
Inside the place, the ex-Marine manages to overpower the two gang members left to guard them, killing both. He and the waitress escape via dune buggy, but the vehicle soon breaks down. It all leads up to a battle in the desert.
(As if this weren't horrible enough, the big chase scene is interrupted when the gang finds three young women on a geology field trip. Of course, they torment, rape, and kill them. This is when Firewater objects to the murders, proving that he's still got a tiny bit of decency hidden deep inside. His disagreement with Anchor leads to a big fight scene, made more effective by the experience of stuntman Cardos.)
Boy, this is nasty stuff. It definitely delivers all the shocks it promises, unlike the occasionally tepid The Sidehackers. It's a lot more coherent than Blood of Dracula's Castle, or Blood of Ghastly Horror, another offering from Al Adamson. For those reasons, I have to give it two stars.
After this double feature, it's time to take a long, hot shower. Let's hope future motorcycle movies won't be quite so slimy.
Coming soon! As the poster indicates, it's already been shown at the famous Cannes film festival. Let's hope it's better than these two films.
It’s exam time here at Royal Holloway College, and there’s nothing better than a bad movie to burn off the stress whether you’re studying or marking. As a break from examining sociology papers, I’ve taken in a double bill of new American movies to check out the state of the low-budget horror world in, well, the States.
Poster for Blood of Dracula's Castle
A young couple (Gene O’Shane and Barbara Bishop) inherit a castle somewhere in Arizona (yes, really). Upon arrival, they find out that the tenants are Dracula (Alexander D’Arcy), his wife (Paula Raymond), his pagan priest butler (John Carradine and probably the best thing in the movie), a shambling moronic manservant named, for some reason, Mango (Ray Young), and a werewolf (Robert Dix). At this point the viewer should be wondering if this is, in fact, a spoof along the lines of The Addams Family or Carry on Screaming, but no, apparently it’s being done straight. It continues on in the same grab-bag-of-horror-cliches vein (pun intended), echoing the Mad Libs feel of the title, up to an ending which I think is a cargo-cult version of the climax of Witchfinder General.
The Draculas: they're just regular folks.
Which is a pity, because I think there could be genuine satirical potential in a modern-day Dracula. He and his wife are living an affluent and luxurious Southwestern socialite lifestyle; rather than biting their victims to death, they have a cellar full of young women whose blood they periodically extract and drink from wine-glasses. It’s not too far a stretch to view this as a metaphor for the movie world, where the old and established prey on the young and naïve, and get away with it thanks to a permissive social environment. Their relationship with the werewolf, Johnny, is also one that could have been more interestingly explored, as they use him to do their dirty work so as to maintain plausible deniability. But this isn’t that movie.
I never like to be totally negative about a film, so I will say that the landscape is beautiful and is shot to its best advantage. The castle scenes were filmed at the real-life Shea’s Castle, a 1920s folly in the California (not Arizona) desert, and I’d like to see more of it. The opening features a groovy theme tune that really ought to make it into the charts.
There's also a human sacrifice scene, because you have to have one of those for some reason.
However, the acting is wooden, the script appears to be a first draft, there are a lot of time-wasting filler sequences and inexplicable character actions. For instance, the girls that the Draculas have chained up in the cellar apparently just hang there, not bothering to attempt escape or even conversation. A human sacrifice to the god (sic) Luna takes place right in front of our protagonists and neither of them do anything to stop it or even raise an objection. The horror is surprisingly chaste and bloodless (particularly given the movie’s title) so there isn’t even the benefit of titillation or a good cathartic wallow in gore. The opening section is a long and seemingly pointless advertisement for an aquatic theme park named Marineland.
One star, mostly for the castle.
Poster for Nightmare in Wax
Vincent Renard (Cameron Mitchell), a brilliant Hollywood makeup artist and lover of the beautiful actress Marie Morgan (Anne Helm), is disfigured when the studio head Max Block (Berry Kroeger), who has designs on Marie himself, throws a glass of wine at Renard just as the latter lights a cigarette. Some time later, Vincent is working at a Hollywood-themed wax museum; Marie’s boyfriends seem to have a habit of disappearing, and tribute mannequins of them winding up in Vincent’s wax museum. You can see where this is going, particularly as one can assume his revenge plan for Max is a bit more complicated than simple murder, though there’s a twist at the end which could have been better handled.
How to get a head in Hollywood.
The performances are at least better than in Blood of Dracula’s Castle, with two weary policemen (Scott Brady and Johnny Cardos) trying their best to investigate the goings-on and Victoria Carroll providing some humour as Theresa, a mercenary blonde trying to get onto Max’s casting couch. There’s some knowing humour about Hollywood and its incestuous, venal culture, and, once again, there’s a groovy psychedelic dance number, albeit in the middle of the movie rather than the start.
We get a little more motivation for the main character than in the previous movie, through the interesting, if not terribly original, idea which comes in towards the end of the story, that Vincent is convinced everyone else is laughing at him and yet we also see that the other characters, in fact, respect his genius as an artist even if they think he’s a bit weird as a person. His turn towards misogyny is also credibly introduced, as his experiences with Hollywood cause him to believe that all women are simply interested in trading sex for career advancement.
I hope I wasn't the only one who shouted "Frying tonight!" at the sight of the boiling vat of wax.
Again, though, it’s all a bit tedious and bloodless, and the cliché of the bitter, scarred artist has been done, well, to death. This is another movie where the script could definitely have done with another draft: plot threads are left hanging, and the motivations of secondary characters left unexplained. The idea that Vincent is deeply insecure really ought to have been brought into the story earlier than it is. A movie director who is something of a Hitchcock figure, but young and handsome, is introduced with great fanfare, leading one to assume that he will be Marie’s new love interest and the one who saves her from Vincent’s twisted affections, but then he vanishes from the story with no explanation.
Two stars.
One conclusion I’m drawing from this slate of films is that the traditional horror genre is, for the moment at least, played out. Vampires, werewolves, twisted scarred genisues and imperiled ingenues don’t have much to offer these days. The future, on both sides of the Atlantic, is clearly with the folk horror movement.
Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini is quite the character: a provocateur, author, leftist intellectual, and filmmaker. Despite his atheism and devotion to communism, his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew was nominated for multiple Oscars a few years ago, and indeed it's a lovely picture. Now we have Teorema, or Theorem in English, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival late last year to good reception. This is not, at first glance, a "genre" film, although it does have subtle supernatural elements, and like Pasolini's telling of the Jesus narrative it is deeply religiously concerned. It is also a political allegory, and the prudish might take issue with its erotic charge and depictions of homosexuality.
English poster for Teorema.
The film starts in a way that doesn't seem to connect with the proceeding plot, but at first glance it does at least make the film's nature as political allegory explicit. We have a documentary-like scene of a union leader being interviewed about something very strange happening recently: a factory owner has given said factory to his workers, seemingly out of a crisis of conscience. We're immediately met with some heady questions, such as: "Is it possible for the bourgeoisie to be transformed in the name of resolving class conflict? Is it even possible for the bourgeoisie to redeem itself, or are such redemptive acts merely the response to a crisis?" We also get a montage of a desert, near a volcano, which likewise seems unrelated to the plot at first.
Terence Stamp as the visitor.
We then cut to such an upper-class family, a husband (Massimo Girotti) and wife (Silvana Mangano) with their grown children, a son (Andrés José Cruz Soublette) and daughter (Anne Wiazemsky), plus a middle-aged servant (Laura Betti) who lives with the family. (These characters technically have names, but their names are not as nearly as important as the roles they play, so I'll be calling them by the latter.) The family receives a message one day that someone will be arriving soon—maybe for a party at the house that's been planned, but we're not told. We're also not told the name of this person, a handsome visitor played by the young British actor Terence Stamp. The visitor comes and hangs out at the party, but then, for no reason and without anyone objecting, stays with the family for days after the party has ended.
Silvana Mangano as the mother, with a shirtless Stamp.
Teorema is a film heavy on ideas and atmosphere, but rather light on dialogue. Viewers might get antsy at the general slowness of it, with the plot on its surface being very simple, and it's common for there to be no spoken dialogue for several minutes at a time. This is just as well. Those who are familiar with Italian productions know that it's customary in that country's film industry to shoot without sound, and then loop dialogue, music, and sound effects in editing. Non-Italian actors speak their preferred languages on-set and then are later dubbed over in Italian. Stamp only has a handful of lines or so, but each time it's clear that Stamp is not the person talking. Similarly Wiazemsky, a French actress, is not the person speaking her lines, and it seems the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to try syncing the dub actress's line reads with Wiazemsky's mouth movements. It's pretty rough dub work.
Father, daughter, and the visitor on the lawn.
The bad dubbing is occasionally distracting, but it's more than counterbalanced by the film's strong visual language, with Pasolini and cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini working to oscillate between picturesque camera framings and frenzied movements that I have to think were achieved with a handheld camera. The at-times painterly camerawork helps heighten what must be the initial draw for many viewers, which is Stamp's physical beauty—a factor that also draws the members of the family, both the women and men, to him like moths like a flame. The servant is the first to fall under the visitor's spell, so affected is she that after seeing the visitor on the lawn one day she tries to commit suicide. Thankfully the visitor saves her, and not only that, but without any words exchanged between them he makes love to her. It doesn't take long for the mother to be the next "victim" of the visitor's charm, although the strange part of all this is that the visitor doesn't seem to have any ulterior motive for having sex with the people of the household one-by-one.
Anne Wiazemsky as the daughter, with Stamp's groin.
To call Teorema an erotic film, or "pornographic," or something like that, would be overselling it; but at the same time it does have an eroticism more often found in French and Italian productions as of late than here in the States. We even—dare I say it—at one point catch a glimpse of Stamp's… hot dog (and bun(s)). And yet despite having sex (offscreen) with people of both sexes, the visitor can't be easily categorized as heterosexual or homosexual, or even be said to have much sexual initiative. When he seduces the daughter, for instance, she literally takes him by the hand and guides him to her bedroom, after having taken pictures of him on the lawn. The strange paradox here, that the visitor is a seducer and yet also perfectly gentle with his partners, is that he retains a kind of nobility—even a purity. It's implied, and more or less confirmed later in the film, that the visitor is an angel that has taken on a human guise.
One of several pictures the daughter took of the visitor.
Up to about the halfway point, you could say the film is strange but not outright fantastic—that this is something even more unclassifiable: a somewhat erotic allegory that stands on the borderline between the real and the fantastic. But then, for no reason given, the visitor leaves. Clearly the family were expecting him to leave at some point, but the reality of the visitor finally leaving them (presumably forever) hits each of the household members like a truck. The daughter, perhaps being driven mad from keeping pictures of the visitor in a photo album, enters a catatonic state and is driven off to a mental hospital. The son gets out of this situation the best, having taken up painting as a hobby, his fate maybe aligning most with what Pasolini considers the best-case scenario for the bourgeoisie being transformed. The mother starts whoring herself out to young men who eerily resemble the visitor, yet she's unable to fill the hole the visitor had left in her life. The servant leaves the estate and returns to her native village, where she becomes a sort of prophet who can work miracles.
Andrés José Cruz Soublette as the son, who has turned to painting on glass.
Teorema is about 95 minutes long, and is split pretty close to evenly in half, between the visitor's stay and after he leaves. As such it doesn't have the three-act structure that we've come to expect from narrative filmmaking so much as two long acts, or maybe even six acts, with each half of the film having its own three-act narrative arc. Those who came to see Terence Stamp both will and will not be disappointed, since sadly he does leave halfway through the film, but he does make the most of what screentime he has, even with how few lines he is given. Once the visitor leaves, both the characters and the structure splinter, with the second half of the film being concerned with each of the members of the house trying to cope with the visitor's absence in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Curiously, the servant, the only one to come from a working-class background, is also the only one who seems to have been "blessed" by the visitor, resulting in the film's only overtly supernatural moments.
One of the mother's substitutes for the visitor.
When it comes to what little dialogue there is, most of it is taken up by a few extended monologues, one of which especially caught my attention. The father at one point takes a passage from the Book of Jeremiah, although it looks like Pasolini abridged it somewhat and reworded things for his own ends. Here is the passage from the King James translation, Jeremiah 20:7 to 20:10:
O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me.
For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil; because the word of the LORD was made a reproach unto me, and a derision, daily.
Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.
For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, say they, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.
And here is the father's monologue:
You have seduced me, O Lord, and I let myself be seduced. You have taken me by force, and you have prevailed. I have become an object of daily derision, and all mock me. Yes, I have heard the defaming of many, terror on every side. “Denounce him, and we will denounce him.” All my friends awaited my downfall. “Perhaps he will let himself be seduced. Then we shall prevail, and take our revenge upon him.”
There is a great deal that can be said about Pasolini's replacing "deceived" with "seduced," or the fact that the recontextualizing of the passage gives man's relationship with God a homoerotic implication. This is all an ambitious gambit for Pasolini, to combine the religious, political, and erotic, into a single concise narrative.
Laura Betti as the servant, levitating, the villagers watching in awe.
Speaking of the father, we finally learn about the context for the film's opening scenes, with the union leader and the desert. It turns out that the father is the factory owner who has given his property over to his workers, and also that he has humiliated himself in public by stripping naked in the middle of a train station. He sheds his material possessions about as far as humanly possible, and yet even as he wanders naked through the desert (how he got from the train station to the desert on foot is anyone's guess), it's clear that this relieving of wealth does not absolve the father, nor does it bring him happiness. The ending, strange as it is, is up to interpretation, but I have a feeling Pasolini believes it's impossible for the bourgeoisie to redeem itself.
Massimo Girotti as the father, naked in the desert, full of sound and fury.
I believe it was John W. Campbell who, many years ago now, said that if the stars appeared only once in a thousand years that men would surely go mad at the sight of them. (Of course I'm also referring to a certain beloved SF story, although I need not tell you its title.) Similarly, in Pasolini's film, the bourgeoisie are suddenly made aware of their own insignificance because of one divine and beautiful man. (I do not mean to say I find Terence Stamp attractive, although I do think it's fair to say, as an objective statement, that he is quite attractive. Yes.) It's a film about confronting the fantastic and turning to dust because you are unworthy of such a sight. It's a challenging film, maybe a bit too slow and structurally off-kilter, but I have to admit I also found it enticing.
The folk-horror movement shows signs of becoming a craze, and now the Americans are in on the game. The Witchmaker is a movie that makes a virtue of its low budget, though it’s let down by some low-level misogyny and a surprising degree of prudishness.
Poster for The Witchmaker
The story involves a professor who studies psychic phenomena (Alvy Moore) and, since psychic powers are apparently vulnerable to interference by things like radio and electricity, takes a research team including himself, a reporter, his research assistant and a few students out to the backwoods of Louisiana. Their aim is to test the abilities of Anastasia, or “Tasha” (Thordis Brandt), a pretty blonde with witches in her ancestry, and apparently genuine psychic powers. They are also undeterred by the fact that someone in the area has been killing young women and draining them of their blood, which would seem a good reason to postpone the trip, but never mind. This turns out to be the work of Luther the Berserk (John Lodge), acolyte of a two-hundred-year-old witch (Helene Winston and Warrene Ott—she rejuvenates at one point in the film, hence the change in actress). Upon learning about the research team and Tasha’s powers, they resolve to add Tasha to the coven and sacrifice the rest of the researchers. The story ends with a twist which, while not unpredictable, was still fairly satisfying.
The aptly named Luther The Berserk
While the twist has caused a lot of early reviewers to compare the film to Rosemary’s Baby, I think a better comparator is actually The Devil Rides Out, given that we have a pair of older men who genuinely believe in psychic phenomena, attempting to rescue a vulnerable young person from a suspiciously international coven (the only non-White person in the story is one of the witches). Which also marks an interesting culture shift of recent years: a decade ago, this would have been a story of Science Versus Superstition, where older male authority figures would expose the “real” answer behind the witchcraft. Now, however, everyone’s a believer and witches are very real. I think people today are taking a more critical view of science and a more positive view of folk culture, and whether or not that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen.
The main sticking point is an unexpected one. The film apparently wants to imitate British and European horror movies not just in terms of folk culture themes and making the most of a small budget, but in terms of prurient and gratuitous nudity and kinkiness. However, it also seems to be afraid of upsetting the censors too much, so we get scenes like a naked blonde running through the woods with her hands firmly clamped over her breasts so you can’t see the nipples, or the world’s tamest orgy with all whippings and rogerings taking place off-camera. There’s also a little bit of sexism in that the women in the movie are fairly obviously divided between Maggie (Shelby Grant), the Good Girl, who is “plain”, intelligent, and conservatively dressed, and Sharon (Robyn Millan) and Tasha, the Bad Girls, who frolic around in unsuitable nightwear and swimming costumes (in a swamp, in February?) and who both get stalked and punished for their sexual forwardness.
No tits please, we're Americans
In any case, I would say that this isn’t an instant classic like Witchfinder General or The Devil Rides Out, nor is it a schlocky piece aimed only at titillation and diversion. What it is, is an interesting take on folk horror from an American perspective, and worth spending a couple of shillings on. Three and a half stars.
Elsewhere in cinema, the latest offering from Tigon is, despite the presence of Hilary Dwyer as the leading lady, definitely no Witchfinder General. The Body Stealers is a tedious alien-invasion story with an unlikeable protagonist that might have made a reasonable episode of an ITC adventure series if it were half its length.
Poster for The Body Stealers
The story begins with the mysterious disappearance of eleven paratroopers while skydiving. All of them have had training for space flight, a mysterious electrical discharge happens before each disappearance, and yet it isn’t until more than halfway through the movie that someone even suggests aliens might be responsible. One paratrooper turns up but with his biology changed so that he’s not human, and a mysterious blonde named Lorna (Lorna Wilde) is wandering the local beaches late at night and distracting the chief investigator, Bob Megan (Patrick Allen)—- but she also doesn’t seem to be human. After far too much time we eventually get an explanation by a very long expository speech, which I won’t reveal too much about except to say that if you’ve seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers you’ll have worked out what was going on much earlier. Lorna takes off in the Dalek spaceship from Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 AD (no, really), and the whole thing is a waste of everyone’s time.
Bob Megan: rugged, sexy and a knitwear aficionado
This is the sort of story that, a decade earlier, might have been helmed by a Quatermass-figure scientist, but, times having changed, we now get a rugged James Bond type who chases literally anything in a skirt and uses harassment as a means of courtship, and for some reason this succeeds rather than getting him slapped and told off. There are a few witty lines in it (for instance, when Megan is asked what he wants, and he says: “A room at the Hilton”. “Try something smaller.” “Okay, a smaller room at the Hilton”). George Sanders has a rather delightful turn as a general and the cast are generally solid.
Recognise this? You should
Unfortunately, as well as the story being slow and drawn-out, the characterisation is rather difficult to believe, and motivations are opaque or contradictory. There is, for instance, a surprising amount of resistance to the logical suggestion of grounding all parachute drops until they have a decent idea of what’s happening, and the ending requires the perpetrators of the kidnappings to do a 180 degree reversal of strategy for no good plot or character reason. One secondary character (played by Neil Connery, brother of the more famous Sean) dies offscreen and no one, not even his supposed best friend, seems inclined to pursue the matter. I could have forgiven at least some of this if the movie was any fun, but it wasn’t.
One star because I am fine with schlock but not boredom.
"In this generation… Love is understanding, we gotta be free"
lyrics from 'for Pete's sake', performed by the Monkees, written by Joseph Richards and Peter Tork
The Beatles released an album called 'Rubber Soul' in America on December 6, 1965 and it heralded a new era. Practically overnight, the music, the fashion, and the youth all changed. Hemlines rose, hair grew out, psychedelia and rock started to merge, and like never before the teenagers of America became a visible force through their protests and love-ins and consumption.
Someone had the bright idea that this force could be profitable, and thus the Monkees were conceived: a fake band of four handsome, mop topped young men manufactured to sell Kellogg's cereal, concert tickets, and merchandise. They would star in a comedic TV show to create wider access and appeal, to turn them into a real happening deal, and it worked. Every week we tuned in to follow the exploits of the Monkees, narratively portrayed as deadbeat musicians trying to scrape by. It was fast-paced and fun, well executed and unique in that it featured intercut lip-synch segments with original songs by the Monkees. But the show really succeeded for the same reason it ultimately fell apart: the members of the Monkees are genuinely talented and driven musicians.
The legacy of the Monkees is great, with two seasons of the series, countless international live concerts, and several self-written albums. With such strong success, it was inevitable that the Monkees would eventually outgrow the narrow caricatures that first helped them to superstardom. Every member of the Monkees in some regard has raw talent in musicianship, composition, acting, and comedy. They each personally have the capacity to pursue new, innovative projects, and the ambition to do so. There is only one thing that restrains them from that independence: their own legacy.
Particularly in the eyes of the adoring fans, the Monkees are not brilliant creatives, but still silly poor musicians going on adventures to make a quick dollar. Particularly because of the manufactured nature of their origin, nobody expects anything more from them, and thus won't acknowledge what exists beyond the popular false image of the Monkees. Still, there will be, and has been, a transition from the Monkees to just Mickey, Davey, Mike, and Peter, and it is necessarily a destructive and torturous one. To be free and independent in image, they must destroy what they were, or else be confined by it forever.
Nothing makes this more evident than their new movie, Head, which not only hammers the theme of desire for freedom to its audience, but does its best to rend asunder everything that the Monkees used to be. The film is constructed as a series of vignettes which abstractly flow one into the other. Structure is given to the story by three disparate elements. First, the story is circular, with the Monkees literally ending in nearly the same place the movie begins, emphasizing the feeling of being trapped eternally.
Second, we as an audience are given glimpses at the beginning of the movie of everything that happens, artificially creating a sense of foresight, implicating the audience as complacent jailers as the Monkees continuously run in circles for our amusement.
Finally, the essence of each vignette is the same. Every scene is a different scenario of the various Monkee members trying to escape a contrived, television-like setting, which ties all the disparate moments together as one long interconnected attempt to extricate the Monkees from TV itself.
Some of the imagery of imprisonment is very literal, with the Monkees trapped in a big black box, or stranded in the desert without the reprieve of a cool beverage (in itself a play at subliminal marketing), or stuck on the fake set of a Western where the only way to exit is to tear a hole in the backdrop.
There are also more disturbing metaphorical elements that speak to the feelings of being commodified by the very role of famous celebrity. At the end of the one and only concert film the Monkees do in the movie, their stage is swarmed by rabid, screaming fans. The Monkees are subtly replaced by mannequins of their likeness, which are promptly and ruthlessly torn apart by the mindless, grasping swarm of fans. The horror of the moment is compounded by the fact that the music video that precedes it is intercut with actual news footage of victims of the Vietnam War, overlaid with the screaming teenage girls of the concert.
All of this serves to send a complex message to the audience of the film: one that reveals the artificial, facile nature of the Monkee television image when contrasted with the atrocities of the real world, and also demonizes the audience/fans by portraying them as passive and active destructive forces in their pursuit of that very escapist television. This stimulates a call to action to emerge from the cocoon that commoditized Western television provides, and to use the incredible energy of the youth to tear down the fantasies we are complacently spoonfed; it tells us to see the real world, with all the horrors that it entails, and to make change, just as the Monkees want to.
The Monkees themselves are part of this struggle, drifting in and out of character over the course of the movie. Sometimes they are the Monkees of the show, mindlessly filling their roles and facing an artificial enemy who appears in various vignettes (played byTimothy Carey). Other times, reality leaks through as the actors confront aspects of the roles that are distasteful or untrue, such as Peter being disturbed by the idea of hitting a woman, or the Monkees being forced to laugh at a cripple, or even Davey seeing a giant eye behind the mirror—a representation of the audience watching the illusion unfold.
There is only one moment of true clarity and personality in the whole film, when Peter gives his soliloquy as the Monkees are trapped (again) in the black box. His speech, given in silence and with the rapt attention of the other Monkees and the audience, is a refrain on opening the mind to escape and emerge free. It is the one oasis of peace in the movie.
But it does not last, and soon the Monkees are arguing and retracing their steps through all the previous scenes and all their previous prisons, until they reach the grim finale.
The film ends with the Monkees being chased by all the faux villains they've encountered and being cornered atop a high bridge. Without hesitation, Mickey jumps over the side, and soon the other Monkees follow. For a moment, it seems that the only escape is death.
But the Monkees don't die when they hit the water. Instead they plunge into a dreamlike world, free to swim and explore, refracted by strange colors and camera filters, as if their image is finally morphing into something new. But then the dream ends, and it is revealed that the Monkees are actually swimming in a fish tank. They bang on the glass as they are driven away by the 'director', the true, larger-than-life villain of the story. The credits roll and the Monkees are sealed to their Sisyphus-like fate.
It is a bitter and dark ending that successfully taints the happy and carefree image of the Monkees. Yet the nihilism is also refreshing in that it's reflective of the larger helplessness felt by the youthful generation. The stresses of assassinations and poverty and politics and the war underlie the suppressive hopelessness that creates both the depression and the need for fantasy television in the first place. The young are trapped and stifled by their very society; they need a world of media to escape into that grants the illusion of freedom. But the Monkees refuse to be that escape anymore. They want to move on and tell their own stories. They will no longer coddle us and in turn be coddled, because they have a right to an independent identity, and in that vein, so do we. Whether we follow them or not, they will forge a path. The only question is whether, while on their new path, they will be able to emerge from the corpse of their former images. Or if we, in our inability to let go, will drag them back to the grave where the brand that they killed remains.
I think the first step, if you haven't already, is to go watch Head for yourself. It's a bit grim, but also funny and brilliant and an editing masterpiece. The seamless transitions from scene to scene give the viewer the impression of riding a carousel; it's unlike anything else I've seen. It's also a glimpse into the real sentiments of the members of the Monkees, so if you're a fan, it's worth it just for that. But beyond the great acting and the technical execution, I think the true value of the movie comes from how it successfully encapsulates the growing restlessness of our changing society in a way that many art films can't. It has the advantage of the metanarrative that the history of the Monkees' name provides, and thus a richer mode of expression than any one standalone piece. You may find that it changes how you see the world, or at the very least, triggers some unconventional thoughts.
For everything Head tries to do and succeeds at doing, I give it five stars.
The trees are down and the decorations put away, but the Christmas films are still clinging on at the cinemas. The splashiest of these, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is a charming but over-long crowd-pleaser that can be best summarised as “James Bond, but for children.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie poster
After all, it’s a screenplay by Roald Dahl from a story by Ian Fleming, produced by Cubby Broccoli, featuring a handsome protagonist who’s a mashup of Bond and Q, a love interest with a suggestively punny name, a magical car, glamourous footage of automobile races and international luxury travel, a cameo from Desmond Llewellyn, sinister Eastern Europeans who want to steal Western technological secrets….
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is actually two stories. The frame story involves Caractacus Potts, an Edwardian inventor (Dick van Dyke, who has fortunately decided not to bother attempting a British accent after his excruciating failure to sound like a Cockney in Mary Poppins). He is a widower with two children, whose inventions are charming and ahead of their time, including: a vacuum cleaner and a device for sending visual images by wireless; however, they fail to find a market.
He strikes up a friendship with Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes), daughter of a candy manufacturer (James Robertson Justice), who persuades her father to consider Potts’ latest invention, candy whistles called Toot Sweets, but when the whistles turn out to attract dogs her father is furious. Rejected, Potts decides to cheer up his children by buying and fixing up a roadster, which they name Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the noises it makes, and takes the children and Truly on a seaside picnic, where he and Truly fall in love.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang takes flight
And then we get the second story, told by Potts at the seaside to his children and Truly. In this story, the gadget-obsessed Baron of Vulgaria (Gert Fröbe, who played Goldfinger in the eponymous movie) sees the car and vows to steal it. After a long sequence where two bumbling Vulgarian spies try and fail to do this, the Baron succeeds in kidnapping Potts’ father (Lionel Jeffries), an absent-minded caricature of British imperialism. Potts, Truly and the children come to the rescue in Chitty, which is able to turn into a hovercraft and an airplane as needed.
They land in Vulgaria to discover that the country has no children, by order of the Baron, and the sinister Child-Catcher soon kidnaps Potts’ children as well. Aided by a toymaker (Benny Hill, of all people) and a cave-ful of children hiding away from the Child-Catcher, Potts and Truly rescue the children and their grandfather and bring about a “free state” in Vulgaria.
The Baron and Baroness profess their love for each other
Back in the frame story, Truly’s father hits on the idea of selling the candy whistles as dog sweets, and offers Potts a contract for the invention. The Potts fortune is made, and Potts and Truly can marry and live happily ever after.
The story-within-a-story was, to my mind, the weakest part of the movie. The Eastern European stereotypes were more than a little silly and boring, there was an unnecessarily nasty undercurrent of misogyny in that the Baron is constantly trying, and failing, to murder his wife for no good plot or character reason, and I’m really, really uncomfortable about the Child Catcher, a big-nosed bad guy who kidnaps children and takes them off to an unspoken but terrible fate. I’m also finding it a little difficult to imagine Benny Hill, a comedian best known for racy sketches about chasing pretty young women who are less than willing to cooperate, as a cuddly child-friendly character, but presumably the younger people in the audience won’t have this sort of contextualising detail.
See what I mean? Scary, and arguably antisemitic
Another problem, to my mind, is that despite Chitty Chitty Bang Bang itself being the named star of the movie, featuring heavily on the poster and other promotional materials, and getting a long opening montage showing its original career as a racing car, it’s barely in the story. It’s over an hour before Potts finally gets around to building the thing, and, after two exciting flying and hoverboating sequences, it disappears for ninety per cent of the Vulgaria storyline. If, like me, you were expecting a story centred around a fantastic car, you’re going to be disappointed.
We do get a car-versus-boat naval battle though
On the more positive side, the music is absolutely delightful, with songs like the title track, “Truly Scrumptious”, and “Hushabye Mountain” likely to be long-lasting hits. They were composed by the Sherman Brothers of Mary Poppins fame, who clearly know their stuff. Potts’ machines were designed by British cartoonist and found-object sculptor Rowland Emett, and they are well integrated into the action: a sequence where Potts cooks sausage and eggs for his children using a variety of silly contraptions is worth the price of admission, as is a brief sequence with an apparently sentient vacuum cleaner.
There are plenty of opportunities for van Dyke to showcase his skills as a dancer, in particular one in which he pretends to be a live-size marionette in order to infiltrate the Baron’s castle. The Edwardian setting of the movie is in line with the current craze for a kind of fantasy-Edwardiana of straw hats and candy stripes. British comedy fans can enjoy watching out for cameos from the likes of Barbara Windsor, Arthur Mullard and Richard Wattis.
The "Toot Sweets" production number, a candy factory fantasy to a catchy tune
However, at nearly two and a half hours, the movie is really far too long: there was a fifteen-minute intermission at the cinema where I saw it, which was just as well. I’m tempted to suggest that it should cut the Vulgaria storyline, but unfortunately that’s the only part of the movie with any real cinematic action, and without it you’d just be left with a cute but low-stakes love story about an inventor and an heiress. Three stars—most of them for the production, music and dancing.
Jacques Tati’s newest movie, first released in 1967 but only recently screened at the Institut Français in London, is a tremendous achievement, dealing with many of the same themes as his earlier movies but in a much subtler and cleverer way. Although the box office has apparently been disappointing, the film is gradually accumulating the critical acclaim it deserves as it makes its way around the world.
The main theme is similar to that of Tati’s earlier comedy Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958): the idea that technologically-focused modernity is a superficial, soul-destroying philosophy which is ultimately doomed to failure. Playtime, though, takes a more subtle and arguably less conservative approach.
Playtime movie poster
We find ourselves in a fantasy Paris which is nothing but glass, chrome and concrete office blocks: the famous landmarks of the city, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, are only glimpsed in the reflections of windows. The theme is made clearer when we see a tourist bureau with posters advertising London, Stockholm, and Mexico, each with the same office building and a few superficial details (for instance Routemaster buses and Big Ben) to mark the supposed differences. We are in a futuristic fantasy world where every place is the same and the subtle, playful, unpredictable details have been erased. It isn’t an unhappy scenario: the streets are clean and no one is poor or sick. But the pleasure people take in it is superficial and vapid (a tourist exclaiming at a trade fair that “they even have American stuff!”), and they also don’t seem to know what they are missing.
The Eiffel Tower reflected in a window
The film opens in a building where the viewer is left for a long time with no idea as to its purpose: we see black and chrome sofas, glass frontage, small cubicles. An older couple converse in accented English; nuns pass by, as does a priest, and a nurse with a crying baby. Is it a hospital? A government office? Finally we see a man with suitcases and the nature of the building is revealed: it is an airport. Tati’s cinema persona Monsieur Hulot is changed, having shed his pipe and scarf and adopted a grey coat in place of his trademark brown macintosh, but a variety of other people wander around the story in M Hulot’s costume and are mistaken for him. We see office buildings full of filing cabinets which are revealed, when seen from overhead, to be cubicles; we see little dramas play out in an apartment building where all the walls are glass and face onto the street. At one point two groups of people in adjacent rooms watch the same television programme, completely unaware of this shared experience and unable to come together and commune over their enjoyment.
Apartment living: isolating and atomising?
Unlike the way in which Mon Oncle harked back to a nostalgic imagined past, however, Playtime sees the doom of this conformist, modernist approach as lying in the future. The glass-fronted modernity is fragile and superficial, and falls apart at the slightest pressure, and so can’t cope with the everyday fallibilities of humanity, whether M Hulot, who lopes and skips around an office building and a trade fair subtly creating chaos, or his female counterpart in the story, American tourist Barbara (played by Barbara Dennek), who is constantly getting separated from her tour, or even background characters like a group of glaziers whose window-fitting activities subtly become a dance routine, enjoyed by a crowd of Parisians watching them from the street.
M Hulot observing office work
The film’s message is encapsulated in a long, climactic sequence in a fancy restaurant whose superficial efficiency and organisation is a façade. We see a beautiful oasis of elegant food and décor, but when the backstage areas are revealed, we discover that the restaurant is still being built, that the waiters are swapping jackets to hide stains and damage, that the kitchen is chaos. The introduction of M Hulot breaks the boundary between front and backstage and sends the whole thing into a joyous spiral of anarchy: the glass door shatters, the ceiling decoration falls down, the decorous bossa-nova music turns into wild jazz. The lighting fixtures break. Random people wander in off the street. Chairs fall over. Waiters trip. A plastic sculpture of an airplane melts. A wealthy American businessman declares one section of the room his private bistro and invites tourists and workmen to eat and drink at his expense. A drunk is ejected and walks straight back in. The austere and ordered modernity is undermined from all sides.
The car carousel makes Paris playful again
Afterwards, the patrons walk out into a transformed city, one which still includes the office blocks and grey concrete, but where the cars are now colourful, the buildings hung with bunting, and cheerful shops selling cheeses and scarves have replaced the trade fair. M Hulot buys Barbara a gift but, being unable to give it to her, delegates one of the Hulot impersonators to do it. Tati’s direction wittily turns a roundabout into a carousel, a car mechanic’s shop into a fairground ride. The message is not to destroy technological modernity, but to subvert it, and to find ways of making it joyful and playful. Five stars. Go and see it—if you don’t speak French don’t worry, most of the dialogue is in English and the physical comedy carries the action.
The Green Slime movie poster
From the sublime to the ridiculous! The other film I saw this week is the recently-released SF-horror The Green Slime, a Japanese production filmed in English with American and European actors. The plot involves a spaceman, Jack Rankin, sent up to a space station commanded by the man who has stolen his girlfriend, to lead a mission to destroy an asteroid which threatens Earth. In doing so, however, he and his crew accidentally bring back some of the titular slime which, when exposed to radiation, develops into alien monsters which must be fought while the two men and their love object reconcile their romantic interests.
I give this film more points than most reviewers because of the, possibly unintentional but definitely hilarious, Freudian message: a man’s jealousy over his ex-girlfriend’s new relationship causes him to unleash, through the medium of green slime, one-eyed tubular monsters onto the universe, and it’s up to him to bring them under control again. The modelwork is good and the characterisation unsubtle, giving the series the feel of what might happen if Gerry and Sylvia Anderson decided to work with live actors rather than puppets (as I’m told is soon to be the case), but without the budget of a Century 21 production. Definitely one to watch only when inebriated and in the right company, but very fun under those circumstances; I'm not sure if I was supposed to laugh all the way through it, but I did. One and a half stars.
Much as I enjoy the jollity of the festive season, I’m also firmly of the opinion that there is nothing better than a ghost story—or, failing that, a horror story—at Christmas. So I was quite delighted to learn my local cinema would be showing the latest British horror movie, Curse of the Crimson Altar.
Curse follows in the footsteps of this summer’s Witchfinder General in being a film where the horror is not supernatural but psychological, suggesting that this genre may be coming into fashion. Although the biggest creative obstacle Curse has to overcome is that someone behind the scenes, or possibly in the censor’s office, has meant that the actual catalyst for the horror remains subtextual throughout.
At the start of the movie, we get a quote from an unnamed “medical journal” about the influence of psychedelic drugs on the human brain: “drugs of this group can produce the most complex hallucinations and under their influence it is possible by hypnosis to induce the subject to perform actions he would not normally commit.” Thereafter, we get no reference to drugs at all, but it should be fairly clear to the viewer how we should interpret the proceedings.
The plot involves an antique dealer, Robert Manning (Mark Eden), going in search of his brother Peter, who has disappeared on an expedition to hunt for salable stock, sending Manning a single candlestick, a witchfinders’ bodkin, and a cryptic note on notepaper from a country estate, Craxted Lodge in the town of Greymarsh. Arriving at the estate, Manning finds Lord Morley (Christopher Lee) and his niece Eve (Virginia Wetherell) gearing up for a local Bonfire Night-type holiday, celebrating the anniversary of the burning of a local witch, Lavinia Morley (Barbara Steele), the Black Witch of Greymarsh. They claim never to have met Manning’s brother, but invite him to stay with them while he investigates. Manning begins suffering from strange erotic dreams about Lavinia Morley and sleepwalking episodes, and, with the help of a local historian and occult enthusiast, Professor Marsh (Boris Karloff), discovers he is descended from one of the people who sentenced Lavinia to death. Someone is out for revenge, but who, and how, and why?
Lascivious Lavinia as played by Barbara Steele
The movie boasts a lot of familiar names behind and in front of the camera, being scripted by Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman, creators of Doctor Who’s Great Intelligence and Yeti, and featuring Roger Avon, Michael Gough and scream-queen Barbara Steele in supporting roles. Gough in particular does a great turn as a manservant who is either under the influence of malign spirits, or else doped to the eyeballs, at all times. The casting of Lee and Karloff, both seasoned horror veterans who usually play villains but have turned their hand to more benign roles, keeps the suspense going as to who is behind the sinister events, and there's a cute nod to Karloff's role when Manning remarks that he feels “like Boris Karloff might pop up at any moment” shortly before, in fact, he does.
Michael Gough as a zombie manservant.
In many ways the story feels a little like an episode of The Prisoner or The Avengers, involving as it does a villain who is using psychedelic drugs and mind games to wear down an unsuspecting victim. The fact that the script can’t directly say that drugs are involved also helps to make the events more ambiguous, suggesting for most of the movie that Manning might really be haunted by the vengeful spirit of Lavinia Morley. The imagery of the dream sequences is very much drawn from British folk culture, with sinister figures in animal masks and references to the witch-hunts of the 17th century.
Unfortunately, the story is also a little uneven, with a long prurient episode featuring Eve having a debauched party with her young artist friends apparently going nowhere; presumably the intention was to suggest that Eve might be behind, or at least complicit in, the implicitly drug-fueled activities which follow, but it mostly seems to be included to cater to the crowd of people who like to tut about modern youth going wild while secretly enjoying the orgy scenes. Similarly I found the dream sequences more laughable than erotic, with supposed demons and witches walking around clad in strips of imitation leatherette. There are also some gaps in the narrative, which I won’t detail in order not to give away the denouement, and the ending felt rather rushed to me.
Another tedious sex party, ho hum.
All in all, I’d say this is a solid if uneven horror story that keeps the viewer guessing for a long time, and suggests that the non-supernatural horror based in British folk mythology is here to stay.
Three and a half stars.
I’d also like to devote a little time to the B feature on the night I saw Curse of the Crimson Altar, a short and cheap SF-horror from 1964 entitled The Earth Dies Screaming, directed by the supremely talented Terence Fisher. The scenario is straight out of John Wyndham: a test pilot, returning from a high altitude flight, discovers that almost everyone else on Earth has been killed—apparently through some kind of gas attack, as the few survivors are people who, for one reason or another, were not breathing the atmosphere at that point. Less Wyndham-esque are the eerie, silent robots now stalking around the deserted Earth, who bear such a strong resemblance to Cybermen that one wonders if it is simply coincidence or if Doctor Who’s design team had been at the movies before working on “The Tenth Planet”. The robots also have the ability to turn anyone they shoot into grey-eyed, mindless creatures who do their bidding.
See what I mean? That's a Cyberman, that is.
Our hero joins a band of survivors seemingly calculated to provide optimum drama (society woman; hedonistic good-time couple; sinister man in a mac; teddy-boy mistrustful of anyone over 30 and his heavily pregnant young wife) and collectively they attempt to figure out how to survive and to stop the robots, despite the conflicting agendas in the group.
While suffering a little from uneven pacing and characterisation (the teddy boy, for instance, suddenly overcomes his suspicions of the establishment for no reason other than plot convenience), this is a pleasingly eerie 62 minutes. I quite like the sub-genre of apocalypse stories that just focus on a small group of people trying to cope with their changed circumstances, and the parallels with the aftermath of a nuclear war are clear without being didactic.
The Emperor's New Clothes by Harry Clarke, inspired by the fashions of the Lucknow Court in present day India and Turkish fashions, a fitting comparison for this article.
A strange thing is occurring in American menswear this winter. A peculiar, most invisible thing. Invisible not because no one talks about it or buys it or advertises it… In fact, everyone from Playboy to J. C. Penny has brandished their bugle horn, lining up their bets behind this most fascinating fad.
No, it is invisible because although men are buying it, they simply aren’t wearing it.
It’s no surprise that men today yearn to move on from the somber three-piece suits and restrictive neckties that inspire discussions of Beau Brummel, Henry Poole, and two-hundred years of legacy. As the definition of American culture expands to include members of the Youth, Hippie, Women's Rights, and Civil Rights movements, just to name a few, young men have realized that they too can expand their own identities. Strangely enough, this ardent wish has manifested as the Nehru jacket.
Sammy Davis Jr in Fall 1968 wearing the new Nehru jacket trend with silk turtlenecks.
Named for Jahawarhal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, the Nehru jacket embodies many of the ideals of American youth. He was an anti-colonialist and social democrat determined to free his country from Western rule, a sentiment young people share against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Like many other revolutionaries and thinkers from colonized cultures around the world, he chose to wear a traditional Indian coat called the achkan as a way of reclaiming India’s cultural autonomy by rejecting Western rules of business dress. Namely, the three-piece suit and the necktie.
Nehru met with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Deutsche Bank Chairman Hermann Josef Abs during a visit to West Germany in June 1956. He looks at ease next to the others with his top button undone, embodying a working class confidence that's defiantly attractive for a generation that distrusts establishment wealth and power, and searches for their own generational identity.
The Beatles wore Nehru jackets for their Shea Stadium concert in August of 1965, less than a year after the prime minister died in May of 1964. As we’ve discussed previously the article "Sgt. Pepper's Anti-War Military Rock Uniform," The Beatles have been an unstoppable force in shaping the fashions, and therefore the identities, of young people in the West through their mop haircuts, peacockish military designs, and bold color palettes. Others such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Lord Snowdon also donned the achkan-inspired look before Pierre Cardin introduced it to the American public last year.
The Beatles perform at Shea Stadium in matching putty Nehru jackets in 1965. Nehru's jackets were also grey and tawny colors. Sammy Davis Jr. often favors this utilitarian color palette in his Nehru jackets this winter.
The first James Bond film, Dr. No, mirrors the hero and villain through the Nehru jacket. Both jackets are made of silk, but Bond's walnut brown jacket is a rough-hewn shantung while the doctor's appears to be a granite silk suiting. The contrast of the fabrics and the fit of the collars both indicate a struggle between the people (Bond) and power (Dr. No).
From there, gossip and excitement over the look has spread like wildfire among experts and celebrities. Esquire went so far as to suggest that the Nehru would be the talk of the winter. But where has it gone? Why have we seen so few of them?
The rather complicated answer is comfort.
Inspired by the total rejection of Western ideals, the Nehru jacket is largely comfortable only to those who also heavily criticize the sum of our mainstream society. However, most consumers are average by default. As a result, such bold shifts are too adventuresome for their everyday lives. These kinds of trends, which often come with great excitement, are bright but brief flashes in the pan.
So what do these emperor’s robes suggest, if they’re bought then stuffed at the backs of closets and into the bottoms of trunks? Bold shifts that make it to retailers and mainstream entertainment, no matter how brief, are indicative of a great yearning in society. And the revolution is happening—it is just taking on a different form.
Rather than rehaul the rules of their workplaces and ceremonies with the Nehru jacket, men are turning to designers like Bill Blass and Ralph Lauren, who are introducing wider, bolder ties and more athletic country tweeds that speak to America’s love of working class leisurewear.
James Coburn in Bill Blass fashions as of November this year for Vogue. Though the fabrics are bold, the shapes are familiar, sporting collars and cuffs with an expeditionary style that calls back to Western expansionism. This, perhaps, is a much more comfortable avenue for change in mainstream menswear than inspirations such as the Nehru that wholly reject the Western lifestyle. Photographed by Henry Clarke.
I agree deeply with the critic Marshall McLuhan in his opinion that after centuries of division, the great tectonic shift of equality in the West is pushing men and women to connect culturally in a way we simply haven’t before. While women are chasing educational and societal inclusion, men are chasing freedom of expression.
We can see this clearly in the rising popularity of Blass and Lauren, for example. The necktie is softer and brighter, but still a necktie. The turtleneck is less structured but still paired with a blazer for daytime events. The Norfolk jacket is slimmer and more youthful, but still made of traditional houndstooth wool. Does this not mirror the advancements of women in our society? Women may attend universities, but they must still wear stockings and skirts. They may work in offices but must maintain a certain figure.
Having donned the uniforms of war and business for as long as women have worn their gowns and corsets, the suggestion that Western men are decolonizing their own fashions, through styles such as Nehru’s achkan, is a hopeful sign of the future. Even if permanent change is slow. Only time will tell if the Western or the Eastern collar will ultimately be the victor…
Hot off the heels of Danger: Diabolik, producer Dino De Laurentis is at it again with another comic book adaptation, this time Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella. The French-Italian co-production is based on the sexy French comic book and directed by Roger Vadim (1956’s And God Created Woman). The movie’s title character is played by the none other than Vadim’s wife, the gorgeous Jane Fonda, who since her breakout role in 1965’s Cat Ballou, has been making name for herself in Hollywood, beyond just benefiting from her already famous last name.
[Make love, not war]
As the film’s heroine, a “5-star double-rated astronavigatrix”, she is contacted by Dianthus, the President of the Republic of Earth (French actor Claude Dauphin) at the beginning of the film, requesting that she set out in search of a supposedly young scientist by the name of Doctor Durand Durand, who reportedly vanished into “the uncharted regions of Tau Ceti” after creating a weapon known as the positronic ray. The device is so powerful that it threatens “to shatter the loving union of the universe”, which had “been pacified for centuries.” Barbarella is the president’s last hope to bring the doctor to justice and prevent possible bloodshed, because he has “no armies or police.” That said, she is armed with some weapons from the Museum of Conflict for “self-preservation” and urged to use all of her “incomparable talents” during her mission.
[Barbarella at the controls of her groovy spacecraft]
Shortly after beginning her journey, Barbarella gets caught in a magnetic storm, which results in her crashing her spaceship into Planet 16, located in the system of Tau Ceti. While stranded there, she meets 2 “marvelous little girls” who knock her out with a snowball, I kid you not. After taking her captive, they bring her to what she recognizes as Doctor Durand Durand’s wrecked spacecraft, but he is nowhere in sight. In fact, most of the inhabitants of the planet appear to be children. Barbarella threatens them with, “untie me or I’m going to call your parents!” Unfazed, the kids sic a pack of creepy dolls with razor-sharp teeth on her, leaving her with some abrasions and badly torn clothes. Luckily for Barbarella, a man draped in furs, known as Mark Hand the Catchman (Italian actor, Ugo Tognazzi), comes to her rescue. He and the authorities capture the children in nets.
[What nightmares are made of]
Afterwards, Mark Hand takes her back to his vehicle, which is basically a cabin on wheels with sails. There, he suggests she repay him for coming to her rescue by making love to him the old-fashioned way, something apparently that has not been done in centuries on Earth, because there is a newer and more civilized way to do the deed, involving individuals taking a pill and pressing the palms of their hands together. Ever the adventurous type, Barbarella agrees, forgetting all about her recent injuries. He fixes her spaceship, offers her some clothing and a tip on the doctor’s possible location, Sogo.
[Barbarella with Mark Hand after he saves her from the children and the dolls]
Barbarella tries to flee Planet 16, but shortly after takeoff, her spacecraft crashes yet again, this time near Sogo, in the Labyrinth of the City of Night on a planet called Lythion. There, she meets a blind angel named Pygar, played by John Phillip Law of 1967’s Death Rides a Horse and more recently Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. He tells her he has lost “the will to fly.” Pygar introduces her to a wise old man named Professor Ping. Here, French mime Marcel Marceau plays Professor Ping, who offers to help her fix her spaceship so she does not get stuck in the Labyrinth, a very frightening place, filled with those exiled from Sogo, City of Night. While Professor Ping works on her spacecraft, Pygar defends Barbarella against the Great Tyrant of Sogo’s guards. Later, one thing leads to another and they sleep together. Almost immediately after their encounter, Pygar miraculously regains his will to fly. He flies her to Sogo, but things take a turn for the worse when the guards to the Great Tyrant, also known as the Black Queen (and little one-eyed wench), spot them.
[Barbarella and her "fine-feathered friend" on their way to Sogo]
Barbarella and Pygar are taken in by the Black Queen’s guards. Model, actress and rock music muse, Anita Pallenberg, stars as the Black Queen. The earthling and the angel find themselves in the Chamber of Ultimate Solution, where they have to choose between 3 different types of death. Just as Barbarella and Pygar are about to choose, they are stopped by concierge to the Great Tyrant, played by Irish actor Milo O’Shea. Pygar and Barbarella end up being separated.
[Her Majesty The Black Queen]
The Black Queen gives orders for Barbarella to be thrown into a giant cage filled with birds, who peck at her and tear her clothes, again. She falls down a secret escape chute, which leads Barbarella into another room, where she meets Dildano, head of the revolutionary forces, played by David Hemmings (of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up). They get to know each other better. Afterwards, they devise a plan to capture the Black Queen while she is asleep in her Chamber of Dreams, so she can “divulge the whereabouts of Doctor Durand Durand.”
[Barbarella in the cage filled with "darling" birds]
I would imagine for the more sophisticated filmgoer, Barbarella’s plot and characters leave much to be desired. Barbarella hardly grows over the course of the film. In fact, no matter what happens to her, she maintains a certain level of naïveté through the entire picture. The same can be said for most of the characters in the film, who tend to be very one-dimensional and are often pretty silly.
[Speaking of silly characters, here are Stomoxys and Glossina with Barbarella after they kidnap her]
Turns out the movie posters sum up what Barbarella is all about with the line, “See Barbarella Do Her Thing!” When the movie’s protagonist is not taking up a tryst with someone new, she quite literally has killer dolls and birds tear what little clothing she does wear to shreds. Barbarella also seems to be irresistible to both men and women. And while it is nice to see a female protagonist, especially one that does not conform often outdated and puritanical views around sexuality, she is clearly some sort of male fantasy. One thing that does make her and the film more complicated is that she sure seems to find herself being tortured a lot.
[Her name isn't pretty pretty, it's Barbarella]
The movie’s opening sequence, involves the main character stripping in zero gravity, before even one word of dialogue is uttered. This alone should tell the viewer exactly what lies ahead. In addition, Barbarella does not bother putting on a stitch of clothing in order to speak to, of all people, the president. Another scene involves the concierge to the Great Tyrant putting Barbarella in his machine, which will cause her to “die of pleasure.” But it turns out that his machine is no match for Barbarella! What I am getting at is that part the film’s charm is that it is pure fluff. Entertaining fluff, sure, but fluff nevertheless.
[Barbarella in the Excessive Machine]
To top things off, Barbarella drives what else but a pink spaceship that has an interior decked out with iconic paintings on the walls, gaudy statues, and floor to ceiling orange shag carpeting. Even if Barbarella is guilty of being an absolute spectacle of style over substance, it does feature some incredibly creative costumes by Paco Rabanne, decent special effects and impressively psychedelic set design. Also, the movie’s theme song had me singing “Barbarella, Bar, Barbarella” for days after watching the film.
[Barbarella inside the Black Queens's psychedelic Chamber of Dreams]
Barbarella probably will not be nominated for any of the major awards anytime soon, but it is still a fun ride. More serious SF fans may want to steer clear of the movie, but I would recommend it to viewers with camp sensibilities. Three stars.
[Will Barbarella and Dildano be successful in carrying out their plan?]
Ice Station Zero: Ice Station Zebra
by Tonya R. Moore
Ice Station Zebra is a paltry film for which, apparently, little expense was spared. The production is elaborate. The special effects and visual details are impressive. The actors’ performances are mostly convincing. The plot of this film, however, leaves a great deal to be desired.
First, some background:
The story of the Russian satellite in Ice Station Zebra is loosely based on real-life technology and events. Discover 2 was an American satellite, a prototype of the optical reconnaissance Discoverer series, launched in early April 1959. It was cylindrical in shape and its film return vehicle, the capsule, was manufactured by General Electric.
Though it neither carried film nor conducted surveillance, Discover 2 was the first satellite equipped with a re-entry capsule and was the first to send a payload back to Earth. As depicted in the movie, mission control did lose track of the capsule when a timing error caused it to land in the vicinity of Spitsbergen, Norway instead of Hawaii. Attempts to recover the capsule were unsuccessful and some suspect it may currently be in the possession of the Soviet Union.
The standout star of the film for SF fans is probably Patrick McGoohan (David Jones in Ice Station Zebra), who is famously known for his role as John Drake in the British television series, Danger Man (Secret Agent in the U.S.) and more recently, The Prisoner. McGoohan is actually an Irish-American who was born in Queens, New York and spent his childhood years in Ireland. The actor is based in England where he has performed in several notable film and television roles over the past decade. Sadly, his performance is not enough to elevate the film beyond mediocrity…
In the first scene of Ice Station Zebra, men in uniform sit in a cramped room equipped with sophisticated machinery, looking very serious.
This is followed by footage of a small object separating from an inexplicably phallic Russian satellite orbiting the earth.
The focus shifts to the main character. Rock Hudson stars as Cdr. James Ferraday, Commander of USN nuclear submarine, USS Tigerfish.
While visiting a drinking bar, Ferraday gets a call on the establishment’s phone.
He promptly leaves to go to another bar. At the second bar, he goes upstairs to a private room where he meets Admiral Garvey.
The admiral gives him a sketchy summary of some potentially disastrous incident at Ice Station Zebra, located at or somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole.
Garvey issues an urgent order sending Ferraday and his submarine crew on an investigative rescue mission to Ice Station Zebra. They are to escort a certain David Jones to Ice Station Zebra, a man whose background they do not know. It is made clear that David Jones has some super-secret agenda pertaining to Russian military intelligence. His true objective for going to Ice Station Zebra is not to be divulged to Ferraday or crew.
David Jones, a paranoid Englishman of Russian origin with a noticeable dependence on hard liquor, isaccompanied by a platoon of marines led by Lt. Jonathan Hansen. Later, the Russian defector (?) Boris Vaslov…
… and Capt. Leslie Anders–The Token Black Man (played by Cleveland Brown and activist Jim Brown), are airlifted by helicopter to board the USS Tigerfish.
After a brief display of the requisite male posturing, the mission goes underway. (eg. Hansen is disrespectful. Anders puts him in his place.)
Upon reaching the North Pole, the USS Tigerfish attempts to breach the surface ice. The first few attempts fail so Ferraday decides to fire a torpedo at the ice.
Disaster strikes when the torpedo shaft/channel (?) suddenly opens. A deluge of freezing Arctic seawater comes pouring in and the USS Tigerfish starts sinking fast. The panicked crew and guests work together to get the situation under control and somehow, the number of casualties are limited to one.
Signs of sabotage are confirmed. Despite the presence of a born-Russian with questionable motives, Jones immediately suspects the Token Black Man of being the culprit instead. His reasoning? Anders comes with impeccable credentials and that just can’t be believable.
The USS Tigerfish successfully breaches thinner ice and surfaces. Ferraday leads Jones, Anders, Vaslov, the marines and a team handpicked from his own crew across treacherous the ice-scape, leaving someone else in charge of the submarine and its operations.
Following a near-death mishap on the way…
… the contingent arrives at the partially burnt out remains of Ice Station Zebra.
They locate some survivors while Jones begins frantically searching for the very secret, very mysterious object. Vaslov joins the search. Ferraday reveals that he actually knows that Jones is searching for a certain 8mm (?) / video tape (?) with highly classified spy intel containing footage and the locations of all of the US nuclear bases.
Reports of incoming fighter airplanes from opposing armies ramp up the urgency of the mission.
The Token Black Man is framed for someone else’s (Vaslov) treasonous act and shot multiple times (by Jones), to death. Naturally.
Disgusted by the stereotypical inevitability of this outcome, I took this opportunity to take a long bathroom break, returning in time for…
A transmission/press release is broadcasted reporting the successful rescue of Ice Station Zebra’s survivors.
– and all’s well that ends well, apparently.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
A Shambling Mess: Night of the Living Dead
by Amber Dubin
I was so pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the first horror movie that I reviewed (Rosemary's Baby) that I thought I had been too quick to dismiss the horror genre entirely. Thus, with a freshly opened mind, I decided to celebrate the Halloween season with a bag of popcorn and a screening of what was promised to be another horror classic. I'll admit that the bar was maybe set too high, so I tried very hard to be kind in my assessment of The Night of The Living Dead. In this, I summarily failed. This film had many never-before-seen, innovative elements and a rather bold story-telling style, but I simply did not see it fit for a major motion picture screen. I could not help but feel like I was being led down a garden path with the promise of the type of character development and storyline that could support this decently to moderately talented cast, only to be jilted at the altar by the loosely shambled together pile of scene changes that make up this film.
Night of the Living Dead shambled into theaters October 1st, 1968
Night of the Living Dead does exactly this when it gets my hopes up in the opening scene. There is something to be said for tension built through hair-raising music played over shots of a lone Pontiac driving over rolling hills in a set of old-fashioned grainy black and white landscape shots. By the time we get to the first lines of the movie, I was already on edge in a subtle way that I was hoping would bode well for the types of thrills would continue throughout. This was my first disappointment, and just like the protracted winding trip that Pontiac took around turn after promising turn, this film alternately dilly dallied, rambled, and ultimately fell flat at a dead end.
The most grounded character in the movie
The opening lines of the movie are delivered by a couple of youngsters named Johnny and Barbra who are visiting the gravesite of their deceased father. They disrespectfully bicker over the obligation the whole time, carelessly switching the radio off right in the middle of an ominous "all points bulletin" and ignoring the slow approach of a shambling figure in the distance. Mocking his sister over her healthy fear of graveyards, Johnny practically tosses Barbra in front of the approaching stranger, only to instantly regret it when the man grabs her by the throat. Johnny comes to Barbra's defense but is overcome rather awkwardly by the man slowly wrestling him to the ground and smooshing the glasses off of his face. Barbra, ever the loyal sister, doesn't bother checking if Johnny is ok before running to the car by herself, losing her shoe and falling to the ground, because it's just not scary enough if the fleeing woman isn't both helpless and unlikeable.
Shoes have always been a woman's greatest weakness
She finds shelter in her locked car for a moment before the man manages to break the window with a brick. Suddenly, she realizes the key is in the ignition and she slowly rolls the Pontiac down the hill. Even though her path is unobstructed, she drives distractedly enough to veer off the road and ding her side mirror slightly on a tree. This mirror seems to be so vital to her escape, that she decides that it'd be safer to abandon the car entirely and run barefoot through the woods away from her attacker (utter genius, this one).
Mind you, the limping man in the graveyard had no special makeup on, so for all we know she just abandoned her brother to be assaulted by a partially disabled, demented, old man. Literally the only way I can assume the strange congregants outside are "living dead" people is because that's title of the movie.
Maybe he's just lost and looking to borrow a cup of sugar
I expected the film to fall into a "poor decision-making blonde flees from monster" formula at this point, but when Barbra seeks refuge in an abandoned house, this film abruptly loses the plot for me. Barbara's actions have made precious little sense up until now, but after entering this house, her cognitive abilities fall to absolute bits. The first illogical decision comes when she is startled by the corpse of the homeowner and decides to rush outside to take her chances with her pursuer, running directly into the headlights of an arriving car. She stands bathed in the blinding lights, confused and wincing as if bracing herself to be struck; instead a complete stranger emerges, grabs her up and rushes her back inside. Unlike I, who was shouting "who are you and where did you come from?" at the screen, Barbra offers no greeting or introduction to this stranger and immediately falls in line behind his frantic attempts to create safety and figure out what's going on.
Ben may cut a dashing profile, but it makes no sense why Barbra would trust him implicitly and make no attempt to ask or help him figure out what's going on
It is here that the stranger, whom we eventually come to know as Ben, takes the torch (sometimes literally) of the protagonist of the story. While Barbra dissolves into quiet hysteria, Ben violently dispatches several of the mindless congregants around the house, dragging their corpses to the lawn and setting them on fire to warn off the others. Once he's mostly boarded up the whole house by himself, Barbra launches into an awkward re-telling of everything we've seen her do in the film so far. Suddenly, she remembers she had a brother. She jumps up and throws herself at the newly sealed door, insisting "we must find Johnny now!" slapping Ben when he refuses. He immediately slaps her back, which normally would appall me, but here seems the only logical way to get the hysterical woman to stop throwing herself in front of monsters and cars.
Ben continues to secure the house, finding food and a weapon, hooking up a radio, and even bringing Barbra shoes as an apology for slapping her. When the radio crackles to life, we settle in with the now catatonic Barbra for our long-awaited first taste of an explanation of what on earth is going on in this world. We are offered the laughably pathetic explanation that the world is being seized by "an epidemic of homicide." We don't even get a chance to finish rolling our eyes at this when we are surprised by Barbra's scream as she witnesses people emerge from the basement.
Suddenly, basement people!
There's absolutely no logical explanation as to why four able-bodied people and a child would remain hidden in the cellar of a house with distressed survivors upstairs, only to emerge and be suddenly invested in those additional survivors coming back downstairs with them. Harry, the obnoxious, stubborn patriarch of the Cooper family, offers such a poor explanation for his motives that I wonder whether this scene had less of a script and more of a general direction to the actors to come up with their own dialog. The teenaged couple, Tom and Judy, are convinced by this awkward exchange to come up and help Ben, while Harry's wife and sick child remain downstairs. Here we are introduced to Helen Cooper, played by Marilyn Eastman, who is a strikingly beautiful, classy and sharp-witted woman. She's responsible for nearly every cogent argument in the film and is such a mismatch for her husband that we are left to wonder why such a talented actress is filling that role and not that of the protagonist.
The stakes are now raised by the fact that there are three women and a sick child to defend. This emboldens Ben to make a plan to escape that involves Ben and Tom getting to the gas pump and truck outside by the barn. It is here that a schism appears in the group, and Harry quietly makes it his mission to undermine Ben's authority for every decision Ben makes (in much the same way I expect he is accustomed to undermining all his wife's opinions).
Behind every bullheaded man, a long-suffering wife bonded to him by poor writing
In another jarring turn, the focus shifts once again to the teen couple, Tom and Judy. Judy begs Tom not to go outside with Ben. She offers little in the way of verbal persuasion, but the scene is suddenly charged with so much of a different type of tension that one wonders if their mutual attraction isn't based in real life. They're clearly not meant to make it out of this movie alive, but knowing this didn't soften the blow for me when their escape plan literally goes up in flames, and Judy's caught jacket condemns them to a particularly gruesome and fiery death.
A romance doomed to go down in flames
From here the rest of the film devolves into a fairly predictable series of disasters: Ben is forced to shoot an increasingly paranoid, maniacal and erratic Harry Cooper in self-defense, Barbara opens a door in order to be eaten by her now undead brother, and the survivors retreat to barricade the cellar. Karen, the little girl who's been lying prone and feverish suffering from an undead bite wound this whole time, suddenly springs to life as a crazed, cannibalistic creature. Her mother is just as shocked as the audience at this development, and she falls back, helplessly paralyzed in fear. To everyone's genuine horror, the child discards the bits of her father's flesh from her teeth as she advances on her mother, violently tearing her apart with a gardening spade.
Ben is set with the unenviable task of destroying the now undead nuclear family and he does so, huddling up next to the barricade afterwards and falling into a fitful sleep as the beleaguered lone survivor of this ordeal. The next day he emerges into the now silent and destroyed house. He is greeted with a swift bullet between the eyes from a sharp-shooting member of the crisis response team tasked with cleaning up the invasion of undead; thus rendering all the heroism and hard-fought survivalism of the entire film moot.
Karen picks up some unusual eating habits
Though I was disappointed in this film as a whole, there were several things I did enjoy about it. I found it added a layer of realism to have the story background delivered by inter-cut scenes of a TV broadcast filled with busy scientists and professors on Capitol Hill trying to say as little as possible to the microphones being shoved in their faces. I thought it was a creative, bold take to explain how their situation was caused when the "unburied dead" were exposed to radiation from a destroyed Venusian satellite. I even found it authentically frightening when the teen couple immolates themselves and Ben is left to fight through the darkness and the silently encroaching hoard with nothing but a chair leg torch, all the while having to listen to the unnerving gnashing and chewing sounds of the undead dining on the burnt flesh of the unfortunate couples' bodies.
Extra! Extra! No one Knows What's Going On!
While I recognize that the film is making an innovative attempt to enhance the drama with bold lighting choices, I see this attempt as a failure because the lighting is so severe that the audience is unable to see what's going on. A particularly disappointing example of this comes in the authentically scary moment where Karen is committing matricide, and she is darkened in such deep shadow that you can barely see her at all. I was also disappointed that the score was absolutely all over the place. The beginning crescendo of appropriate music only serves to make the rest of the sound in the film feel poorly balanced by proving that at least one member of the staff knows how to smoothly score at least one scene. Cymbals crash and trumpets blast when stationary objects are meant to surprise the viewers, cricket noises get played very loudly in a bizarre attempt to make the approach of the undead hoards eerie, and yet the sound suddenly dies when the situation takes an actual dire turn; In a genuinely scary moment when undead break the window open, they do so noiselessly and a grasping, attacking undead hand gets dismembered in frustrating silence.
What made me feel this film was not of high enough quality to be released in theaters was the unforgivably sloppy pacing and direction. The Barbra-centered, awkward, choppy scenes at the beginning felt padded for runtime, and yet we are rushed through a systematic slaughter of the entire cast at the end. The script of each scene varies in quality so wildly that there are tonal shifts fast enough to give me whiplash. I felt volleyed between at least one writer who understood how couples banter, and one that decided to put a group of actors in a room and suggest that they improvise. The end result makes the film feel like a loosely connected collection of scenes, rather than a cogent story that supports character development or enhances the performances of some of the cast's talented actors.
Ben, the tragic hero who couldn't defeat racism(?)
While I appreciated the idea that Ben's death at the end implies that his race makes him just as worthless to society as the monsters getting burned in the fields, it's a poorly executed and shoe-horned-in concept. If that was going to be the message in the end, the least that could have been done is that he be attacked or singled out based on his race; but even Harry's prejudice against him was not clearly race-related and could have purely stemmed from him being an overbearing, control-obsessed, vile man.
Next time I decide to watch a film with an open mind, I'll make sure to look out for brain eaters first.
![[June 18, 1969] Sleazy Riders (<i>The Sidehackers</i> and <i>Satan's Sadists</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Untitled.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[May 24, 1969] Cinemascope: The [NOUN] of [PROPER NAME]’s [NOUN]: Blood of Dracula's Castle and Nightmare in Wax](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/690524posters.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[May 6, 1969] Touched by an Angel: <em>Teorema</em> (<em>Theorem</em>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MV5BODA1ZWZiZWYtYjVhMC00ZGQxLWI1Y2MtM2VmYjg2MzQyMDM3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUzOTY1NTc@._V1_-scaled.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[April 28, 1969] Cinemascope: Witchmaker, Witchmaker, Make Me A Witch: "The Witchmaker" (a movie) and "The Body Stealers" (a flick)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690428posters.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Poster for The Witchmaker
No tits please, we're Americans
Poster for The Body Stealers
Bob Megan: rugged, sexy and a knitwear aficionado
Recognise this? You should![[April 22, 1969] Corpse or Cocoon? – (the Monkees movie <i>Head</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690422headtitle.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[February 4, 1969] Potts, Caractacus Potts: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Chittychittybangbangposter.jpg?resize=258%2C372&ssl=1)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang takes flight
The Baron and Baroness profess their love for each other
![[January 12, 1969] Taking French Leave: Playtime (a movie) and The Green Slime (a flick)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690112movies.jpg?resize=672%2C328&ssl=1)
The car carousel makes Paris playful again
![[December 18, 1968] Sex, Drugs and Boris Karloff: Curse of the Crimson Altar](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Curse_of_the_crimson_altar_poster.jpg?resize=320%2C240&ssl=1)
Another tedious sex party, ho hum.
![[December 14, 1968] The Emperor's New Nehru](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Cardin.jpg?resize=600%2C372&ssl=1)
![[October 16, 1968] Cinemascope: <i>Barbarella</i>, <i>Ice Station Zebra</i>, and <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681016movies.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
