Movies are getting bigger and better these days, so they tell me, but man I just can’t get off the YouTube!
There are few things as enticing to me in my old age as getting the chance to see a movie that has eluded me for decades. One such itch, recently scratched, is an obscure little number called FALSE FACE (1977), which was also marketed under the alternative title SCALPEL. I remember Bruce Williamson reviewing this in Playboy around that time and the involvement of actor Robert Lansing — a childhood favorite from THE 4D MAN (1959) and the “Assignment: Earth” episode of STAR TREK and AN EYE FOR AN EYE (1966) and NAMU: THE KILLER WHALE (1966) — made it a must-see; sadly, the opportunity was long in presenting itself. SCALPEL/FALSE FACE was a United International release (United International generally distributed foreign films in America, among them Max Pecas’ JE SUIS UNE NYMPHOMANE, dubbed into English and retitled LIBIDO: THE URGE TO LOVE, and an assortment of martial arts films for the chop sockey market), a weird mash-up of DIABOLIQUE (1955) and EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959), the tale of a plastic surgeon (Lansing, jobbing his way toward EMPIRE OF THE ANTS and ISLAND CLAWS) who, wanting to grab a family inheritance for himself, transforms a mutilated prostitute into the spit-and-image of his runaway daughter (both roles played by Judith Chapman), the sole and rightful heir. Things work out pretty well until the real daughter turns up and you start to wonder who is siding with whom. Shot in Covington, Georgia, SCALPEL is good trashy Southern Gothic fun, like a prime time soap opera without all the velour. It was nice to catch up with it at the distance of almost forty years.
To watch SCALPEL/FALSE FACE click here.
Even better than catching a movie you’ve been waiting to see for a long time is finding a movie about which you knew absolutely nothing, which proceeds to blow you away. Such was the case with SHE-DEVIL (1957), a cheap science fiction thriller directed by Kurt Newmann for downmarket Regal Films around the same time that he made THE FLY (1958) for 20th Century Fox. Filmed in widescreen “RegalScope,” SHE-DEVIL is the story of a terminal case (Mari Blanchard) who is given a new lease on life thanks to an experimental treatment cooked up by brash young scientist Jack Kelly (on the rebound from CULT OF THE COBRA and FORBIDDEN PLANET and on the cusp of a starring role on TV’s MAVERICK). A side effect of the life-saving treatment is that the patient, Kyra Zelas, is now a legit sociopath, willing to steal and even murder without compunction. Worse yet, she is bullet-proof… and I don’t mean that figuratively. She literally cannot die! Shoot her and she heals before your eyes! Drive her off a cliff and she will arise from the wreckage and step gayly over your mangled body! Kelly and his mentor Albert Dekker (who still seems to be playing Dr. Soberin from KISS ME DEADLY) gnash their teeth as the bodies stack up (among the victims, John Archer from KING OF THE ZOMBIES and WHITE HEAT) and begin to devise ways in which they can put this particular problem to bed. And therein lies the fascination of SHE-DEVIL. It would be fun enough if it were just a chronicle of Blanchard’s escalating psychopathy but when Kelly and Dekker sneak into her bedroom and try to chloroform her the whole thing gets positively perverse. (Later, when the pair attempts to “penetrate” Kyra with a hypodermic needle and wondering aloud if she can feel it, I started looking over my shoulder to make sure my Mom wasn’t in the room.) By the end, Kyra has been strapped into a hospital bed for the equivalent of a lobotomy, by which time SHE-DEVIL has revealed itself as a phalocentric nightmare fantasy about the prospect of a completely emancipated woman, a “female monster.” It’s like CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN but without the fleas!
To watch SHE-DEVIL click here. I’ve since learned that SHE-DEVIL is legitimately available on DVD from Olive Films, where it is preserved in all its RegalScope splendor!
Mari Blanchard was the star also of NO PLACE TO LAND (1958), an economy noir distributed by Republic Pictures and set against the backdrop of the cropdusting industry. Blanchard plays a small town twist who, not being able to wrap dust jockey John Ireland around her finger, marries local businessman Robert Middleton instead. When Ireland remains unfazed at the marriage and even moves on to another town, Blanchard begins to devise an endgame towards getting him back. Shot in “Naturama” (yeah, never mind) by Albert C. Gannaway, a specialist in low budget westerns, NO PLACE TO LAND is an interesting variation on the theme of the femme fatale, with the kink being that none of the characters are criminals or even predisposed to lawbreaking. Rather, it’s the story of love withheld, love denied, and love turned inside out into pure, white hot hatred. John Ireland had burned his own bridges in Hollywood, screwing himself through sheer pigheadedness out of the rewards that should have been his post-RED RIVER (1948) and ALL THE KING’S MEN (1949), which makes him a good fit for the footloose hero Jonas Bailey, a decent if directionless guy who is built for better things but disinclined to do much about it. Jackie Coogan has a better-than-average pre-ADDAMS FAMILY role as Bailey’s partner and mechanic, who is slowly going blind due to an accident that was Bailey’s fault (but, in truth, really the fault of Middleton’s corpulent Buck LaVonne). Things get hot when Bailey falls for a married woman — a role played by third-billed Gail Russell. An ill-fit for Hollywood, even after star turns in such quality films as Lewis Allen’s THE UNINVITED (1944) and Frank Borzage’s MOONRISE (1948), the sad-eyed Russell relied on alcohol to quiet her jangled nerves and smother a gnawing shyness. By NO PLACE TO LAND she was only three years from death at age 36 from liver failure and yet her character has a speech about the alcoholism of her onscreen husband that, if you know her history, will strike you as unbearably sad. The bodies really stack up in this one and NO PLACE TO LAND ends with a murder-suicide you will see coming a mile off but which you won’t believe.
To watch NO PLACE TO LAND click here.’
The made-for-cable BLACKOUT (1985) isn’t particularly good but it was satisfying to scratch it off my must-see list, where it sat for a full thirty years. One of the last feature-length helmed by British director Douglas Hickox (whose curriculum vitae includes the bullet points of THEATRE OF BLOOD with Vincent Price, BRANNIGAN with John Wayne, and ZULU DAWN with Burt Lancaster and Bob Hoskins), BLACKOUT is the tale of an amnesiac pulled, horribly disfigured, from a car wreck who could be either the innocent driver or the passenger, who had just murdered his entire family on the day of his child’s fifth birthday party. This logline beguiled me back in my post-college days but even though the film was widely available on VHS tape I just never crossed its path. Turns out it’s a bit of a snoozer, with startlingly uneven performances from Keith Carradine and Richard Widmark (who drops the F-bomb a lot) and a dreary British Columbia setting, but what makes it interesting in retrospect is how it anticipates Joseph Rubin’s THE STEPFATHER (1987) by a couple of years, though the climax is straight out of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978), with Widmark popping out of the shrubs in the neck of time to save heroine Kathleen Quinlan from a fetish-suited UnSub (who could be Carradine, or ex-boyfriend Michael Beck — I’m not tellin’) with a couple of blasts from his trusty service revolver. The ending is similar, too, in its broad strokes to that of the Joe Eszterhaus-scripted THE JAGGED EDGE (1985), which opened about three months after BLACKOUT was first broadcast by HBO.
To watch BLACKOUT, click here.
And there are so many more movies I’m forgetting and so many more that are yet-to-watch. I seriously need to revisit THE THIRSTY DEAD (1973), having seen it at the drive-in as a kid, and I’ve still never seen THE DEATHHEAD VIRGIN (1974) and I’ve not had a fresh look at THE EVICTORS (1979) since my sister and I caught it back in the day and, man, I’d never even heard a whisper about the spelunker shocker THE STRANGENESS (1985) until earlier this week, so you know I am on that! And! And! And! FOOD OF THE GODS (1976) and SQUIRM (1976… I read the novelization but never saw the movie!) and WILLARD (1971) and Larry Buchanan’s IN THE YEAR 2889 (1967) and RATAS DE LA CIUDAD (1986) which is in Spanish without subtitles but it’s a rats-attack-humans movie, so I think I’ll understand! Man, what bounty! They tell me there’s a new STAR WARS movie coming out and all I can think of is “I’ll catch it on YouTube!”