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This week on TCM Underground, two “animal revenge” shockers from the latter half of the 1970s. Before I begin, a confession: when I was a pre-teen I killed a snake in the side yard of my childhood home. I didn’t have to kill the snake, it wasn’t threatening me in any way, it wasn’t even all that big… but I had been socialized to fear and hate snakes and to think of their presence on my property as a crime punishable by death. Watching that snake die in front of me changed me in a major way and I will never forget its death agonies, the way its mouth gaped as the life ran out of it. So with that on my conscience, I go into animal revenge movies with some reluctance because, even though they invariably target mankind’s corruption of the natural world, they still turn animals — God’s creatures, if you want to look at it that way — into constructs of fear and loathing when the truth of the matter is that far more animals die by the hand of man than vice versa. As a Cub Scout leader it is my job, and my honor, to try and undo some of that damage when I lead scouts into a wilderness setting, to teach kids that they don’t have to go into the woods with an aim to kill animals, even the dangerous ones. I will admit to not having the highest enthusiasm for this double feature of “animals attack!” movies but, to paraphrase a recent Internet meme, I will still do my job and tell you all about them.
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Chicago-born Harry H. Novak got himself onto the RKO Radio Pictures payroll while he was still a teenager, and spent his early years of employment as a go-fer, running movie posters to the studio’s cinemas prior to the federally-mandated divestiture of 1948. After World War II, Novak acted as a liaison between the studio and the Walt Disney Company, playing an integral role in the distribution of such animated classics as THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD (1949), CINDERELLA (1950), and PETER PAN (1953). It may well have been the influence of bosom-worshipping RKO head Howard Hughes that pointed Novak to a life in the skin trade; after RKO ceased production in 1957, Novak pooled his resources into the founding of his own company, Boxoffice International Pictures, under the aegis of which he produced a string of “nudie cuties,” films taking full frontal advantage of slackening censorship standards in Hollywood. Working with minimal budgets but a maximum of showmanship, Novak brought to the less reputable movie houses and drive-ins such peek-a-boo classics as KISS ME QUICK! (1964), THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF GIRLS (1965), THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF ROMEO AND JULIET (1969), and MIDNITE PLOWBOY (1971).
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Near the end of his career, and with hardcore pornography having eclipsed his comparatively modest gains in the raincoat market, Novak put his money behind the occasional horror film, guaranteed money-makers in inner city grindhouses and on the Southern drive-in circuit. Novak produced a softcore remake of the Roger Corman killer plant classic THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) titled PLEASE DON’T EAT MY MOTHER (1973) and stamped his imprimatur on such economy shockers as FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE OF FREAKS (1974) — yes, that is a real movie — THE CHILD (aka ZOMBIE CHILD, 1977), the Canadian DELIVERANCE (1972) wannabe RITUALS (1977), and RATTLERS (1976). One of many “animal revenge” movies produced in the wake of WILLARD (1971) and FROGS (1972), a horror subgenre then riding the tidal wave of JAWS (1975), RATTLERS concerns the infestation of a small Mojave town with seemingly predatory vipers, whose murderous massing compels a university herpetologist (Sam Chew, Jr.) and a photojournalist (Elisabeth Chauvet) to suss out the source of the plague. Produced with a painful lack of wherewithal, RATTLERS could not help but prove a money-maker for Novak, who distributed the film to more than a dozen foreign markets, among them the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Greece, Egypt, Italy, Iran, Israel, and Portugal.
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A long-standing guilty pleasure for the Psychotronic crowd, RATTLERS boasts more than its fair share of unintentionally funny moments – as when the leads find themselves trapped in their desert tent by a rattler swarm and are saved from the death of a thousand bites by the last minute intervention of soldiers from a nearby army base, who spray the flimsy interior with M16 fire. Nonetheless, the script by director John McCauley and cowriter Jerry Golding reveals an occasionally sardonic edge, tipping its hat to a particularly relevant Alfred Hitchcock film by having an ornithologist character register his fear of snakes with the line “I think I’ll stick to working with birds – they don’t strike at all.” Cast for affordability rather than marquee value, RATTLERS‘ cast does offer up some retroactively notable names, among them Darwin Joston (who went from a bit as a snake victim here to the lead in John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 the same year), Don Siegel rep player Al Dunlap, and former child star (ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS [1964], WILD SEED [1965]) Celia Kaye, who had shared a 1965 Golden Globe with Mia Farrow and, post-RATTLERS, married writer-director John Milius and appeared in small roles in his films BIG WEDNESDAY (1978) and CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982).
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And, finally, what is there to say about Irwin Allen’s THE SWARM (1978) that hasn’t already been said? Allen’s adaptation of the best-selling novel by Arthur Herzog is like that drunk, shirtless fat guy at a Charlie Daniels concert who stands up and air fiddles to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” … and by that I mean it is not the best use of your time to make fun of it. Watch it, don’t watch it; laugh, don’t laugh. Cringe, don’t– no, you’ll cringe. You’ll cringe like Hell. But, Sweet Jesus Jones, at least you’ll feel something!
Tune in at 11:15 pm PST, 2:15 am EST.
Take only photographs, leave only footprints.